What Is to Be Done?

 

What Is to Be Done?

June 28, 2022

 

My country, the United States of America, is in trouble today in a way it has not previously been, at least not in my rather long lifetime. Of course, we’ve never been a perfect democracy. The monied special interests have almost always controlled our nation’s politics and economy is their own, usually shortsighted economic interest. Still, even those special interests have for the most part acted within the framework, flawed as it is, of the nation’s constitution. They have at least paid lip service to the value of the rule of law. The arc of our history has bent slowly, but in significant ways it has bent toward justice. We’ve had bad presidents before. Richard Nixon was one of the worst (although his domestic policies were a whole lot better than those of today’s Republican party). He’s the only president whose misdeeds forced him to resign. Yet even he was to some extent an American institutionalist He acted outside the law, but he never tried to overthrow our constitutional system of government. Our Supreme Court, which has the final say on what the Constitution actually means, has at times made horribly bad decisions. Dred Scott and Plessy are examples from the nineteenth century. More recently, Citizens United opened the floodgates for money to pour into our politics like never before. The Supreme Court has also made horrible decisions in recent years when interpreting the Second Amendment. No, we’ve never been a perfect democracy. Still, we have been a democracy. We’ve had people in positions of power who broke the law, but we have been a country that has embodied the rule of law perhaps better than any other country ever has.

Today our constitutional system of government and the rule of law are threatened as perhaps they never have been before. In the recent Dobbs case evil forces had a tragic success in bending the arc of our history away from rather than toward justice. The court did something it has never done before. It took away what had been established as a constitutional right of the American people. When he lost his bid for reelection in 2020, Donald Trump did not accept his loss and facilitate the transfer of power the way George H.W. Bush did in 1992 and Al Gore (the sitting vice president) did in 2000. Instead, he tried to overthrow the Constitution of the United States so he could hold onto power though the American political system had made Joe Biden the president-elect. Both our constitutional system of government and the rights of the American people are under attack in a most alarming way.

Two men, Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas, are primary actors in those two threats. They are the human faces of the danger we face today. No, Donald Trump is no longer president; but he will try to become president again, and tens of millions of Americans, blind to the threat he poses, still support him. Yes, Clarence Thomas is only one of the nine justices on the Supreme Court; but he has said out loud (or at least in writing) what a majority of those justices certainly think about the court’s precedents that have, at least since 1954, expanded our country’s concept of freedom and equality for all. He thinks, and other justices very probably think too, that many of those precedents should be overruled the way the court recently overruled Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas represent a threat to America like no other president and few supreme court justices ever have.

When Vladimir Lenin was attempting to overthrow Russia’s tsarist government he wrote a little book titled in Russian Chto Delat’?, which means literally “what to do?” but that is best translated “What Is to be Done?” Lenin of course is no model for what is to be done, and I don’t mean to suggest that he is. He did, after all, initiate the system of secret police and state terrorism against its own people that culminated in the 1930s with Joseph Stalin. Lenin gave the wrong answer, but he asked the right question, and the title of his book poses the question that all Americans who value liberty and the rule of law must ask today. What is to be done? What are we to do? I don’t have any novel answers to those questions, but they have raised for me a moral question that I thought I had answered for myself quite some time ago. I have long been an advocate of Christian nonviolence. I have enthusiastically endorsed Jesus’ teaching of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. I must admit, however, that the threats to my country’s core values that Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas represent have raised the question for me of whether violence in the defense of freedom is ever appropriate. My answer to that question is still no, but I think feel the need to examine that answer carefully to see if it is valid in today’s context.

From 1933 to 1945 Germany was ruled by one of history’s great monsters, Adolf Hitler. He set out to kill every last Jewish person in Europe, and he was making horrific progress toward that diabolical goal. In 1939 he plunged Europe into the most brutal and destructive war in that continent’s violent history. A German Lutheran pastor and theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was faced with Lenin’s question: What is to be done? Bonhoeffer knew that the one he confessed to be his Lord and Savior had taught nonviolence as the way of God. Jesus, Bonhoeffer knew, did not allow his disciples to use violence even in an attempt to save him from execution by crucifixion by the brutal, oppressive regime under which he and his people lived, the Roman Empire. Yet Bonhoeffer saw the immense evil of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. The only way he could see to stop that evil was to kill Hitler. So, despite his commitment to Christian nonviolence, he joined a conspiracy to do just that to that personification of evil. He knew that murder, even the murder of Adolf Hitler, was a sin which he would have to beg God to forgive, but he saw no other solution to the catastrophe that Hitler was. The conspiracy he joined never made much progress toward that goal, and Bonhoeffer paid for his participation in it with his life. His importance for me today is the way he asked the question of what was to be done and the way he answered it.

Is violence against the likes of Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas justified in today’s context? Should we resort to Bonhoeffer’s answer to the question? Until recently it never occurred to me that I would have to ask that question about my own country, but I do have to ask it. I don’t mean to suggest that they are nearly as bad as Hitler was, but there simply is no doubt that our country would be better off if Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas (and the four other reactionary justices on the Supreme Court) were not part of its life. They have been nothing but destructive. The Supreme Court will certainly continue its assault on American liberty. Donald Trump will overthrow our constitutional government if he ever gets another chance to do it. The people I have named here are in all probability as much symptoms as causes of our country’s woes; but they have done evil things, and they will continue to do evil things. We would be better off without them.

Does that conclusion justify violence against them? I must admit that I feel a strong temptation to say yes, but I’m still going to say no. Jesus didn’t teach us to say no to violence except when we want to resort to it. He didn’t teach us to be nonviolent toward people we like but violent toward people we don’t. He didn’t even say it was permissible to use violence against evil. Though many have thought he did, he didn’t tell us passively to accept evil. That’s not really what “turn the other cheek” is about. He did say those who live by the sword die by the sword. Truly to follow Jesus means never reducing yourself to the level of the bad guys. If you behave like bad people, you’ll very probably become a bad person. Jesus didn’t tell us to use nonviolence only when it “works.” He told us to be nonviolent even when it doesn’t. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence though it cost him his life. He calls us to do the same.

So. Should we assassinate Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas? As tempting as it is to say yes, our answer must be no. Evil never justifies more evil. Those of us who believe in personal freedom and the rule of law must use other, nonviolent means to resist the evil that is so active among us. We must use the law and the constitution we are trying to save. I’ll propose two areas in which we can do that. One is to use our state’s political system to preserve individual liberties even when the Supreme Court takes them away at the national level as well as preserve the rule of law even when the president tries not just to avoid it but to destroy it. For example, the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade doesn’t make abortion illegal. It just allows the states to make it illegal, as awful as even that result is. States can still make abortion legal, and many, including my home state of Washington, did so a long time ago. Those laws are still in effect. If the Supreme Court does what Clarence Thomas and almost certainly other Supreme Court justices want, that is, overrule the precedent-setting cases that guarantee the rights to contraception, free private sexual acts, mixed race marriage (like Clarence Thomas’!), and same sex marriage, we can preserve those cherished freedoms at the state level, and preserve them we must.

The other arena for our nonviolent resistance to evil is national politics. We can mobilize people who believe in law and freedom to work against politicians who support reactionary policies. We can work against politicians like Donald Trump who don’t believe in the rule of law. Personally, I have no such politicians representing me except at the level of the Washington state legislature where, thank God, they are in the minority. We can work against them (though one of them is a neighbor of mine who at the personal level is truly a decent person). We can support efforts across the nation to convince people to stop voting against their own self-interest by voting for politicians not committed to law and to real freedom, and whose policies benefit only the wealthy. We can vow never to vote for a single Republican for at least as long as that party is in thrall to Donald Trump and big money. We can love what our country says it stands for and oppose with every fiber of our being today’s assaults on those values.

Will we end those assaults? Will we stop them from succeeding? Perhaps or maybe even probably not. Does that mean we may resort to violence? No, it doesn’t. A great people mobilized for nonviolent resistance to evil can work miracles. Look at what Gandhi did in India. We don’t have a Gandhi right now, and it isn’t at all clear where one could come from. Nonetheless, nonviolence must be our creed. We must ground all of our actions in a strong commitment to it. There is no other truly Christian choice. So let’s get on with it, shall we?