bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Emotional reactions.

    Can we have a moratorium, please, on calling the many upset and frightened people, post-election, "crybabies?"

    And otherwise mocking and sneering at them, or anyone, for being upset or worried by this election?  Or for coping with it in any peaceful way?

    It's dumb.  It lumps an enormous class of individuals into one faceless mass, as if everyone who's upset is upset for the same reasons instead of being upset for a wide variety of reasons.  Furthermore, the sneerers selectively choose their favorite strawman reason, rather than their favorite noble one, and choose to paint the crowd with a wide negative brush.  

    Finally, it's unkind.

    + + +

    200px-Caravaggio_-_Sette_opere_di_Misericordia

    I lead a relatively privileged life and so I am not worried, not very much, about coming to personal harm as a result of the recent election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.  I do not expect to be targeted by any gleeful thugs, nor to have my property or my place of worship vandalized.  

    I have a little bit of fear that I might be caught in a situation where justice might require me to speak up and put myself at risk.  This is not much, either.

    So on the one hand I am not qualified to comment about the authenticity of the fears other people are feeling.

    On the other… I do have some experience with the way that reports of a few frightening incidents around the country — and there have been such incidents of intimidation and harassment — have a way of getting under your skin.

    I know this, because of trying to be part of the Sane Mom Revolution.  Parents everywhere have been cowed into raising their children with extra shelter, not enough outdoor play, and a ridiculous amount of supervision because of a few frightening incidents around the country — sometimes directly (you can't play at the park because I'm afraid you won't be safe there) and sometimes indirectly (you can't play at the park because I heard that one of the neighbors once called CPS on a mother for letting her kid play at the park).   Not only that, but institutions are reinforcing it with illiberal rules:  Kids having to be in the direct line of sight of a parent while inside a library, for example.

    It's a self-perpetuating cycle of safety fears.  It's very hard to push back against, and it gets to you:  you catch yourself being frightened, even when you know intellectually that the specter of kidnapping and sexual predation is not actually part of a real trend or threat, that it's a bunch of isolated rare events that have been blown up by media.

    It still frightens people even if they know that.

    And by the way:  it's too soon to know whether the reports of intimidation and harassment are, or aren't, a real trend.

    And by the way:  Even the intimidating graffiti and signs that are supposedly "hoaxes" perpetrated by anti-Trump people?  That doesn't make them any less intimidating or scary.  Why should the political orientation matter?  Why does it matter whether the 'Go Home [Slur]' sign-painter wanted to honestly scare you into leaving the neighborhood, or wanted to deceitfully scare you into rising up and fighting back?  It's intimidation either way.   

    + + +

    The sixth spiritual work of mercy is "console the afflicted."  

    "Consolation" can mean helping the afflicted see that the situation is better than it looks, if that is true (and I don't think any of us know yet whether it is true).  To judge that requires a good deal of prudence.  

    I don't stake my honor on the claim that I have enough prudence to know.  I do stake my honor on the assertion that it is not "consolation" to call the afflicted crybabies and whiners, nor to dismiss them as not really afflicted.

    + + +

    I'm having my own emotional reactions to the election of President Trump, and I'll lay them out here frankly.

     

    Chief among them is surreal disbelief:  that we seem to be living in a parody sketch.  I really do find myself going about my day busy with things and then suddenly feeling a heavy weight drop into the pit of my stomach and remembering:  No, it really, really happened.  It isn't a joke.  It isn't a Bloom County strip.  It isn't a Simpsons sketch or a riff on The Producers.   Donald Trump is our next president.

    Sometimes I start hyperventilating a little, or I tear up.

    I know.

    Crybaby.

    Not.  It's real.  I'm horrified.  I didn't think it would really happen.

    + + +

    And even though I didn't think it would really happen and so maybe I'm part of the problem, I'm angry.  So very angry.

    Not that much at Trump voters as a whole, who voted for a wide variety of reasons and so don't deserve (any more than the sad and angry people) to be painted with a wide and universally negative brush.

    I'm angry at all the influential, supremely privileged people – people even more privileged than me, even less likely to hurt from a Trump presidency than I am — who thought it was HI-LARIOUS that Trump ran.  

    John Oliver will do for an example. In a response to the news that Trump was considering running for president:  "Do it," Oliver challenged, grinning widely as his audience cheered and laughed.  "Do it!  Look at me!  Do it!  I will personally write you a campaign check!  Now!  On behalf of this country, which does not want you to be president, but which badly wants you to run."

    Stupid.  Stupid.  Stupid.  Did they not know how this works?  

    "I didn't think it would happen."

    Well.  Maybe you shouldn't have enabled it then.

    This goes for every media outlet who thought Trump was ridiculous and awful and gave him free airtime because he was ridiculous and awful.

    This goes for anyone who may have voted for Trump in an open primary in order to make the GOP as weak as possible.  

    It goes for everybody who celebrated, or even minimized the awfulness of it all, because it was a sure victory for the Democrats when Trump was named the Republican nominee.

    It goes everybody who thought that what was obviously bad for the Republicans must also be good for the country.   

    Bad! Bad! Bad!  I'm angry at you.  Could you not see it as simply bad?  Why can we not all sincerely hope, in a first-past-the-post election, that both parties put forth their best possible candidates? 

    The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.  

    + + +

    That's me being mad at entertainment-class liberals.  I'm so mad at the GOP that I am not even in a place where I can effectively write about it.  Really.  Not anywhere near there yet.

    + + +

    Finally:  I'm struggling personally with feelings that — I wanted to call them private feelings, but I guess I'm airing them now — feelings that I can only describe as personally traumatic.

    First of all — this part is an update — I can't bear to listen to Trump speak.  I make people mute it and put on headphones.  I wait to read the transcript, if for some reason  I want to know what he said.

    This is because I had a probable narcissist in my life once, a very deceitful narcissist, who was charming in public and vicious behind closed doors, a wealthy serial adulterer who flashed the keys to his Porsche, who worked behind the scenes to pit family members against one another, who liked to make fun of children, and who reacted with irrational aggression to strangers and family members who failed to show him sufficient respect or stood in his way whenever money was on the line.

    Donald Trump reminds me of him, and I can't bear to listen to his voice for that reason.  I know I have harped more than is probably helpful on the theme of "Trump has narcissistic personality disorder" here on this blog.   It's because I have seen the danger of the double faces it presents, and I have been worried since the beginning of the campaign that the "charming" is more visible than the "vicious," because that's been my experience.

    The other personal trauma:  I had a really rough time during the week of the tape of Trump leering aloud, "grab 'em by the pussy."

    I cried a lot.

    I expect there are other people out there, mostly women, probably some men too, who felt exposed and raw every time that piece was played or quoted.

    I find myself thinking that I don't even deserve to feel upset because my own experiences with men grabbing me without my consent, verbally harassing me, and in situations where I was afraid to complain about it — I was not even an adult, I didn't know how to cope with it — are few and long ago.

    But hearing the words over and over again brought it back.

    The tape was old news, but it was new news that many people who should know better, people in positions of power, people I knew personally, were today excusing and minimizing the description of assault.  I was harassed and bodily touched as a young and relatively powerless teen.  There are more people around than I thought who today think that this kind of hurting people is normal, even expected.

    It was new news to me that people would frame "they let you when you're a star" as some kind of proof that Trump was talking about consent.

    They also let you when you're their much older co-worker and they're afraid they might lose their job.

    They also let you when you're alone in an elevator with them and you're much larger than they are and they're afraid of what else you might do and so they're just trying to make it to the next floor.

    It's not consent.

    And it's not excusable.

    And it's infuriating, upsetting, and tears prick my eyes, just thinking about how many people… don't think it's a deal-breaker.

    + + +

    Our job is to do good work.  The year of mercy is coming to an end.  Let's pay it forward.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_of_mercy

    For your neighbor's bodily well-being:

    1. To feed the hungry.
    2. To give drink to the thirsty.
    3. To clothe the naked.
    4. To welcome the stranger. (Previously referred to as "harbor the harborless" and "shelter the homeless")
    5. To visit the sick.
    6. To visit the imprisoned. (Previously referred to as "ransom the captive")
    7. To bury the dead.

    For your neighbor's spirit:

    1. To instruct the ignorant.
    2. To counsel the doubtful.
    3. To admonish sinners.
    4. To bear patiently those who wrong us.
    5. To forgive offenses.
    6. To console the afflicted.
    7. To pray for the living and the dead.

     

    —

    |

    2 comments on Emotional reactions.

  • Boundaries and bubbles.

    Today I went on a run around the lake. We are having unseasonably warm weather here in Minneapolis, which is supposed to end after a week or so; the leaves are still on the trees, the sky is clear and blue, and as yet there’s been no snow and little frost. The path around Lake Calhoun is wide, tree-canopied, and inviting: it passes two playgrounds, swings by a busy uptown intersection, then close to where the lake laps against a wall and the waves bound and rebound, crisscrossing each other on their way in and out, dissolving into turbulence. At many places along the path there are lovely views of the skyscrapers of downtown, which from many glass surfaces reflect the sky-colors; when it’s clear, at sunrise or sunset, the whole skyline sometimes turns a brilliant shade of aquamarine.

     

    I love my adopted hometown, and I am fond of the familiar views that give me a sense of place. I thought about all the people in all the hometowns across the country, waking up and walking the dog, or driving to and from jobs, or hanging out with family, looking at the views they see every day: views that I could only see and appreciate with visitor’s eyes. I know not everyone loves the place where they live, but my wish for everyone in all the places is to see something beautiful that means “home.”

    + + +

    I realized today that I live in a bubble online that I have created around myself. It is not a bubble of liberals nor a bubble of conservatives, not a bubble of Catholics or of homeschoolers or of mothers. Indeed my Twitter feed and my timeline have people from across the political spectrum and who do many different jobs and who belong to different religions or no religion at all. With most of my privacy settings to “friends of friends” I often hear from new people. I believe in reading arguments I don’t automatically agree with. I believe in listening to people tell their stories, even if they come with agendas.

    But I do live in a bubble from which I will readily expel anyone that violates a certain value I have, and that value is civil discourse. Say what you like, say it firmly, even say it sharply in order to best make your point. But I will mute you, block you, or unfriend you if you persistently make ad hominem attacks on the other people in the discussion. Likewise, if you use abusive language or excuse abuse. Likewise if you use slurs aimed at racial minorities, slurs for gay people, or gendered and racialized terms of abuse, intimidation, or mockery. Likewise if you attempt to use a person’s legal or social vulnerability to intimidate them.

    I mentioned that I set my privacy settings to “friends of friends” because I enjoy hearing from new people. This is true, but one thing that makes it possible is my willingness to block and mute friends-of-friends whose discourse is so uncivil or unpleasant that I don’t wish to see it on my wall. No one needs to know that I have done it; I don’t generally mention that I have blocked someone, because why give an unpleasant person any more oxygen?

    I have blocked friends of friends for making sexually and racially charged jokes in the comments under a post about breastfeeding advocacy in minority communities.

    I have blocked an immediate family member of my own for pointedly mentioning to one of my friends, a homeschooling advocate who had disagreed with him in my comments, that he was “friends with the superintendent of her district,” and then contacting her repeately in private messages after she told him to stop. (Friends: I have your back.)

    I have blocked friends of friends for making unwelcome sexual comments about images I have posted (that my own friends have “liked.”)

    I regularly hide from view posts that dehumanize, that express unjust prejudice against people of different religious beliefs, or that mock people for having strong feelings or disabilities.

    I readily mute people who bother me on Twitter in an uncivil manner. No, not because I disagree with them. Because they are asses. There’s a difference.

    If you stir shit online where you think I can see it, and you don’t get a rise out of me, know that it’s probably because I have found a convenient way to ignore you.

    + + +

    I mentioned in my post yesterday how I was swinging from place to place, trying to find where I stand post-election. I think I am narrowing that place down a bit, and I am doing it by setting boundaries around myself not to keep undesirable people out, but to rein myself in.

    Building a little fence, saying I will only go so far in such and such a direction.

    Some of that I expressed in a comment I made on Jamie’s post…

    I’m struggling to find a place that

    — does not normalize this president-elect

    — does not further marginalize the poor and rural voters who chose him

    — respects the free and fair election process

    — sees clearly the reality of this new political order and acts rightly within it

    — distinguishes between the things the president will want to do that are bad ideas because they are, you know, normal wrong political policies I would normally oppose, and the things that come out of his narcissistic cruelty or that would cause structural damage to the republic that transcend politics

    — finds common ground among the many people with disparate political philosophies who are dismayed at the character of the president so we can work together and speak together to limit damage to the republic from the latter example above

    A tough place to be.

    The more I think about it, the more I can see that I am setting boundaries for myself. I don’t know what my final attitude will be, exactly. But I know what I don’t want it to venture into, and I am building little fences that say “This far and no further.” I won’t normalize Trump’s behavior or minimize his psychological unfitness. I won’t strike back at, marginalize further, or dehumanize the poor and rural voters who chose him. I won’t undermine the free and fair electoral process. I won’t be trapped myself in denial or paralyzed by dismay. I won’t mistake ordinary partisan politics for fundamental existential threats to the republic, and vice versa. I won’t let political disagreement between myself and other #nevertrumpers — whether they are to my left or to my right — dissuade me from trying to communicate and work with them to minimize the damage that a Trump presidency might do.

    Since then I have added a few more boundaries.

    I won’t denigrate anyone for being upset or frightened, or for coping with that upset and fear in any peaceful and respectful way.

    I won’t wish that things will go so poorly for certain causes that I will get to say “I told you so” to people that trusted Trump to promote them.

    I won’t teach my kids that President Trump’s unworthiness means we don’t pray for him or wish his ultimate good.

    I won’t despair.

    + + +

    Here’s hoping I draw strength from the bubble I live in, the one I am not sorry for, not one bit.

     

    —

    |

    3 comments on Boundaries and bubbles.

  • Processing votes in a swing state: and the broken stair.

    It seems that the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States has done what nothing else could: spur me to blog daily.

    I'm still reeling. Swinging. Did I sound like I made some kind of sense the other day? My mood is like we used to say about the weather in Ohio when I was growing up there: if you don't like it, wait a minute.

    Sometimes I'm: Okay, time to move on. The election is over and the election mentality won't help us now. What is the best thing to do in the current situation?

    Sometimes I'm paralyzed by disbelief. I keep waking up with a sense of vague dread and unsettlement which takes a few minutes to understand before it hits me that the American people have elected Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States. This is why I keep making myself type things like The American people have elected Donald J. Trump to the presdency of the United States, in its full shameful glory. Cauterizing the disbelief. Before the election I joked about Bill the Cat. (The newspaper comics of my childhood featured a cartoon cat which, for a while, had had its brain replaced by Donald Trump, and which periodically ran for president.) The ludicrous image which leaps to mind these days, not sure why, is Fred Willard playing the Global CEO in the movie WALL-E. Maybe because Fred Willard does batshit crazy so well, and I am rolling all his roles mentally into one.

    Sometimes I am: Let's try hard to understand how this happened and what the voters were thinking and let's stop slinging insults around and let's all just radiate peace and love to everyone around us and let it radiate outward to the whole world. I am not a politician, or a professor, and my soapbox is not very elevated. I am a mother of children and my job is to raise them right and if I do my job faithfully there will be a little more love and respect in the world and blah blah blah, you see where I am going with this.

    Sometimes I have a surge of political activism and I think: Now there are people both on the left and the right who range from "kind of worried" to "scared out of their minds" about either the geopolitical or the domestic implications of a Trump Administration (Trump Administration. Trump Administration. Trump Administration.) Maybe those people will be able to join together to enact some useful political change that could mitigate the damage? I will write my Democratic congressman and tell him to fight the good fight! I will share petitions on Twitter to put a layer of Congressional oversight between the president and the nuclear codes!

    Sometimes I think this new "wear a safety pin to show worried marginalized people you are a safe person" idea (Google it; I had to) is a great thing and sometimes I think it'll accomplish nothing but virtue signaling; I would like to hear from some of the worried marginalized people themselves before making a final judgment.

    Sometimes I am just angry that the bully won, and so did all his lapdogs and hangers-on. People like Ann Coulter won. This is proof of the fallenness of the human race, as if we needed more. I am actually more angry at the enablers and lapdogs and hangers-on, the Wormtongues, than I am at Donald J. Trump the president-elect because, as I have written before, I think Trump is mentally ill, a sick man, and not entirely at fault for being the person that he is, but the enablers and lapdogs and hangers-on have not got that excuse.

    + + +

    Today I find myself nodding in agreement with Jamie at Light and Momentary, in her post entitled "Sore Losers:"

    I do not apologize for holding the leader of the free world to a high standard. I do not apologize for recognizing the plain truth that Donald J. Trump fails to meet that standard. I do not apologize for expecting the president of the United States to be a person who is, at a minimum, reasonably truthful and reasonably capable of putting a coherent sentence together.

    I will not back down from my assertion that someone who has not managed to learn by age 70 that adults don't talk about genitals in the public sphere — either the size of their own or the grab-ability of someone else's — is unfit for polite society, let alone the highest office in the land. I will never rest easy about the judgment of a man whose only metric for evaluating women is how hot they are…

    For those of us who said #neverTrump there is a bit of a balancing act here: we must deplore violence (I do) and support the peaceful transfer of power (I do) while also steadfastly refusing to normalize this gravely abnormal election (I'm going to do that too). I have an obligation to show respect for civil authority. But I have no obligation — quite the reverse, I would argue — to pretend I don't notice when someone seems untethered from reality.

    It is not normal human behavior to assert repeatedly that you never said something that you actually said on video. If I talked to the family of someone who did so while also demonstrating paranoid and vengeful behavior, I would recommend that they take him immediately to a neuropsychologist for a thorough evaluation. Instead he is taking his family to the White House. This concerns me.

    We cannot explain this away. We can certainly hope that his presidency is not marked by the volatility and the — I can't think of another word here — the lunacy that made his candidacy so singular. There has been a movement throughout his campaign to explain away his errors in judgment. I will not link to the Catholics4Trump page that asserts he wasn't really mocking a disabled reporter (he was just gesturing, they assure us), but it crossed and re-crossed my Facebook feed. I decline to accept their justification for his clearly aberrant behavior. And let me be very clear: I do not apologize for doing so.

    Jamie's post reminded me of a concept that maybe not everyone who reads here is familiar with, the "broken stair" analogy. I first encountered it in an online support group for people who have an abusive family member, but I have also seen it used to refer to mental illness in a family or in an organization; either way it will work. Wikipedia (I just looked there for the first time) has it listed as a "missing stair" and says it refers originally to rapists within a particular community, but has since been expanded to other concepts. Here is the essence, from the Wikipedia article:

    Missing stair is a term used to describe a sexual predator who many people know cannot be trusted, but who, rather than excluding, they work around by trying to quietly warn others. The analogy is to a structural fault in a house, such as a missing stair, that everyone who lives in the house has gotten used to and warns newcomers about, rather than fixing.

    "[It is] something you're so used to working around, you never stop to ask "what if we actually fixed this?" Eventually you take it for granted that working around this guy is just a fact of life, and if he hurts someone, that's the fault of whoever didn't apply the workarounds correctly."

    We have to get used to the idea of President Trump (President Trump, President Trump) enough that we can act effectively in this new reality. But we don't have to — we mustn't — get used to him enough that he and what he represents become a missing stair.

    (Updated to clarify:  Distinguish between run-of-the-mill differences between liberal and conservative solutions to problems, and the fundamental unhealthy and dangerous features of Trumpism.  The broken stair is not "stuff I disagree with" or even "stuff everyone would disagree with if they saw it my way.  I argue that part of the Democrats' problem is that lots of then called out every single Republican as a broken stair, and inured people to their warnings.)

    We mustn't get to the point where we say, "I can work within this new reality, so everyone else should too."

    We need to keep calling him out and pointing out that he is a broken and bent man, and his presidency (though real) results from a deeply weird and broken structural problem in the country that needs to be fixed.

    I doubt we will all agree on the nature of the underlying structural fault. Did the ground shift under the foundation? Was the wood rotten? Did someone — a resident, an intruder — take an ax to this spot just above the landing? If we just replace the stair, will that be the end of it, or is there something else we all have to train our eyes to see?

    That question is not answerable yet from where I sit, and even if we were to reach consensus on it we might all be wrong.

    But damn it, at least let's go on seeing that a broken stair is a problem in and of itself. It is not the fault of the people who trip on it or who now hesitate at the foot of the flight.

    -———

    *Don't quibble with me about how the American people did not really elect Trump because the national popular vote went to Mrs. Clinton, or because only about a quarter of eligible voters cast votes for him, or because the electoral college is intentionally undemocratic, or because none of your friends voted for him. We knew the rules before the game started; turning nonvoters into voters is part of the task of a campaign; the popular vote margin, compared to the number of people who could have voted but didn't, is so small as to represent mere noise and could have been different if the weather had been different (I think; ask Nate Silver). To say otherwise is to persist in denial. Tempting denial, but isn't it always?

     

     

     

     

     

    —

    |

    1 comment on Processing votes in a swing state: and the broken stair.

  • Draining executive power: a bipartisan cause for the next four years.

    Principled conservatives, and liberals of good faith have never had so much in common as they do now. We’re both dismayed.

    Let’s do this.

    Let’s work together. Immediately.

     

    Let’s deprive Donald J. Trump — and whoever comes after him — of the most worrying powers that the executive branch holds. Powers that by the design of our country’s founders rightfully belong to Congress, the people’s tribune, the seat of representative democracy in this republic.

    Let’s put a layer of Congressional approval between the chief executive and the nuclear codes.

    Let’s end the cowardly practice of writing blank-check legislation that lets the executive branch — the Presidential administration and its agencies — craft unilaterally most of the rules that govern Americans’ daily lives.

    Let’s have more and more transparent Congressional oversight over matters deemed crucial for national security.

    Let’s stop calling checks and balances “obstruction,” and accept that the President has to earn the support of enough members of Congress (remember? our representatives? our assembled voices in Washington?) to enact his policies.

    Let’s demand that our Congressional representatives remember that they are representatives of their whole districts, that our Senators are representatives of their whole states — not just of the folks who belong to the same party. That their first loyalty needs to be to their constituents of either party, and not to the President even if he is of their own party. They need to protect the enumerated powers of Congress against executive overreach.

    Let’s do it now, while there are a lot of people in both parties who recognize the inherent danger of having an unhinged person in such a powerful position. I hope that it is clear to all that the fundamental structual problem is not this particular man’s character and emotional fragility, but the fact that so much power has become concentrated in one office in the national capital.

    We need to rediscover federalism, checks and balances, and the separation of powers. And what’s more, now is the time to get it done.

    + + +

    I hope my more liberal readers will not take it as a slight, but only as a factual observation, that (in general) progressives and the Democratic party have worked over the generations to concentrate power in the federal government and remove it from regional, state, and local oversight. Probably some powerful people have promoted this in order to consolidate their own power and influence, but most of the proponents have been well meaning — the goal being to make sure that citizens all over the country enjoy the same rights, prosperity, safety, and freedoms.

    Conversely, in general, conservatives strongly value regional and local autonomy and have worked to reduce federal programs and regulations. Probably some powerful people have promoted this in order to advance their own economic interests or preserve their in-group’s place in the social hierarchy, but most of the proponents have been well meaning — the goal being to solve problems efficiently at the local level where people understand them, preserve personal freedoms, and to keep the accumulated weight and cost of regulations from dragging the economy down.

    We are in a place now where progressives — like principled conservatives — wish to rein in the power of the federal executive. The principled conservatives are still around. Many of them are not only opposed to the currently swollen federal executive power in general, but are actually opposed to the program of the new Republican president-elect in specific. This is a rare chance to work together to do something that could really be good for the country.

    + + +

    I think that soon, after the initial shock dies down and people in the government start getting back to work, I am going to write my Congressional representative — Keith Ellison (D-MN) — and congratulate him on his re-election to Congress. I will propose that he and the other Democratic members of Congress, as well as any Republicans who are troubled by the overreach of executive power that we saw in the last couple of administrations and who have serious concerns about the fitness of President-Elect Trump and his authoritarian tendencies, consider what they can do immediately to drain the power from the executive branch and return it to where it belongs: with our representatives and senators.

    A good place to start was suggested by my friend Ed on Facebook. HR 6179 would “prohibit the conduct of a first-use nuclear strike absent a declaration of war by Congress.”

    Let’s start by getting the president’s fingers off the nuclear button. Then we can start peeling his fingers away from everywhere they have no business digging into.

     

    —

    |

    No comments on Draining executive power: a bipartisan cause for the next four years.

  • Pivoting, post election.

    I spent the last several months trying to convince people that Donald Trump's character, alone, was reason enough to deny him the presidency by voting for almost anyone else.

    This was a bit of a departure for me.  I think that a lot of people have had similar experiences with 2016:  a shift in the possible.  Until this year I would have argued that character was not nearly as important as policy proposals when it came to evaluating a candidate for office.  This campaign season made me realize I was wrong.  Most of the time, it's a good rule of thumb.  But I had neglected to consider the depths to which character can sink.  I hadn't realized that character had a floor.  Most of the time, you simply look at the two or three candidates and pick the one with the best policies, or the least worst ones, anyway.  But it turns out that there is a sort of character that I look at and say, "I don't even need to know about your policies.  I don't want you or anyone like you in that office." As long as you meet a minimum standard of character, policy is more important.  But what I didn't realize is that I have a minimum standard for character — and failure to meet that minimum standard trumps your policy positions, in my view.

    So anyway.  My argument against Trump was essentially, This man is unpredictable.  He has no boundaries.  He reacts angrily to personal slights.  He encourages and emboldens a small but frightening set of vile racists.  He's dangerous.  

    As for policy, he promoted a lot of bad ones (waterboarding; reneging on NATO; mass deportations) and where he promised "good" policies, he was vague (the best judges) or promised things that weren't even in his power (we'll make Mexico pay for the wall) or seemed not to understand the nuances (we'll punish women who have abortions).   The bad plans were very bad, and the theoretically good ones were literally un-believable.

    But the main problem?  Character.  And I reiterated the character problem again and again, in the hopes of convincing other people that he couldn't be trusted with the presidency because he wasn't trustworthy.

    + + +

    Now Donald J. Trump is going to be president, and I'm having trouble pivoting.  Because once he's already president, the character question is rather moot.

    Much like "but he's better than Hillary Clinton!" is now moot.  There is now no Hillary Clinton to frighten the children.  There is only Donald J. Trump, and he has to stand entirely on his own.

    And the character question is moot.  He has been entrusted with the presidency.  No arguing about his character will change the outcome.  Now there is only policy and choices and action.

    + + +

    Before Donald J. Trump was elected to be our president, I could hope in good faith that the bully would crash and burn.  Nobody wants to see the bully win.  I certainly didn't.  But I'm having to stop myself now, because I don't want the bully to fail if it means America fails too.  I have to want the bully to succeed — in the sense that I want America during his administration to grow more prosperous, just, and welcoming.  I don't want him to fail and take the rest of us down with us.

    How can I hope that he succeeds in this way?

    + + +

    I have to get rid of any vestiges that still want to see him fail so badly that he resigns or at least slinks away in disgrace.  Even though I warned that his terrible character risked failure for the country, and even though I would be "proved right" if the failure happened and Trump slinked away embarrassed,  I can't want that any more.  That would mean, more likely than not, that bad things will have happened to the country.  I don't want bad things to have happened.  Ergo, I can't want utter, embarrassing failure for Trump.  It is going to take me a few days to align myself to the reality that now, Trump's interests are partly aligned with the country's interests.  I can't want him to crash and burn unless I want the country to risk crashing and burning too.  I have to hope that he redeems himself.  That would be good, not bad, and to wish otherwise is to sink into revenge.

    + + +

    But while I have a moral responsibility to train myself to hope that Trump succeeds in the sense that the whole country succeeds while he is at the helm,  I have a different moral responsibility towards hope in the other traditional measures of a president's success.

    For example, one measure is:  was he able to enact his program of policies?

    Now policy matters.

    Donald J. Trump promised us many things, some of them bad, some of them good, some of them mutually contradictory, some of them impossible.

    Where he promised bad things that are possible, I must oppose them.  

    Where he promised bad things that are not possible, I must not be distracted by them, and must help others not to be distracted by them.

    Where he promised good things that are possible, I must hope for them.  

    Where he promised good things that are not possible, I must not be distracted by them, and must help others not to be distracted by them.

    Where he promised things that sound good but have foreseeable bad consequences, I must point them out.

    Where he speaks the truth, I must agree.

    Where he speaks lies, I must disagree.

    It's just the same as a politician with better character.

    The fact that I expect a lot of bad things, and am highly skeptical of the promised goods, is almost irrelevant.

    + + +

    Character still does matter — because there will be more promises, and we must evaluate the reliability of future promises based on the track record of the past.

    Character still does matter — because one thing a president does is ask other people to help him with his inadequacies, and we must evaluate proposed helpers (the Cabinet, for example) in the light of the deficiencies that they are supposed to alleviate.  

    Character still does matter — because we're (finally) about to have a national conversation about how much power the president should have, compared to the power of our representatives in Washington.  It seems not so bad to hand over lots of power to someone who won't abuse it, or (apparently) who will abuse it only in ways that hurt other people, not ourselves.  Time to look bluntly at the character of the executive and ask, "Should the legislature have signed over so much power to the office now held by this man?"  We assumed the president would always have certain characteristics:  a certain wisdom, a certain discretion, a certain desire to do the right thing (even if different presidents disagreed on what was the right thing).  Do these assumptions still hold?  Time to evaluate.

    + + +

    But arguing against Donald Trump's character is mostly pointless now, at least till 2020.  There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president must be of good character.  He will stand or fall in 2020 based on his actions.

    And actions can be evaluated independently.

    That's our job now.  

    + + +

    I've been thinking a lot about the #nevertrump hashtag.  I was unapologetically #nevertrump, but now I am uncomfortable with the hashtag.  I would have been embarrassed by anyone who spent 2008-2016 claiming to be #neverobama.  It's too close to "Not My President," which to me is too close to refusing to accept a free and fair election.  

    The hashtag #nevertrump meant, "I won't vote for this man, ever."  It can't mean that I will never support him, ever, now that he is already going to be president.  Because if by chance he does a good thing I should support him in that good thing.  We aren't allowed to call good "bad" and bad "good" based on how we feel about the messenger.

    I feel like we need a new hashtag.  But I'm floundering as to what it should be.

    Give me that week.  Maybe I'll come up with one.

    —

    |

    4 comments on Pivoting, post election.

  • From now until I’m forty-six.

    I am so placed that the most power I have for good, on your average day that does not call for heroism, is:

    • to raise my children to understand deeply the preferential option for the poor, to trust that God has already won the only lasting victory, and to choose kindness and good sense every day.
    • to direct a stream of my own relatively substantial wealth and social safety net to people and to organizations that possess the skills and connections to use it for works of mercy.
    • to exercise kindness myself, and to bear my share of the little burdens of life in order not to leave them for others to bear.
    • to write and send my best thoughts out to the world.

    Today will be a hard day.  It will be hard because I feel impotent.  But the reason I feel impotent is not because I cannot do the things in my power, but because the things in my power — what Mark teasingly calls "fighting the forces of chaos and ignorance" — seem small and confined today.

    And yet, they are in my power.  It will take an effort, but the dismay and disappointment I feel, plus a little coffee, I will use.  I will finish this blog post.  I will get up from the desk.  I will look at the day's schedule and I will do the things on it.  

    I will make the grocery list.  Heroically.  It's one of my least favorite chores.  I will make the list as if I can defeat Trumpism with legibility and thoroughness.

    I will teach my son how to carefully attend to his negative signs when solving algebra equations.  I am relatively confident that if there is more mathematical thinking in the world, it will be a blow to Trumpism.  Very well, somehow.  And if I can do it with patience, there will be more love in the world, even if only at my own kitchen table.

    I will go to a music class and watch three-year-olds dance with scarves and sing songs about barnyard animals while their mothers cradle newborn babies and wave scarves with just one hand.

    I will write — oh, this will be very hard — I will write a high school civics exam for next week.

    It's what I do.  It's all I can do today.  I have faith that it is something.

    Here's the blog post.  It's my best thoughts.  I have other thoughts.  Those thoughts are not "best."  You get these instead, because I'm making an effort.

    Now on to the rest of it all.

     

    —

    |

    3 comments on From now until I’m forty-six.

  • Love is patient, love is kind. Yes, yes, and other stuff.

    Sometimes I feel like I still need a basic how-to of the Christian life.  Love is such a difficult concept for me.    I think it's because even though I know better, I constantly slip into the error of mistaking the word as a kind of feeling rather than a kind of act, a choice, or a way of life.  It's a common error, maybe one of the fundamental American social errors.  And I'm kind of embarrassed to fall for an error so common.  Which is itself a problem, I suppose.

    Mistaking "love" for a kind of feeling leads some souls to mistake the ephemeral for the lasting, and so endanger themselves.  It leads others to mistake the surface for the substance, and so fail to deepen.  Me, it tends to tempt me to despair.  I have feelings, but not many of the kind that one can mistake for love.  So sometimes, in forgetting, I go a long time wondering if I actually have any in me.

    Oh, there are exceptions.  I'm human, and a mother, and I live in the experience of biological attachment — something that nearly knocked me over with its power, because the sense of wanting to love, of having physical desires that aligned with total self-gift, was so alien to me.   It gave me much food for thought — can I harness this power? I wrote in 2007, about real love, "Attachment is the natural way that we become disposed to love.   The other way, the supernatural way, is through the sacraments."  Sometimes, if you know something (intellectually) about what love really is,  you wonder how people get so snookered by its substitutes.  One reasonable hypothesis:  We mistake feelings not so much for love itself, but for attachment, love's natural source of power.

    I've gone to the writings of St. Thérèse and listened to her explain the merits of "doing little things with great love."  Daily life is a string of such little things, the ordinary duties of marriage and motherhood, citizenship and community; how to swing this "love" thing?  Can I transform my tasks?  Can I transform me?

    + + +

     I'll tell you right now, trying to generate feelings of love whilst going about the tasks of the day works imperfectly at best.  It's not a bad exercise:  one considers why this task is here, for example, that the laundry pile is so high because I have many children, for whom I am truly grateful, and try to convert it into being grateful for the laundry itself.  St. Francis embraced Death itself as a beloved sister:  perhaps laundry could be a sort of affable nephew or something?  But I never quite get there, although I can fake it to myself for a while, sometimes even long enough to get it all sorted into baskets.

    + + +

    This week I went back to 1 Corinthians 13, always a corrective when one has forgotten what love is.  

    I did get sidetracked somewhat by a sudden fascination with a translation problem*, but managed mostly to focus — as I swear I've done over and over again — on the attributes.  Love is patient, love is kind, and then some more stuff.  Rejoices in the truth.  There's a list there of what love is not, as well as what love is, but honestly I could stand just to pick a couple of these things – patience, kindness — and work on that.  For me, "doing small things" with a love greater than I usually can muster might simply be to do them with patience and kindness.

    And neither are things that you have to feel in order to do.

    (Yes, even patience.   Certainly we can feel impatience, but we can do, or at least try to do, patience despite it.   Who hasn't snapped at a whining child, "Be patient!"  Why ask for patience if we don't mean a behavior change?  What we really mean is "Stop whining and wait."  Surely we can ask the same of ourselves.)

    I foresee a time of muttering to myself, "Love is patient, love is kind," as I go about my day.  Seriously, those two attributes alone are enough effort to keep me occupied, never mind all the others.

    + + +

    I do think ahead with some foreboding.  Even if you actually get a handle on the intellectual meaning of "love" as an interior disposition, you still have to reach out to others with something that is sensible, i.e., available to their senses.  "The body, and it alone, is capable of making the invisible visible" — that is St. John Paul II — and wherever our vocation has placed us, we have a duty to communicate love.

    A love that is known by nature.  By how it seeks to be felt — sensed.

    We have to try to generate those feelings — in others!  (Feelings that are true — feelings of being-loved — that are safe, not dangerous, because we really do love and desire to love the ones who feel them: we know they are worthy, that they are persons, knowing and bearing with them and beholding always an image of all creation and all the Uncreated too.)  We create the space where it is safe to feel love, and then it is our job to fill that space so love can be felt.  Not so easy for those of us who don't "feel" very much, or who don't trust "feelings;" who prefer to take the easy way out, reasoning and thinking about everything instead.  

     I wonder, too if the comparative dearth of "feeling" might not turn out to be a sort of gift, in the end.  I hope, maybe, it makes it easier for me to rejoice in the truth, because the reason I'm naturally suspicious of "feeling" is because "feeling" tends to obscure.  Still, conscious acts of patience and conscious acts of kindness — or at least, squelching urges to vocalize impatience, to react with unkindness — cannot hurt, and might spread outward, even if they don't penetrate inwardly as much as I would like.

     

    __________

     *Because I can't let it drop.  NAB:  "love is not rude."  But Latin Vulgate:  "non est ambitiosa."  Rude or ambitious?  Quick survey of various English translations reveals a split between the two. The Greek received text is ἀσχημονεῖ, which everybody seems to translate as "acts unbecomingly," so more "rude" than "ambitious."  What did Jerome have in mind, exactly?  A mystery for another day.

    —

    |

    1 comment on Love is patient, love is kind. Yes, yes, and other stuff.

  • My endorsement.

    With only a little more than a week left, I'll make my case.

    Do I want a Clinton presidency?  No.  

    Do I plan to vote for Mrs. Clinton?  Probably not; most likely, I'll vote third party in the contest for Minnesota's electoral votes.  (More on that below). 

    But if I must state a preference between the two?  Fine.  I'm not the one who apparently made up the rules.  But I'm not afraid to say it, not among my conservative friends, not among my liberal friends, and not among people who aren't my friends at all.

    I prefer Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Trump.  

    I'll sum up my position both succinctly and at length.  

     I believe a bad President of the United States to be preferable to an insane one.

    Now, at length.

    + + +

    I'm not voting "against my conscience" if I refuse to vote for the Republican party.  I won't even be voting "against my conscience" if I decide to color in the little bubble next to Clinton/Kaine when it comes to the final day — something I haven't ruled out, because every bit of information counts.

    I vote my conscience every time I vote, and this is no different.  I urge you to vote your conscience too.

    + + +

    First I'm going to address why it's permissible to vote against Mr. Trump.  If you think you must vote for Mr. Trump because you're not allowed to vote for someone with Mrs. Clinton's beliefs, this is the part you should pay attention to.

    The reason I'm not sure yet whether I'll vote third party or whether I'll actually vote for Mrs. Clinton is because it matters to me how close the election is in Minnesota.  Not because it will affect whether I will vote my conscience, but because my conscience directs me to consider the pragmatic effects of my vote.   It matters to my conscience how close the election is.  

    I've already determined that I prefer a Clinton presidency to a Trump presidency (more on that later), the closeness of the election is relevant to whether I will try to help Mrs. Clinton to get more votes than Mr. Trump by voting for electors who will select Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine, or whether I will just allow it to happen without my help.  There might be some other good I could accomplish with my vote, such as expressing positive support for another candidate that I view as good.

    Make no mistake, I view Mrs. Clinton as a bad candidate and a poor choice.  I think it likely that she is corrupt, self-interested, and that she thinks herself above ordinary laws and rules, something that's rather dangerous in an executive.  Along with most of the rest of the Democratic Party, she advocates some positions that I agree with strongly; but she also promotes other policies that I believe are repellent and so fundamentally contrary to justice as to outweigh the goodness of her good and right positions.

    Mrs. Clinton hasn't earned my vote.

    And yet, people older and wiser than me, whose task and vocation is the guidance of the people of the United States on moral matters, and who share my understanding of the meaning of the human person, have written about this type of situation.

    34. Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who favors a policy promoting an intrinsically evil act, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, deliberately subjecting workers or the poor to subhuman living conditions, redefining marriage in ways that violate its essential meaning, or racist behavior, if the voter's intent is to support that position. In such cases, a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate's opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

    35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate's unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

    36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

    37. In making these decisions, it is essential for Catholics to be guided by a well-formed conscience that recognizes that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions. These decisions should take into account a candidate's commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching.

    It's important to understand that the U.S. bishops' document quoted above (Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship) is meant to supplement rather than to substitute for the pastoral advice given by one's local bishop.  The USCCB has no special authority and isn't higher-up-in-the-hierarchy than your own bishop, who knows your local situation better than the USCCB acting as a whole.  But supposing that one's own bishop hasn't made a contradictory statement, one can safely use this as a guide to the practical and specific problems of voting as a moral act in the United States. 

    Practically speaking, it's rare that Americans face an election in which any candidate is certifiably evil-policy-free.  We are used to the idea that it's okay to vote for a candidate who promotes an intrinsic moral evil, if our vote is somehow against a candidate who promotes a worse one.  We sometimes give this idea the shorthand of "voting for the lesser evil."  But that's not actually the moral principle that we are working with.  The principle that permits us to do so is the principle of remote material cooperation with evil when proportionate reasons exist.

    The term "material cooperation with evil" is an unfortunate term because it sounds like a bad thing.  But material cooperation with evil is almost impossible for most people to avoid.  It's contrasted with formal cooperation, in which you have the intention to further the evil end.  In material cooperation, you do something that happens to further an evil end, even with full knowledge that your act will have some evil effect, but with no intention to do so.  In the United States of America, paying your taxes is an act of material cooperation with evil, because it is entirely foreseeable that the government will use some of your money to do bad things that you don't want it to do.  And yet we pay taxes, even consider it a duty, because we all have proportionately grave reasons.  Justice demands it.

    What the U. S. bishops are saying is that voting for a candidate who has an intrinsically evil policy you don't support — even voting for a candidate who has lots of intrinsically evil policies that you don't support — is an act of material cooperation, not formal cooperation, in the evil policies.  That's why it says a voter can't vote for a candidate who has evil policies "if the voter's intent is to support that position."  The "if" matters! (Voting for a candidate who has intrinsically evil policies that you do support would be formal cooperation, not material.)  

    And material cooperation with intrinsic evil is permissible – might even be obligatory, like paying taxes — if you have a proportionate reason to do so.

    Material cooperation with intrinsic evil is exactly what you're doing when you vote for a candidate who has some evil policies but you think, "They're not as evil as the other candidate's policies."  Even if you think you're voting "for less evil," it's not okay for exactly that reason.  It's okay because you have a proportionately grave reason.  Often that reason is "the other candidate's policies are also evil," but it doesn't have to be.

    Indeed, "the other guy's policies are more evil" is not the only possible proportionate reason out there.  

    You might do it out of justifiable fear of real danger to some important good, for example.

    But I digress.

    The principle here is this:

    It's morally permissible to vote for a candidate who has intrinsically evil policies if (a) you do not do it because you support the intrinsically evil policies and (b) you have ANY proportionate reason to do so.  The reason does not have to be "the other candidate also has intrinsically evil policies and I think those policies are more evil."  In fact, that reason is almost nonsense, because just as the value of human persons cannot be compared because all persons have an INTRINSIC value, then the evilness of intrinsic evils cannot be compared because they are INTRINSIC to their very nature.

    The moral calculation then comes down to how proportionately grave the foreseeable consequences of one's act are.

    And that's why I'm waiting to see the outcome of the Minnesota polls all the way to the election:

    Possibility one is that Mrs. Clinton's positive supporters — people who are happy to support her as President under the current circumstances — will be counted so numerous in my state that they can be predicted to handily deliver our ten electoral votes to her and her running mate.  If that's the case, then I should have no fear that a candidate even worse than her will win them without my help.  Already resolved not to cooperate formally with those of her policies which are intrinsically evil, I will not have a proportionate reason to cooperate materially with them either.  

    In that case, I will use my vote to express positive support of a good candidate:  

    Evan McMullin, who appears on the Minnesota ballot on the Independence Party ticket.

    Possibility two is that Mrs. Clinton will not have enough positive supporters to predict with high probability that they can, alone, deliver the ten electoral votes.  If this is the case then I will conclude that I have a proportionate reason to materially cooperate in her evil policies, in order to assist her positive supporters as well as her reluctant ones in keeping Minnesota's electoral votes away from the candidate who is even worse than she is.  I won't be happy about this situation, but I will do what I believe I must — not despite my conscience, but in obedience to it, and with a full understanding that a vote for Mrs. Clinton — like a vote for most political candidates, no matter what the letter behind their names — is a remote material cooperation with evil.  

    So, yeah.  I don't live in Ohio or Arizona or any of the other swing states.  Your local conditions, you know better than I do.  But with the information I have and the beliefs I have, I would not rule out voting for Mrs. Clinton if I did live in those places.   

    I won't lie to you.  I'll be more unhappy if I vote for Mrs. Clinton than if I vote for Mr. McMullin.  Not because I'll be doing the wrong thing — I believe that voting in accord with a proportionately grave reason is the right thing — but because I'm particularly emotionally moved by the evils I'll be materially cooperating with.  But in my experience, emotion has never been an accurate guide to the rightness of a difficult decision.

    + + +

    You'll notice that I haven't yet explained why I think there are "truly grave moral reasons" to defeat Mr. Trump, such that I consider it potentially permissible to vote for Mrs. Clinton.  There are three tactics I can take to answer that, all of which (in my view) adequately answer the question individually.  Two take it for granted that the cause of protection of the unborn is the most important activist cause in the United States today, and opposition to that cause to be a very grave intrinsic evil.  One admits the possibility of still graver threats.

    + + +

    First,  it's not enough that a candidate merely speak the words "I am pro-life" or "I will appoint pro-life judges."  As the bishops say, when evaluating candidates' stances, These decisions should take into account a candidate's commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue.  Mr. Trump's commitment to the pro-life cause is risible; his character is that of a person who contributes to the culture of death by demeaning and using human persons and treating them as sexual objects, which is contrary to the culture of life; his integrity is not attested to by any trustworthy person; his ability to influence the cause of life is significant — significantly damaging.   In short, Mr. Trump is not a pro-life candidate.  We are faced with two candidates who promote the culture of death, albeit in two different ways.  And once you accept this truth, it rather lowers the bar of any "proportionately grave reason" to decline to vote for Mr. Trump.  That's one reason.  If it is not sufficient to drive a vote to Mrs. Clinton, it is at least sufficient to permit voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a pro-choice candidate, at least, to decline to vote for the Republican nominee.

    + + +

    Second.  I once received a wise piece of advice from a pro-life activist that, at the time, I respected.  It was to "consider the gains that the pro-life cause can make in any election."  I have considered those gains, and I have concluded that, in many ways, the pro-life cause has already lost this presidential election.  Our chances to make reliable gains on November 8 are solely in downticket races, in opposing bad presidential policies via the checks and balances inherent to federalism and the separation of powers.  We do not have a candidate — we do not have a candidate — who can be trusted to make good and pro-life appointments to the Supreme Court.  (Even well-intentioned candidates have made appointments that turned in unexpected directions.)  The Democratic candidate is committed to the Democratic platform; the Republican candidate is a womanizing, sexually aggressive scoundrel.  The GOP had a chance to nominate several different candidates who would have been good, or at least good enough.  The GOP declined to provide us with one.  We have already lost the political power of the presidency on our side, with its Supreme Court appointments, with its vetoes.  The question is, what more can we lose?   

    And the answer to that question is:  a great deal.  We can lose our integrity, we can lose our public image, we can lose all chance of convincing an entire generation that to be pro-life one must first be committed to justice for women (because to be pro-life is to believe in the equality of dignity of all human persons, no more, no less).  We can go from having the ear of one major party, at least, to having the ear of no major parties, while the GOP devolves into squabbling over the votes of white nationalists.  It's already clear to me that the real battleground of the pro-life cause is within the hearts and minds of individuals, masses of people:  it's moving everyone towards love, through fear.  Steering the composition of the Supreme Court is putting the cart before the horse.  Electing Trump will do nothing predictably good for the Supreme Court, and much that's predictably bad for the public understanding of right and wrong and acceptance of the most marginalized human beings.  This also is sufficient reason to vote against the man.

    + + +

    Third.  There are greater dangers to human life than the danger that our particular U.S. form of the culture of death will become one notch more entrenched than it already is, here, via this one election.

    Mr. Trump has evident fascist tendencies:  he has suggested he would order U. S. soldiers to commit war crimes (evincing a lack of respect for the rule of law as well as a dangerous disregard for our military men and women), he promotes the force of his own personality as a solution in and of itself to our social problems, he expresses admiration for foreign autocrats, he sees strength as a virtue of itself rather than a tool to enact virtue in the world, he tweets dog whistles to unapologetic racists and antisemites, he openly calls for the prosecution of his political enemies, he openly calls for making wild demands of nations that we need to be our allies.  It's fundamentally dangerous to elect a person who appears to have no respect for the underlying structure of the American republic. Our republic is not perfect, and yet there are many things about it which shelter the weak against the strong, which promote justice and equality and human dignity.   We must protect what is good in it, or we will not be able to keep it.  (If we wish to improve protection of the unborn, that means we wish to extend the rule of law to protect them; it means that we need to elect leaders who will not undermine that rule of law; arguably, it is not possible to promote life while permitting fascism to flourish.)    

    Furthermore, Mr. Trump has an evident mental disorder, or personality disorder.  I'm not the only person to observe that he displays evidence of narcissistic personality disorder.  He lashes out at anyone who criticizes him, cannot handle criticism of any kind, and if there is one thing that a president can expect to face while in office, it is criticism.  He speaks recklessly rather than diplomatically about foreign leaders.  He is unpredictable and temperamental.   If this were the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when the President of the United States did not wield quite so much power to harm or help people all over the world as well as people within our borders, it would not matter so much to elect a person who is, possibly, not actually sane.  

    Once the United States was not a military power to be reckoned with.  Once the President was effectively checked by an ambitiously self-interested Congress.  Once the President did not hold the personal power to unilaterally order the launch of nuclear missiles.  Now the Presidency is different.  The calculations are different.  A President can, and regularly does, do enormous damage to human lives all over the world.  We have to take that into account, and protect against unintended evils as well as against intended ones.   

    I judge that the danger of having an insane fascist president is a grave enough reason, all by itself, to vote for a more-or-less-ordinary, if even-less-appealing-than-usual Democrat — yes, even Hillary Clinton — or at least for a third party, if it seems that Mrs. Clinton will win in my state without my help.  I judge an insane fascist president to be a grave enough reason even to vote for a terribly corrupt and dishonest alternative.  

    I admit, that's a matter of personal judgment.  You might well think that the danger of an insane fascist president is overblown and not a proportionate reason to vote against the Republican nominee.  I disagree with that.  I respect your right to form your own conscience.  I'm only laying out what I see from where I sit, here in Minnesota, on October 28.

    But remember:  the "down with insane fascists" argument is only one of three.  Each of the three reasons are sufficient, in my view, all by themselves, to justify a #nevertrump vote — at least from me, at least in my state of Minnesota.  I think that Mrs. Clinton will be ahead enough due to her own supporters that I can vote third-party, in a bid to let the GOP know what I think of their choice; but I really will be watching the numbers down to the very day before the election.  I know I'll feel "right" about my choice when I make it.  I hope I'm also happy about it.

    + + +

    My final note is an exhortation.  Consider where you are.  Look at the polls in your state.  Consider what good your vote might do in the context of your state's electoral votes.  Then vote your conscience to do the most possible good.  Vote on November 8.

    —

    |

    8 comments on My endorsement.

  • Looking for love, a repost: Meditation on French saints.

    Over and over again I wonder what's meant by "doing small things with great love," and feel I can't do before I understand. But I know I've struggled with this before, and so I searched in my blog archives for the term "love" yesterday and read through what I'd written.  I pulled this post from August 2015 out today, as a repost.   Edited slightly to improve the flow.

    + + + 

    A week or two ago [that is, in summer 2015] I posted briefly about I Believe in Love, originally published in 1969 as Croire à l'Amour (that is, To believe in love). It was gifted to me in a spiritual direction session that I'd sought out for some very specific advice, and the priest handed it to me almost apologetically explaining for the cover design, with its prominent headshot of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in her habit. "This isn't one of those sentimental books about St. Thérèse," he said, and I had to give him points for having pegged me pretty well. 6a00d8341c50d953ef01b8d13d688b970c-120wi

    (I can appreciate kitsch as well as the next person, but the porcelain-and-roses holy-card drawings of Thérèse, um, actually offend me. The embalmer has done his work so thoroughly that the beloved is not visible.)

    + + +

    Anyway, d'Elbée turned not to be writing about St. Thérèse very much at all. The book is subtitled (in the English editions at least) A personal retreat based on the teaching of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and indeed, in the first "conference" (as the chapters are called), d'Elbée announces, "During this retreat I intend to talk to you about confident love, following the teaching of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, of whom Pope Pius XII said, 'she rediscovered the Gospel itself, the very heart of the Gospel.'"

    But the various quotes and examples from the life of that saint are pulled out more as crumbs of inspiration that support the various themes that d'Elbée is writing about. There are many quotes from Scripture — many more than there are quotes from Thérèse — and also quotes and anecdotes from many others. St. John Vianney, St. John of the Cross, St, Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine, St. Francis de Sales, but also lesser-known figures, principally French ones: St. Claude de la Colombière, ordinary journalists and authors. I get the impression that d'Elbée assumes his reader, his retreatant, already knows St. Thérèse very well — the unsentimental, audacious, mischievous, wildly courageous St. Thérèse — and points out her features to one who already recognizes them in context.

    + + +

    I don't know why the good theological books that have crossed my path in the last several years have so often been the work of French thinkers and saints, or occasionally of others who were heavily influenced by them. It's a happy coincidence, because that's the one modern language (besides English) that I read really well, and so I have the opportunity of consulting the untranslated originals from time to time. But it's also interesting to me — why do I so often find that the French-speaking writers (Francis de Sales, Jeanne de Chantal, Thérèse, Elisabeth Leseur, and now d'Elbée) have good and sensible answers to my particular problems?

    Sometimes I think that particular history of the French-speaking Church must have generated just exactly the right curatives to the particular history of me.  Cathars and Calvinists, Jansenists and Jacobins, [Third-]Republicans…. all a slow forging of a particular kind of blade, one that feels at home in my hand.

    But though it sounds pretty awesome, the blade metaphor isn't right.  The French saints are demulcent, cooling, healing rather than cutting.  The challenges of French history inside and outside the Church have been harsh, punishing, unforgiving, frightening; the French saints respond with confidence, good humor, and serenity.

    Some of it is linguistic, for sure.  "Blessed are the meek" in French comes out as "Heureux les débonnaires," often footnoted "litt., 'ceux qui sont doux'" — "mild" with all its connotations of calm weather, "good-humored" with all its connotations of an unruffled, un-ruffle-able disposition. It makes me think of the disciples waking Jesus in alarm, only to see him calm the waves with a word.

    I am convinced that the French connotation of serenity  rather than timid submission is the correct one, and I believe that the term "meek" has damaged English-speaking Christianity in a way that's going to be difficult to recover from.

    Something in my nature — it precedes my conversion and reaches far back into childhood — looks critically upon the self and despairs. I am forever working in vain to silence, or at least drown out, an unrelenting, driving, punishing inner voice. The French saints, I think, had to deal with (and continue to deal with) a shape-shifting and ever-constant specter, of which the extant anticlericalism is only the latest outer appearance: the depressing philosophy of total human depravity.

    The message of confident love —

    the belief that Jesus' goodness >> any individual's weakness — is the corrective to both.

    This is, I think, what I find in the French saints.

    + + +

    The whole book is good, but judging by the frequency of my pencil scratches on the pages, the earlier chapters are the ones that I most needed to read at this time. Here is a selection of my marked passages.

    + + +

    Prior dilexit nos: God loved us first that we might love him. That is the explanation of it all: of the Creation, the Incarnation, Calvary, the Resurrection, the Eucharist.

    Corrective: The love we have is evidence that God loves us; but we don't have to love him in order for him to love us. We are loved without any effort on our own and do not have to earn that love before we can access it.

    + + +

    We do not read the Gospel enough in the light of the love of Christ. Thus, sixteen centuries after the Last Supper and Calvary, the most satanic of all heresies, Jansenism, was able to appear and spread: a heresy which turned a God of love, saying "Come to me, all of you, come because you are unworthy, come because you are sinful, come because you need to be saved," into a God whose arms are raised to strike, a demanding God, a vengeful God. Under the pretext of recognizing our unworthiness, Jansenism diabolically led souls away from Jesus.

    Thus, no longer willing to endure this heresy, Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary [Alacoque] at Paray-le-Monial and through her gave His Heart to the world.

    + + +

    When someone asked little Thérèse to summarize her little childlike way, she answered, "It is to be disturbed by nothing." … Naturally this means not to be voluntarily disturbed, not consciously or deliberately disturbed, because nature always worries…. The main thing is not to consent consciously to anxiety or a troubled mind.

    The moment you realize you are worrying, make very quickly an act of confidence: "No, Jesus, You are there…" Perhaps He is sleeping in the boat, but He is there…. It is really an offense against Him when we worry voluntarily about anything….

    I emphasize this concept of "worrying with the full consent of the will," for it is very important in the spiritual life to make a distinction between our nature and our will, united to the love of Jesus. "Homo duplex:" my nature says "No"; my will says "Yes." …My nature is troubled and afraid; my heart recalls the divine testament: "Peace I leave with you"… My nature revolts; I force myself to say, "All is well, Jesus; do not change anything." It is a fight which we must take up again and again without ceasing, for our fallen nature always rears up its head. St. Francis de Sales says it dies a quarter of an hour after we do! This is the drama of our life. But the beautiful thing is that Jesus sees our will united to his by a fundamental choice — the profound, habitual disposition of having only one will with Him. All those movements of our nature, if we do not consent to them, do not exist for Him. There is no sin without consent.

     

    This is precisely the passage I needed to see most right now [in this summer of 2015]. A handful of life events recently have shown me the degree to which I was reared to confuse nature and will, ignorant of the fundamental inner freedom of voluntary choice.  

    Where do I come from? A land of "this is the way that you are and always will be: accept it."

    Of "This is the way it has to be."

    Because the alternative is to live in a land of understanding right and wrong, of calling good good and evil evil, and that is … uncomfortable.

    + + +

    To be blind to the distinction between nature and will is to be mired in one of three terrible errors about the totality of being human.  And that's because our nature is truly a mess — but it doesn't make any of the errors right.

    — The first error is to live in the hopeless apathy of predestination: the best we can do is pretend to be among the elect, only to find out at the very end whether we really are.

    — The more popular error is,  rejecting that (because who wants to stay totally depraved?) some of us *cough* strive endlessly to redeem our own nature by the powers of that nature, in endless programs of self-improvement and collective social reform. (We are encouraged by the appearance of progress, as we harvest a little waste heat and turn it into power for good; but it's nothing more than a slight improvement in efficiency.  There is a theoretical limit that is inherent to the material system.  Thanks for the analogy to the very French Jules Carnot.)

    — The third error rejects the others, recognizing correctly that there is something good in all of us, and concludes that human nature is usually not depraved at all,  In this vision human nature is fundamentally good, at least in a wide variety of its forms, and must be affirmed and celebrated everywhere — except where one's affirmative expressions infringe upon the inclinations of other natures.

    But better than all three is to realize that our essence, and our acts, are not the same:  even as the former makes the environment for the latter, and the latter prunes and shapes the former in its development.

    + + +

    The saints learned to rejoice in humility and humiliations… I speak here, obviously, of a love that is pure will, for our fallen nature does not seek humiliations or love them.

    I wrote in the margins, "We forget again the distinction between nature & will & we often ascribe to the saints a holy Nature instead of a holy will, & then we see our own nature & despair."

    + + +

    Frequently make what I call the examination of the prayer "O Jesus, I thank you for everything." It should be the fruit of your disposition of will, of heart, and of soul to bless Jesus for everything that He wills or permits for you, for everything that happens to you… In this short and simple prayer there is at the same time humility, an immense confidence in merciful love, abandonment, and thanksgiving.

    + + +

    There is a repeated theme that Jesus rejoices with us in our wretchedness because it enables him to act in his role as Savior. That we should be thankful even for our misery because it leads us to seek mercy, and that the act of seeking mercy is itself a joy. And to be completely confident in that mercy.

    The Curé of Ars: "Our sins, grains of sand beside the great mountain of the mercies of God." St. Thérèse..: "All possible crimes, a drop of water thrown into a blazing furnace."

    One reproach sometimes made to this spirituality of confident love is that it would entail the danger of presumption and of letting ourselves go. You shall see… how abandonment and obedience do away with this danger. I think, on the contrary, that there is a double danger in the method which diminishes the role of confidence and stresses the role of personal effort, subjected to numerous self-examinations. If we are successful, there is the danger of pride, of attributing to ourselves what is in reality the work of grace; on the other hand, if we see no signs of progress, nine times out of ten we fall into wretched, sterile discouragement…. But in order to live this sound doctrine to the fullest, we must be very convinced…

    [E]ven the most beautiful souls… do not want to believe that confidence is the key which will open the door for him, becau this door is a wound made by love. They look for other ways, as if this way were too beautiful to be reliable.

    …So what then? He calls me just as I am? I can go to him with all my miseries, all my weaknesses? He will repair what I have done badly? He will supply for all my indigence?

    Yes, provided that you go to Him, that you count on Him, that you expect everything of Him…

    + + +

    [W]e must live a presently existing love…What would a husband think who, when asking his wife, "Do you love me?" received the response "I have a great desire to love you; I shall work toward it; I hope one day to achieve it by dint of my efforts and generosity and sacrifice." You are right to smile. But is this not the spiritual disposition many excellent souls adopt toward Jesus?

    Make rather the admirable response of St. Peter: "Lord, You know all things; You know that I love you."

    That gave me a rueful little laugh of recognition, because that's how I often phrase it when I greet my spouse. Not the first way, but the second. "You know I love you," I will say. There is something a little desperate in that phrasing, I think, because always — always — I am tempted to think I do not love enough. I want, I think, to be reassured that, at least, I love enough for it to be known.

    One of the great fruits of a good marriage has been the realization, no less astonishing to me for the frequency with which I realize it, of being beloved. I know and see my own faults constantly. And yet, someone (a pretty great person, if I may inject my opinion) loves me, really and for real. I wake up to it every morning and marvel, because it is marvelous, but at the same time I don't doubt it even for a minute. And I try with all my will to apply the same marvel as well as the same confidence to divine love and mercy, unfathomably vaster and more constant.

    Perhaps returning to d'Elbée's little book of meditations will nudge me toward that confidence — and, maybe more importantly, to let that confidence power real acts of love every day.

     

    —

    |

    No comments on Looking for love, a repost: Meditation on French saints.

  • The poverty of nationalism.

    I was driving to H’s this morning for homeschooling, and listening to Minnesota Public Radio as Marketplace ended and local programming began. Kerri Miller was interviewing poet and professor Claire Rankine on the topic: what it means to be an American. She opened the segment with a quote from Langston Hughes, just as I pulled up in front of H’s house to let the kids out and carry my books up the walk.

    “‘Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed,’” quoted the host, and the guest was beginning to comment: the line was a line of nostalgia, for a thing that in her view, has never existed in reality, but only in that dream — and I turned off the radio and gathered my children and schoolbooks, never getting to hear the resolution, any challenge or dialogue, only a quote and a snippet of one reading, one reaction.

    + + +

    We are living in a time in America when the specter of white — or at least nativist — nationalism has swelled up and tried to take its place in the public forum, out of the corner to which it had seemed the polite company had banished it. I doubt anyone really believed it was gone, but for most of my life it has been possible for me to live under the illusion that it was only really espoused by a Them, an embarrassing Them that made the rest of us look bad. It is dismaying to find it demanding a seat at the table, reminding us where we came from. We would all rather pretend not to recognize our own cousins.

    Maybe it was Langston Hughes that made the connection in my head. My oldest is studying American literature this year, with H., and will probably encounter some of Hughes’ poetry.

    There are a lot of ways to design a course in American literature. There is a certain canon that you can stick to, without going too far wrong, but it’s more interesting to take a thematic approach. You can go chronologically, choosing significant pieces that exemplify American thought at each stage. You can take a regional approach, examining the stories and sermons that came out of New England Puritanism, the dark twists of Southern Gothic writers, social commentary in urban realism and of the homelessness born of the Dust Bowl, the peculiar pastorales of Westerns and of frontier stories, friends on a river raft under the stars. My favorite theme, however, is the same topic as the radio show: what does it mean to be American?

    This is a rich and fruitful theme because — because — the answer is not simple or obvious. Nor is it complete, because every generation adds its own gloss. I think it is the underlying theme of all literature which is properly “American” rather than literature, even the greatest, produced by American writers: although many American writers have produced great literature that is part of the universal human heritage, only some of it is “American” in the sense that it reflects on the aspects of America that make it itself.

    The reason that the answer is not simple or obvious is that nationalism, nativism, is the wrong answer. That is the simple and natural human answer to “What is a nation,” the answer that countless failed nations (and a few that have not yet failed) have fallen back on, fallen on, for ages and ages.

    You cannot build much of a literature with meaning on the idea that our nation is made up of people who look like us and talk like us and were born here of parents who were born here.

    At least, you can’t make very much of it when your nation is only a couple of hundred years old.

    + + +

    But you can build a great tradition of struggling, in prose, in poetry, in song, with the different possible meanings of your national identity when you are willing to listen to the many kinds of experience that are produced by a troubled country struggling to interpret and apply an idea with justice, struggling even with the meaning of justice itself. What does “equal” mean? What does “free” mean? What does “men” mean? We have been grappling with these words, with more or less success, from the beginning. It is what our nation is made from. And grappling with words is what makes a literary tradition.

    I place “What does it mean to be American?” at the center of all themes of all American literature. American literature is regional literature — because we are a country that has imperfectly but persistently united disparate regions, with much bloodshed. American literature is populist literature, and intellectual literature, often embodied in the same work. American literature is the writing of the wealthy landed class, and the writing of the marginalized immigrant. American literature is written in languages that aren’t English. American literature is sometimes written neither by nor for Americans (I am looking at you, de Tocqueville). American literature is sometimes written outside our borders. American literature is genre and canon. American literature aspires to Old World respectability and hails invective upon Old World failures and shame. It puffs itself up and is its own harshest critic. At its best it reflects honestly both something great and something fallen; perhaps even when it tries only to do one or the other, it proves its own opposite, is at once both commentary and artifact, not timeless or universal, but anchored in time and place.

    And yet, that’s timeless and universal too, because all of us do have a time and a place.

    To reject the great question at the center of American literature — the question of American identity — is to reject the questioners. It is to discard all that thought and discourse, with all its challenges and contradictions, in favor of a simple and intellectually poverished American neo-Know-Nothing-ism. It is a minor tragedy, compared with the real-life marginalization of individual lives, loves, livelihoods. Is the tragedy more or less poignant because the tradition of that intellectual grappling is, today, so often cast off by free choice?

    —

    |

    No comments on The poverty of nationalism.

  • Compassion, pity, and blame.

    Even though it’s probably irresponsible to diagnose, amateurishly, from a distance via the Internet, I’ll tell you what I think to be true: Donald Trump is mentally ill.

    Or, more specifically, and more fundamental to his nature from the very beginning — after all, mental illness can come upon a person late in life — I think he has a personality disorder, almost certainly one of the Cluster B disorders, probably narcissistic personality disorder.

    I’m not going to take the time to marshal the evidence here — it is easy enough to find. Here’s my point.

    If Donald Trump’s mind and personality is as deeply disordered as I think it is, then there is not much point in hating and blaming and cursing the man. If there is ever an appropriate place for hating and blaming and cursing a person, it is surely not because of a mental condition that he has probably been affected by since he was a small child. Indeed, there’s even something unseemly in mocking him, the person, as ridiculous and clownish and mean as his words and actions have been.

    The man is sick. I truly believe that. If we are human persons and he is a human person, the only acceptable response to him is a response of love. And if the only form of love we can muster for a mean, small, twisted, stunted mind and heart like his is the form we call “pity,” then we should muster it with all the strength that we can.

    If a saint can overcome her instinct of fear and disgust to clean and bind the sores of a dying, diseased, homeless person, then surely we can overcome our disgust at the sight of a festering and starved spirit.

    What good will it do? They all die in the end.

    A question to ponder, no?

    + + +

    Pity and forgiveness does not compel us to stand within reach of an abuser, however. Dangerous tools must be removed from the reach of the people who would hurt themselves and others. That’s prudence. That’s justice: we protect the innocent, even from people who can’t help being who they are. Justice also demands that we insist on right and just behavior, we forcefully condemn injuries and wrongs.

    There’s no excuses here.

    But where mocking ceases, pity can remain.

    + + +

    And on the other hand:

    There are a large number of people who, let’s put it bluntly, out of pure self-interest and the love of money and power, colluded to put dangerous weapons in the reach of a literal madman, colluded to excuse his ravings and to call them sane.

    Those people?

    Not born that way.

    I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what compassion for them should look like.

    —

    |

    No comments on Compassion, pity, and blame.

  • Cognitive dissonance and 2016.

    One significant casualty of the Trump candidacy might arise from massive cognitive dissonance among well-meaning early supporters, like the primary voters who made this all possible, and people like them who told their friends and family and/or local news crews that they planned to pull the lever for Trump in the general election.

    It is well-established that people will unconsciously go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting in the face of new evidence–even to themselves–that they have made a serious error in judgment. See the Wikipedia article “Cognitive dissonance” for an overview of the details:

    In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

    A key tenet of cognitive dissonance theory is that those who have heavily invested in a position may, when confronted with disconfirming evidence, go to greater lengths to justify their position….

    Dissonance is felt when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one’s belief, the dissonance can result in

    • restoring consonance through misperception,
    • rejection or refutation of the information,
    • seeking support from others who share the beliefs,
    • and attempting to persuade others.

    So let’s review what we have got out there. Unless you assume that most Trump supporters (instead of a small fraction) consciously relish the notion that girls and women are objects, seethe with more-than-implicit contempt for minority groups, and argue that Constitutional checks on executive power are part of the problem —

    — and I don’t think that’s true —

    — there’s a large bloc of people out there who are being faced with numerous pieces of evidence that they have judged very, very poorly, but are already “invested” in that judgment.

    A population experiencing cognitive dissonance.

    Some of them undoubtedly will walk back their support. A number will do so in the privacy of the voting booth, and then will hope that their mistake will just go away. Some will renounce their former support even publicly. They will admit that they were taken in — they might come up with some way to save face, to insist that given the information they had at the time, it wasn’t such a crazy idea (the past, even the 1990s, is a foreign country). Those people will attempt to start fresh.

    Good for them.

    But some fraction of this well-meaning voting bloc, faced with the choice of either accepting evidence that shows they chose poorly, or of forcing the evidence to fit their own unconscious desire to avoid that discomfort —

    — some as-yet-unknown fraction of what is a pretty large chunk of the electorate —

    — some of those are going to adapt by a psychic doubling-down on the notion that “what America needs is someone like Donald Trump.”

    For a number of this fraction of the electorate, the doubling-down is on “Trump is objectively bad, but the spectre of a Clinton presidency is probably worse.” This development is not what I would call surprising, given the state of political discourse; America has already demonstrated, in spades, that we are willing to think and believe massively terrible things of even decent people in the Other Party. And because it maintains some hold on the evidence, it isn’t quite as alarming — “who will be worse as president” is, technically, a matter of opinion and prediction of an unknown future — even as the question is sidestepped: How bad would your candidate have to get, anyway, to change your mind?

    I’m concerned about the fraction who can’t comfortably think of themselves even as reluctant supporters of an objectively bad man, or who are already invested in the notion that Donald Trump is the leader that America positively needs.

    A number of people will not be able to deny that Trump said the things he said and did the things he did, but they also will not be able to divest themselves of their enthusiastic early support. And these people have only one refuge: to maintain that what Trump evidently is…

    … is what America really needs.

    This population, nudged by our common human need to not be wrong, is going to become invested in the notion that we need exactly what Trump is dishing out.

    America needs, e.g., more honest talk, of the sort that goes on in locker rooms, where deal-making men don’t have to worry about political correctness. (link)

    America needs, e.g., to be tough on crime, not soft like that New York DA who let those five confessed black rapists out of prison just because of some so-called DNA evidence. They confessed, didn’t they? (Link)

    America needs, e.g., someone who will order U.S. troops to commit war crimes… what do people in faraway Geneva know about American interests? America needs someone who isn’t afraid to offend people — no, America need someone who takes visible pleasure in offending people. America needs someone who will stand up to obstruction in Congress, who won’t let legislation or advice and consent stop him. America needs a strong man, a proud man, a man whose gospel glitters with prosperity, smells of it.

    America needs to call evil good, and good evil.

    That’s what we will hear, because a number of formerly well-meaning Americans will need it, at a deep level, and they will need the rest of us to approve of it too.

    They are going to say it out loud, and it will take an effort to fight this notion, because the more people are invested, the harder it is to cut their mental losses. It will also take more than a little self-discipline for the rest of us to fight it without sinking to that level ourselves, and to fight it effectively — because what effectiveness requires is for the rest of us to craft a way that initially-well-meaning Trump supporters and endorsers can save some kind of face, emerge with their tattered dignity intact. And that means forgiveness, something that is hard for every human, because forgiveness itself requires overcoming cognitive dissonance of our own.

    + + +

    To sum up: This is on the GOP leadership. By signing on enthusiastically, by squelching voices of principled dissent — I watched the convention feed with my own eyes, don’t tell me they couldn’t see what I saw and hear what I heard — by throwing their weight behind this man — they legitimized a bad, bad candidate. They gave voice to ugly ideas. And they’ve harnessed human psychology to assemble an army of people whose easiest mental exit from the discomfort of what they’ve created is via 1930s-level nationalism.

    We are going to be fighting this army with one hand, the other held out in an offer of peace-through-repentance, for a very long time.

    —

    |

    No comments on Cognitive dissonance and 2016.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later