The Fascist Personality of Donald Trump

 

The Fascist Personality of Donald Trump

August 18, 2022

 

Former president Donald Trump is an American fascist. I analyzed that truth back when he was about to become president under our federal system of government though he would lose the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. You’ll find that analysis on this blog under the title “American Fascist,” posted on October 26, 2026. I want here briefly to consider the personality of Donald Trump the American fascist. He is a very dangerous individual. We must take him and his movement seriously, and we must make sure he never comes to power again.

Fascism is a political system in which a state establishes strict control over all aspects of a nation’s life. The state controls not only the country’s politics. It controls the country’s economy, education, and cultural life. No aspect of life is beyond its control. That control is always exercised by one dictatorial leader. Examples include Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin in Soviet Russia, Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy, Mao Zedong in Communist China, Kim Jong-un in nominally communist North Korea, and many others. In a fascist state like these, the leader, whether he be called Der Fűhrer, Vozhd, Il Duce, the Supreme Leader, or Chairman, exercises total or at least near total control over the country he is said to lead. The leader of a truly fascist system is inevitably a person who craves control over the people close to him and the people of the country over which he rules. He invariably enforces his control over the system he has created (or inherited) through a secret police force or other sort of organization that is loyal only to him and that terrorizes the people of the country into obedience to his will. He demands total loyalty to himself as if that were the same thing as loyalty to the country. In fascist systems, the distinction between leader and state virtually disappears.[1] Donald Trump exhibits the characteristics of the fascist personality in, among other ways, the way he draws no distinction between himself and the United States of America. We also see his fascist tendencies in the way he uses the Big Lie to take and hold on to power.

As president he recognized no difference between himself and the government of the United States. We see this aspect of his personality in the way he took with him a large cache of government documents that weren’t his to take when he left the White House. When his aids told him he had to give the documents back, he said they’re not theirs they’re mine. He wanted everyone in his administration to be loyal to him, not to the people of the United States, nor to the constitution he had sworn to protect and defend, nor to the rule of law as a foundational principle of our system of government. He fired the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when that man would not pledge his loyalty to Trump personally. He wanted his Attorney General to act as his lawyer and the whole Department of Justice to act as though it represented him not the US government it actually represents. He fired his first Attorney General when that man recused himself from the independent counsel’s investigation into Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia rather than stay involved in the investigation to protect Donald Trump from the truth. He strove to exercise personal control over every aspect of the federal government that he cared about. He did not have an official terror agency like Hitler’s SS, Mussolini’s Black Shirts, or Stalin’s NKVD (a predecessor of the KGB). He did, however, encourage violence by white supremacist terrorist organizations (usually quite weakly called militias) that surely would gladly have taken on the role of those institutions had he asked them to. In all of these ways, and more, Trump demonstrated that he has the personality not of a democratically elected representative of the people but of a fascist Supreme Leader instead.

Trump also fits the mold of the fascist leader in his use of the Big Lie. Fascist regimes are invariably built upon lies. Often there is one Big Lie that the regime insists that everyone accept (or at least say they accept) as the truth. Hitler had a couple of Big Lies on which he, nominally at least, based his regime. One was that the German “race” was physically and morally superior to all other people. Another was that the supposedly evil Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s troubles and had to be eliminated. Stalin had a couple of Big Lies too. One was that the government and party he headed were all about establishing a classless society called socialism that would morph into an ideal age of communism in which all people would be equal. In the communist earthly paradise, everyone would happily gave what they could for the general welfare, and everyone would receive everything they needed for a good life. Another of Stalin’s Big Lies was that he was the great friend of all of the Soviet people who did nothing but protect their interests. Never mind of course that he killed something like twenty million or more of them before the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Donald Trump’s fascism is seen in the way he uses lies both big and small to advance his personal interests. He is an inveterate liar. He simply does not function within the categories of true and false. We can’t believe a word he says because truth just doesn’t matter to him. He told thousands of lies during his time as president. And along with all of his smaller lies, Trump has two Big Lies too. One is that he will “make America great again.” MAGA has become a shorthand for the Trumpist movement. Of course, Trump doesn’t give a damn about America, and he did nothing as president to make it great again, whatever that is supposed to mean. He sold the Big Lie of MAGA to enough gullible Americans to make him president in 2016. That he did hardly makes him truly be about American greatness.

 Trump’s other Big Lie, and one that is particularly important these days, is that the American people all love him but that corrupt Democrats rig elections against him. He insists that he won the 2020 presidential election by a landslide, but evil Democrats stole his victory from him. All through his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 he told his followers that the only way he could lose the election was if the election were rigged against him. He won the 2016 election by winning the electoral votes of several small states that offset the Democrats’ victory in a few of the larger ones, but he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. So he didn’t object to the electoral vote. He did insist that he had also won the popular vote by a large margin and that somehow his popular vote victory had been stolen from him.

That lie of 2016, however, pales in comparison to Trump’s Big Lie of 2020 and thereafter. In the presidential election of that year Trump lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote to Democrat Joe Biden. All through the 2020 campaign he kept repeating his patently absurd claim that he could lose the election only if it were rigged against him. He lost that election. So he claimed over and over again, and he continues to claim to this day, that his victory was stolen from him. He and his minions like Rudi Giuliani said again and again, and continue to say, that the election was invalidated by massive voter fraud, never mind that they have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence of such fraud. Trump sent Giuliani and other hack lawyers into courts in every so-called swing state that he had lost trying to get a court to declare the state’s election invalid because of that alleged voter fraud. He lost that argument in court sixty times, and courts often chastised his lawyers for bringing a frivolous case for which there was no evidence. He pressured the Secretary of State in Georgia, a Republican, to “find” him enough votes to reverse Biden’s narrow victory in that state. He tried to get Republican controlled state legislatures to declare that he had won their state though he had really lost it. Certainly with his knowledge and consent, and perhaps at his instigation, several Republicans in states he had lost forged documents naming them as their state’s electors when they were in fact no such thing. Some state parties submitted their false elector certificates to the federal government, something that surely must be a violation of some federal law or other.

When none of those ploys worked to keep Trump in office, he quite desperately turned to a constitutional provision few of us knew about. The Constitution says that the Congress shall meet in joint session to accept and tally the electoral votes of the states. As President of the Senate, the Vice President presides over this joint session. Trump tried to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting the electoral votes of enough states that Trump would win or at least that the election would be sent back to the states or that the House of Representatives would select the president as the Constitution specifies.[2] Trump told Pence that as Vice President he had the legal authority to do it. Pence, thank God, knew he had no such authority. He refused to give in to Trump’s demand.

So, in a last desperate attempt to stay in office, Trump made one last use of his Big Lie. He called on his supporters to gather in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the date of the joint congressional session that would finalize Joe Biden’s victory. A huge crowd gathered that morning at the Ellipse, near the White House and walking distance from the Capitol. Several of Trump’s minions, including Rudi Giuliani, fired up that crowd repeating Trump’s Big Lie over and over again. When Trump finally addressed them, the crowd had become a riled up mob. He told them forcefully and repeatedly that he had won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide. He said yet again that his victory had been stolen. He told them they had to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. When he said those things he knew that some in the mob were armed with semi-automatic rifles. Trump sent the armed mob down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to “stop the steal.”

Trump’s mob went to the Capitol, stormed the Capitol, overwhelmed the grossly outmanned Capitol police, invaded the building, and very nearly succeeded in overthrowing American democracy. The Secret Service got Pence out of the House chamber where the joint session was taking place and to an undisclosed safe location. The members of Congress present, and everyone else properly in the building, had to flee for their lives. Through it all, Trump sat in the dining room near the Oval Office watching it all on television. Members of his staff and even members of his family begged him to go public and stop the insurrectionary riot at the Capitol. For over three hours Trump did nothing. He said he agreed with the mob when it chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” His inaction during these hours is inexcusable and may one day play a part in a criminal indictment against him.

On January 6, Trump saw what a Big Lie can do with gullible, unsophisticated, and, frankly, quite stupid people. Hitler’s Big Lies brought him to power in Germany. Stalin’s Big Lies enabled him to come to power in the Soviet Union and terrorize the people of the whole country in a way that matched Hitler in Germany. Trump’s Big Lie hasn’t yet produced an Auschwitz or a Gulag. But with it he very nearly overthrew the government and constitution of the United States. Trump was desperate to remain in power. He still is.

In Donald Trump we see a classic fascist personality. He is a megalomaniac concerned about nothing but his own status and power. Most importantly, he combines two of the most telling characteristics of a fascist leader. He sought to use his Big Lie to subvert the US Constitution, overturn the country’s democratic structure and traditions, and retain the power the American system of government was legally and fairly taking from him. In doing so he was acting not as a politician within a democracy. His personality is not that of a democratic politician committed to the political institutions and traditions of his country. It is that of a would-be fascist dictator. Heaven help the United States of America if he ever again gets the chance to impose American fascism on our country. Heaven help us if he ever actually becomes president again. If he does, he may well succeed in becoming the fascist dictator he really wants to be.

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[1] I’ll address one issue here briefly. I have called both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fascist states. Yet of course those two dictatorships were based on very different lies. The Nazis proclaimed the superiority of the German people and the diabolical nature of the Jews. The Soviet Communists proclaimed the victory of the proletariat and the creation of a socialism that would eventually turn into communism. For my purposes here, this distinction is unimportant. Whatever their foundational lie, all totalitarian systems are essentially identical in the nature of their rule and the means they use to exercise it. For my purposes here, the differences between Nazi rule in Germany and the rule of the Communist Party in Russia make no difference.

[2] The Democrats were the majority party in the House, but under the Constitution the vote in this case was not done by each representative having one vote but by each state having one vote. Though they were a numerical minority, the Republicans controlled more state delegations than the Democrats did. If the election had gone to the House, as it did after the 1876 election, Trump would have been made president.

On the Value of the Law

 

On the Value of the Law

August 14, 2022

 

I’m not a lawyer, but I used to be one. I have a law degree. I practiced law for over twenty years. Since I changed professions and resigned from the Bar I have continued to write legal analyses on various issues. I haven’t practiced law for a while now, but I know more about the law, both its gifts and its challenges, than most Americans do. Most Americans, after all, are not and never have been lawyers. A relative of mine recently told me that the law is bullshit. I think he was referring only to one specific legal event, but still. He said the law is bullshit. I certainly dealt with a lot of bullshit when I was practicing law—incompetent judges, untrustworthy attorneys, uncooperative clients. It all goes with the territory of being a lawyer. Many of us believe that today’s US Supreme Court is dishing out a great deal of bullshit with its ideological, politically reactionary decisions.

Yet the law is not mostly bullshit. Indeed, most of the law is nothing like bullshit. It seems to many without legal training or experience, or without even a good civics class for that matter, that the law is more bullshit than it really is. A foundational truth that few Americans seem to understand is that law is indispensable for any collection of people to live together without violence and chaos. The law is first and foremost a way to prevent and resolve disputes between people peacefully rather than through force. That, after all, is why law developed in the first place. That is why we preserve it and live under it despite its complexity and at times apparent absurdity. It is something no ordered society can live without. We could easily live without as many lawyers as we have, but we cannot live without the law.

The law comes to us in two basic ways. There are written laws, and there are oral laws. Ancient humanity existed for a very long time before the rise of civilizations without formal law, yet even they surely had rules by which they lived and violation of which they punished. Though there were older legal codes in Mesopotamia, the oldest comprehensive legal code we know of is the Code of Hammurabi. It was written down around 1750 BCE. It takes its name from the king who issued it, King Hammurabi of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The ancient Hebrews had (and the Jewish faith still has) a code of laws called the Torah. It was written down no later than the early fifth century BCE. One of Rome’s lasting gifts to the western world was its code of laws. That code is still the basis of the law in some European countries (and in the state of Louisiana). The United Kingdom has a complex legal system. One of its chief characteristics is that most of it isn’t written. It functions nonetheless. The Roman Catholic Church, modeled as it is in so many ways on the Roman Empire, has a code called the canon law. The law of the United States (with Louisiana as an exception, something I won’t mention again) grew out of English law. It consists of written laws federal, state, and local. It also contains laws not written in law codes but in the case decisions of appellate courts both federal and state. It includes written codes of counties and cities. It also comes in the form of codes of administrative procedures both federal and state.

That’s where we find our laws, but why do we have laws in the first place? Laws, after all, regulate human behavior, and wouldn’t we prefer to have our behavior left up to ourselves and not regulated by some agencies and sets of rules most of us don’ t know much about? Well, we might think that could be good, but it wouldn’t be. In a complex society like that of the United States, relationships between people and institutions are so complex that there would be chaos without law. Laws facilitate people living together in an orderly way without fear of arbitrary governmental actions. To illustrate how valuable law and government under the rule of law is, lets look at a country that certainly had laws but that did not consistently apply those laws. It will help us understand the value of the law to look at what that country’s law and legal system did to the country’s people.

The country to which I refer is the late, unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It origins went back to the Bolshevik coup of November (October old style), 1917. It was organized into and given its name in 1922. It ceased to exist on December 25, 1991.[1] For all of its existence it was a one party state ruled by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had two institutions relevant to our discussion. On the one hand it had real laws. On the other it always had a security apparatus that operated as a foreign and domestic spy network. That agency’s name changed over time, but we know it as the KGB, the initial letters of the Russian words for Committee on State Security. The KGB was the primary institution through which the Communist Party exerted its tight control over all of the people of the country.

In my experience, it surprises many Americans to learn that the Soviet Union had a system of courts and both civil and criminal law, but of course it did. No country as complex as the USSR was can do without them. Those laws and courts functioned reasonable well nearly all of the time. The courts tried and convicted real criminals. The courts resolved contract disputes and personal injury cases. Most of the time there was nothing unique or remarkable about Soviet law and the Soviet legal system.

That does not mean, however, that the Soviet Union operated under the rule of law. It didn’t. The reasons it didn’t were the Communist Party and its enforcement arm, the KGB. The USSR was a one party dictatorship. The Communist Party controlled all aspects of Soviet life. Except to a very limited extent the Russian Orthodox Church, there were no nongovernmental organizations.[2] As a totalitarian regime, the Soviet government and its one political party always got what they wanted. That was as true in the field of law as it was in any other area of activity in the country. The courts functioned reasonably well until the KGB expressed an interest in the case. If the KGB wanted a particular outcome in a particular case, the court would invariable provide that outcome regardless of the facts or the law of the case.

The pervasive presence of the KGB (sometimes overt, sometimes covert), and the people’s knowledge that it was always present and always got what it wanted destroyed the rule of law in the USSR. Because the KGB operated at will outside the law the country’s people lived constantly in fear of the KGB and the Communist Party that controlled it. I’ll give you one minor example of that fear from my personal experience. I lived in Soviet Moscow for the 1975-1976 academic year doing PhD dissertation research in Russian history. My late wife, our toddler son, and I lived on the fifth floor of a dormitory wing reserved for western students of the enormous Moscow State University building south of downtown Moscow. We got to know a Russian student at the university who lived in a different wing of the building. Once we invited him to come to our place, consisting of a couple of very small rooms, for dinner. He immediately asked, “What floor does Boris live on?” He didn’t have to tell us who Boris was. We all knew that the was the KGB plant in the western students wing of the dormitory. We told our friend that Boris lived on the seventh floor. So our friend agreed to come. If we and Boris had lived on the same floor he would not have come. The risk of Boris seeing him associating with Americans would have been too high. And it was rather clear that this Russian student had some connections in and protection from the Communist Party. He was still afraid of the KGB. Our friend’s apprehension about encounters with Boris is just a minor example of the way the Soviet people lived in fear of the authorities. They knew the KGB could be brutal and that it often operated outside the law. Everyone was afraid of drawing goo much attention from anyone working for the KGB, and no one ever knew exactly who that was.

That little example demonstrates the value of a legitimate legal system for any country. Yes, laws are human creations, and the people of the legal system are fallible human beings. There are bad laws. There are some incompetent and even bad people working in the legal system, though mercifully in my experience not that many of them. Still, unless a society lives under the rule of law, there is no real security for anyone in the society. Everyone’s relationship with other people and with the society’s institutions becomes a matter of chance or a matter of the whim of powerful people. The rule of law doesn’t guarantee everyone’s safety. No legal system can control all of the people all of the time. Still, a society governed by law is far more orderly and secure than a society left to the whim of some leader or even of some minor bureaucrat who wants to flex their muscle. That’s why every human society has a legal system. Some of those legal systems work better than others. Still, be thankful you live in a country governed by law rather than in one that isn’t.

There is one element of the rule of law that is of great importance in the United States today. For the rule of law truly to be the rule of law, the law must apply to everyone. Full stop. No exceptions. In a society that truly functions under the rule of law, no one can be above the law, not even a president of the United States. That’s the only way the rule of law can be fair. No one is beneath it. Law applies to everyone. It protects everyone’s legal rights.[3] Also, no one is above the law. The law holds everyone accountable. Richard Nixon infamously said that if the president does it, it’s not illegal. He was dead wrong about that. If anyone is above the law, wrongdoing will go unpunished. Moreover, the people will lose faith in the law. Yet the law’s proper functioning requires that the people to whom it applies trust it, have faith in it. We see in our country that some people, perhaps many people, have lost or are losing faith in the law because of how some police officers, the courts, and the prisons treat Black people as though they were below the law. If we want to trust and obey the law, we must insure that we correct those wrongs and insure that the law applies to everyone equally.

The law often has its own way of doing things. There are often rules and procedures that lay people do not understand. People sometimes criticize the law not because there’s really anything wrong with it but because they don’t understand it. A striking example of this dynamic is the time Chief Justice Rehnquist of the US Supreme Court said that innocence is no reason to reverse a conviction for murder. To the lay mind that statement is nonsense. It doesn’t make sense to that lay person, however, because she doesn’t understand the proper function of appellate courts. They see an appeal as a new trial rather than as a review of legal issues only that it actually is. It’s not surprising, then, that to many people the law can appear to be bullshit.[4]

Yet on the whole the law is not bullshit. Neither is concept of the rule of law. The rule of law is out best, indeed probably our only, assurance of at least some peace and order in our life together as a society. If you need proof of that statement, please reconsider what I said above about Soviet law. Or learn about some other situation in which the rule of law is missing, where a nation is ruled more by the whim of some dictator or some controlling party. You’ll see what the rule of law is designed to prevent. Perhaps you’ll become more grateful for the law than you have been before.

Tragically, the rule of law is under attack in the United States today. One man, Donald Trump, is responsible for that potentially disastrous development. Former president Donald Trump thinks he is above the law. Many of his actions betray that conviction of his. He tried hard to reverse the result of a lawful election. When any law enforcement agency takes any action against him, as when the FBI executed a search warrant at his garish resort Mar-a-Lago, he and his minions, including his Republican minions in Congress, scream political persecution. At the very least Trump passively supported and very probably engaged actively in a violent insurrection against the United States government. As president he tried to make the Department of Justice his personal law firm, and to a limited extent he succeeded. Not all of his supporters by any means are white nationalist terrorists, but many of them are. He accepts and encourages the support of radicalized people who are prepared to use violence to get what they want. It is beyond comprehension how this man ever became president. If he ever becomes president again the United States will quite probably no longer be a country ruled by law.

I’m nearly 76 years old. I’ve lived through the debacle of the Nixon administration with its war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I lived through the revelation of the collection of criminal acts we call Watergate. I’ve experienced the Republican Party under Reagan and the two presidents Bush reduce the federal government to the handmaiden of the economic elite at the expense of all other Americans. I’ve seen George W. Bush commit an illegal war of aggression in Iraq. Yet through all those horrors I never thought that the rule of law in this country was in serious peril. Today we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is. We are in serious danger of losing the only thing that makes communal life possible for us humans, the rule of law. May each and everyone of us do everything we can to defeat Donald Trump and his lawless supporters. It’s the only way we can preserve the rule of law our country so badly needs.

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[1] Because the Russian Orthodox Church uses the old Julian calendar, December 25 in the Gregorian calendar we use is not Christmas in Russia.

[2] The Russian Orthodox Church was not officially an agency of the Soviet government, but it did not oppose the Communist Party. It wouldn’t have survived if it had. In fact, at least some of its priests were also or primarily KGB agents. But at least the Church’s stated functions and aims were not those of the atheistic Communist Party.

[3] I know. In this country the law often does a lousy job of protecting everyone’s legal rights. That the law falls short of what the theory says it should mean does not make the theory wrong. It just means we have to work harder at making the law more truly function the way it is supposed to function.

[4] I’ve never been a judge, but if I were an appellate judge considering a murder case and was convinced that the defendant was innocent, I’d find some legal hook on which to hang a reversal of the judgment against them. Actually, real judges do things like that all the time. I was taught that when doing an appeal, make the court want to rule in your favor, then give it a legal hook on which to hang a judgment in your favor.

On the FBI's search at Mar-A-Lago

This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett Herald, the local newspaper in Snohomish County, Washington, where I live.

I am hearing a great deal of nonsense about the FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump’s home and resort Mar-A-Lago. I have heard it called Gestapo tactics. I have heard it called worse than McCarthyism. Former president Donald Trump has called it a politically motivated witch hunt. The truth appears to be that the FBI submitted an affidavit to a federal judge or magistrate that contended that there was reasonable cause to believe that there was evidence of a crime at the place to be searched. The judge or magistrate agreed and issued a search warrant. The FBI executed the warrant. They searched the subject premises and took material they believed to be related to the crime in question. Nothing in law enforcement could be more routine. Yes, the FBI sent a large number of agents and vehicles to Mar-A-Lago. Yes, what they did was dramatic. There is no evidence that it was in any legally improper. As a legal matter the FBI’s motivation for seeking and executing the warrant is irrelevant provided that its agents complied with the law for obtaining and executing it. There is nothing improper about the FBI pursuing a case in which a person may be in possession of classified material illegally. That’s their job. Yes, the subject of the warrant in this case was a former president of the United States. Legally, however, he was only a private American citizen at the time the warrant was executed. The same law applies to him that applies to all of us. The FBI may or may not have been politically motivated. The hysterical response to what they did clearly is. Everyone should just calm down and let the FBI’s criminal investigation run its legal course. That’s how the rule of law works.

 

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson, JD

919 Perkins Way

Sultan, WA 98294

425-268-0649

A Failure of American Federalism

 

A Failure of American Federalism

August 9, 2022

 

There is a widespread misunderstanding among the American people. The United States of America is not a democracy as so many Americans assume it to be. It is a constitutional republic. It is a nation with a representative form of government the structure and limitations of which are set out in a document called the United States Constitution. That constitution does not create a pure democracy. It creates a governmental system in which the people elect a president every four years, but not by a direct, purely democratic vote. Instead, the states elect people called electors. Those people cast their state’s votes for president and vice president in the electoral college. The number of electoral votes each state has is the number of representatives  the state has in the House of Representatives plus the number of the state’s senators. The number of each state’s members in the House of Representatives is determined by the size of the state’s population. Thus, the state with the largest population, California, has far more representatives than does Wyoming, the state with the smallest population. Every state gets at least one member of the House even if its population is smaller than the number used to calculate the number of representatives each state has.

So far so good, but here comes an enormous problem with the American federal system of government. Every state gets two senators regardless of the state’s population. For example, California and Wyoming each have two senators. The population of Wyoming is approximately 581,000. Thus, Wyoming has one senator for every 290,500 people. The population of California is approximately 39,600,000. Thus, California has one senator for about every 19,800,000 people. The discrepancy between the number of people per senator in these two states could hardly be more dramatic.

One result of this unequal way of determining the number of each state’s representatives while each state has the same number of senators is that small population states have a disproportionately large say in the outcome of presidential elections and of votes in the Senate. We see the disproportionate political power of small states most clearly in the outcomes of our presidential elections. It has happened a few times, including twice recently, that a candidate who loses the popular vote wins the presidency because that candidate has a majority of electors in the electoral college. I’ll use the 2016 presidential election as an example. In that election the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received 65,853, 514 popular votes. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, received 62,984,828 popular votes. Thus, Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by 2,868, 686 votes. Yet Trump became president because he received 304 electoral votes while Clinton received only 227. It mattered not at all that Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes. Trump won the electoral college vote, and that victory made him president.

Similar things happen in the US Senate. Today’s Senate consists of 50 Republican senators and fifty Democratic senators (counting two independent senators who caucus and usually vote with the Democrats). Yet the Republican senators represent only 43.5 percent of American voters while the Democrats (with those two independents) represent 65.5 percent of those voters. Therefore, today a decided minority of American voters have senators with voting power identical to that of the majority of American voters. The conclusion is unavoidable. America’s federal system of government established by the US Constitution is undemocratic and unfair to a majority of the American people.[1]

Why is our system of government structured to produce undemocratic and unfair results? The answer to that question lies in the context in which the Constitution’s unfair provisions were written. To understand that context we must step back in time to before the Constitution was written and adopted to look at the structure of the nation the Constitution’s predecessor document, the Articles of Confederation, created. That document expressly stated in its Article II that, “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.” Article V created that Congress. It said that each state shall have no fewer than two nor more than seven members of Congress. It also says, however, that in that Congress each state shall have one vote.[2] In specifying the matters delegated to the Congress, the Articles emphasized foreign relations and questions of war and peace.

We see in the Articles of Confederation how the leaders of the thirteen original states saw the states that joined that confederacy.[3] They saw their various states essentially as sovereign nations that have given only very limited authority and jurisdiction to a national government. That government consisted only of a congress, and it is especially telling that the Articles provide that each state shall have one vote in that congress regardless of how many members a state sends to Congress and regardless of each state’s population. Thus, Delaware, the smallest population state, had the same number of votes in Congress, namely, one, as did Virginia, the state with the largest population. This arrangement makes sense only if each of the states truly was an independent nation that has ceded only very limited power to a multi-nation governing body. In short order the Articles of Confederation failed to create a viable order of cooperation between the states. Clearly something more was needed if there were to be any sort of functioning unity between those states. The document we know as the Constitution of the United States of America was written and adopted to create that functioning unity.

We see a significant difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution at the Constitution’s very beginning. The Constitution  claims to have been created not by the states but by the people of the country. The famous Preamble to the Constitution reads:

 

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

 

The reference to “a more perfect union” means more perfect than the union the Articles of Confederation created. In the Articles of Confederation the people are mentioned only in specific provisions about citizens of one state being, in effect, treated like citizens of every state. The Articles are not about the people. They are, primarily at least, about the relationships between sovereign states. For the Articles of Confederation, the states are what matter.

In addition to the introduction of the people right at the beginning of the document, we see in the US Constitution its authors striking a balance between the people on the one hand and the states that make up the nation on the other. That balance appears in the Constitution’s provisions on the Congress, the legislative branch of the government. The Constitution creates a legislature consisting of two branches, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The ways the people and the states are represented in those two houses of Congress are not the same. The number of representatives each state has in the House of Representatives is determined by the size of the state’s population. Thus California has 52 representatives in the House while six small population states have only one each.[4] In the Senate, however, each state has the same number of senators, namely, two, regardless of the size of the state’s population. In this balance we see the country’s conception of the relationship between the states and the federal government shifting away from the understanding of each state as essentially sovereign expressed in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution’s understanding that the states together constitute one nation. Yet the notion still persists in that document that the nation consists of a coming together of states that, in theory at least, retain some sort of limited sovereignty.

We Americans today, I believe, think of our country as one nation with some relatively minor differences between the states than as a coming together of sovereign states. At least those of us who do not live in a state that was not part of the Confederacy during the Civil War think of the country that way.[5] The realm of the federal government’s jurisdiction and power has expanded greatly since the Constitution was adopted in1789. Although lawyers know how important state law is, I’m sure most Americans would consider federal law to be more important than state law. And of course, unlike state law, federal law applies uniformly across the whole country. The way in which the federal government today sets a broad range of policies for the entire country moves us ever more in the direction of, as the Pledge of Allegiance says, one nation. (Whether or not that one nation is “under God” I’ll leave for another day.)

It is also relevant to this discussion that the size differences between the states is much greater today than it was when the Constitution first went into effect. In those days the population of the largest state, Virginia, was roughly 12.65 times larger than the population of the smallest state, Delaware. Today California has the largest population of any state, and Wyoming has the smallest. The population of California is approximately 65.15 times larger than that of Wyoming. The total population of all of the states having only one representative in the House of Representatives is roughly 4,500,000. That’s about 12% of the population of California. Yet those states have fully 33% of the number of California’s electoral college votes, nearly three times the number they should have if representation were equal in this country. It is thus undeniable that America’s constitutional system of government gives vastly disproportionate electoral power to small states at the expense of large states. It also gives small states disparate power in the Senate.

There simply is no reason for the United States to retain this undemocratic federalist system of unequal representation. It isn’t democratic. It isn’t fair. There is of course, with exceptions, a significant difference in political culture between most small population states and most large population states. Wyoming never votes the same way California does. That reality, however, is irrelevant to this analysis. A country that claims to be democratic should be democratic. A country that touts the notion of one person one vote really does need to make all votes equal. Under our current federal structure, in many instances they are not. It’s way past time for to correct that imbalance and finally become more fully what we claim to be.

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[1] This situation is made worse by the Senate’s rule requiring 60 votes on a procedural matter for any bill to come to the floor for argument and vote, but that’s a topic for a different day.

[2] The Articles of Confederation created neither an executive nor a judicial branch of the national government.

[3] Though the names of a couple of them were slightly different than they are today, they were the same thirteen states that later adopted the US Constitution.

[4] They are Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

[5] The Civil War was fought over slavery, but at the beginning the issue was one of the sovereignty of the states. The states that seceded from the union and formed the Confederate States of America insisted that they were essentially sovereign. The north fought, initially, to maintain the union, that is, to maintain the nation as one rather than several.

God Damn the Supreme Court!

 

God Damn the Supreme Court!

August 7, 2022

 

I wrote this piece a while back, I think right after the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. I never typed it up or posted it. I’m not sure why not. Maybe I thought its tone was too angry. Well, today’s Supreme Court gives us lots to be angry about. So, here it is.

 

God damn the United States Supreme Court! Not all of it of course. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson are right on every issue on which the extremist conservative majority is so horribly, horribly wrong. Yet all the three decent judges on the court can do is write scathing dissents against the ideological, destructive decisions of the majority. So God bless the conscientious three, and God damn the uncaring, reactionary six. I am not a lawyer, but I have a law degree; and I practiced law for over twenty years before changing professions. I have disagreed with Supreme Court decisions before, but I have never been nearly as angered by the court as I am today and have been for quite some time. I write this piece to express that anger and analyze at least some of the dynamic that is causing the court’s majority to issue such horribly wrong and damaging decisions.

We have known for a long time that right-wing political forces in this country have schemed to remake the Supreme Court in their own image. They have long known that a substantial majority of Americans oppose their narrow, prejudiced, policies grounded in ideology rather than in the public good. Yet they have also known that the federalist system of the United States Constitution gives disproportionate power in both the electoral college and the United States Senate to small population states. They have known that those states are far more supportive of political reactionism than are states with larger populations. So they have known that, although they are a minority of the American people, they had a chance to elect a president and a Senate majority that would genuflect before their unintelligent, reactionary Christianity and do their will. They have cared, and care, not at all that most Americans find their policies utterly unacceptable.

Ever since the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade in 1973, right-wing Republican political candidates have promised their extremely conservative base that they would nominate and confirm justices to the Supreme Court who would overrule that landmark case. Roe stands, now tragically stood, for the equality and personal autonomy of American women, something the supposedly-Christian right cannot stand and wishes to restrict as much as possible. Decade after decade the Republicans these people elected failed to deliver on that promise. Then Donald J. Trump, an utterly unqualified, personally reprehensible New York real estate wheeler dealer lost the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election but became president anyway because of the Constitution’s federalism. Mitch McConnell, the perfectly partisan, obstructionist senator from the relatively small population state of Kentucky, became majority leader of the Senate. The Senators of the Republican majority represented far fewer people than did those of the Democratic minority, but it didn’t matter. Mississippi has as many senators as California, and it makes no difference that the population of California is more than ten times larger than that of Mississippi. Such are the wonders of American federalism. Through the death or retirement of Supreme Court justices, Donald Trump was able to nominate three woefully unqualified, ideologically inclined justices to that court. McConnell and his Republican majority in the Senate confirmed those nominations despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone not mentally hamstrung by conservative ideology that they had no business serving on the highest court in the land. The evangelical American right finally had what the Republicans had long promised them, a Supreme Court that would overrule Roe v. Wade, and overrule it that court did.

That’s court’s most recent term was by far the most destructive Supreme Court term in living memory. Its decisions were perhaps the worst Supreme Court decisions ever save for the Dred Scott case and Plessy v. Ferguson. In its most recent term the court finally overruled Roe v. Wade. thereby taking a constitutional right away from the American people, something the court had never done before. It weakened the separation of church and state when it let a public high school football coach pray at the center of the field after a game, never mind the pressure to join him his doing so undeniably put on his players. It made Americans less safe by overturning New York’s reasonable and necessary regulation of firearms. It also handcuffed the federal government in its efforts to respond to the current climate crisis and probably in any of its regulatory activity. Never in my wildest dreams could I ever have imagined a Supreme Court as dangerous and destructive as this one.

The court’s reactionary majority cloaked each of these disastrous decisions in a robe of legal reasoning, Yet each of those decisions is more ideological than legal. No Supreme Court at least in modern times has acted so ideologically with such a thin layer of legal rationale laid upon top of purely political decisions. I won’t bother here to do a legal analysis of each of these cases and their legal failings, for they aren’t grounded in law but in reactionary ideology; and their destructive effects are obvious to anyone with an open mind and a caring heart whether one has legal training or not. In depth legal analysis is hardly necessary to make the wrongness of these decisions apparent.

To get at least a beginning understanding of this Supreme Court, we begin with an understanding of courts and the law that the popular media often seem to lack. On the one hand, it is not the function of any court to implement or even to be influenced by public opinion. Especially in the realm of constitutional law, but really in all if its functioning, the role of a court, especially an appellate court, is to determine what the law applicable to the case before it is and to apply that law to the case. Especially when it comes to the specification and application of law relating to individual rights, the law must disregard public opinion and apply the law to protect those rights from any public consensus that would dispose of them. That public opinion strongly opposes most of the current Supreme Court’s decisions in no way, in itself, makes those decisions wrong.

On the other hand, a court must consider the effect its decisions will have on its legitimacy with the American people. No court, not even the Supreme Court, has any power to enforce its decisions. Those decisions have effect only if the American public and the country’s institutions recognize those decisions as legitimate and binding upon them. Because it has made unpopular decisions on a range of subjects of vital interest to the American people, and because those decisions are so obviously wrong, the current Supreme Court is putting the legitimacy of the court in serious question. Even some of that court’s justices have recognized this danger.

One way to understand how the decisions of this court are wrong and how they impact the legitimacy of the court is to wade into the swamp known as “hermeneutics.”[1] Hermeneutics is a swamp because few people have ever heard of that academic discipline, and fewer understand it. Yet hermeneutics is important in any field that involves the interpretation of written texts. We learned hermeneutics in seminary because it is absolutely necessary for the interpretation of religious texts like the Bible. Though I never heard it mentioned in law school, It is equally important in the field of law.

Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. It applies to anything that requires interpretation. Now, if you’re like most Americans, you probably think that all you have to do to understand any writing is to read it. You probably think that a writing, or at least any honest one, says what it means and means what it says. Well, I’m sorry (actually I’m quite happy) to disillusion you. All reading in interpretation.[2] Any text in itself is just markings on a piece of paper or other surface. Those markings in themselves have no meaning. They just sit there doing and meaning nothing, something that is also true of this text of mine that you are currently reading. Those markings mean something only when a reader reads them. The text’s meaning arises in the encounter between the reader and the text. That it does means that a text can mean different things to different people at different times. Those different meanings are all legitimate unless the reader departs too far from the text itself in interpreting it. It matters not that a reader may find a meaning of a text different from the meaning the text’s author intended. An author loses control over her text as soon as someone other than she reads it.

There is, unfortunately, this complication that we must consider. There are two basic hermeneutics, two basic theories of interpretation. We must understand both of them if we are to understand two basic theories of interpreting the constitution, both of which are represented on the Supreme Court today. One is what I have called the “modernist hermeneutics.” This approach to textual interpretation denies that the meaning of a text arises only in the encounter between the text and its reader. It holds that a text means only what the text’s author meant in the context in which that author wrote the text. It generally assumes that a text means what it says. If there is any vagueness or ambiguity in the text, the way to discover the text’s meaning is to determine what the author meant when she or he wrote the text. That task is not always easy. We have available to us texts that are two or three thousand or more years old. Those texts were written in contexts far different from ours.[3] Modern hermeneutics holds nonetheless that the text means what its author meant when he or she wrote the text. To this way of thinking, the text cannot mean anything else.

I have called the other hermeneutic, the other theory of interpretation, the “post-modern hermeneutic.” This hermeneutic accepts first of all that, like I have said here, the meaning of any text arises only in the encounter between the text and a reader. Postmodern hermeneutics draws several more truths from that understanding. I just mentioned how an author loses control of her text’s meaning when someone else reads it. There are others. Every text, including the US Constitution, is written in and for a specific context. Just as we cannot truly transcend our cultural context, neither can any author of any text old or new. An author always takes certain things about her context for granted. Every author, either explicitly or implicitly, understands his intended audience to share certain information and understandings. Either explicitly or implicitly, the author tailors her words to include or reflect that information and those understandings. For example, the author of the creation story at Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 had no modern cosmology, no modern, scientific understanding of the structure of the universe. Neither did the author’s intended audience, namely, the Jewish people of the late sixth or early fifth century BCE. He wrote within a context that was already very old by his time.[4] He had a certain understanding of God, and he could assume that his audience more or less shared that understanding. He challenged some of the understandings of God or the gods present in his context, but he did so within the context he shared with his audience. Even when a text challenges some aspect of the author’s culture, it does not ultimately transcend that culture.

Postmodern hermeneutics understands that as the context in which a text is read changes, the meaning of the text can change as well. I’ll use the Second Amendment of the US Constitution as an example. That Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It was written in the young United States in the late eighteenth century. It became part of the Constitution in 1791. The United States was a very different place in 1791 than it is today. The authors of the Second Amendment understood certain things about the context in which they wrote. They understood that the nation’s armed forces consisted largely of citizen militias the members of which mustered with their own arms when called. They had some underlying understanding of just what “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” was that was not to be infringed. They didn’t have to specify what is was, and they didn’t. The same is presumably true of the meaning of the word “infringed.” Perhaps most significantly, they and their audience shared an understanding of what “Arms” were. The word surely applied at that time to muskets, that is, muzzle-loading rifles that could fire at most four rounds per minute. Some people may have owned pistols, but like the muskets, the pistols of that day were quite primitive by our standards.

The authors of the Second Amendment can have meant only the weapons of their day. They had and could have no conception at all of the weapons of our day. Even something as simple as a Colt 45 was beyond their ken. The weapons so often used in today’s mass shootings date from the 1950s. An AR-15 style rifle can fire rounds four times faster than could an eighteenth century musket. It holds an ammunition clip containing ten rounds or more. It is far, far deadlier than anything the authors of the Second Amendment could imagine even in their wildest dreams. Also, the national defense today no longer relies on citizen militias whose members report with their own weapons. Our context today is indeed very different from the context in which the Second Amendment was written.

Modernist hermeneutics says this change in context between the time when the Second Amendment was drafted and today makes no difference in the Amendment’s meaning. To this way of thinking, the term “Arms” means today any weapon, which is what it meant in 1791, never mind the difference between and AR-15 and a musket. Post-modern hermeneutics says that contextual difference makes an immense difference in the meaning of the same words. A man with an unregulated eighteenth century musket acting alone was a serious threat in a civilian context essentially to no one, or at least to very few people. A man acting alone with an unregulated AR-15 can kill a great many people in virtually no time at all. Modern hermeneutics says the Second Amendment means the same thing today that it meant in 1791 and must be applied and enforced now as it would have been then, that is, that it applies to all arms. Post-modern hermeneutics says no, the radical change in context between then and now means that today we must interpret and apply the Second Amendment quite differently than it was or would have been interpreted and applied back then. The changes in context between 1791 and today make pretending that those changes are irrelevant to the meaning of the Amendment unjust at best and immensely destructive at worst.

The conservative majority on today’s Supreme Court operates entirely with a modernist hermeneutic. We see that hermeneutic at work in the Dobbs case that overruled Roe v. Wade, thereby taking away the constitutional right to abortion (within limits) that American women had enjoyed for nearly fifty years. In his plurality opinion Justice Samuel Alito said that Roe was wrongly decided because the US Constitution contains neither the word “abortion” nor the word “privacy,” privacy being the concept from the earlier case of Griswald v. Connecticut on which Roe was based. He concludes from that truth, I assume, that the framers of the Constitution meant to create neither a right to abortion nor the broader right of privacy. About that he is certainly correct. But he is right about the conclusion he draws from that fact only if one uses only a modernist hermeneutic. In that hermeneutic what the Constitution’s authors meant when they wrote it controls even today. To this way of thinking, the Constitution can mean nothing else.

In a postmodern hermeneutic Alito is dead wrong. That hermeneutic says that today’s radically different context demands that we apply the Constitution to our context not to the context of over two hundred years ago. Societal attitudes toward privacy have changed. Societal attitudes toward the rights and personal autonomy of women have changed. So too perhaps have the meanings of constitutional phrases like “the right of the people to be secure in their persons…against unreasonable searches and seizures” from the Fourteenth Amendment and “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws” from the Fourth Amendment. Our context is so different from the contexts of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries when those words were put into the Constitution that our world would be unrecognizable to the people of those times as would their world be to us. Surely we are as entitled to read the Constitution and give it meaning in our context as were the people of those times in theirs.

But, the users us the modernist hermeneutic (usually called strict constructionists) say, if you want to ament the Constitution, is contains a mechanism for doing it. Indeed, they quite correctly say, the Constitution has been amended several times through the use of that mechanism. Post-modern hermeneutics responds that its reading of the Constitution doesn’t amend the Constitution. It reads the same words in that document as the strict constructionists do. It just understands how to interpret and apply those words in ways meaningful in today’s world rather than meaningful only in the worlds of centuries ago. Moreover, the mechanism for amending the Constitution is complex and time-consuming. It has been used only twenty-seven times in the two hundred thirty-three years since the Constitution was first adopted, and ten of those amendments were done at the very beginning of the Constitution’s effectiveness. So in the last two hundred thirty-one years the Constitution has been amended only seventeen times. Three of those seventeen amendments were added to the Constitution within five years from the end of the Civil War. So in circumstances less than exigent than recovery from civil war, the Constitution has been amended only thirteen times, and one of those amendments repeals another of them. Thus since the Civil War amendments were adopted, only twelve amendments remain in effect. Yes, the Constitution can be amended, yet courts must decide cases that are before them in today’s circumstances not the circumstances of past decades or centuries. It is neither sensible nor just for the court to apply eighteenth century understandings to twenty-first century cases. It is neither practical nor necessary to amend the Constitution to fit today’s context. The postmodern hermeneutic does that in the way it interprets the document without amending it.

Yet today’s Supreme Court majority considers applying long outdated standards and concepts to today’s cases neither unreasonable nor unjust. Those six justices, more often than not, will read the words of the Constitution, think those words have only one meaning, namely the meaning they understand them to have had when first written, then apply that meaning to the case before them. In doing so they completely disregard the real life circumstances of today’s world. Does the Constitution ban unreasonable or unlawful searches and seizures? Fine. That means only searches for and seizures of material objects because, these justices would probably insist, that is what the phrase meant in 1791. It matters not at all to them that our society today has a much broader conception of individual privacy and autonomy than anyone had way back then. Thus today the court can legitimately read that phrase as creating a personal right of privacy though it does not use the word privacy. The six justices who make up the court’s majority see that the Constitution does not expressly create a right to abortion, and that’s all that matters to them. The fully foreseeable, destructive impact of revoking the constitutional protection of the right to abortion their court established nearly fifty years ago in Roe on real, living women means nothing to them. That reality in no way influences their reading of the Constitution in today’s context. The Second Amendment says the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. To these supposedly esteemed interpreters of the law, the difference in the killing powers of an eighteenth century musket and a twenty-first century AR-15 affects the meaning of those words not at all. So they make it even easier than it has been for mentally disturbed people to buy such a weapon and use it to murder nineteen schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas,  or twenty schoolchildren and seven adults at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, something no one could have done with a muzzle-loading musket.

The significance of the destructive effect in today’s world of the court being concerned only with what words are and are not in the Constitution is immense. The destructive effect of the court assuming that context is irrelevant to the meaning of the Constitution in today’s world is obvious to anyone who will deign to look for them when interpreting the law. Yet, operating entirely within the limitations of the modernist hermeneutic, today’s Supreme Court is imposing a reactionary revolution on today’s people. They are charging headlong into understandings of the law one or even two centuries old, and they are taking the rest of us kicking and screaming with them. They are reactionary ideologues who find “strict construction” of the Constitution an effective means of undoing most of the progress toward justice our country has made in the course of its long and tortured history. They are making our country less than it used to be.

The gap between what this country has claimed to be and what it actually is has always been wide. The majority of today’s Supreme Court is making that gap into an immense chasm. It will take us decades to undo the damage they have already done and the additional damage they will surely inflict on us in the future. Today’s Democratic president and congressional majorities could in theory pull the court majority’s fangs by expanding the Supreme Court so that today’s majority would become a minority. Sadly, President Biden as already rejected that solution of the problem of today’s court. No other solution seems possible.

So I say God damn the Supreme Court! God damn Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. God damn them for the immense harm they are causing and will continue to cause to our nation and to the world. Yes, God can and will forgive them. I cannot. I will not. Those six justices make this the worst Supreme Court we’ve had at least since the court that sanctioned Jim Crow segregation in 1896. They are hellbent on destroying our country in the name of a reactionary ideology that cares not one good God damn about real people and the effects their decisions have on those people. So yes. God won’t do it, but I say God damn them to make my point. Of course I can’t damn them. But trust me. If I could, I would.

 

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[1] Hermeneutics is an awkward word. It is plural in form, but it also has the singular form of hermeneutic. I will use both versions of the word here and will treat them both as singular unless the context clearly requires a plural noun.

[2] For a more complete discussion of hermeneutics see my Liberating the Bible, Revised Edition, Vol. 1 Approaching the Bible, Stop 3, “The Art of Biblical Interpretation, Part One, Hermeneutics.” What I say there about interpreting the Bible applies equally well to the US Constitution.

[3] Yes. I know that there are a great many different contexts in our country today. None of them, however, is anything like the context in which any two thousand year old text was written.

[4] The author of this story was certainly a man not a woman. In his context, men wrote religious texts, women didn’t. Hence, I refer to this author only as “he.”

And Yet

 

And Yet

August 2, 2022

 

There have been a great many stories in the media lately about astronomy. The Webb telescope, though in operation for only a short time, has already given us images of the universe that are simply stunning. The scientists say that over time the Webb will give us images of galaxies farther away and therefore farther back in time than any we have ever seen before. That telescope, parked what seems so far from us, truly is a marvel of contemporary science and engineering. The scientists who work with it say it has hardly scratched the surface of what it is capable of doing. It truly is amazing.

All of these stories about the Webb telescope and outer space have got me thinking about the universe. It’s not that I’d never thought about it before. I have, and I don’t really have any new revelations about it today. Yet some things about it have been particularly vivid for me lately. First of all, what the astronomers tell us about the size of the universe is simply incomprehensible. The light or other radiation we detect from the farthest known galaxies has been traveling at 186,000 miles per second for billions of years. Our minds simply cannon grasp the distance that radiation has traveled. The distance that light travels at 186,000 miles per second for billions of years is, for me at least (and I suspect for everyone) beyond our ability to conceptualize. We can express it mathematically, but we can’t visualize it. It is simply too great for that.

Not only is the universe immense beyond our understanding, it is filled with more things than we can even begin to imagine. Scientists tell us that the universe holds billions of galaxies and that each galaxy holds billions of stars. We can express the number of stars we know or at least believe to exist only mathematically. I have trouble getting my mind around the number one billion. The extent of billions upon billions is way beyond the ability of my little mind to comprehend. I’m quite sure it’s way beyond your ability too.

Then the astronomers tell us about our planet’s place in the universe. We live on a rocky planet that seems in itself to be utterly insignificant. It orbits around a thoroughly unremarkable star near the outer edge of one of the arms of a thoroughly unremarkable spiral galaxy. Even seen just from the moon the earth looks lonely and isolated in infinite space. Pictures we’ve seen taken much farther away than the moon show the earth as a nearly invisible dot amounting to absolutely nothing. We are so small relative to the size of the universe as to be utterly without meaning as far as the universe is concerned. It all makes us humans and our problems seem so small. So petty. It looks to us, or at least to me, that we are nearly infinitesimally small. It would matter to the universe not at all if some death star were to blow up planet earth the way Darth Vader’s death star blew up Alderaan. Relative to the whole universe our planet isn’t even a speck of dust. It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that we mean exactly nothing to anyone but ourselves.

That sense of our smallness even gets expressed in the Bible. In Psalm 8 we read:

 

When I look at your heavens, the work

     of your fingers,

          the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are humans that you are mindful

     of them,

          mortals that you care for them? Psalm 8:3-4 NRSVue.

 

The question is of course rhetorical. The clearly intended answer is: Nothing. We’re nothing. We’re so much nothing compared to God’s heavens that it makes no sense for God to see us and care about us at all.

And yet. And yet, small as we humans are, we have always known that there is a reality far greater than us that really does care about us. We humans have known for a very long time of a greater reality with which, despite the infinite size disparity between us, we are eternally in covenant. Psalm 8 expresses that truth too. Speaking of God as “you” and us humans as “them,” Psalm 8 continues:

 

Yet you have made them a little lower

     than God,

          and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

     you have put all things under their feet….Psalm 8:5-6 NRSVue.

 

God, Psalm 8 says. God is what we call the transcendent reality which humans have known for so long. We know that women and men have long known God because all human cultures past or present have had a system of myths and symbols that point their people toward God and express their experience and understanding of who God is and what God wants. Christianity is the system of symbols and myths that we Christians use to do just that. And like humans of all times and places, some of us have had our own experiences of the transcendent reality we call God.

It makes no sense of course. Yet we know through personal experience and the experience of all humankind that God never dismisses us because of our lack of size. Small relative to all of creation is, after all, how God created us. The planet earth is where God has put us, its cosmic insignificance drawing the decision to do that into question notwithstanding. If our cosmic insignificance doesn’t matter to God, and it doesn’t, we shouldn’t let it matter to us. Yes, our knowledge of the universe can make us seem small and insignificant indeed. And yet. And yet we know that to God we aren’t insignificant at all. It makes no sense of course, but that lack of sense doesn’t make it false. We are tiny, God is infinitely big. And yet God knows us, cares about and for us, and even loves us. And for that cosmic truth let all of us tiny, seemingly insignificant people say, “Thanks be to God!”