On the Fourth of July

 

On the Fourth of July

July 5,2025

I have seen a couple of people on Facebook post Fredrick Douglas’ famous piece “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.” In it, he excoriates the United States for its maintenance and tolerance of the brutal, abominable, sinful institution of slavery, and he was perfectly correct in everything he said. The racism that so appalled Douglas and must appall all of us is still with us, and we must continue the civil rights struggle in which Douglas is such a towering figure.

Today, however, on the day after the Fourth of July, I think we need to ask a different though related question, namely: What does the Fourth of July mean to those of us who understand the catastrophic nature of the things we are living through under the Trump administration? To answer that question, we need first to understand just what it is that we’re supposed to be celebrating on that holiday.

In 1776, the thirteen territories that would become the United States were all British colonies. As colonies, they were ruled by the British government in London, and they had no representation in that government. Many of the residents of those colonies believed, with good reason, that the British government under King George III was oppressing them with taxation in the imposition of which they had no say at all. Many of their leading citizens yearned for freedom from what they considered to be the British yoke that was hampering the economic development of the colonies in which they lived. In the summer of 1776, a number of these leading citizens met in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress. On July 2, 1776, representatives of twelve of those colonies (New York abstained) declared that the colonies they represented were free from Great Britain. On July 4, 1776, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

The second paragraph of the Declaration begins with one of the most famous sentences in US if not in world history: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” This sentence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote, when interpreted in our present context, states the foundational principle of the United States: All are equal. All have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We can, I think, take the right to the “pursuit of happiness” to mean the right to live one’s life as seems best to the one living it, within the bounds of the law of course.

There are of course many comments and objections that can be made to this sentence. Today we don’t much believe that much of anything is self-evident. We do not put the stock in human reason that the drafters of the Declaration, adherents of the European Enlightenment all, did. We know that by “Men” they meant property-owning white men and no one else including neither women nor Blacks, something to which we must vehemently object.  The Declaration of Independence is far from a perfect statement for us of the truth it seeks to convey.

Nonetheless, it is signing of the Declaration on July 4, 1776, (not the actual vote for independence on July 2) that we celebrate every year with parades, barbecues, and fireworks. We put up American flags all over the place. We thank our military for preserving our independence (something our military hasn’t actually done since 1812, but never mind). Politicians make patriotic speeches. We crow that we are “the greatest country in the world,” (which we aren’t and never have been, but never mind). July 4 is our great national celebration of who we think we are. It is a celebration of the indispensable truth of each person’s right to life, liberty, and the freedom to live as one wishes.

Today that truth is under vicious attack by our nation’s federal government. That attack has been instituted and is led by one man, Donald J. Trump. It seems inexplicable how this country elected this despicable, completely unqualified man president not once but twice, and the second time after he had been given due process of law and convicted of thirty-four felonies. Yet that is precisely what the voters of this country did. The second time they elected him, though not the first time, they gave him a majority of the popular vote. Because the American voting public was so ignorant, so bigoted, and just so downright stupid as to elect this personally immoral, mentally unstable, megalomaniacal criminal as president, we are faced with a great crisis as we celebrate our nation, or contemplate whether or not we should celebrate our nation, in this season of such celebration. The list of outrages the Trump administration has committed is so long one can hardly get one’s head around it, but here I’ll mention just three of them that I believe to be the most serious of all.

First, Donald Trump is leading an assault on the rule of law. Immediately upon becoming president for the second time he pardoned all of the people who had been convicted of crimes committed when he sent his mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In doing so he told the world that it is perfectly acceptable for rabid humans to storm and damage important governmental buildings, assault police officers, and interfere with the constitutional functioning of their government. He made a woman Attorney General who has no credentials for the job but who will kiss Trump’s ring whenever he tells her to and will use the Department of Justice as Trump’s personal law firm. He maintains that the president does not have to obey orders from federal courts. The constitution and other American law means nothing to him. He sees it not as the guarantor of public order and personal freedom that it is supposed to be but merely as something that gets in his way as he tries to be an authoritarian not a democratic ruler.

Second, our law, from the constitution on down, establishes and regulates a democratic republic, but Trump does not believe in democracy. He is leading a nationwide effort so to distort our democratic processes that only he and his anointed minions will be able to win elections. The federal government does not conduct elections, the states do (with some federal regulation to prohibit things like racial discrimination in voting); but Trump is trying to force all of the states to adopt undemocratic voting procedures and abandon their own democratic ones for the benefit only of Donald Trump and his MAGA subordinates.

It is tragic, but Trump is today our duly elected president. He, however, will never be satisfied with being a president duly elected by the people of the country of whose national government he is the chief executive. Trump doesn’t like either capital D or small d democratic politicians either here or abroad. He model of leadership appears to be Russia’s Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an anti-democratic national leader and a war criminal if ever there were one. Trump wants to be America’s Putin. He has not ruled out seeking a third term as president, the constitution limiting him to two terms be damned. He will make himself America’s dictator if he finds a way to do it and we let him get away with it.

Third, there is what Trump and his people are doing to immigrants in this country. His model for what he is doing appears to be the way Hitler treated Europe’s Jews at least up to the point when he started murdering millions of them. When Hitler came to power in Germany in January, 1933, Germany was not in good shape. The country had myriad problems. The Great Depression was on worldwide. Unemployment was high. Germany had not only lost World War I, it had been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles in numerous profoundly unfair ways. Among other things, it had had to give up territory and was severely restricted in its ability to defend itself militarily. It owed massive war reparations to the victorious allied nations in that war.

Hitler, of course, promised the German people that he and his Nazi party would solve all those problems. He could probably have done that legitimately through proper legal measures, but that is not what he set out to do. Rather, he acted like the fascist he truly was. He created a cult of personality around himself, claiming that only he personally could make Germany great again. He suspended Germany’s laws and political system and made himself the country’s dictator.

And he did something else that fascists do. He gave the people of the country a scapegoat. He blamed the country’s problems on a group of people who had little or nothing to do with them, namely, the Jews. There actually weren’t that many Jews in Germany in 1933. Microsoft Copilot tells me that they made up only .75 per cent of the country’s population. But Hitler grew up and operated in a German culture (and an Austrian one, Austria being culturally and linguistically German) that had been violently antisemitic for centuries. It was common throughout Europe for Christians to call all Jews “Christ killers”, never mind that it was the Romans not the Jews who killed Jesus. Europe had a long history of Christian violence against Jews, violence the church(es) fomented rather than stopped. For example, men going on the Crusades often stopped along the way to slaughter Jews. Spain, England, and other countries had simply expelled all of them. That’s why there were to many of them in central Europe, especially in Poland. The great German Reformer Martin Luther was a despicable antisemite. The ground was fertile for Hitler’s genocide.

Hitler took full advantage of that fact. He told the German people that the Jews caused all of their problems. That claim was patently absurd as a matter of fact, but it didn’t matter. The German people wanted someone to blame for their problems, and Hitler gave them he Jews. He first set out simply to move all German Jews out of Germany. At one point he wanted to move them to Madagascar with only the presence of the British navy stopping him from doing it. When he couldn’t do that, and when it became clear that he would lose the war he had started, he increased the rate at which he slaughtered them to proportions far beyond human understanding. Auschwitz, for example, always a brutal place, became a major center for killing Jews only in 1942.

I’ll give Donald Trump this much credit: He hasn’t started mass extermination of any demographic group the way Hitler did with the Jews. Yet it remains true that Trump is following Hitler’s pattern of bigotry and harm. In true fascist fashion he is giving the American people a scapegoat for what they perceive to be their problems.[1] That scapegoat isn’t primarily the Jews, though Trump and his MAGA fanatics are clearly antisemitic. It is our country’s immigrants.

The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants and their descendants. I suppose the first immigrants to North America were the people who migrated here from Siberia thousand of years ago. Their descendants are with us today as Native Americans or, perhaps more properly, people of this country’s First Nations. That, however, is not what the word “immigrant” refers to today. The word refers first of all to people who migrated to what became the United States from Europe beginning in the early seventeenth century CE. A very large number of people migrated to this country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the country adopted restrictive immigration laws. I have ancestors who came to this country from various parts of Europe in the seventeenth century and ancestors who came in the nineteenth century, and my family history is far from rare among us Euro-Americans. There were in the nineteenth century also a great many immigrants to this country from Asia, particularly from China. And of course there were the involuntary immigrants African descent most of whom were slaves until 1865 and who were and are people of such African descent right up to the present day.

Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans are not, however, who Trump means by immigrants though he certainly is bigoted toward African Americans and others. By “immigrants” means people who came here, or whose parents came here, much more recently. They have come mostly though not exclusively from Mexico, the nations of Central America, and South America. Not all but a great many of them are people of color, not necessarily Black people (though some of them are) but people whose family history includes a large percentage of First Nations heritage. They aren’t white like those of us of pure European heritage are. Many of them don’t speak English, their native language being Spanish or some other tongue. They are in some significant ways different from the majority of the people of the United States.[2] Many of them are relatively easy to identify, though a great many native-born American citizens have ancestors from the places from which these immigrants come and look not dissimilar to them.

These immigrants are not the cause of our nation’s economic or other problems. Most of them are constructive members of society. In fact, it is clear that American agriculture would collapse without them. So would the building trades. Many of them work in the landscaping, hospitality, and other industries. They pay taxes, and those of them who are not here “legally” receive no benefits from those taxes.

Which raises the question of legal versus illegal immigration. Since the 1920s, the United States has had extremely restrictive immigration laws. We have established quotas of people who may move here legally from the other countries of the world. These laws were probably motivated by bigotry toward Jews and Asians, but they apply to everyone. As far as I know, people wishing to move to the US fill those quotas every year. They are the “legal” immigrants among us.

A great many people, however, enter our country without going through immigration process American law, for better or for worse, establishes. They are the “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants among us. Most of them come from Central America. They come mainly from countries like El Salvador, where poverty is rampant and the government is oppressive and brutal. They come to avoid governmental violence and the poverty that makes it hard for them even to survive. I suppose there are “illegal” immigrants who do not fit that pattern, but most of them do. Microsoft Copilot tells me there were approximately eleven million undocumented immigrants in the country in 2022. They thus make up a grand total of around 0.03% of our country’s population. They don’t make up much more of a percentage today.

Now here’s a truth far too few Americans understand. Under international law, every person has the right to enter a country other than their own for the purpose of seeking asylum. They seek a place of safety from the brutality and poverty of their home countries. They seek a better life for themselves and their children. A great many supposedly “illegal” immigrants come here for that purpose. Whether they qualify for asylum or not isn’t our issue. Our point is that though they did not come here through legal US channels, under international law they are not here illegally. They are exercising a perfectly legal right under that international law.

Though most of them are in fact not here illegally (at least under international law), and though most of them make positive contributions to our country, Trump is using them in very much the same way Hitler used the Jews. They are the scapegoats he is giving his followers. They are a small, vulnerable group, making them a good target for the bigotry of fascists and good scapegoats for our fascist leader to use in this way. Trump has turned ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) into a Gestapo-like force for attacking immigrants and even people who aren’t immigrants but who look to ICE agents like immigrants. These agents cover their faces, making individual agents impossible to identify. They operate largely without warrants. They burst in on businesses and on any sort of public gathering an haul people away. They have generated great fear among not only immigrants but among American citizens who have reason to believe that ICE agents will take them for immigrants.

Once ICE hauls someone away, that person often ends up in what can only be called a concentration camp. The most recently constructed and most infamous of these camps is called Alligator Alcatraz, or sometimes, Alligator Auschwitz though it is not an extermination facility, at least not yet. It is located in marshlands in Florida surrounded by water with alligators obviously present, hence the facility’s popular name. People are sent there and to other detention facilities without due process of law, and they get no due process of law while they are there. Alligator Alcatraz bears a startling similarity to the detention barracks at Auschwitz, a similarity that should be unsettling to all Americans and certainly is to me.

All of that is just some of the abomination taking place in our country today, We call ourselves “ the land of the free,” but an enormous number of us are not free but are held, probably illegally, in ICE detention facilities. We say we are a country governed by laws not by the whims of any person, but today much of our federal government serves not under the law but at the whims of Donald Trump. We call ourselves the world’s longest established republic, and in a sense we are. But our republican (and I mean small r republican here) form of government is under assault by a president who wants to be a dictator and who may think that he already has dictatorial power that others, especially the federal courts, are keeping him from exercising. We are governed not by committed democrats (and I mean small d democrats here) but by an American fascist and those who kneel before him.

So we have to ask: What was there to celebrate yesterday, July 4, 2025? Congress just passed and Trump just signed one of the most unconscionably unfair and destructive pieces of legislation in the country’s history. Are we supposed to celebrate that abomination of a law? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump building (or at least gloating over) concentration camps in alligator-infested swamps? Are we supposed to celebrate the way the president isn’t sure he is obligated to obey the constitution and who thinks the nation’s courts have no power over him? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s assault on our democratic system of government? Are we supposed to celebrated his celebrated personal immorality? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s fascist campaign against the immigrants among us? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s MAGA movement with its irrational anger, bigotry, and violence?

Well, far too many people among us think all of those abominations are good things. They are happy to celebrate the country in which they are taking place. I and a great many others know that these and so many others are disastrous things Trump is doing to our country not good things for it. They make celebration of our country in the tradition of the Fourth of July simply impossible for me and for a great many others. Yes, my country was founded on principles of democracy and freedom, though it has never lived up to those principles as much as it claims to have done. But my country today is a political and social wasteland. It is ruled by a mob of wholly irrational people who made the least qualified man ever to hold the office president not once but twice. A mob that celebrates illegality and authoritarianism at the highest levels of our national government.

So no, I did not celebrate yesterday. I will not be able to celebrate my country in any way at all until we wake up from the nightmare of Donald Trump. Yes, something of world significance happened on July 4, 1776. Yes, the Declaration of Independence is in many ways one of the most powerful and significant documents in human history. But my country lives under a dark cloud, the dark cloud of the fascist Donald Trump. He distorts and rots nearly everything about my national government, and his congressional acolytes facilitate his doing it. At the ends of their sacred Seder meal Jews often say: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Today I say, maybe some day in America, but not today. Not yesterday. No July Fourth until we are rid of Donald Trump and his American fascism. May that day come much sooner than later.

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[1] And he tells them that their problems are far worse than they really are. Fascists need a people in despair if they are going to become true totalitarians.

[2] I first wrote “America” not “United States” here, but then it dawned on me that most of these immigrants also come from America, just other parts of the Americas than most of us do.

On Legal Equality and Class Inequality

 

On Legal Equality and Class Inequality

July 4, 2025

 

Hannah Arendt is one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. She coined the term “totalitarianism,” and her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is one of the most important books of that late, unlamented century. Early in the book she is discussing what she presents as the creation essentially of a new kind of antisemitism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We needn’t go much into that discussion here, but on page 18, at least page 18 of the Kindle edition I’m reading, of The Origins of Totalitarianism, discussing developments in those centuries, Arendt writes: “The fundamental contradiction between a political body based on equality before the law and a society based on the inequality of the class system prevented the development of functioning republics….” Her contention is that while the new nation states of that period of history made everyone equal before the law, in reality there was still a class system in those states that contradicted the equality the law posited. The tension between the equality of all in the legal systems and the inequality in society and the economy in those states prevented them from functioning in the way theory said they should function.

Now, despite my having a PhD in nineteenth century Russian history, I’m not much interested in late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe here. But as Arendt does so often in this book, which was written seventy-five years ago, this statement caused me to ask as soon as I read it: Is the tension between the equality before the law that the US Constitution posits and the socioeconomic realities of American life part of the dynamic that today threatens to destroy the American republic that has been functioning for well over two hundred years? I think that it may well be doing precisely that. At least I’m sure that the question of whether it is or not is worth some serious consideration.

The first question we must ask is: Does American law establish the equality of all persons before the law? The answer, in theory at least, is yes. Two amendments to the US constitution contain provisions that establish this legal principle. In the Fifth Amendment we read: “nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law….” This amendment requires the federal government, though not the states, to treat all persons as equal before the law by giving everyone due process. The Fourteenth Amendment, which applies to the states but not to the federal government, is more specific. It reads in relevant part: “Nr State shall…deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” These two amendments establish the principle of equality before the law in both federal and state law.

Neither of them uses the phrase “equality before the law,” but it is easy enough to see how they establish that principle more or less directly. One of the key phrases in both of them is “any person.” Not “any citizen.” Not “any legal resident.” Not “Any person except people not here legally. It says: “Any person.” Since all legal rights pertain only to persons, the provisions of these two amendments apply to everyone. The amendments make no exceptions. Any person, that is, any human being, present within the jurisdiction of any state or of the United States is guaranteed equality before the law either directly or indirectly. There is of course an enormous body of court decisions interpreting these provisions, but none of that law does or could completely disregard the principle of equality before the law.[1]

There is one tragic caveat we must insert here. On July 1, 2024, the US Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in the case of Trump vs. The United States. That case, against all valid legal logic, establishes that there is a constitutional basis for the president having immunity from criminal indictment or prosecution for criminal acts that relate to “core” or “exclusive” presidential powers. The case doesn’t tell us just what those powers are. This deplorable case also gives the president “at least” presumptive immunity for all other official acts, but no immunity for “unofficial” acts.[2]

What are we to make of this indefensible decision of our Supreme Court? It does not completely negate equality before the law for the president. The president remains criminally liable for “unofficial” acts while in office. The case doesn’t tell us what “unofficial” acts are, but, whatever they are, the president can still be criminally prosecuted for crimes committed that relate to them. The case does, however, eliminate the principle of equality before the law for certain criminal acts a president may commit while in office. Though the court’s decision is indeed legally indefensible to the extent that it gives the president a legal privilege that the US constitution does not provide and that no other person has, one that violates a foundational principle of American law, it does at least retain a small remnant of that legal principle as applying to the president while in office. Despite Trump v. United States, we can conclude that equality before the law remains part of the bedrock of American law.[3]

The next question we must ask is whether or not there is socioeconomic inequality in this country. The answer to that question is so obvious that it hardly needs mentioning. There is indeed extreme socioeconomic inequality in the United States. Despite the country’s persistent claim that all Americans are equal, all Americans are not and never have been socially or economically equal. We have always been a country socially and economically organized on the basis of class, and we still are. One recent analysis has it that the top 0,1% of the population controls as much wealth as the bottom 90%. The top 0.01 percent of the population controls 11.2% of the country’s total wealth.[4] And of course, within the 90% percent of the population, there is income inequality too. We all know that there is an upper middle class and a lower middle class, and they don’t all have the same amount of money or assets. Economic inequality between classes is and always has been the norm in the United States.

There are other inequalities as well. Two of the most glaring are racial inequality and gender inequality. Racism has been part of our country’s culture from the country’s very beginning. White Europeans brought the first kidnapped Africans as slaves to what became the United States in 1619. The economies of southern states were grounded in and depended on racial slavery until 1865, but racism was rampant in the north and the west as well. The south held so firmly to race-based slavery that it took a civil war that still is the deadliest war in the country’s history to eliminate it.

Ending slavery did not, of course, end American racism. In my experience, few white Americans are aware of the extent to which racism has rotted American culture since the Civil War. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century racial caricatures of Black people were the norm in American popular literature. Jim Crow laws preserved racial discrimination in the south up to the 1960s, and there was de facto if not de jure Jim Crow in the north and the west too. For example, first the territory of Oregon, then the state of Oregon, passed laws prohibiting Blacks from settling in the state in 1844, 1849, 1857, and 1926.[5] With very few exceptions, Blacks have been able to get only low paying, menial, overly physically demanding, and/or dangerous jobs until at least very recently in our history. Racial discrimination still prevails in our job markets and even more so in our judicial systems.

There has also been gender inequality throughout American history. For much of that history, our culture demanded that women were to be only wives and mothers and not to work outside the home. Now, there is nothing wrong, of course, with being a wife and a mother. Both can be a great blessing for a woman who is a wife and/or a mother.[6] The problem in American culture has been that these were the only roles deemed appropriate for women. Yes, for most of our history women could be school teachers and, at least since the Civil War, nurses. Teaching and serving as a nurse are two noble professions to be sure, but, once again, the problem in American culture has been that it has long attempted to limit women to those two and perhaps a very few other professions.

Then there is the right to vote. From the beginnings of our country women did not have the right to vote. Only men could vote. Slaves never had the right to vote, and under Jim Crow, as a practical matter, only white men could safely vote in the south at least after Reconstruction ended in 1877. This unconscionable gender discrimination began to change shortly after the Civil War. Wyoming extended the right to vote and hold public office to women in 1869, the first state to do so.[7] Some but far from all states followed suit. It was not until 1920, however, that the 19^th Amendment to the US Constitution extended the right to vote to women nationwide.

There is no doubt that, while equality before the law (except to a certain extent for the president) remains an essential principle of American law, there has been great social, economic, racial, gender, and other discrimination throughout our history. We have made some progress in overcoming that discrimination, but we haven’t made nearly enough of such progress. Social, economic racial, gender, and other tensions continue to be the rule among us.

OK. So we meet Arendt’s two criteria for inequality impairing the functioning of states, but we have ask: Does it make a difference to the functioning of our country’s political entities? The answer is a qualified yes. There is one demographic distinction that is playing an enormous role in American politics today. Throughout American history, white men have been our most privileged class of people. Not all white men have been wealthy. Not all white men have been economically or politically powerful. Yet it remains true that white men as a class have been the most privileged broad group of Americans from the country’s earliest days. Yes, wealthy white men have been more privileged than middle class or poor white men, but all white men have been privileged over women and racial minorities.

Lyndon Johnson is at least supposed to have put it this way when discussing how white men have viewed themselves as privileged over people of color. Using old language we wouldn’t use today (”colored man”), he said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

America’s political history since at least the 1960s proves Johnson’s point. At least since the first Nixon presidential electoral victory in 1968, millions upon millions of Americans have consistently voted against their own best interest. They have sent extremely conservative politicians to Congress. They have turned their state governments deep red. They have, in other words, voted for politicians who cared not one whit about them but acted instead in the interest of the wealthy and the big corporations?[8]

The reasons for this tragic shift may be complex, but they all add up to a reality that white American men were feeling even if they couldn’t articulate it. The unjust status quo that privileged white man over all others began to change in quite recent times. In the civil rights movement, Black Americans and their white and other allies rose up against American racial discrimination. In the women’s movement, women and their male and other allies rose up against American gender discrimination. Black Americans have begun to play a much larger and more public role in American life than they ever had before. We even elected a Black president in 2008 and reelected him in 2012.

Women have become more prominent in American life too. We haven’t elected a woman president yet; but we’ve had a woman vice president, and two of our Secretaries of State have been women as have numerous other cabinet officers and members of Congress (though members of Congress are still disproportionately men). Blacks and women have served at every level of state government and have led large corporations and elite universities. Things are indeed changing.

Millions upon millions of white American men feel threatened by these changes. Threatened, that is, with the loss of the privilege they have had until very recently. They fear losing their privilege to Black Americans, that is, people they have always looked down on and even hated. They fear losing their privilege to women, that is, other people they have always looked down on and over whom they have exercised significant control.

And they are responding against their own interest. They are responding in significant part by electing Donald Trump president not once but twice, the second time after he had already been convicted of 34 felonies. They vote for Trump. They wear his red MAGA hats. They go to his rallies. They cheer at his racism. They cheer at his misogyny. They cheer at his xenophobia. They buy his lie that the country’s problems, which are in any event nowhere near as bad as Trump claims, are all the fault of immigrants. They cheer as Trump uses immigrants in exactly the same way as Hitler used the Jews. As I write on July 4, 2025, a great many of them are cheering the passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that is a body blow to the public welfare but which benefits the very wealthy, the very wealthy being the only people Trump cares about other than himself if indeed he even really cares about them at all.

America’s political culture is split as it has rarely been split before. We talk about red states as predominantly Republican and blue states as predominantly Democratic as if the states were politically monolithic. Conservative or even reactionary leaders, including supposedly Christian preachers, have convinced a hoard of people that “liberals” are “socialists” and that socialism is a very bad thing, never mind that socialist policies would benefit most of Trump’s voters. MAGA people won’t listen to people with brains and a conscience, and we on the left just can’t understand how anyone could vote MAGA. We consider those who do to be ignorant, stupid, and/or bigoted.[9] We can’t talk to each other. We don’t understand each other. To a considerable extent, we don’t want to have anything to do with each another.

That divide is a consequence of social and economic inequalities that contradict the notion of the equal protection of the law for all persons. MAGA zealots see equal treatment of minorities, women, and those of other gender identities as discrimination against them. They see enforcement of the separation of church and state as an attack on them and their religion. All of which flows from the country’s changing demographics and white American men’s loss of privilege.

I was going to say that the rift in American politics hasn’t turned violent yet, but that’s not quite true. At the end of his first term as president, Trump unleashed a rabid, violent mob on the US Capitol in an attempt to stop it from doing its constitutional job of certifying Joe Biden as president. They violently assaulted police officers who were just doing their duty. Someone once took a shot at Trump but did little or no harm. A MAGA zealot recently shot at two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses, killing both the woman and the man in one of those couples. We have more armed, disordered people in so-called militias than we have ever had before. Some of them speak of a civil war to rid the country of liberals.

Will the political split in this country that results from social and economic inequalities lead to a new civil war? I pray not, but I have no way of stopping Trump’s armed followers. And, frankly, I wish my home state of Washington and the state in which I grew up, Oregon, could secede from the union so that the red states couldn’t influence my life and the lives there as much as they can now, not that I would fight a war to make that happen. I am, after all, a Christian and an adherent to Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. Yet I have to wonder: What will happen at the end of Trump’s current term as president? He clearly wants to be president for life, and he doesn’t give a damn that the constitution limits him to two terms. Will his followers turn even more violent this time than they did last time in a criminal attempt to keep him in office?[10] There is no way to know, but the possibility surely exists. How would the US military react to such a violent attempt to keep Trump in power? I hope and pray that they would follow the law, but our military is riddled with MAGA zealots posing as patriotic Americans. At least some of them might well join an armed rebellion and bring their military training and weapons with them.

I don’t know what the future holds. I just know that Hannah Arendt was right when she pointed to social and economic inequality as a cause of major problems for any republic. When, right after the constitutional convention, someone asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government they had created he said: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Our republic, the one Franklin and other national founders created, is under attack by fearful forces who would take authoritarian rule over democracy as long as the authoritarian in charge were Donald Trump. Let us pray that reason may yet prevail, and we will, as Franklin said, keep our republic.

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[1] The Dred Scott decision of 1857 and Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 are dreadful exceptions to this statement.

[2] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB11194/LSB11194.2.pdf

[3] Most if not all state constitutions also establish equality before the law for people present within the state.

[4] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2014/1110/Economic-inequality-in-the-US-reaches-levels-not-seen-since-Great-Depression

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

[6] That being a wife and/or a mother is not always a blessing for all women does not change the truth of this statement.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Wyoming

[8]In a book published in 2004, political analyst and historian Thomas Frank examined this phenomenon in his home state. What’s the Matter With Kansas, How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004),

[9] We’ve got that one correct, but never mind.

[10] Of course, Trump is almost exactly the same age as I am, that is, 78 as I write. Neither of us may live to the next presidential election, though I hope that at least I do.

A Shameful Day

 This is the text of a letter I sent to our local newspaper on July 4, 2025.

Thursday, July 3, 2025, was one of the most shameful days in American history. On that day, Congress passed President Trump's horrendous budget bill. That bill gives massive tax breaks to the wealthy, many of whom pay little or no tax anyway, while slashing services for Americans in need and blowing the federal budget deficit up to unprecedented proportions. Republican promises that they would not touch Medicaid were a lie. Because of this bill, people in dire need will be thrown off Medicaid and others who need to get it won't. Rural hospitals will close. Hungry children will not get food. Charitable organizations will not be able to compensate for these cuts but will have even more demand for their services than they have already. It will take our country years at least to recover from this body blow to the public welfare. It is a shameful time for our country but most of all a shameful time for the Republicans, only a very few of whom spoke out against this despicable law. We can only hope and pray that Republicans will pay the price for this betrayal of public trust in upcoming elections.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

Today's Three Facebook Posts

July 3, 2025

Trump has now accomplished what Republicans have been trying to accomplish for decades, yet there is a difference between him and earlier Republicans. Earlier Republicans were socially and economically conservative and were in the pockets of the wealthy and the big corporations, but they weren't fascists. They bought political results with their money, but they never attacked democracy itself, or at least I'm not aware that they ever did to any significant extent. Trump is an American fascist. About that there is not the slightest doubt. He does not believe in democracy. Rather, he wants to be an authoritarian if not totalitarian ruler. He thinks he can issue laws of his own, and they will actually be laws. He says he isn't sure if the president must obey the Constitution, and he disobeys the federal courts that interpret the Constitution and other federal laws all the time. He has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult in much the same way Hitler did with the Nazi Party in Germany and Stalin did with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the USSR. No, we are not dealing with typical red state politics here, as appalling as red state politics often are. We are dealing with a threat to the rule of law, and that threat controls two-thirds of our federal government and has way too much influence in the third. Will decent Americans wake up and stop Trump and his unthinking followers from accomplishing even more of his goals? Only time will tell.

Republicans have been working for decades to destroy America's social safety net. Perhaps it started with Reagan's "welfare queens." Or perhaps it started when Republicans opposed FDR's New Deal. Nixon was no Trump, but he was no friend of the poor and vulnerable. Republicans have been doing in red states what they want to impose on the rest of us nationally for very long time, doing everything they can to make life for those in need worse than it has to be. And the Democrats have let them get away with it. They let them get away with it nominating people like DINO Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama, who turned out to be nowhere near as progressive as some of us convinced ourselves he would be. Joe Biden is a decent man and was a decent president, but he was hardly a truly radical reformer. Can the Democrats develop a spine and a meaningful program to counter MAGA? Will they? I wish I were more confident that the answer to both of those questions was yes.

We're screwed. Trump and his congressional acolytes have finally succeeded in passing a law that deals a body blow to American's already inadequate social safety net. I just read that some cities are canceling Fourth of July celebrations at least in part out of concerns that ICE would use the gatherings to arrest people. We've reached the stage what people are actively trying not to give the Gestapo a chance to do its dirty work. Sure, we can vote the fascists out of Congress late next year, and we can elect someone who's not a fascist president in 2028. But there is at least as good a chance that we won't as that we will. But who'd ever have thought this country would sink so low that saying things like that is a perfectly reasonable and even necessary evaluation of America slipping into American fascism. Like I said, for now at least, we're screwed.

Today's Facebook Post

 I'm sorry, but this country is simply insane. Congress is about to take money away from poor, needy people like my twin brother so they can give more money to the fat cats who don't need it and most of whom don't give a damn about the rest of us. In Idaho, as I write, a madman is shooting at first responders in Coeur d'Alene and may have started the fire they were responding to so he could shoot at them. But gun control? Oh hell no! We can't do that! Well, like hell we can't, it's just that we won't. We've killed hundreds of innocent people in Iran, and that's just the most recent incident of our irresponsible use of our military. Save the environment? Hell no! That would cost money! Well again, like hell we can't do it, we just won't. End racism? Hell no! To do that we'd have admit that we white people are still racists and that racism is alive in our institutions. You can't expect us to do that! Admit we're not perfect? Hell no! We can't do that! Value people over profits? Hell no! That's not the capitalist way! Well, no it isn't, which is why this country must become less capitalist. This is the greatest country in the world! Well, like hell it is.

Am I A Literalist?

 

Am I A Literalist?

June 22, 2025

 

Those of you who have followed my writing about the Bible even a little bit know that I have criticized and deconstructed biblical literalism from many different angles. I consider it to be a deadly sin that will kill our great, ancient Christian faith if we can’t overcome it because it so out of touch with the cutting edge of our culture, with where that culture clearly is headed. I am not a literalist. I am not a biblical literalist, neither am I a literalist about any other Christian document or statement of faith. About that I have no doubt whatsoever.  So my answer to the question that is the title to this piece is: No, I am not a literalist.

Yet a friend and colleague of mine, with whom I do at least a little bit of Bible study nearly every week, has called me a literalist. Not to my face but apparently to others, perhaps including my wife. So I have to wonder: What is it about me that would cause him to call me that? What about my approach to the Christian faith could possibly seem literalistic? I’m so convinced that I am not a literalist that I’m not sure I can really answer that question, but I have given it a good deal of thought. So here are those thoughts, which may or may not actually answer the question of what about me could seem to be literalistic.

I’ll start by asking: What is a literalist? In other words, what, for our purposes, is biblical literalism? It is the belief that we must read everything in the Bible as literally correct. To put the matter in other but equally true terms, it is the belief that we must take everything in the Bible as factually correct. This belief is false in large part because it almost always rests upon the assumption that God wrote or at least directly inspired everything that is in the Bible. I won’t go into all the reasons why that assumption isn’t just wrong but is actually absurd. If you want to know, ready my book Liberating the Bible, especially the first volume of that book’s Revised Edition, which has the subtitle, Approaching the Bible. I’ll just say here that the Bible is so full of statements that are just factually false, and it is so full of obvious factual contradictions, that God can’t possibly have written it or even much inspired it.

Next I’ll present what I have been taught and believe is a foundational principle of biblical exegesis. The purpose of biblical exegesis is to understand the biblical passage one is considering. Exegesis means to bring out of. It doesn’t mean to read into.[1] And it perhaps is, and it certainly should be, obvious that to do exegesis of a biblical text you have to start with the text itself. Even when we read a biblical text in translation, which nearly all of us do nearly all of the time, we have to start with what the text actually says. With what the words of the text are. We cannot start with what we wish the words were. We cannot start with what we want to words to be. We cannot start with a meaning that we read into the words. We have to start with what the words of the text actually are.

And we have to start with what the words of the text actually mean. Now, knowing what the words of a biblical text actually mean can often be more difficult than we might assume it would be. After all, the biblical text were (almost all) written in either Hebrew or koine Greek, ancient languages that most of us, you humble author included, don’t know. We have to rely on our translations and on whatever we’ve learned about specific translation issues. Once we’ve taken any translation issues we know about into consideration, we can proceed with our exegesis relying on our translations.

We read what the words of our text actually are. Unless we’re doing it because we know of a specific translation issue, we read the translated words that we have just as we have them. We don’t replace them with words we prefer. We don’t replace them with words we wish were there, that we want to be there. What are the words of our text? What do they say? We have to know that before we move on.

Then, when we do move on, we must recognize that our text, whatever biblical text it may be, was written nineteen hundred or more, sometimes a lot more, years ago in and for cultures very different from ours. We must make an effort to understand what the words meant in their original context. We’re starting with the words, and those words weren’t written in a vacuum. They were written in and for the people of a particular time and place, the people of a particular culture. We need to understand what the words of our text meant in their original context before we ca move on.

Understanding our text in its original context isn’t always easy. Scholars spend lifetimes studying just small aspects of the ancient cultures that are the original contexts of every biblical passage. We non-scholars, ordained or not, don’t do that. We can’t. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the training. We have to rely on what we’ve been taught and what we’ve read about those cultures as we seek to understand our text in its historical context.

Sometimes a word, phrase, or passage will have meant something quite different in its original context than it means to us. A good example is the word “adultery” in the Ten Commandments. We all know that those Commandments prohibit adultery. See Exodus 10:14. What far too many of us don’t know is that “adultery” meant something quite different in ancient Israel than it means to us. Most of us take it to mean a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse. Some of us understand the word more strictly as meaning any sexual act outside of marriage.

That, however, is not what the word meant in ancient Israel. It is not what it meant, originally at least, in the Ten Commandments. In ancient Israel, only women were prohibited from having sex outside of their marriage, which was, of course if unfortunately, always to a man. Men were not prohibited from having sex either when they were not married or outside of their marriage.

The reason for this dichotomy had nothing to do with sexual morality as we understand it. It had to do with property rights. Property belonged to men not to women, perhaps with rare exceptions. Ancient Israeli culture put great emphasis on a man’s property passing to his biological offspring after his death. If a man’s wife had had sexual relations both with her husband and with someone other than her husband and become pregnant, the man would have no way to know if a child to whom his wife gave birth was his biological child or not. Therefore, married women were prohibited from having sex with anyone other than their husbands. That’s what adultery was, a married woman having sex with someone other than her husband. It is not what our culture means by the same word, by adultery. Yet, it seems, nearly no one in our culture is aware of the truth that that word originally meant something different in the Ten Commandments than it does in our culture today.

Which raises an important question about exegesis applied to this prohibition of adultery. Is it appropriate for us to apply our definition of adultery to that prohibition when we understand the word differently than the word’s author and its original audience did? I have long insisted that words can have meaning beyond what the author originally intended the words to mean. I have long understood that words can have an “excess of meaning,” that is, they can mean more than its author took them to mean. I have long insisted that we must allow the meanings of ancient texts to evolve as culture and language evolves. That’s post-modern hermeneutics in a nutshell. That’s what I was taught in seminary.

Yet as I write this post I’m struggling with that concept. I’m thinking: Really? It is supposed to be legitimate for me to read something written something like two thousand five hundred years ago as meaning something different today than it did way back then? I guess the answer to that question has to be yes, but for me it has to be a qualified yes. Perhaps it can be yes, but we can make words mean something different from their original meaning only if we truly understand that original meaning.

In the case of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, we must always remember that that prohibition had to do with property rights not sexual morality as we understand it. So in determining what, if anything, that ancient commandment means for us, we must begin by asking not about sexual morality but about property rights. We have to ask whether property rights have anything to do with sexual acts in our culture the way they did in the ancient culture of the Ten Commandments. The answer to that question, I think, is no, they do not. Even if one is concerned that a man’s property pass only to his biological offspring the way the ancient Hebrews were, we have DNA tests that can determine definitively who is a man’s biological offspring and who isn’t. Ancient Israel, of course, had no such thing. So the first thing we have to conclude about the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is that its original reason for being in those commandments no longer applies to us.

So, does that make the commandment’s prohibition of adultery irrelevant to us? Well, not necessarily. The Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, obviously, applies to sexual acts. And, of course, we all know that the morality vel non of sexual acts is a vital issue in the lives of us humans. Of course, we know that truth quite apart from the Bible. So I think the use we make of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is to understand what the prohibition meant in its original context and then to ask: What does a prohibition of adultery mean in our context? Adultery is about marital relations. In the context that produced the Ten Commandments, marital relations weren’t really about love. They were mostly about procreation and property rights. In our context, marital relations are different. They are, or at least we believe that they should be, about love.

And that change of context makes a huge difference in what the Bible’s prohibition of adultery means to us. In our context, adultery is a violation of the bonds of love. To us, adultery means, or at least I am convinced that it must mean, sexual relations that violate that bond. That bond may be expressed in a marriage or not, but the value of the bond of love is that it directs the people who have entered into it to be faithful to the person with whom they have done so and to conform their behavior to the terms of the commitment they have made to the other person. It follows that where there is no bond of love between the people engaged in a sexual act, and when neither of them has formed a bond of love with another person, the sexual acts between them are not adultery. Those acts may or may not be legal. They may or may not be moral; but, in any event, they are not adultery.

So, am I a literalist? No, I am not. I do insist that in seeking meaning for our lives in any biblical passage, we must first understand what the passage meant in its original context. We must understand what the words of the text really are not what we perhaps might wish them to be. Then we must remember that no biblical text arose in a context anything like ours except that the people of biblical times were every bit as human as we are. But while any text may have a surplus of meaning, it also has an original meaning. That meaning may be one the author intended, or it may be one we must assume the text’s original audience would have found in it whether that was the author’s intended meaning or not.

We cannot legitimately go reading any meaning we want into a text. Every text has its own integrity, and any meaning-making we do with the text must understand and respect that integrity. We may draw a meaning from the text that its author never intended, but we can do that legitimately only if we can truly assert that the text means something in our context different from what it meant in its original context. That’s what I have done with the example of the Bible’s prohibition on adultery in this piece.

Perhaps it will help if I give another example of what I mean. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to love one another. John 13:34. In its original context, the words the gospel attributes to Jesus applied only to Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, the people he was talking to when he spoke the commandment. The context of this verse is that it was told from and to a very small, insecure, an perhaps persecuted group of Christians. Clearly, those Christians had to love one another if their community and their faith were to survive at all.

Christians today are not a very small, insecure, and perhaps persecuted group. Christianity is, rather, the largest faith tradition in the world, and it has been that for a very long time. It doesn’t exist only in small communities in the Roman Empire the way it did when John was written. It exists everywhere in the world. It doesn’t exist almost exclusively in one culture the way it did in John’s time. It exists in every culture there is in the world. Jesus’ directive to his disciples to love one another is still important inside Christian communities, but the changed context in which we read it today gives the directive a much broader meaning. The “one another” the author of John had in mind was the Johanine Christian community. To us, “one another” must mean everyone. Everyone in the world. I have heard this verse quoted for that meaning many times, though I have never seen an exegesis other than my own that explains how it came to have this meaning that is so much broader than its author ever intended. To read this verse as saying “love everyone” is legitimate even though that’s not what it originally meant. It has a surplus of meaning. It can mean more than its author intended, and to us indeed it does.

So, I’ll ask once again: Am I a literalist? No, I am not. I am, however, professionally trained in both history and ministry. When I was writing things that were history only I had no interest in considering whether an historical text I was working with could have a meaning for me and my world other than the one it had for its author, though I suppose some of them could have that surplus of meaning. Doing that is not the historian’s job. It is, or at least in many circumstances it can be, the Christian minister’s job. Yet the minister’s job when doing exegesis must begin where the historian’s job both begins and ends. It must begin with the text itself. It must always respect the integrity of the text. No one doing exegesis of a biblical text can ever legitimately make it mean something totally unrelated to the text itself. If you’re going to do that, just write your own text. Don’t do it an call it legitimate biblical exegesis. It isn’t.

So no, I am not a literalist. I do insist on staying closer to any biblical text one is considering than many of my clergy colleagues do. I object to reading any meaning into a text that is simply unrelated to the words of the text. I don’t go in for speculation about things we might want to know about a story that the story doesn’t tell us. I consider such speculation to be a waste of time. No. I am not a literalist. I just respect biblical texts more than many of my liberal/progressive Christian colleagues do, something for which I have no intention of apologizing.

 

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[1] Reading something into a biblical passage that isn’t actually there is called “isogesis,” something any decent biblical scholar will always seek to avoid.