Political culture – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Practical politics

In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell provides historical context that helps us understand why philosophers tackled certain problems at different times in history. In much of the Middle Ages, there was no philosophy. So Russell describes the battles between various polities, and the struggles between the Roman Catholic Church and secular authorities, which helped set the stage for the blossoming of scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century.

In 1154, Hadrian IV became Pope. Hadrian soon became embroiled in a struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, who had become king of Germany in 1152, and wanted the Pope to crown him Holy Roman Emperor. According to Russell, however, Hadrian IV and Barbarossa were able to find common cause when the city of Rome sought to become an independent city. A poulist faction in Rome wanted an elected body of lawmakers, and they wanted the right to choose their own emperor. The Romans brought in one Arnold of Brescia, a man known for his saintliness. Russell doesn’t make it entirely clear what Rome hoped to get from Arnold, but I suppose they wanted moral credibility.

Unfortunately for Rome, Arnold was a heretic. Russell describes his “very grave” heresy thus: “he maintained that ‘clerks who have estates, bishops who hold fiefs, monks who possess property, cannot be saved’” [i.e., cannot be saved from damnation in the Christian scheme of the afterlife]. Arnold maintained that clerics should abjure material things and devote themselves solely to spiritual matters. However, Arnold’s biggest heresy was that he was supported Roman independence. This enraged Barbarossa. Hadrian IV became equally enraged when there was a riot in Rome in which a Roman Catholic cardinal was killed.

This happened during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter which was the most holy week of the year for the residents of Rome. Hadrian banned the Romans from joining in the Easter rites, unless they got rid of Arnold. The Romans submitted to Hadrian, and expelled Arnold from Rome. Arnold went into hiding, was discovered by Barbarossa’s soldiers, executed, his body burned, and the ashes disposed of in a river. Literally nothing of Arnold remained around which resistance could be organized.

Once Arnold of Brescia was disposed of, Hadrian and Barbarossa could resume their political battle without further distraction. Russell comments:

“The honest man being disposed of, the practical politicians were free to resume their quarrel.”

This is a useful lesson for our own time. Since at least the time of Newt Gingrich, it feels like the honest people have slowly been forced out of politics by the “practical politicians” who seem mostly interested in their personal grabs for power.

Noted with comment

I’ve been rereading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2006). Van Ronk was a musician best remembered for his fingerstyle guitar and his interpretations of blues music, although he thought of himself as more of as a jazz musician manque. He was one of the core musicians of the 1960s Folk Revival, though he never hit it big like his friend Bobby Dylan. Van Ronk was also a serious leftist. He started out as an anarchist, joined the IWW, and wound up as a Troskyite. In his memoir, he reflected on the politics of the 1960s:

“I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their stances — I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar — but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood — and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power — if the working class folds it arms, the machinery stops — and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.”

Interestingly, I feel the current Republican party actually does have a serious theoretical grounding. I disagree violently with the Republican party’s economic policies, but you have to admit that they are firmly grounded in Milton Friedman’s economic theories. Even if today’s Republicans have drifted away from Friedman in some respects, still a great deal of their agenda — doing away with Social Security, privatizing the National Park System, getting rid of the Post Office, etc. — comes straight out of his work.

Who on the American left offers any theoretical grounding to compete with Friedmanism? If Dave Van Ronk were still alive he’d no doubt advocate for Troskyism, although to my mind that’s a non-starter in 2025 America. Personally, I’d vote for William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. However, I suspect Barber’s Christian affiliation is a dealbreaker for many of today’s pissed-off liberals; plus it has proved difficult to get pissed-off liberals to focus on poverty as a central issue.

Noted without comment

From “The American Taboo on Socialism” by Robert N. Bellah in The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 5, pp. 112-138:

“Inevitably when a dichotomy becomes magnified in such a way that both sides of it are distorted, one begins to suspect the presence of the psychological mechanism of projection. The ‘rugged individualist’ decrying every form of collectivism, above all atheistic communism, as the very embodiment of evil, may be projecting his own dependency needs and needs for community, ruthlessly repressed and denied in himself, onto his alleged enemies. Even granted the unspeakable crimes committed in the 20th century by Communist nations (a close inspection of the history of the century, however, would disclose that such societies have had no monopoly on unspeakable crimes) the morbid anti-Communism of the American right, and the tendency to assimilate every kind of socialist or even liberal position to that of Communism, indicates, I believe, some serious failure to come to terms with the balance between dependence and independence, solidarity and autonomy, that are part of any mature personality or society. This morbid obsession may be a symptom then, not of the genuine Americanism that it claims, but of its distortion and pathology.”

Alternate definitions for “socialism”

Sometimes I wonder why the religious right, and the political conservatives, express so much disdain for “Marxism” and “socialism.” It kinda makes sense that the religious right might dislike “Marxism” and “socialism” so intensely, because Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and because many Marxist-Leninists promote a crusading atheism that wants to get rid of religion entirely.

But wait. The definitions for “socialism” and “Marxism” are not always the definitions you’ll find in the dictionary. For an example of what I mean, let’s go back in time to 1963.

Not long after Martin Luther King, Jr., was released from the Birmingham jail, White terrorists bombed the house of King’s brother. This violent act provoked a violent response from the Black community, which in turn prompted the infamously racist Governor George Wallace to respond with even more violence: he sent in state troopers who mercilessly beat Black people. Jonathan Riedler takes up the story in his book Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 124:

“The violence of the state [of Alabama] was the physical expression of an ideology of white supremacy…. George Wallace had sworn to the Alabama State Assembly that he would squelch ‘agitators’ and ‘integrationists’ who aimed to ‘destroy the freedom of Americans everywhere.’ Twenty-one times the legislators applauded him. Not long after the bombing, when President [John F.] Kennedy moved federal troops to Alabama bases, Birmingham’s lame-duck mayor, Art Hanes, fulminated against ‘bayonet brotherhood’: ‘They gonna tell the people of Birmingham, “You’ll love this nigger at the point of a bayonet, whether you want to or not” … This is Socialism of the rankest sort.’…”

Note that in the above example, Art Hanes is not using the dictionary definition of socialism. For him, “socialism” has an alternative definition: it is government action that prevents him from committing acts of racial violence. He perceives this as infringing on his rights as an American, and he defines anything that infringes on his rights as an American as “socialism.”

This helps me understand some of the visceral emotion I sense when people reference Marxism” and “socialism” in today’s political debates. There are times when opponents of “socialism” and “Marxism” are not using the dictionary definitions for those words, but rather more emotionally-loaded meanings pertaining to race.

Voting

Carol and I are getting ready to cast our vote in the upcoming election. Early voting starts today at Cohasset Town Hall, and we wanted to be ready. So we sat in the kitchen and did some research on the candidates and the ballot questions.

We no longer have a real newspaper in Cohasset. There’s the Coastal Mariner, but it’s a typical Gannet local paper, with very little actual local news. There’s the online Cohasset Anchor, which has some good lifestyle stories but it’s not a place I’d look for hard news on local elections. As for the regional newspapers, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger used to be an OK source for local news, but it’s yet another Gannet paper where staff has been cut to the point where there’s not much local coverage any more. As for the Boston Globe, they pretty much ignore southeastern Massachusetts.

So we turned to the League of Women Voters for information about state and local elections. We went to https://www.vote411.org/ and entered our address. Up popped a list of every candidate for every race. We looked at the Massachusetts Information for Voters booklet, which is mailed to everyone in Massachusetts and contains comprehensive information about the five ballot measures we vote on this year.

In this post, while I’ll offer some opinions about the election, more importantly I’m going to reflect on democracy and the democratic process. And my first reflection is this — we hear a great deal about the presidential election, both in the news, on social media, and in face-to-face interactions. This emphasis on the presidential election makes it seem like we’re voting for emperor or king. But U.S. democracy encompasses far more than Harris vs. Trump (and before you complain, I listed those two candidates in alphabetical order). In fact, the overemphasis on the presidential election is harming our democracy. So let’s talk about all those other elections.

A sticker saying "I voted" on a blue shirt. — After I wrote this post, I walked over to Town Hall to cast my ballot…and got my sticker.

We started by looking at the candidates for the U.S. Senate. The League of Women Voters sends out these standard questions for all Senate candidates to answer:

Noted with minimal comment

The following sentence by J. M. Berger has been widely quoted: “If you believe that only ‘the other guys’ can produce extremists and that your own identity group cannot, you may be an extremist yourself.”

The original context of the quote provides more nuance:

“In the United States, the term extremist is frequently hurled, shorn of context, across racial and partisan divides. Many in the wider West contend that the entire religion of Islam is inherently extreme, arguing for policies that range from the curtailment of civil rights to mass internment. Within Islam itself, furious debates rage about which sect, movement, or nation is normative and which is extremist. These debates influence the study of extremism. There are perhaps three times as many academic studies referencing jihadism as there are referencing white nationalism. Pseudo-intellectuals, some in positions of political power, have argued that white nationalism is far less important than jihadism, despite the fact that white nationalism has a far longer and more deadly history. And they have shaped policies accordingly. If you believe that only ‘the other guys’ can produce extremists and that your own identity group cannot, you may be an extremist yourself. History provides ample evidence that extremism is part of the human condition and not the exclusive province of any single race, religion, or nation. Not all violence is extremism, nor are all of humanity’s countless wars, conflicts, and atrocities. Many cases are ambiguous, but some clearly align with our modern understanding of the word. The diversity and ubiquity of the problem can be seen in a review of historical outbreaks of significant violence driven by ideological belief.”

— from the book Extremism by J. M. Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), p. 2.

Why the debate shouldn’t matter

I’ve read three or four recent news stories claiming that some large percentage of voters are going to place a lot of weight on the debates.

My personal opinion is that this seems silly. Skill in debating doesn’t necessarily correlate to skill in governing. Furthermore, a president of the United States is really only as good as their team. Debating skill tells me nothing about the ability of someone to put together a good management team. (Besides, we’ve already seen both of the two major presidential candidates govern for several years; we already know how they’re going to perform.)

But the United States seems obsessed with high stakes performance evaluations like the presidential debate. For high school kids, we love our high stakes school tests, and our SAT scores. For sports teams, we love our playoff games. For Unitarian Universalist ministers, we love our “candidating week,” seven days in which to evaluate a candidate for a years-long tenure.

We United Statesians also love our hyper-individualistic take on leadership. We love to imagine that the Great Man theory of leadership is correct. We like to believe that one person in a leadership role has a huge impact on an organization, which is why we pay Chief Executive Officers of for-profit corporations millions and billions of dollars. Even though the Great Man theory of leadership is obviously wrong, we fervently cling to our belief in it; we are leadership theory fundamentalists.

And people wonder why United States democracy is in such trouble….

Things that you’re NOT liable to find in the Bible

Louisiana state law now requires that the Ten Commandments shall be posted in every classroom. But if you compare the Ten Commandments found in the Bible with Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, you quickly see that they are not the same Ten Commandments.

Where did Louisiana’s Ten Commandments come from? Apparently, in the 1950s “representatives of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism developed what the individuals involved believed to be a nonsectarian version of the Ten Commandments because it could not be identified with any one religious group” — Anthony Flecker, “Thou shalt make not law respecting an establishment of religion: ACLU v. McCreary County, Van Orden v. Perry, and the Establishment clause”, St. John’s Journal of Legal Commentary, vol. 21:1, p. 264 footnote 136. (This Patheos post gives another take on the same story.)

In other words, the Louisiana version of the Ten Commandments may be inspired by the Bible, but it is not Biblical. If you’re a Biblical purist, you could say that Louisiana’s rewriting of Exodus 20:2-17 is actually a type of graven image or idol — something that seems like it comes from God, but is actually made by fallible humans.

Below the fold, I’ll include several translations of the relevant Bible passages so you can compare them.

Christians against Christian Nationalism

You’ve probably already seen this, but I just discovered the Christians against Christian Nationalism website. The tagline of the website is “We believe that Christian nationalism threatens our faith and country.” Amen to that.

For my co-religionists, and any other readers, who are Christians: you can read and sign their statement against Christian Nationalism. It’s just so refreshing to see Christians standing up against this pervsion of the Christian faith.

For everyone: that website has great printable resources you can share with your Christian friends. Plus there’s a related TikTok account, @EndChristianNationalism, which might also be worth sharing.

Police departments vs. labor

Starting with the George Floyd protests in 2020, we began hearing calls to defund police. Police departments, so the thinking went, mostly served White interests, and thus tended to support White supremacy. This argument may have been valid, but it ignored other interests that have controlled police departments in the U.S.

“On May 28, 1937, a strike of seventy-eight thousand steelworkers spanned seven states in the Steel Belt from Homestead to Chicago. The Little Steel Strike of 1937 showed that business would not accommodate unionization even in the face of federal directives. Little Steel companies came prepared. They each bought tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of tear gas, gas grenades, pistols, and rifles to supply to local police and corporate guards to stop a strike. A congressional investigation found that the companies together had purchased $178,000 worth of such armaments. Bethlehem Steel had directly paid the policemen’s salaries. In Chicago, on Memorial Day, came the climax of the strike, when a thousand strikers took American flags and began to walk toward the steel mill. When told to disperse by police, they refused. The police fired on the crowd in what was reported as the Memorial Day massacre, killing seven and wounding ninety. Most of the injured were shot in the back. The strike fell apart soon after….” (Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary [Viking, 2018], p. 35)

That’s just one small example of how police have always served the interests of corporate employers over the interests of working people. Police departments are still serving corporate interests over worker interests. I’ve never heard of a police department protecting striking union members from corporate security. I’ve never heard of a police department raiding a company’s premises to stop unsafe and exploitative work practices. You will never, ever hear of a police department shooting and killing CEOs. Police departments get paid to support bosses, not workers. (And please notice that I’m referring to “police departments” and not “police” — many police officers are ethical people working a tough job; but, like other workers, they have to do what their bosses tell them.)

The key point is that police departments serve the existing power structure. If the existing power structure includes systemic racism, then the police departments will support that systemic racism. If the existing power structure wants cheap labor to maximize corporate profits, then the police departments will suppress workers who go on strike.

Which raises an interesting point: It might be that the interests of Black and other non-White people, and the interests of working class people of whatever race, have some significant overlap.