Is There Any Way Off This Runaway Train?

Son of Indian immigrants, 37-year old, Ohioan, biotech entrepreneur, hedge-fund partner, and author (Woke, Inc., 2021) Vivek Ramaswamy was the third Republican to announce his candidacy for president (after Donald Trump and Nikki Haley). Whatever makes him think he is qualified to be president (a mystery to me), he certainly knows a winning issue (in MAGA world) when he sees one. “I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country,” he has already announced, ahead of Nikki Haley, who has since seemingly also jumped on the pardon bandwagon.

I remember the fierce debates after President Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974 about whether or not he should be indicted or tried - or pardoned. I remember President Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon once month later and the firestorm of reactions it produced. That probably contributed to Ford's narrow defeat in the 1976 election. Since then, the verdict of history has generally supported Ford's decision. Recently, however, the growing obsession with prosecuting Trump has moved the needle back to the historically somewhat less than true and otherwise politically useless mantra that "no one is above the law." 

Personally, I thought that Ford did the right thing then, and I still think so now. Not only would prosecuting Nixon have been disastrously divisive, it would have eclipsed all government policy-making for months or more - much as Trump's antics and Trump's legal woes are now eclipsing everything else. President Ford understood that, and I believe he did the right thing.

Notwithstanding the historically somewhat less than true and otherwise politically useless ideological insistence that "no one is above the law," the case for making Trump go away by pre-empting a trial and/or conviction has a certain appeal. I see little or no "upside" (to talk in Succession speak) to a Trump trial or trials - and even less "upside" to either his possible acquittal or  conviction (and possible reversal on appeal). MAGA world wants a hero, who is also maybe a martyr. The rest of us, I suspect, at least many of us might really prefer for Trump to go away, to disappear from the coming campaign and from electoral politics for the long term.

(To be clear, Trump's going away would not mean that Trumpism would go away. The Republican party, which used to be just about making rich people richer, is now the institutional political expression of MAGA Trumpism in all its frenzied delirium. Nothing short of overwhelming political electoral defeat might conceivably make Trumpism go away. The other side of that, however, is that prosecuting and convicting and even imprisoning Trump would not make Trumpism go away - and might well even empower it,)

It is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It could be that Trump may prove to be guilty of significant crimes, and it could also be true that prosecuting, convicting, even imprisoning him might do significant, perhaps irreparable damage to or already fragile constitutional system.

Actually, of all the suggestions I have head being thrown around in media speculation, the most promising one that I have heard - not to Trumpism, but to Trump's personal participation in electoral politics - might be an Agnew solution. Spiro T. Agnew was Richard Nixon's corrupt vice president, who resigned in October 1973 as part of a plea bargain, which involved his pleading nolo contendere to several significant charges. Agnew was accused primarily of personal corruption. He was not the existential threat to constitutional government that Trump has proved to be. But the relevant analogy is not the severity of the alleged crimes but the social and political benefits from a mutually agreed upon outcome. In return for escaping a trial and probable prison sentence, Agnew agreed to resign the vice presidency - thus making Nixon's impeachment and removal plausible and the much more palatable President Ford possible. Agnew escaped prison, but in return the country escaped any more Agnew (and ultimately escaped Nixon). It was a deal well worth the price.

Would it not likewise be well worth the price to offer Trump some sort of alternative-to-trial plea bargain in which the government agreed to no prison time or fine in return for some sort of probation with the explicit condition of his immediate and complete withdrawal from electoral politics? Of course, everything we know about Trump suggests that he would never actually agree to anything like that. And there is the further complication of possible state charges which would be hard to negotiate away, given the intense ideological investment in those prosecutions. Frankly, I suspect the intense ideological investment in the "no one is above the law" mantra may make it unlikely that such a plea bargain would ever even be considered on the government side either. Still, wouldn't it be worth the effort?

It is hard to imagine Trump, who is often his own worst enemy, coming to terms with what he has done, making (like Nixon) some modest admission of responsibility, and taking the best deal on offer. Yet even Trump must be a little anxious at the legal jeopardy his actions have put him in. It is at least plausible that the main reason he is running again at this point - even more than revenge for 2020 - is to stop present and future prosecutions and eventually pardon himself. Resigning form public life might be a lot less fun for him than revenge and pardoning himself would be, but even Trump might be persuaded to consider such a more secure outcome by the overwhelming threat that these indictments actually pose.

Trump aside, the country as a whole and our increasingly fragile constitutional system also have a real interest in an outcome which might make it less likely that the prosecution of former presidents become normalized, much as political impeachment has now become normalized - first against Clinton, then against Trump. It is in the interest of the country as a whole and our increasingly fragile constitutional system that, when a Republican wins the White House it will not have become the new normal that his Democratic predecessor be indicted!

Obviously, all this is speculation. For all the reasons above cited, it seems less and less likely that this runaway train can be stopped at some sane point. Perhaps, the primary penalty that "no one is above the law" is imposing is actually on the country as a whole, as we seem to be  sentencing ourselves as a nation to continuing this sorry spectacle in the form of a presidential election in which the main issue may be whether Trump will win and so get to pardon himself.

After "Neoliberalism"

Historian Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: American and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022) represents a sort of sequel to a much earlier work, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton University Press, 1990). The key concept connecting the two books and the periods they describe is that of "political order." By this, the author means "a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles." In the last century, the U.S. has had orders: "the New Deal order that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s." Characteristic of each order is its "distinctive program of political economy." The New Deal order was about managing capitalism in the public interest. The Neoliberal Order has been about dismantling all of that.

Gerstle emphasizes how each political order brings the opposition party along: "the success of a political order depends on its proficiency in shaping what broad majorities of elected officials and voters on both sides of the partisan divide regard as politically possible and desirable. By the same token, losing the capacity to exercise ideological hegemony signals a political order’s decline." 

The author begins this sequel by recalling the by-now familiar story of the rise of the new Deal Order in the 1930s and 1940s and how it collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, battered by racial conflicts, the Vietnam War, and domestic economic decline. (The New Deal coalition that reigned supreme from the mid 1930s through the mid 1960s famously included core constituencies like southern white voters and the northern white working class that defected almost en masse in the 1960s and 1970s.) Almost as an aside, he notes the New Deal order's avoidance of engagement with religion. This was partly strategic, given the need to keep both Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants in the same Democratic party coalition. But it also reflected a belief in the superiority of secular government, wherein "religion was best left to the private realm and individual choice."

If the new Deal Order was itself a reform of liberalism in one direction, an even more radical reform in another direction was on its way. The author highlights how the neoliberal reaction remained relatively marginal until the 1970s. "All that began to change across the 1970s, as the long economic recession generated frustration and fear." Then, an ascending neoliberal architecture of "Money, votes, policies, jurisprudence, media influence, and a strong moral stance," all "came together under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, "whose "greatest political achievement was to reconcile a politics focused on restoring white supremacy and godliness with his own neoliberal market orientation, with its emphasis on personal freedom and antagonism to the New Deal state." And the post-Reagan collapse of Soviet communism, besides opening a large new area to capitalist penetration, also "removed what remained in America of the imperative for class compromise." Communism's collapse also "shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order."

If the true test of a political order is when the opposition acquiesces to the new order’s ideological and policy imperatives, somewhat as Eisenhower had done with the New Deal, Bill Clinton "became the Democratic Eisenhower, America’s neoliberal president par excellence." As many of us who lived through that era may now remember with some regret, Clinton promoted the globalization of manufacturing and the deregulation of banking and telecommunication, and oversaw a wholesale remodeling of the American economy from an industrial economy with an upward-mobile working class to an upper-class oriented new economy of high tech and high finance.

But the neoliberal order contained the seed of its own destruction. "The distress and economic dislocation caused by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 came on the heels of decades of deepening economic inequality between those benefiting from the global orientation of the neoliberal order and those who were not." The author traces the development, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession of such varied opposition movements as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. He also highlights the unique development of precariat labor during this period, and perhaps most significantly the prime political beneficiary of all that, Donald Trump. "In each of Trump’s three beliefs—that free trade and open borders were harming America, that America should privilege its people of European descent, and that America’s true strength lay in its professional wrestling heartland far more than in the aspirations of America’s coastal elites—we can see an incipient attack on America’s neoliberal order."

That neoliberal order having lost credibility, "disorder and dysfunction" now reign.

What comes next?

This Is the Day

Move over Saint Anthony! Move over war in Ukraine! Today's news knows only one topic - the news media's absolute favorite figure, the sun around which the media and its profits seem to revolve, Donald Trump. The ex-President (and potential next President) will formally show up in federal court in Florida today to be arraigned for his allegedly criminal misuse of classified national security documents, which he not only illegally took from the White House but then also obstructed the government's legitimate efforts to recover them (rather than cooperating with the government's efforts to recover the documents - as, for example, former Vice Presidents Biden and Pence did). 

Unlike the dubious New York State case, for which Trump was charged back in April, this charge is easy to understand and is actually quite serious. Moreover, unlike Hillary Clinton's infamous personal emails, for example, the documents in question in this case are actual government documents, which Trump can make no conceivable claim to own - despite the false equivalence some Republican spokespeople may try to make. And again, unlike the government documents which former Vice President Biden and former Vice President Pence apparently kept, but then returned, in this case the ex-President not only did not return them when asked to do so but apparently obstructed the government's efforts. Absent such unconscionable obstruction, it is hard to imagine the Special Prosecutor attempting to prosecute this case. 

In response, the usual suspects are saying the usual things. On one side, we hear ad nauseam how no one is above the law. They say this despite the obvious fact that, whatever we say or want to believe, rich and poor are seldom treated the same. And the rich, at least a lot of them, clearly see themselves as a caste apart to whom the rules that apply to others do not necessarily apply, at least not in the same way. (Remember when Leona Helmsley famously said that only "little people" pay taxes?)

On the other side, of course, there has been the predictable Republican rush to defend Trump, even while excoriating others (President Biden, Hillary Clinton) for far less serious offenses and even at the cost of undermining law enforcement and national security.  Once again, people in positions of authority and responsibility, who presumably ought to know better, are saying things that it is hard to credit them with really believing. In the process they are further stirring up the increasingly unhinged passions of MAGA world. 

Accordingly, there are widespread fears of how MAGA world will react in this conflict which Trump himself has called "the final battle" against "the deep state" and "the globalists" and Joe Biden. Such apocalyptic rhetoric reflects and highlights the dangerous divisions Trump - and his Republican party allies - have fostered. The Court will accord Trump due process, all Republican party fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding. Whatever happens in that courtroom today and in the months to come, however, our intensely stirred up, culturally divided, and politically polarized society will suffer further intense division and polarization and likely irreparable damage.

Climate Change Rules: California Comes to New York

New York City is increasingly unbreathable. The other day, its air was rated the worst of any city in the world. Blame Canada!

Yes, of course, it is Canadian wildfires that are sending their smoke this way. But wildfires are nothing new. California has them regularly, and New York's sickly yellow sky this week is eerily reminiscent of San Francisco's similarly sickening sky a couple of years ago. It's sickening not just to look at, but sickening in the literal sense that it can make people actually sick. As David Wallace Wells recently wrote in the NY Times:"Globally, all forms of air pollution are responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths each year, and, short of mortality, contribute to respiratory disease and cardiac disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, dementia, cancer, mental illness and suicide, miscarriage and premature birth and low birth weight. According to some recent research, of all forms of particulate pollution, wildfire smoke may be the most toxic."

And there is no escaping the smoke, Wells notes: "Sixty percent of the pollution from American wildfires is experienced by people living outside the state in which the trees are actually burning."

This is, of course, one more classic case of climate change chickens coming home to roost. While political leaders dawdle and dither and keep finding ways to postpone our needed national reckoning with the demon of fossil fuels, while the news media obsesses over the latest political polls and presidential primaries theoretically still many months away, happily distracting us from why we can't breathe or see more than a few feet in front of us, the crisis continues to escalate. To quote David Wallace Wells again: "the haunting gray glow of the sky this week was both a throwback to a more contaminated past and a portent of a future clouded more regularly by airborne toxic events such as these."

That future is one I am just barely living to see the beginning of, but which future generations will sadly suffer the full pain of.

Photo: Dave Sanders for the NY Times

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit

 

According to a familiar legend (the veracity of which it is impossible to establish), Saint Patrick used a shamrock to teach the Trinity when evangelizing Ireland in the 5th century. Resorting to something like a shamrock illustrates some of the difficulty of talking about the Trinity. But I think the principal problem perhaps is not so much that the Trinity is a mystery, which we can never completely understand, but that it seems more like an abstract philosophical idea than an expression of religious experience.

I say this, despite the obvious fact that as Christians, our religious lives are all thoroughly permeated by our faith in the Trinity. We begin Mass and most of our prayers with the Sign of the Cross, blessing ourselves In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The principal prayers of the liturgy are typically addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Way back when, we were all baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity – the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our sins have been forgiven many times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; and as a priest I have in turn many times absolved the sins of others, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As a priest I have also presided at weddings – at which rings have been exchanged, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The psalms in the Divine Office are all concluded – Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit – and we do the same in our private prayers with each decade of the rosary. That doxology is amplified at Mass in the Gloria, that great hymn of praise to the Trinity that we say on most Sundays and feast days. As Saint Basil the Great said, back in the 4th century, we pray as we believe, and we believe as we have been baptized.

Admittedly, the doctrinal language we use to talk about the Trinity - words like “nature” and “person,” when used not as we use them in ordinary language, but as technical philosophical terms - may seem somewhat abstract. But the doctrine of the Trinity is our fundamental – and uniquely Christian – insight into who God is.  Who God is - in his inner self - we cannot know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us. Hence, God himself has revealed who he is – a trinity of Persons in one divine nature. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is distinctly divine, their distinction residing in their relationship to each other: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both.

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. Who God is in himself is how God acts; and how God acts in the story of salvation reveals who God is.

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as he did to Moses in today’s 1st reading, as one whose nature is revealed in how he acts toward us: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It was to such a God that Moses prayed – as we all pray – do come along in our company … and receive us as your own.

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, as the visible image of the invisible God, came down from heaven, so that the world might be saved through him. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church.

Hence, the Church faithfully follows St. Paul in praying: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all!

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, June 4, 2023.

Photo: The Altar of Saint Patrick, designed by John La Farge, altarpiece painted by William Laurel Harris (1889), Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.