The Verdict

 

The world waited (with varying degrees of interest, anticipation, and worry) as the jury of Trump's fellow New Yorkers deliberated for two days (actually 11 hours). The verdict is now in: Guilty on all 34 Counts. The trial of the century (or, at least, of this election cycle) is now over (although, of course, the verdict will almost certainly be appealed, both judicially and in the court of public opinion). To whatever extent the facts (as opposed to the law, about which there may be more debate) were ever really in dispute, the former President has now been formally convicted of unlawfully behaving in the 2016 campaign in regard to his "hush money" payments to Stormy Daniels and the accompanying "catch and kill" scheme. Whether the law is right in so regarding these offenses remains a somewhat open question, to be settled presumably by the Appellate Court.

Defendant Trump - now Convict Trump - called it "a rigged disgraceful trial" and said "the real verdict" will come on Election Day, November 5. In a formal, legal sense, of course that is nonsense. Unless set aside on appeal, the verdict of the jury is the verdict. the fact of the case have been established beyond reasonable doubt. Defendant Trump is indeed now Convict Trump. But, of course, in a political sense, he is right. The final verdict, the verdict that will matter most, will be the one which the voters hand down on Election Day.

The apocalypse has not happened. A single prosecution of one former President, who is also a current candidate, does not, ipso facto, make the U.S, a "banana republic," as some have feared and about which all of us should be worried. Meanwhile, the hysterical outbursts on the political right, while regrettable in a law-governed democratic polity, are utterly unsurprising in their disregard of any principle other than partisan victory. On the other hand, Progressives probably would be well advised to tamp down their "rule-of-law" triumphalism. In Wednesday's NY Times, in a column entitled "There’s a Reason Most People Aren’t Following the Trump Trial," Matthew Walter, editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, wrote:

"Pretending that Mr. Trump’s worthiness to serve a second term is a matter of criminal law rather than a political question is typical of our American insistence upon using certain tools (judicial originalism, democracy promotion, tax credits) for purposes to which they are fundamentally unsuited (outlawing abortion, defeating Islamic terrorism, increasing the birthrate). Most of the time we misuse these tools in the hope of addressing problems that do not admit of any easy or obvious solution." Mr. Walther continued: "The question of Mr. Trump’s fitness to serve as our commander in chief is one that voters are readily able to answer."

I don't know that I have ever read The Lamp, nor am I at all familiar with Matthew Walther's other work, so I can only infer his position on Trump's past presidency or current candidacy.  That said, the author's conclusion seems irrefutable. After all, nothing new has really been revealed about the shameless ex-president's personality or character. And, of course, in an earlier and better time, we would likely have never gotten to this point, because anyone who behaved as Trump has behaved would never have gotten near the White House. But that was then, and this is now. When all is said and done, Donald Trump's fitness for the presidency (and his party's fitness for governance) will ultimately only be finally resolved by the electoral, not the judicial, process. Until such time as convict Trump is decisively defeated, he remains a serious danger to our country.

The important point is not Trump's personal failings and bad behavior. The important point is that he is the leader of a Republican party personality cult masquerading as a political movement that represents a fundamental threat to democracy, the rule of law, and the American idea.

The Civic Bargain (the Book)

 

Somehow I missed this very important book, when it came out last year: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (Princeton University Press, 2023). As the title suggests, it is a work about establishing and maintaining a consensus-based democracy. A successful democracy of this sort is sustained by what the authors call "a grand civic bargain," which "is a negotiated agreement among citizens about the terms of their collective self-governance, enabled by practices of civic friendship and supported by civic education. It is achieved through a history of predemocratic political bargains. And it si sustianed over time by ongoing, incremental bargaining."

As the title suggests, this is not a political theory of moral absolutes - e.g., like universal human rights. "For a democracy to work, all must accept getting less than they desire. All must subordinate certain of their personal or subgroup interests to the good of the whole." The opposite of value absolutism, "bargaining will fail if the parties come to the bargaining table inflexibly committed to rejecting any agreement that does not fully instantiate their own conception of what a perfectly just (or happy, pious, or moral) outcome would be."

The authors also recognize the salience of who is or is not a participant in the bargain. "When the citizen body is increased, the capacity of the community is increased: more human capital is available in the form of more information, knowledge, and experience." On the other hand, "expanding the citizen body means more and more diverse members at the bargaining table. And that means that there may be more and different issues on the table."

The authors apply their theories to four familiar historical cases: "the four greatest democratic experiments in Western history," four "long-duration cases," which they consider "especially valuable for understanding democracy as collective self-government by citizens." The four are ancient Athens ("The Bargain That Invented the Power of the Citizenry"), republican Rome ("The Compromises That Created the First Great Republic"), England and then Britain ("The Royal Bargains That Made Parliament Sovereign"), and finally the U.S. ("Painful Compromises in Search of a More Perfect Union"). The historical analyses of each of these cases is too long and detailed to be effectively recapped here. Suffice it to say that the authors demonstrate how in each case, "citizens struggled with the challenges of scale, and struck bargains to face those challenges." Also, "in each case, the historical trajectory ending in democracy featured political bargains made long in advance of the civic bargain," bargains which granted or established citizens' rights and responsibilities. In all cases, "democracy is hard to get, not easy to keep, and never finished: democratic emergence and survival is never a sure thing." 

Indeed, the two ancient cases offer valuable lessons in how and why democracy was no longer sustainable and so ended in each instance. Their account of the long history of the development of British democracy highlights the many stages along the way, the many political bargains preliminary to the final early 20th-century civic bargain that made Britain the successful democracy we are familiar with. 

In the U.S case, the authors emphasize the early colonial experience in local self-government. "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, civic rights, including the right to vote for local representatives, were more widely distributed in the English colonies in the New World than anywhere in Europe." The founders were well versed in the history of the ancient democratic experiments, which had taught them that "self-interest could be tempered by the active promotion of civic virtue. Formal institutions and civic education could help build strong norms of public-spirited commitment to seeking the common good, a passionate love of country, and a consequent willingness to sacrifice when necessary."

The political bargain between the colonists and the Mother Country having broken down, the first attempt at an American civic bargain, the Articles of Confederation, also failed. The process that led to the ratification of the new constitution became "a preeminent example of self-conscious civic education." That constitution required compromise between free states and slave states: "ratification of the bargain would fail if the Philadelphia delegates did not compromise with what some of them already recognized as an inherent evil." The new country continued to scale up in size, and organized political parties developed to structure political debates and outcomes. The Jacksonian era made the U.S. more democratic, but not more liberal. With the Civil War, the imperfect civic bargain collapsed. "The founders had depended on the bonds of civic friendship along with the common interest in security and welfare to hold together a union in which regional interests diverged and passions ran high. But fellow citizens now saw one another as deadly enemies." The post-Civil War civic bargain failed until the mid-20th-century in its initial goal to fully incorporate freed slaves, but was much more successful "in building civic friendship among ethnically diverse residents." Recent conflicts, however, have highlighted how "the basic question of 'who actually has a place at the civic table' has not been fully resolved." The present question is whether the American civic bargain can "be renegotiated int he face of a toxic mix of misinformation, ideological rigidity, and the threat and fact of resort to violence. Is civic friendship again being replaced  by the fatal enmity that led to the Civil War? What civic education might shore up the civic bargain and enable democracy to survive?" The last part of the book attempts to answer those questions.

The authors repeatedly stress the difference between "democracy as self-government by a self-defined body of citizens," which is the achievable goal, and some alternative "just regime predicated on an egalitarian principle of distribution or full array of universal human rights." The goal is citizens ruling themselves "through managing benefits and costs, dividing both the moral and material payoffs of their political cooperation and the duties, including military service and the payment of taxes" - doing so in a way regarded "for the time being, as fair enough." Such a civic bargain is "never final and must always be open to revision."

Among the lessons learned from studying the four cases are the necessity of leadership and "the requirement of periodically rethinking what democracy requires of individuals and groups, and what it offers to them." There is also the warning concerning "unproductive absolutism" concerning the ends to be sought, frequently experienced today, and "hyperpolarized partisanship aimed at winning, when winning is defined as destroying our enemies on the other side." The important point is that, despite contrary claims, we never really all want the same things. Democracy is about "finding workable compromises so that as citizens we can move forward together." Hence, the authors' repeated emphasis on civic education which "forges vital bonds of knowledge, values, and behaviors on which shared membership in the ongoing project of self-government stands or falls."

Unlike, for example, Robert Kagan's ideology of  rights individualism, or Progressive wokeism, Catholic integralism, or any other extremely polarizing absolutism, these authors' proposals probably require more effort on the part of all, since they acknowledge as acceptable the fact that we do not all agree on the same values or want the same ultimate outcomes and so need to negotiate a genuinely political way to live and make a future together. 

Liberalism vs. Antiliberalism

 

Brookings Fellow and Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, has written a short but important and timely book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing American Apart - Again (Knopf, 2024). Kagan does not accept the classic Luis Hartz thesis about the exclusive ubiquity of American liberalism. On the contrary, he considers liberalism (by which he means a Lockean preoccupation with individual rights) and illiberalism as having coexisted an opposed each other throughout American history. Largely an historical study, Rebellion is nevertheless focused very much on the present. Kagan considers the 2024 election "a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue." While he recognizes that Trump himself is probably unique, "Trump's movement is not unique." That movement is part of the ongoing competition between Lockean liberalism and what he calls illiberalism, that has dominated American history from the beginning.

Contrary to what Kagan considers "one of liberalism's great weaknesses" (namely, "the belief inits own inevitability"), he believes liberalism has been a uniquely American creation, that "grew out of a confluence of unique ideas about the nature of government, a unique interaction of political and international events, and a unique place, North America." Kagan acknowledges, even celebrates what many may regard as liberalism's greatest moral failing. His liberalism "has no teleology, no final resting place toward which it aims." Rather, it is a theory of "universal natural rights," which inhere in the individual. He recognizes the American Revolution's debt to Locke, but not to the traditional Whiggish notion of th British constitution. Nor does he acknowledge more communitarian value systems, such as civic republicanism and religion, which many would argue have played a comparably positive role in American history and even now can serve as correctives to liberalism's obsessive preoccupation with individual rights.

A majority of pre-revolutionary American colonists, Kagan acknowledges, "did not believe in universal rights," and anti-liberal traditions would therefore persist as rivals to liberalism. "Yet the revolutionary and founding generations, with their unusually intense obsession with their individual rights, ensured that the question of individual rights and how best to protect them would be the central issue of American politics for the rest of the life of the republic." I doubt anyone would disagree with that, although many might look for communitarian antidotes to the rights individualism Kagan extols.

Kagan's historical narrative does an excellent job of telling the American story in a way which honors liberal rights individualism, while never underestimating the challenges to it from illiberal currents, primarily in connection with slavery and consequently race. He is especially insightful in how "suspicion of strong government that shaped the contours of the new republic became entangled with the slaveholders' demands to limit the federal government's ability to intrude in their affairs." His account of the divisions that led to the Civil War and the political conflicts of subsequent periods in American history is an excellent summation of how we got to where we are now at our present, highly fraught political moment.

Kagan also admits that "the founding generation believed religion was an important adjunct for the maintenance of a healthy, virtuous society." He recognizes that "a surge of religious revivalism" stirred up a host of reform movements, above all, abolitionism. But he insists such religious movements were "inspired by secular liberal principles." One wonders whether it is rather the reverse, that the religiously motivated reform movements, having succeeded, have since been transformed into secular liberal principles. That said, he recognizes the illiberalism inherent in the strong anti-Catholic strain in American culture and politics throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, and ranks "virulent anti-Catholicism" as "a close second" to slavery and racism as a challenge to the liberal ideal. And in the anti-immigrant politics of the early 20th century, he recognizes "a loss of confidence about the American powers of assimilation and absorption" that "was part of a larger loss of faith in liberalism itself." In fact, he considers the 1920s to be "a high-water mark of antiliberalism, the highest until now." He considers the 1920 election "more like the 2016 election of Trump than any other American election."

In his discussion of the New Deal, he admits that "the Catholic critique of liberal individualism temporarily meshed with popular views," and that the New Deal's "collective, government-centered" approach "was more in keeping with Catholic teachings than the 'rugged individualism' of unfettered capitalism." On the other hand, while he appreciates the fact that "the rights protection machine that the founders set in motion is destructive of many traditions, and that includes religious institutions," he seems serenely untroubled by that. Yet surely the socially catastrophic consequences of the melting of all that is solid (to employ Marx's image) cannot so cavalierly be dismissed because they are the concerns of illiberal ideologies! Kagan's seemingly single-minded focus on rights individualism as the single apparently ultimate value only highlights the inherent moral limits of rights individualism and the need to complement Lockean liberalism with traditional American antidotes, such as the tradition of civic republicanism.

That said, Kagan's analysis of our present highly polarized politics and the appeal of Donald Trump highlights the challenge our democracy faces for its very survival in the U.S. at this juncture. Some of his potential post-election scenarios may appear perhaps overly apocalyptic. But perhaps they are not! In any case, he displays a sharp understanding of the working of our political parties and of how Republicans accordingly "have a stake in the party's viability; all ultimately depend for their own viability on being roughly aligned with the party's positions; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too."

Kagan's book is a well argued wake-up call in the cause of the preservation of a severely threatened liberalism. One only wishes he offered a morally broader and more communitarian foundation for society than Lockean liberal rights individualism. That is precisely what Manville and Ober offer in The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (Princeton, 2023), about which I hope to write more later this week.

Memorial Day

 

It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead (2 Maccabees 12:46).

Last week, while we were on retreat in New Jersey, my community took an evening (as is customary on such occasions) to remember and mourn, to celebrate and give thanks, for those who have gone before us. As people of faith, it is our joy to commend them to the mercy of God. As brothers-in-community who remember and miss them, it is our duty recall their lives with profound gratitude.

That, of course, is what we as a nation ostensibly do each year on Memorial Day, a day devoted to memory and gratitude for all who honorably served our country in life – especially those whose lives were tragically cut short by the perils unleashed by war. We have done this as a nation since the aftermath of the Civil War, a fratricidal conflict of apocalyptic proportions, which in many ways foreshadowed the catastrophic character of modern warfare which we would experience especially tragically in the 20th century and which parts of our world are experiencing even now in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere.

I said “ostensibly,” because like so many civic observances, the “Memorial” in Memorial Day has atrophied along with so much of our national and communal life. (The loss of Memorial Day as an occasion for civic education and its turning into a day "for family picnics or to buy a new mattress on sale" is alluded to in an important recent book, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, which I will be writing more about later this week.)

Not only have the dead been forgotten by many, but many of us have lost touch even with the living, as our once characteristically American associational impulses have withered, and contemporary Americans seem more and more to have turned in upon themselves.

What was once a nation of joiners has become a nation of loners. What was once “a nation with the soul of a church” has become a nation of souls lost in the market. We seem rather lost this Memorial Day, a nation now more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, highlighting the practice of visiting veterans' graves on this day. When I was a pastor in Tennessee, we used to celebrate Mass outdoors at the parish cemetery on Memorial Day, decorating the graves of all those buried there with our grateful prayers. It is a good and worthwhile thing to visit a cemetery on Memorial Day. Even more, this is a day to renew our civic sense of mutual commitment to one another - the living - who are our fellow citizens in this treasured but troubled land of ours.

Trinity Sunday

We began this Mass in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. All of us who have been baptized were baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, our parents and godparents – or we ourselves - made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our sins have been forgiven in Confession, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who are married have exchanged wedding rings in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And we have all repeatedly been blessed (and blessed ourselves) in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. In short, our entire lives, both as individuals and as a Church community, have been defined, formed, shaped by this awesome Trinitarian mystery of who God is, that defines God’s ongoing relationship with us and ours with God.

The doctrine of the Trinity is our uniquely Christian insight into who God is, our specifically Christian way of speaking about God, expressing what God has revealed about himself to us in Jesus his son through the activity of the Holy Spirit.  As human beings, created in God’s image and likeness, we all have a built-in, natural, longing for God. That God exists is something we can experience naturally.  We can reason our way, so to speak, to the existence of God as our Creator. But that is all we can reason our way to. The rest is revelation. Who God is - who God is in himself - is something we could never completely come to know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us by God himself, by God revealing himself to us in words and actions human history. And God has done so, revealing who he is in himself – one God in three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three divine persons acting together externally in a way that reflect God’s inner trinitarian life, the Father acting through the Son in the Holy Spirit. In that inner trinitarian life, the three Persons are perpetually present to each other and inconceivable without each other. Externally, God has revealed in the incarnate Son, who has a visible face and has acted in human history, while the faceless Holy Spirit is known by the effects which we experience. 

So, on the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the ultimately incomprehensible inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is truly God, each distinctly God, but existing eternally in relationship to each other: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Holy Spirit to both. The very names Father, Son, Holy Spirit are relational names. By analogy, the titles “husband” and “wife” are names that are only understandable in terms of the relationships they signify.

At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself, how he acts toward us. Who God is in himself is how God acts. How God acts in human history reveals who God ultimately is. Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as Moses testified in today’s first reading - as one who repeatedly reveals himself in how he acts toward us.

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who for our salvation came down from heaven, and who, seated at the right hand of the Father, has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, making her the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Led by the Holy Spirit – as Saint Paul told the Christians in Rome and through them tells us - we become true sons and daughters of God the Father and joint heirs with Christ.

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. Thus, at Mass the Church petitions the Father to send the Holy Spirit to sanctify the bread and wine that they may become the body and blood of Christ and that, filled with the same Holy Spirit, we who receive Christ’s body and blood may then be transformed into one body in Christ, participants in the mission of his Church.

That mission is nothing less than to make disciples of all nations - in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, May 26, 2024.