Light for the World

Light for the World

January 26, 2020

For Prospect UCC Seattle

Scripture: Psalm 27:1, 4-9; Isaiah 9:1-4

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Friends, I need to tell you that I do not find it easy to preach these days. When we Christian preacher types preach we think we’re supposed to offer the people joy, peace, and hope. Challenge too, and maybe some other things, but mostly joy, peace, and hope. I know that’s what I’m supposed to do up here, and these days I find it almost impossible to do it. I mean, the state of our nation and of God’s world certainly isn’t bringing me peace, or hope today. Even less is it bringing me joy. It’s hard if not impossible for people like me who don’t want to deceive you to bring you things that I’m not feeling myself. So when Louise asked me if I’d preach here today I said yes, but I knew when I said it that finding something worth saying to you that would feel authentic to me would not be easy. Here’s the best I’ve come up with.

I’m sure I don’t need to chronicle for you the sorry state of our nation and of God’s world these days. You already know as much about it as I do. We all know the world’s a mess. I’ll just mention a few of the lowlights. War and violence rage across the globe from Syria to America’s inner cities. We’re hellbent on destroying the environment of the only planet we’ve got. Fascist nationalism, exclusionism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry are on the rise and in many places, including the good old USA, and are becoming more socially acceptable than they’ve been in decades. The world went mad with most of these things in the first half of the last century at a cost of tens upon tens of millions of lives, or more; and today it looks like the world has learned little or nothing from those decades of hell on earth. So yes, I know what I’m supposed to preach; and yes, I find doing that very difficult to do these days. And if I find preaching joy and hope and peace difficult, perhaps you find those things as hard to find these days as I do.

So what are we to do? The only thing I can think to do is to keep returning to the foundations of our Christian faith. Of course the Bible is not the only foundation of our Christian faith, but it is certainly one of the most important of them, a truth that coincides very nicely with the fact that we Christian preacher types, if we’re doing our jobs right, mostly preach from that very same Bible. For this week the readings in the lectionary turned out to be very helpful to me, and I think perhaps two of the readings I found there may be helpful to you too. We just heard them. Here’s some of what I take from them that I think speaks to the despair that I find it so hard to avoid these days.

First, a few verses from Psalm 27. They begin with a startling declaration: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” The word Lord here is actually Yahweh in the Hebrew original. We can take it to mean God, though it doesn’t mean Jesus. This wonderful psalm has other striking verses in it too. It says that God “will hide me in [God’s] shelter in the day of trouble.” These verses speak powerfully to me in these difficult days. I certainly experience our days as days of trouble. I sometimes find fear hard to avoid in the face of an overheating planet and right-wing hatred that seems to rise all around us. I certainly experience our times as a time of metaphorical darkness, and the world sure seems to need a lot of salvation. The psalmist of Psalm 27 powerfully expresses the response of faith to difficult times like these. God is light in the world’s darkness. We need not be afraid. God protects us in our time of troubles. Salvation is available to us and to the world, and that salvation comes only from God. The ancient unknown author of these words spoke profound truth indeed.

Then we have our passage from Isaiah. We read: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” And: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken….” These verses probably originally referred to events in the ancient history of Israel, so we need to ask: Do they mean anything to us? I mean, it’s not like everyone in our present darkness has seen a great light. It’s not like the yoke of the burden of our current context has been broken. These verses say God has done that, but it sure doesn’t look to me like God has done that for our country today. So do these verses mean anything to us at all? I think they do, and here’s how I think they do.

God is light in our darkness, and I think it is precisely as light in our darkness that God lifts the yoke from our shoulders. Scripture tells us that our present darkness, the burden we’re all feeling these days, is not God’s will for us. When Isaiah says God have lifted our burden I hear the text saying that while darkness and burdens persist they are not God’s will. They are not what God wants for God’s creation. When we combine that notion with the profound truth that God is light in our darkness we learn that God is present in that darkness shining the light of God’s truth into the world and calling us always toward God’s light and away from the world’s darkness. And because God is present in that darkness we can have hope. We can have faith that God isn’t going to give up on God’s world or on us. Thanks be to God!

So Ok. That’s all well and good in theory I suppose, but what good does it do us in our daily lives? Every day we get bombarded with the bad news. Our president’s claim that he could shoot someone on 5^th Avenue and his supporters would still vote for him seems to be borne out by the continued support they show him in the polls. We hear of environmental regulations being repealed nearly every day. Thousands upon thousands of children remain separated from their parents at out southern border. The rich get richer and millions of others struggle with little hope of improving their lot in life. I won’t go on. You all know these things as well as I do.

Is that message of God’s presence with us under our burdens and God’s light in our darkness really any help in the face of all that bad news? I don’t know about you, but I hear the world’s bad news a lot more than I hear God’s good news. The bad news is all over the TV. I’m aware of no good theology on TV. If I’m lucky I hear good preaching once a week, not more.

So here’s what I think we need to do. Pay more attention to God’s presence and light in our darkness than I at least usually do. Connect ourselves to God more frequently and intentionally than I suspect most of us usually do. Give God’s good news as much airtime in our lives as we give the world’s bad news. How? Pray. Pray hard and often. Study scripture. Practice spiritual disciplines like meditation and observing sabbath time. And please realize: I’m talking to myself here as much as I’m talking to you. I need to hear these words as much or probably more than you do. None of that is going to make the world’s bad news go away. It can however make God’s good news more present to us. It can give us something to hold onto when we feel ourselves falling. It can lift us up when we’re feeling crushed. It can light our path when we feel lost. It can give us hope when all we feel is despair. It can get us off the couch and out doing something good in the world when we feel immobilized by hopelessness. Frankly, people of good will and good intent doing that is the only way the hope God offers us becomes real in the world.

So yes. We can find the light in our darkness of which Psalm 27 speaks. We can experience God lifting some of the yoke from our shoulders as Isaiah says God does. But we won’t find the light, we won’t experience the lifting of the yoke, if we just sit and wait for it to happen. Seeing the light requires work—from us. Feeling relief from the burdens of the day requires work—from us. So let’s get on with it shall we? I hope I will. I hope you will too. Amen.

On President Trump's Impeachment Defense

On President Trump’s Impeachment Defense

President Trump’s impeachment defense team has filed its brief in response to the articles of impeachment against him and the arguments the impeachment managers made in their brief a couple of days ago. News reports say that the trump defenders argue basically two things. First, the president did nothing wrong. Second, that the allegations against him in the articles of impeachment do not amount to impeachable offenses. They are so obviously wrong on both counts that it's hard to know where to start to rebuff their arguments. In holding up aid to Ukraine in an attempt to force that nation's government to announce an investigation of the Bidens Individual-1 violated the 1974 act on disbursement of funds approved by Congress and solicited a bribe in return for release of those funds. He solicited a violation of campaign finance law by seeking something of value from a foreign government for use in an American election. He obviously and undeniably did at least these things wrong. His defense team's argument that he did nothing wrong is simply absurd.

I think the argument that what he did is not impeachable, while false, is less facially inaccurate than the argument that he did nothing wrong, especially with regard to the obstruction of Congress charge.[1] When a president is faced with an impeachment on undeniable facts, as Bill Clinton was, the best argument the president has is that those facts do not establish an impeachable offense. As lawyers say, when the facts are against you, argue the law. That’s all that Trump really has at this point, to argue the law.

The question of whether or not what Trump has done amounts to an impeachable offense turns on the meaning of the Constitution's phrase "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." The consensus among scholars seems to be that this language does not require a criminal violation of the law. As Lawrence Tribe, the nation's premier constitutional scholar, says, when the Constitution was adopted there were no federal criminal laws. This language could hardly require violation of something that didn't exist at the time it was adopted. Trump did violate several laws as I noted above, but it seems to be relatively well established that impeachment does not require a criminal act.

The first of the two impeachment articles against Trump charge him in effect with abuse of power. That is, he used the power of his office in an unacceptable way. Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s lawyers, has said publicly that abuse of power is not impeachable. Yet how can that be true? Surely the framers of the Constitution intended to protect the republic against a president who disregarded the constitutional provisions on presidential power to the detriment of the national security or other vital national interests. That is precisely what Trump has done. Congress established that providing aid to Ukraine in its battle with Russia is in our national interest. It really doesn’t matter for our purposes here whether that finding is correct or not. It is the law of the land. Trump used the power of his office to thwart the implementation of the policy Congress had established, however temporarily. It simply is inconceivable that the framers of the constitution did not intend such actions to be impeachable. They are. They must be.

Under any more or less objective factual and legal analysis the arguments Trump’s lawyers make against his impeachment and removal from office fail. They are factually and legally untenable. Sadly that does not mean that the Senate will remove him from office. Because the Republicans are the majority party in the Senate, because they care more about keeping their party in power than they do about anything else, and because removing him from office requires a vote of two-thirds of the senators, they almost certainly will not. They should, but they won’t. How sad for our suffering republic that we have descended to this level.

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[1] The weakness of the second article of impeachment charging obstruction of Congress is that while Trump certainly did obstruct Congress, Congress’ remedy for that obstruction was to take Trump and his people to court to enforce their subpoenas. The House impeachment committees didn’t do that. Certainly doing it would have taken far too long, which is why those committees didn’t do it. Still, in theory at least they had a remedy for Trump’s obstruction that they did not pursue. That they didn’t is a stronger defense against impeachment article two than any argument Trump has against article one.

Some Concluding Remarks on Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev

I have turned my old PhD dissertation into a book on Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the imperial Russian statesman who was a tutor of the last two tsars and Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905. It is based on several years of research in the relevant historical documents, including an academic year in Russia. I don't yet know where or if that book will be published, but it contains a brief final section titled "Some Concluding Remarks." I find it to be a very good summation of my conclusions about Pobedonostsev, and I thought at least some people might be interested in it. So here it is:

Some Concluding Remarks

(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2019

What has our study of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev revealed? Most importantly it has revealed that he had a well-developed political ideology that we can characterize as both conservative and populist. He was a conservative in the spirit of Edmund Burke. He apparently never read Burke, or at least he left no direct evidence that he did. He was however familiar with the writings of Thomas Carlyle, and it was precisely the Burkean elements in Carlyle’s thought that appealed to him. Burke’s principles of prejudice and prescription were the essential elements of his ideology. The Burkean notion of prescription is seen in Pobedonostsev’s historicism. For Pobedonostsev as for Burke political and social institutions were legitimized only by history. Such institutions which had developed through history, he believed, corresponded to the needs of a given country as no institution created on the basis of political theories ever could. In Russia’s case the two most important institutions created and legitimized by history were the autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church. Together they had made Russia strong. Pobedonostsev was convinced that Russia’s continued greatness depended upon their preservation into the future essentially unchanged from what they had been in the past.

Pobedonostsev’s historicism was also influenced by the school of German legal historicism founded by Savigny. Pobedonostsev was trained as a lawyer. He became a widely respected legal scholar. Savigny’s historicism was the dominant tendency in European legal literature when Pobedonostsev graduated from the Academy of Jurisprudence in 1846, and he clearly accepted the fundamental assumptions of Savigny’s approach to law. Because the German historicists were familiar with Burke, their work reinforced Pobedonostsev’s commit to the Burkean principles he found in English literature. German historicism was another way in which Burke’s ideas found their way into Pobedonostsev’s mind.

Burke’s idea of prejudice was even more central to Pobedonostsev’s thought than was Burke’s idea of prescription. Prejudice for Burke meant a rejection of abstract reason and a reliance on ideas and loyalties accepted largely uncritically simply because they were there. Pobedonostsev rejected abstract reason in terms virtually identical to Burke’s, although Pobedonostsev did not make Burke’s distinction between abstract reason and political reason. Pobedonostsev denied the validity of all conclusions arrived at logically on the basis of general principles. In the place of this approach he put a reliance on what he claimed were the ideas and loyalties of the mass of the Russian people, the narod. The narod, he said, had a sure guide to knowledge and action in its reliance on faith and immediate impression. Because the narod, he believed, rejected the Western notion of reason and abstract rights based on reason it remained true to Russian beliefs and customs. It also retained its traditional fidelity to the two primary institutions of Russian life, autocracy and Orthodoxy.

Pobedonostsev was then a conservative in the standard Western sense of that term. He was also a consistent populist. We have seen that a populist, as that term was originally understood in Russia, was one who desired to subordinate his or her own wishes to those of the narod and to work with the narod to attain goals that the narod defined for itself. Pobedonostsev fits that definition quite well, although it seems that he fits it because he attributed goals to the narod that he actually defined himself. He was not entirely naïve about the Russian narod. He knew full well that most of its members were illiterate. He knew that far too many of them drank far too much vodka and other spirits. Still, he believed in the basic goodness of the narod, and he desired that the autocratic government base its strength directly on the narod and on what he insisted was the narod’s reliable loyalty to the regime. He rejected the claims of the liberal intelligentsia to speak for the narod. He rejected its claim of a right to formulate policies for it. He seems, however, not to have been bothered by the reality that he was a member of the conservative intelligentsia who claimed to speak for the narod and claimed the right to formulate policies for it. In other words, he did precisely what he denied his opponents the right to do. Still, he was a populist in the technical, etymological meaning of that word.

One of the most important aspects of Pobedonostsev’s thought was its consistency from the beginning of his career to its end. Pobedonostsev was never a liberal despite the fact that he has often been considered by observers to have been one. In his first important published work, the article “On Reform in Civil Judicial Procedure,” which appeared in 1859, the fundamental elements of his ideology are already apparent. In his work on the judicial reform of 1864 he consistently stressed that any reform had to be based on the needs and desires of the Russian narod, not on abstract judicial theory. He stressed the historically conditioned nature of judicial institutions and rejected any effort to transplant institutions from one society to another. These are the basic principles of his fully developed conservatism. He held those principles from the time of his first significant publication until his death in 1907.

It is not surprising that even in 1859 Pobedonostsev was a consistent conservative. He was in many respects a product of the reign of Nicholas I, the reactionary tsar who came to the throne in 1825 after putting down the revolt of the Decembrists, a group of nobles and military officers who undertook what was essentially a coup d’état upon the death of Alexander I. Pobedonostsev’s father was a conservative nationalist. The education he received at the Academy of Jurisprudence was designed to produce competent and loyal servants of the autocracy. Pobedonostsev was not exposed to the lively and often radical intellectual atmosphere that so significantly influenced some of his contemporaries in Moscow in the 1840’s. He was not the sort of person attracted to fashionable intellectual doctrines or heated debates. He was not part of the debate between the Westerners and the Slavophiles, and he was untouched by Russian Hegelianism. His training and personality helped make him a supporter rather than an opponent of autocracy.

There are other significant parallels between Pobedonostsev’s thought and the doctrine of Official Nationality that was prevalent under Nicholas I. Official Nationality stressed Orthodoxy, autocracy, and Russian nationality, as did Pobedonostsev. Nicholas I and his supporters believed in the uniqueness of Russian institutions, as did Pobedonostsev. It seems probable that he was influenced at least in a general way by the atmosphere of Official Nationality in which he grew up. We have seen that much of the legislation he initiated as Over Procurator of the Holy Synod was designed to return to the status quo that had existed under Nicholas I before the reforms of Alexander II. He seems to have seen the years before 1855, the year in which Nicholas I died and Alexander II came to the throne, as in many respects a golden age for Russia. It is not possible, however, to establish any direct influence on him of any specific writers of that era. He never referred to Uvarov or any other apologists for Nicholas I as a source of his ideas. The sources for his specific ideas appear to have been Western rather than Russian, although sources on his development before 1859 are lacking. Official Nationality was probably important for Pobedonostsev, but it is impossible to establish specific influences on him from that era.

The question of Pobedonostsev’s relationship to the Slavophiles is complex. The Slavophiles’ conception of the Russian narod was similar to Pobedonostsev’s, although many of the Slavophiles were probably more guilty of romanticizing the narod than Pobedonostsev was. Yet Pobedonostsev was no Slavophile. His conception of Russian history was very different from theirs. He did not seek a return to Russia’s pre-Petrine past. After all, he spent 25 years in a governmental position that Peter the Great had created. He did not believe that Peter’s reforms had broken the moral bond tying the narod to its tsar like many of the Slavophiles did. His conception of Russian Orthodoxy did not include the notion of sobornost’ that was so important to such Slavophiles as Khomiakov.[1] Despite his denunciation of Alexander II and his reforms, the structure of the Russian state in the nineteenth century was much more acceptable to him than it was to the Slavophiles. He differed from many of the Slavophiles in temperament too. He frequently criticized his friend Ivan Aksakov, a noted Slavophile, for his intemperate attacks on the government. Slavophile thinking was not an important source of Pobedonostsev’s ideas.

We have seen how Pobedonostsev’s career in public service and his personality were related in many ways to his ideology. His life touched upon most of the significant events in the history of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. He first became active in public affairs during the period of intense discussion and debate about the most fundamental problems of Russian life that preceded the introduction of the Great Reforms of the 1860’s. He witnessed the implementation of those reforms and the period of indecision and doubt that followed them in the 1870’s. He lived through and commented on the “crisis of autocracy” at the end of that decade. His critique of the rise of revolutionary terrorism, a critique based on the fundamental assumptions of his ideology, led him to dismiss the significant threat it appeared to pose, blaming Russia’s problems not on the terrorists but on the weakness and vacillation he perceived in the government and its policies. The ultimate victory of the revolutionaries in Russia has led modern historians to stress the importance of the revolutionaries for Russia from the moment they first appeared. In the late 1870’s, however, Pobedonostsev’s faith in the fundamental loyalty of the narod to the regime was probably not as unrealistic as it might appear. The peasants most often rejected the revolutionary populists. Pobedonostsev had great faith that the government could rely on the devotion of the narod.

Pobedonostsev obtained the institutional base from which he would proceed to work out the consequences of his ideology when he became Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1880. In 1881 he was able to exercise decisive influence on the new emperor Alexander III in the events that led to the issuing of the Manifesto on the Reaffirmation of Autocracy that Pobedonostsev drafted. His opposition to any continuation of the reform policies of the previous reign was a direct consequence of his ideology. His success in stopping the adoption of the so called constitution of Loris-Melikov ended hope for any peaceful constitutional evolution in Russia and ushered in the era of reaction and counter-reform that would last until 1905, when the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century forced the government onto a different course.

Pobedonostsev’s own contribution to the counter-reforms appeared in the form of four pieces of legislation issued in 1884 and 1885. The reform of the number of Orthodox parishes and of their structure and reform of the Church’s schools embodied in these laws constitute Pobedonostsev’s plan for the Russian Orthodox Church. They too were a logical consequence of his ideology. He desired to increase the number of churches and clergy serving the narod. He wanted those clergy to be priests not highly trained theologians or men learned in secular disciplines. Their chief duty was only to perform the Orthodox liturgy completely, beautifully, and often. The Church for Pobedonostsev was more an institution of the Russian narod that it was the successor to the Patriarchate of Constantinople that it claimed to be. He meant to bind it more closely than ever to the masses it was meant to serve.

Of the four measures that made up Pobedonostsev’s program by far the most important to him was the law on the parish schools of 1884. Pobedonostsev designed those schools to be the principal educational institution of the narod. Their function was to tie education to the Orthodox Church, to provide the basics of literacy in a manner understandable to the narod while strengthening the attachment of the narod to the Church and to the state. His success in founding and spreading the parish schools was remarkable. By the time he left office in 1905 the parish schools provided nearly half of all popular education in Russia. He had created a huge system of public instruction that was a major part of the imperial government’s drive to attain universal literacy, a goal to which Pobedonostsev was wholeheartedly devoted. The parish schools were Pobedonostsev’s major accomplishment as Over Procurator. They are the fullest embodiment of his ideology.

That being said, we must not forget how limited the education those schools provided really was. Many of the schools existed only in someone’s home and provided only most basic instruction, if indeed it provided any at all. Most of the parish schools not located in a home provided only two years of instruction. The most education any of them offered was only four years. Pobedonostsev was not trying to create a truly well-educated population. He was trying to create only the most basic literacy. He tied that literacy to the Russian Orthodox Church, its liturgy, singing, and doctrines, not to any goal of secular education. The parish schools were better than nothing, and we must not forget the realities of Russian life when we evaluate them (that being a statement with which Pobedonostsev would have whole-heartedly agreed). Still, in 1905 most of the Russian population was educated to nothing like the levels prevalent in Western Europe or the United States.

Pobedonostsev’s long career in state service ended amid the turmoil of the revolution of 1905. His participation in the events of that year was limited to questions involving the Church, and those efforts had their effect. His letters to Nicholas II in the spring of 1905 were no doubt largely responsible for the tsar’s decision not to call the general council of the Church that many were demanding both inside and outside the Church. His argument in those letters is a perfect illustration of his ideology in action, appealing to historical precedent and the desires of the narod as authority for his position and for state action (or in this case inaction).

Pobedonostsev’s personality was as complex and many-sided as was his career in public service. He was not a notably friendly or sociable man. He preferred a life of seclusion and study to a life in the public spotlight. He preferred books to people and resented the numerous intrusions into his privacy that were inevitable given his high position in the government. He was very nearly humorless. It is difficult to imagine him laughing and joking with friends. He took life much too seriously for that. He was almost continually depressed, morose, and gloomy. He was in all probability an unpleasant man to be around for any length of time, not that others finding his company unpleasant would have bothered him much.

There was, however, another considerably less well-known aspect of his personality. There is no doubt that he was a devoutly religious man in his own way. He loved the Russian Orthodox Church will all his heart, or at least he loved its beautiful and powerful liturgy. In the Church he found a spiritual and emotional release that helped him survive the depression and morbidity that characterized so much of his life. In his statements on the Church service there is a joy and an elevation of spirit found nowhere else in his writings. In his relationship with the Church he was capable of a great sentimentality that could become maudlin and saccharine. The sincerity of his feelings cannot however be questioned, and his love of the Church and its liturgy had important consequences for his policies as Over Procurator. We see it, for example, in his frequently expressed desire to teach people church singing. I doubt that he ever said he wanted to teach people church theology.

Was Pobedonostsev’s faith in the Russian narod justified? Was the narod in fact what he said it was? There is little doubt that for most of the period we have been discussing most Russians by far were loyal subjects of the tsar and at least nominally members of the Russian Orthodox Church. They could hardly have been otherwise given the traditions of Russian life and the resistance to change that has always characterized peasant societies. Still, despite his awareness of many of the vices of the narod his view of it turns out to have been an idealization. He saw in it strength, faith, and virtue. He saw it as the force in which autocracy and Orthodoxy were grounded and made secure. Yet the Russian narod turned out not to be quite so loyal to Orthodoxy and autocracy as Pobedonostsev thought it was. By 1905 unrest had become so widespread that the government had to give sweeping concessions to stop the erosion of public confidence in the government. By 1917, only 10 years after Pobedonostsev’s death, virtually no support for the autocracy remained at all, and the last Russian tsar fell from power almost without resistance. Pobedonostsev’s beloved narod did nothing to preserve autocracy. Under the Soviet government the Russian Orthodox Church was reduced almost to a caricature of its former self. It supported a government that oppressed it, and it retained only a tenuous hold on a small portion of the Russian population. Unlike the autocracy, the Russia Orthodox Church didn’t die under Communism. It has had a resurgence of sorts to a place of some prominence in Russian life since the fall of the Soviet Union. Orthodox priests bless Russian rockets as they take astronauts into space, something that certainly would not have happened under the Communists. President Vladimir Putin uses the Orthodox Church, perhaps quite cynically, for his own purposes. Yet it cannot be said that the Russian narod defended the Church with the vigor Pobedonostsev would have expected. In the end the narod as a source of strength for an unaltered autocracy and an unchanging Orthodoxy turned out to be a mirage. Pobedonostsev’s fall from power in 1905 corresponded with the first act of the great drama that was so to transform, for better and for much worse, the Russia he loved and defended.

In the end Pobedonostsev appears as a tragic figure. He spent his life defending a system that was doomed to failure. His devotion to that system, to the autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church, together with his romanticized image of the narod kept him from seeing how weak Russia really was. He may have put his faith in God, but he also put it in a population that wasn’t what he thought it was. He fought to preserve that which could not be preserved. He was a true conservative, and in his commitment to keeping what could not be kept his dream of unending stability went the way of all conservative dreams, into the dustbin of history. Konstantin Petrovich, you are indeed a fascinating character. I wish you had seen the reality of your nation and her people more clearly than you did. If imperial Russia had tried in earnest to modernize, to democratize, and to deal in truly constructive ways with her manifold problems perhaps her future would have been different. Perhaps the horrors of Soviet Communism could have been avoided. Pobedonostsev was one of the figures who kept Russia from being different. We can only wish that it had been otherwise.

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[1] Sobornost’ means something like “communality.” It is based on the Russian ecclesiastical word sobor, which means “council” (and can also mean cathedral). It refers to a desire for the different parts of society to work together as if they were meeting regularly in a council.

Our System is Failing

Our System is Failing

The American political system is failing. The American empire is in decline. There is lots of evidence of those facts. More than ever money determines outcomes. Our two-party system has deteriorated into tribalism. The two parties rarely cooperate to accomplish anything. Millions upon millions of people vote against their own self-interest. The agencies of the federal government work to destroy the environment rather than protect and restore it. The federal government, through tax laws and other means, works for the benefit of the country’s richest individuals and largest corporations rather than for the benefit of the people. We use fascist tactics on our southern border because we don’t like brown people coming into our country. Yet perhaps the most convincing and alarming evidence of the failure of our political system is the certainty that the United States Senate will not vote to remove President Donald J. Trump from office when it votes on the articles of impeachment that the House of Representatives are certain to approve and present to it. That our political system has a mechanism for removing Trump from office but will not do it is unconscionable. It is incomprehensible except as a symptom of the fact that our entire system is utterly failing to function the way it was intended to function.

Impeachment is not an American version of the British vote of no confidence. It is not intended to be used over policy disagreements (although when a policy becomes criminal its use is of course mandated). But consider these undeniable facts about Donald Trump:

·       He has sex with a porn star to whom he is not married, then is named in federal court papers as the person who instigated a scheme to pay her to keep quiet while he’s running for president, in effect naming him as an unindicted coconspirator. He and his campaign then violate federal campaign finance law when they fail to disclose that payment as a campaign expense.

·       He benefits from his office financially in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

·       He solicits and accepts Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

·       He then obstructs justice by doing everything he can to impede or even halt the federal investigation into that Russian interference. See Vol. 2 of the Mueller Report.

·       He withholds military aid to Ukraine that the Congress has passed and refuses to schedule a White House visit for the president of Ukraine, demanding that that president publicly announce an investigation into debunked claims against former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter and into the thoroughly specious claim that it was the Ukrainians not the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election He makes the Ukrainian president announcing such an investigation a condition for the release of the military aid he has illegally withheld and for the scheduling of a White House visit for the Ukrainian president. In these acts he put his personal political interest before the law and the national security interests of the country he was elected to lead.

·       He then obstructs the Congressional investigation into those acts of extortion and campaign law violation by directing everyone involved over whom he has any power not to testify before Congress and by refusing to turn over a single document to Congressional investigators.

If this litany of moral and political sins doesn’t justify removing Donald Trump from office the impeachment provision of the US Constitution has lost all of its meaning and might as well be repealed.

Congress, however, will not remove Trump from office. That failure of our Constitutional system is nearly enough to make me give up on it altogether. Failure to remove Trump is inexcusable, but it is not insignificant. It proves more than anything else in our national life does that the American empire has entered its declining phase.

All empires decline and end. Most Americans think that will never happen to us. They think that for two reasons, both of them inaccurate. First, they deny that we are and have been an empire. True, we have only a few colonies around the world—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Hawaii (now a state but originally a colony). We are however a different kind of empire. We project military might around the world. We say we do that to defend democracy and our national security, but that’s not why we do it. We do it to extend and protect American economic and political power, and that makes us an empire. We act,(at least when we want to) as the world’s policeman, and that makes us an empire. Countries around the world look to us to be part of solving their problems, and that makes us an empire. So many Americans are just wrong to say we are not an empire.

Second, they are wrong to think that the American empire will not decline and fall the way every other empire has. It seems simply to be in the dynamics of empire that they decline and fall. As they do, their internal political functioning and morality decline. Great Britain perhaps more or less escaped that part of the process, but virtually every other world empire has experienced it. Rome is the model here, and we seem to be going the way of Rome. We elect an philandering adulterer president. We address most of our social ills with power rather than really trying to find lasting solutions to them. We steal children from their parents at the border because we want to protect what we have from desperate, non-white people who don’t have it. We live on bread and circuses. Most Americans still have enough of what they need to live, so they devote their energies to rooting for their favorite NFL team and spend their tie playing video games rather than working for meaningful solutions to social problems. When we encounter hordes of homeless people in our cities we just want to make them go away rather than address the real causes of homelessness or spend the money necessary to provide housing for those who don’t have it. We hear that the world’s climate is changing in catastrophic ways and do next to nothing to address problem. A great many of us just deny that it’s happening or that we are any part of the cause of it happening. We face an epidemic of gun violence, and we say you can’t take my guns because I need to protect myself and my family as if an AR-15 were really any defense against the firepower of the police and the American military. Untold numbers of our people become addicted to both legal and illegal drugs, and all we want to do is cut off the supply of drugs rather than deal with the things that generate the demand for drugs. The list of social ills that we face and the ways in which we avoid addressing them in meaningful ways could go on and on.

And it all adds up to one thing. Our system is failing. Our empire is declining. We won’t even remove a grossly unfit and dangerous president from office though we have Constitutional means to do it. Given that reality I truly don’t know how to avoid despair. I could withdraw into a shell and pretend the problems don’t exist; but I’ve spent my whole life paying attention to national issues, and I’m not at all sure that now at age 73 I can stop doing it. Nor am I sure it is the proper thing to do. But what else is there? The House of Representatives district and the state in which I live don’t send Republicans to Congress these days, so I don’t even have anyone to vote against. I just have to put up with the reality that other districts and states elect politicians who are useless at best and destructive and worst. I can put up blog posts like this one that almost no one reads. I can write letters to the editor of the local paper that have no effect whatsoever. I can write letters to my congressional representative and senators, but they become just one voice among thousands and have little if any effect. I wish I knew how to avoid despair and effect constructive change, but I just don’t. That is the spiritual effect the failure of the American system has on me. If that changes I’ll let you know.