The comments made by this panel of conservative figures from the Aspen Ideas Festival are well worth pondering. Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner and David Brooks make a powerful case for a better politics emerging in the aftermath of the abuse of the public realm (something which pre-dated Trump by many decades, Trump is not the cause of public degeneration, he is the consequence).
Pete Wehner says, "I think you're going to see a rise. People are not satisfied with the state of political discourse and the state of politics, and they're looking for something else."
Beneath the tumble of day-to-day politics — the anger and crude attacks, the polarization and zero-sum thinking — vital democratic legacies are being squandered. To rebuild the moral and intellectual infrastructure of democracy, we need to reclaim the good name of essential public virtues such as moderation, civility, and compromise — once widely admired and praised, now often dismissed as weakness or even betrayal. This session will focus on where we are and what needs to be done to repair the ethical fabric of our humanity, with a focus on some practical steps that might be taken.
For the recovery of public life. And how good to hear someone calling for the recovery of the intellectual virtues, as well as the moral virtues.
An increasing number of prominent conservative figures are becoming vocal in their criticisms of the Republican party and its politics. They are identifying what has been clear for a very long time: the principal actors in Republic politics are not conservatives with a reasonable, balanced, sceptical approach to the world and the various plans many have for its improvement, but ideologues with very definite plans for bending the world, and the people in it, into a certain shape. Read Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, or Edmund Burke's criticisms of political abstraction and geometry to see what is meant by genuine conservatism. These people are not conservatives, they are hardline economic liberals who seek to aggressively advance individualism and 'free' markets, constraint government and law (that is, the democratic will and its legitimate expression via the principle of self-assumed obligation) as infringements on individual liberty, and undermine all collective and social forms as restraints on liberty (liberty, they say, when they mean licence to exploit, pollute, use, abuse, free-ride). This is not conservatism, as expressed in the ethical life of a Hegel, in which government is the ethical agency serving the universal interest, the economy serves the system of needs, and civil society is the associational space in which social ties and bonds are formed; as expressed in Tocqueville's intermediary institutions fostering 'habits of the heart'; as expressed in Burke's 'little platoons.' I could go on. Eric Voegelin is worth reading. The point is, these extreme right apostles of individual liberty are not conservatives, they are hardline ideological individualists practising a bastardized Darwinism rooted in Ayn Rand's perspective in which greed is good, altruism is not and the cardinal virtues are sins against the GNP. One of my favourite sociologists is Robert Nisbett. Read his Quest for Community to see what true conservatism looks like. The extremists driving Republicanism are not conservatives, and they are not Republicans - they have contempt for the 'things of the public', and are concerned only with the corporatisation of public business. They seek to conserve nothing but the power and profits of the rich. Their freedom is no more than the anarchy of the rich and powerful. Here's the newest well-known defector, Joe Scarborough.
"I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses. The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments. President Trump’s Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution....As the new century began, Republicans gained control of the federal government. George W. Bush and the GOP Congress responded by turning a $155 billion surplus into a $1 trillion deficit and doubling the national debt, passing a $7 trillion unfunded entitlement program and promoting a foreign policy so utopian it would have made Woodrow Wilson blush. Voters made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House in 2006 and Barack Obama president in 2008.After their well-deserved drubbing, Republicans swore that if voters ever entrusted them with running Washington again, they would prove themselves worthy. Trump’s party was given a second chance this year, but it has spent almost every day since then making the majority of Americans regret it.The GOP president questioned America’s constitutional system of checks and balances. Republican leaders said nothing. He echoed Stalin and Mao by calling the free press “the enemy of the people.” Republican leaders were silent. And as the commander in chief insulted allies while embracing autocratic thugs, Republicans who spent a decade supporting wars of choice remained quiet. Meanwhile, their budget-busting proposals demonstrate a fiscal recklessness very much in line with the Bush years.Last week’s Russia revelations show just how shamelessly Republican lawmakers will stand by a longtime Democrat who switched parties after the promotion of a racist theory about Barack Obama gave him standing in Lincoln’s once-proud party. Neither Lincoln, William Buckley nor Ronald Reagan would recognize this movement.It is a dying party that I can no longer defend."
Also
From the article: “I spoke with a relative who is solid GOP and he acknowledged all my concerns as being factual. He asked me to stay in the party and fight for its soul. There is nothing left to fight for.
"His comment about a soul was interesting. That is the problem with the GOP. It has lost its soul.
"It has no compassion, it has no empathy, it is just a collection of self-centered individuals who care about nothing outside of their own lives. There is not a bigger picture, there is only self-absorption with the GOP."
Also, with respect to Church and State and the relation between religion and politics - the abuse and manipulation of God and religion in the service of political ideology is dangerous, divisive, harmful to people, is an affront to politics, invites demonisation rather than dialogue, and is a religious abomination that is light years from genuine spirituality.
I need to add that it isn't Trump at all that is killing the Republican Party, and it isn't Trump who is the architect of the aggressive individualist ideology that is eating conservatism from within. These forces have all been a long time in preparation.
'Author Nancy MacLean has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American right. Her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, tells the story of one James McGill Buchanan, a Southern political scientist and father of “public choice economics.” MacLean details how this little-known figure has had a massive impact on the ideology of the far right. None other than Charles Koch looked to MacLean’s theories for inspiration. They are libertarian — but with a twist: bluntly, it “entails restrictions on the freedom of the great majority in order to protect property rights and the prerogatives of the most well off.” MacLean shows how this idea can be traced down through the last 60 years of right-wing politics, starting with Brown v. The Board of Education and continuing with the Koch brothers’ empire. And she demonstrates that those followers and those in thrall to the Koch billions are pumping up their fight under the new administration.'
I'd just add that none of this is news, surely. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, we saw the rise of the call for a 'straighjacketed democracy.' The argument from the right was that the democratic state was raising expectations and being compelled by democratic demands into social commitments that led to the overloaded state, and that therefore democracy needed to be placed in a straightjacket. The attack on the public realm is deliberate and systematic and expresses a definite political ideology, once concerned with concealing and preserving asymmetries in social resources with existing power relations. It is an attack on democracy, achieved by disabling and/or disabling political and social forms of collective democratic expression. It is certainly obsessed with checking liberalism, socialism and communism, environmentalism too in the shape of Green politics. But it is also profoundly anti-conservative. It was Plato and Aristotle, too eminent conservatives from long ago, who identified human beings as social beings who require a public life, a Republic, in order to be themselves. Happiness, it was called, rather than freedom - eudaimonia, or 'good spirit', meaning flourishing and flourishing well. The extreme individualism in the context of social inequality delivers anything but flourishing - it's an anarchy of the rich and powerful that dissolves the public life of human beings and removes us further and further from the common good. And it is anything but conservatism.
Me? I am 'very Hegelian', as Kantian philosopher Gary Banham told me over a pint of Guinness in a Manchester pub back in March 2001. A new book explains why I rate Hegel highly in his social and political thought.
Hegel’s Social Ethics offers a fresh and accessible interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s most famous book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on important recent work on the social dimensions of Hegel’s theory of knowledge, Molly Farneth shows how his account of how we know rests on his account of how we ought to live.
Farneth argues that Hegel views conflict as an unavoidable part of living together, and that his social ethics involves relationships and social practices that allow people to cope with conflict and sustain hope for reconciliation. Communities create, contest, and transform their norms through these relationships and practices, and Hegel’s model for them are often the interactions and rituals of the members of religious communities.
The book’s close readings reveal the ethical implications of Hegel’s discussions of slavery, Greek tragedy, early modern culture wars, and confession and forgiveness. The book also illuminates how contemporary democratic thought and practice can benefit from Hegelian insights.
Through its sustained engagement with Hegel’s ideas about conflict and reconciliation, Hegel’s Social Ethics makes an important contribution to debates about how to live well with religious and ethical disagreement.
We are generally well aware of Martin Luther King’s debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries—G.W.F. Hegel. King “stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Adviser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher.”
Very timely when it comes to reclaiming our political and ethical commons.
The Russia story is the height of sleazy stupidity
This piece by President George W. Bush's speechwriter contains the best description of Trump's moral worldview that I've seen--and should especially strike home to anyone who supports him and also claims to be Christian:
"The ultimate explanation for this toxic moral atmosphere is President Trump himself. He did not attend the meeting, but he is fully responsible for creating and marketing an ethos in which victory matters more than character and real men write their own rules. Trumpism is an easygoing belief system that indulges and excuses the stiffing of contractors, the conning of students, the bilking of investors, the exploitation of women and the practices of nepotism and self-dealing. A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament."
'What is wrong with him?
But I have come to believe that question misses the point. Sixty-three million people voted for this. And make no mistake, they knew what they were getting. It was always obvious that Trump was a not-ready-for-prime-time candidate, but they chose him anyway. And the rest of us need to finally come to grips with the reason why.
It wasn’t economic anxiety. As a study co-sponsored by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic reported in May, people who were worried for their jobs voted for Hillary Clinton. But people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people mortally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump.
That’s the reality, and it’s time we quit dancing around it.
No, Donald Trump isn’t crazy, but he’s not very smart, either
This has been said a million times: Donald Trump is a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man who is as dumb as a sack of mackerel. But he is the president of the United States because 63 million people preferred that to facing inevitable cultural change. So I am done asking — or caring — what’s wrong with him. Six months in, it’s time we grappled a far more important question.
What in the world is wrong with us?'
~ Leonard Pitts Jr, Miami Herald
It seems that many don't care that Trump is an idiotic, incompetent con-man lacking in personal integrity and public spirit. He panders to their backwards worldview and emboldens them to express their racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism under the banner of the bastardised patriotism that is 'Merica First! That will result in America Alone and America Last, without friends, without influence, without anything put naked power and brute force. Which is something these characters worship, of course. These people are as terrifying as they are appalling, and the way that they drag God and religion into the mire is a source of deep worry and embarrassment to all people of faith. This is precisely why politics is secular, why there is an insistence on the separation of church and state, and why millions find religion an anathema. So thank you Trump and his white evangelical worshippers, you have just given secularists, humanists and atheists sufficient material to prove their case that religion is the province of the stupid, the bigoted, the prejudiced, the hate-filled and the divisive, and all that religious folk can do is remove the religious cloak from these people and their politics, and make the case, once more, for the umpteenth time, for a genuinely religious ethic. But it comes to this, yet again – religion used to divide and demonize and be mean and nasty and cruel to people, with self-righteous certainty. One of my favourite religious thinkers is Pascal, and he said something pertinent here: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’
It’s religion that loses out in this, every time, and people, people on the end of such bigotry and cruelty, and people who continue to be deprived of true religion and all that that brings to a whole life.
There is plenty that the left of centre in politics has been getting wrong, and for a long time. And these failures have created a vacuum in politics that Trump has exploited. I’ll stand by that view. If the conventional political realm was so strong, how could a man such as this even get close to office? That still needs sorting out. But none of the failures of conventional politics justifies the thoughts and deeds of these characters. They can’t be reached, neither by fact nor value. They respect neither and respond to neither. It’s prejudice all the way down, right to the bottom. Which is the natural habitat of these people. There is no reasoning with wilful ignorance and hate-filled stupidity, and as much as we should keep on trying to expose the real source of the complaints of so many, expect them to direct their anger to soft and easy targets – the marginalised, the minorities, the vulnerable – rather than the rich and powerful, for the simple reason that these folk who love to talk tough and talk big are, in all truth, weedy and pusillanimous. The thing that a lot don’t like about Trump is that he has revealed a truth about America that many would prefer not to know – he has shown was resonates with far too many people, and it is far from pleasant, and not something that any healthy politics – or religion – should pander to.
All you can do is keep appealing to fact and value, emphasise that truth matters and that morality matters, and affirm ‘the inner consistency of reality’ (Tolkien) – the existence of a bedrock truth and justice about the world, and hope that in some way, some day, people will get back on nodding terms with their birthright. Because these folk having got the sense they were born with, they’ve had it stolen away, or diverted and perverted. You will get democracy when people are capable of leading themselves by the nous, instead of allowing themselves to be led by the nose. The right in politics have been all too happy to mop up the low information voters for a long time now, as part of their project to constrain government and curtail the democratic will. They are happy to diminish the public imagination, as part of an attempt to diminish public expectations with respect to government – that is, to the idea of a legitimate common power capable of exercising restraint upon private economic power. It’s all deliberate. And here we see the ‘public’ they have engineered in support of that ‘vision’ – a passive, lumpen, ill-informed, resentful mob armed with nothing by way of information and understanding, just what they may pick up from extreme right media.
They’ve been around quite a while.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." —Isaac Asimov.
By this stage, with battle lines drawn, and the ‘us against the world’ mentality entrenched, I doubt that any Trump supporter can be reached by rational and moral appeal. If they weren't already beyond facts and reason, they will have long since been taken beyond the point of no return by the Trump engineered anti-fact/science/logic fake news irreligious religious political propaganda.
I could care less if America First would become America Alone, an isolationist nationalism that would at least keep these people out of the affairs of the rest of the world. I don’t want to see them. The bigots, racists, xenophobes and ignoramuses are most certainly out of the proverbial closet, and when America has bases of all kinds all over the world, it isn’t nice. When I was little, I would watch my dad as he would pick up a pen and scribble in the newspaper, the same three words, time and again: ‘Yanks go home.’ I have no idea who he meant or in what context. But it makes sense now. These people want to give the world the finger, to make them feel powerful. Fine. ‘I hope we pull out’ one told me on the eve of the US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. ‘Feel free’ I replied, and take yourself out of everything else everywhere else too.
I hasten to add that my comments are directed at certain Americans, far from all Americans. I have plenty of American friends in all fields who have something alive and that works between their ears, and a moral backbone too. I am just baffled as to why so many people professing a religious faith should be so loyal and so fervent in their support of Donald Trump. I am sure the key to this is the paranoid view that the world is going against them, that all the rights being extended to so many groups they don’t like amounts to a world being eaten up by hordes of atheists, humanists, and pagans – a lot of them foreign, no doubt, of dubious sexual orientation, and college educated to boot. Trump doesn’t seem to like them much either. And he will fight for the cause. He won’t simply turn up at church and pray with the faithful, he will fight for them. And he’s rich and powerful. A political winner. And … so much for the usual anti-political ‘my kingdom is not of this world’ line that is usually peddled, a convenient religion for all those whose purpose is to devalue and disable democratic politics.
These are not the Americans I know and love, the ones I count amongst friends. Out of an attempt to reach out to all sides, I turned a blind eye to the anti-intellectualism, the bigotry, the racism, and the pure hate amongst certain American people. I read it as casual or innocuous, or as an expression of something else, just normal right wing politics. But it is more than that, it is consistent and persistent, in its more sophisticated form it engages in apologetics that rationalises ugly actions, it never condemns those actions, it gives licence to them. And it expresses an implicit contempt for all that I stand for, which would become explicit in any direct political clash.
I think that one of the characteristics of Trump that appeals most to his audience is his obsession with winning and being dominant. Some folk like that quality, it makes them feel big and tough. Which must feel good when you are constantly on the receiving end of those who are more skilled in the world of fact, value, reason, logic, empathy …
I get that large numbers of people have been neglected in an era of globalisation, elites and experts talking about complicated problems, but there are ways of challenging the abstraction of power that restore democratic life, rather than justify an anti-intellectualism. You will exhaust yourself trying to get through to these characters. You can't reason with them because they twist facts, ignore facts, make them up, twist logic, ignore logic, conflate issues, misunderstand, misrepresent, make false accusations, confuse – and have you doing all the intellectual hard work, for no end or purpose at all, because they recognise nothing you say as valid if it doesn’t fit their prejudices. You can’t upset a swamp – and you can’t reason with one either.
Personally, I’m just desperately sad at the abuse of religion. I argue for religion and God in terms of transcendent truths, norms and values that serve as an objective standard outside of time and place, by which to judge, criticise and orient government, politics, laws and customs. To drag that standard into the political arena and to put it into service as an ideology of money and power seems the work of the Anti-Christ to me. When Trump is long gone, the damage to religion and Christianity will remain. This is precisely why many, many people are sceptical, to say the least, about religion in public life. And the idea that Trump is one of the faithful …
Leonard Pitts counted himself as a conservative Republican for most of his life. But he wants nothing to do with Trump, and is concerned to identify something that has gone badly wrong in sections of the American people. He comments that ‘the GOP has been conspicuous in its acquiescent silence.’ That’s putting it mildly. The Republican Party has been engaged in misinformation, division, nullification, obfuscation and obstruction for decades now. Republicans have been peddling an anti-politics politics for a long time, abandoning any pretence of being for something positive in politics – less politics, less government, fewer regulations, lower taxes hardly counts as a political vision – and embracing instead a permanent knee-jerk opposition to any attempt to use government and politics for the public purpose. The Republican Party thus ceased offering a balanced and reasoned conservative opposition to the liberal side of the political spectrum, and opted for unthinking automatic negation. Worse, as part of the anti-political anti-government agenda, the attempt to curtail democratic inroads into private power has involved an alliance with that segment of the population that views the extension of equal rights to marginalised and oppressed groups as an antithesis to what they value. The religious see the rise of humanism and atheism here. I see the extension of natural rights to each and all, in keeping with basic natural law. The truth is … they just don’t like some people. In fact, they hate them. Curtailing democracy has thus had the GOP complicit with a populism that possesses some very ugly strains. The Republican Party abandoned public responsibility and a commitment to the good and the true so as to collude with the bigots, the racists, the xenophobes and the prejudiced in society in order to gain political power to implement their own anti-government, pro-untrammelled markets (unrestrained corporate power) agenda. And it leads to the hollowing out of public life, the loss of politics as the sphere in which dialogue and consensus for the common good reconcile differences, division and rancour, and who knows what else in the future. The Republicans have used lies, half-truths, and deceit to pander to the worst instincts of many voters in order to gain power. And the result is that they have fostered hate and fear and legitimised prejudice. America First? This will be the ruination of the country.
I’ll end on an optimistic note. There never will be a ‘post-truth’ society, only a society that has lost its way and which struggles to tell the difference between right and wrong. The religious folk backing Trump with such fervour do not represent the religious ethic, they represent its denial. That ethic transcends time and place and will see out the failures of this tawdry political ideology. There will be a sweeping away of the detritus, and the healthy will come to the fore and will grow. Hate and fear create some powerful storms in the short term, but it blows over eventually, and destroys the hate- and fear-mongers in the process.
Mapping Dante’s Inferno, One Circle of Hell at a Time
A topography of torment.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mapping-dante-hell-inferno-satan-divine-comedy
I found myself, in truth, on the brink of the valley of the sad abyss that gathers the thunder of an infinite howling. It was so dark, and deep, and clouded, that I could see nothing by staring into its depths.”
This is the vision that greets the author and narrator upon entry the first circle of Hell—Limbo, home to honorable pagans—in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his 14th-century epic poem, Divine Comedy. Before Dante and his guide, the classical poet Virgil, encounter Purgatorio and Paradiso, they must first journey through a multilayered hellscape of sinners—from the lustful and gluttonous of the early circles to the heretics and traitors that dwell below. This first leg of their journey culminates, at Earth’s very core, with Satan, encased in ice up to his waist, eternally gnawing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius (traitors to God) in his three mouths. In addition to being among the greatest Italian literary works, Divine Comedy also heralded a craze for “infernal cartography,” or mapping the Hell that Dante had created.
This desire to chart the landscape of Hell began with Antonio Manetti, a 15th-century Florentine (like Dante himself) architect and mathematician. He diligently worked on the “site, form and measurements” of Hell, Even Galileo Galilei weighed in. Sandro Botticelli
And if you are wondering what circle of hell Donald Trump and the republicans belong to …
The answer is the worst ones. I dare say there is enough sin there to fill the whole of Dante’s Hell. I’m just wondering where all the evangelicals who support Trump and Pence belong. The lowest reaches, upside down, alongside Lucifer, maybe. But the punishment in the ninth chasm may be more appropriate. The punishment in this part of Hell is bloody and grotesque. The ninth chasm is the place of the Sowers of Discord and Scandal, and the Creators of Schism within the papacy. The sinners in the ninth chasm are damned to walk around the chasm until they arrive at a devil who slashes them with a long sword, according to the nature of their sin.
The sowers of discord and scandal sounds right, but the sins of politics are multiple, and Dante sprinkled all parts of Hell with his political enemies. I don’t know. The key thing to say here is that if we don’t check these people, they will assuredly turn this planet into a living Hell.