Revisiting 2020

 

Far from the glamor of, say, New York in HBO's series The Gilded Age, Eddington, New Mexico, is a sad little fictional town in May 2020, stuck in covid pandemic lockdown, its almost empty streets the site for Ari Aster's eventually very violent movie condensation of the experience of our national virus-induced nervous breakdown and social reckoning.

Eddington, the film, follows the career arc of presumptively "populist," bordering on fascist Joe Cross, the town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), who chafes under covid restrictions, like mask-wearing. His wife Louise (Emma Stone) makes weird-looking dolls for sale and has fallen under the influence of a cult-like figure (Austin Butler), while his mother-in-law, who moved in for the duration of the pandemic, is fully immersed in conspiracy theories. Sheriff Cross goes out of his way to take up the cause of anti-maskers, which adds to his own alienation and puts him in conflict with the town's presumptively liberal Mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), with whom he already has a bad personal history for Garcia having once dated Louise, and whom he now challenges (on Facebook) for re-election as mayor.

The mayor comes across as a more sympathetic character, but he too has family troubles, having sometime earlier been abandoned by his wife and currently experiencing some apparent conflict with his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hiaka). Eric and his friend Brian (Cameron Mann) socialize in apparent violation of lockdown rules. Both seem attracted to Sarah (Amelie Hoferle), and they and their friends get on the post-George Floyd social-justice bandwagon in what must surely be the most satirically intended part of the plot. Sarah uses a Black Lives Matter protest to lecture Michael, the Black deputy sheriff (Michael Ward) on racism, while, at home in front of the family's gun cabinet, Brian lectures his parents about the problem of "whiteness."

That's the first, still somewhat sane-seeming part of an obviously insane story, which, however, eventually degenerates into an appalling orgy of gun violence, when the sheriff (suffering from asthma and possibly infected with covid) descends into  a kind of gun-inflected madness, which soon turns a dystopian pseudo-western of socially-distanced emptiness into a violent horror scene, which it would be hard to describe (and which frankly went on longer than any viewer should need).

The pandemic did not exactly create our current political polarization, but it intensified it in the crucible of isolation and loneliness and the phony world we call "on-line." Eddington highlights all the absurdities of the pandemic experience and all the social and inter-personal divisions it metastasized. Presumably, the movie intends to satirize and ridicule both the conspiracy-minded, anti-mask, supposedly individualistic right and the conspiracy-minded, progressive, self-hating left, both of which lose all rootedness in regular reality as they turn on each other.

When the violence is over, Eddington, the town and its sheriff, are left to an unenviable fate, which presumably bears some symbolic resemblance to the worst of our post-pandemic American society.

The Nasty Nineties

 

"With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. ... We shall repeal the twentieth century." 

Those were the words of economist and, what author John Ganz calls, "the leader of the paleolibertarians," Murray N. Rothbard in a 1991 speech, which both presumably gave Ganz the title for this book but also exemplifies the incendiary style and politics of the individual characters and social movements whose rise Ganz recounts. in this enthralling accoutn of the early 1990s.

John Ganz is a journalist and podcaster, and his book is When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), with a 2025 Postscript.

I remember the 1990s well. I spent half the decade in ministry in a foreign country, but I retained personal and family links to New York the whole time. So I do remember the increasingly weird world of the U.S in the 90s, and in retrospect I can readily trace the through line to where we have ended up now. But neither I nor anyone I knew could remotely foresee quite where it was all leading!

It's all in the book, however, which portrays the aftereffects of the collapse of the post-war social contract and the shattering of American society in the aftermath of the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The book describes the clock-breaking characters and political movements in all their drama and apparent weirdness - David Duke, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, the L.A. Riots, the Gulf War, Rudy Giuliani, Bush vs. Clinton, Randy Weaver and, John Gotti, to name some of the highlights. The surface stability some of us may still fondly remember from that era barely managed to disguise - and in hindsight the disguise is now completely gone - all the increasing individual and group alienation and accumulating resentments that accompanied increasing economic precariousness and social isolation, all of which would over the long term redound to the ultimate benefit of Republican demagoguery. Both Clinton's notional Democratic solidarity and Bush's preppy establishment conservatism would prove to be temporary and inadequate responses to the angry America of non-stop culture war.

In his Trump-era Postscript, Ganz says he based his book "on an intuition that the disparate phenomena I catalogued were actually reflections of a single underlying phenomenon," which he calls "the politics of national despair." His book, he claims, "did not and cannot predict anything," but he hopes "it will continue to illuminate what happens."

Choosing the Better Part

 

Many of us may be familiar with the famous Russian icon which imagines Abraham’s three visitors as the three persons of the Trinity. Christians have long seen hints of the Trinity in this story, which highlights how God communicated directly with Abraham in a scene which simultaneously suggests both God’s closeness and his mysteriousness. 

Meanwhile, Jewish tradition has frequently focused on Abraham’s openness to others as expressed in his generous, extravagant hospitality. Thus, Abraham is legendarily said to have kept his tent open on all sides, so he could see someone approaching even at a distance and thus rush to offer hospitality, as he does in this scene, offering first water for washing, then bread and meat for food.

 

Welcoming strangers was an important value in the ancient world. Likewise, we Americans have often – but not always, and certainly less and less so nowadays - imagined ourselves as a welcoming nation to the homeless, tempest-tossed, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, as is written on the Statue of Liberty which my immigrant grandparents got their first look at over 100 years ago.

Today’s liturgy pairs this familiar story of Abraham’s extravagant welcome with that of Jesus’ close friends Martha and Mary. We tend to imagine Jesus primarily as an itinerant preacher moving from place to place, but he obviously also visited friends, like Martha and Mary, who obviously had sufficient means to host him in their home. In all pre-fast-food societies, meals were an important bonding experience, as well as a source of needed rest and nutrition. There was no rest for Martha, however, who burdened with much serving, sems to have resented her sister, Mary’s sitting still, listening to Jesus speak. In any social group, some people eagerly step up to take responsibility, while some seem content to let others do the work. In seminary, we used to refer to the workers as “Marthas” and the shirkers as “Marys.”

 

As he so often does in the Gospels, however, Jesus here reverses our normal notions of what is important and valuable, saying, somewhat strangely, Mary has chosen the better part. Are we to assume that Jesus and his disciples weren’t all that hungry and didn’t care about dinner? I doubt that! I think that Jesus wanted and expected to be fed, and that he fully appreciated the work Martha was doing. But, while dinner was important, dinner isn’t everything.

Jesus warns Martha about being anxious and worried about many things – a lesson maybe even more important and timely to us in our workaholic society with its profit-oriented understanding of who and what counts as worthwhile, with its profit-oriented understanding of time well spent. Jesus surely appreciated Martha’s hospitality – as Abraham’s visitors did. But he, like Abraham’s visitors, was no ordinary guest, and this was no ordinary dinner party. Just as Abraham, after all his frenetic activity, had finally to settle down and wait under the tree to hear what his visitors had to say. So too Martha needed to calm down and learn to listen.

 

Modern-life – especially since the invention of the smart phone - is one big attention-grabbing machine, which weighs us down even more than Martha’s housekeeping burdened her. It is hard for us for find the time or the space to listen – to listen to one another, to listen to anyone at all, let alone listen to God. Much of what passes for pubic conversation today is just largely rival factions talking past one another, seldom if ever pausing enough to hear one another and try to listen and learn how the other side sees the world.

 

Both Abraham and Martha served their guests well, as we are all called to serve one another’s needs as well as we can – especially the poor, especially strangers, especially immigrants. But the ultimate prerequisite for a life well lived is learning to listen – listening to the poor, the strangers, and the immigrants, but also listening to one another, and above all learning to listen to God, who speaks to us in many and various ways and through many intermediaries as he did with Abraham and Martha and Mary and continues to do here and now with us in his Church.

Homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY NY, July 20, 2025.

 

2024 (The Book)

In this post-election cycle of excellent campaign accounts and election analyses, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America (Penguin Press, 2025) by journalists Josh Dawley, Tyler Page, and Isaac Arnsdorf, is truly outstanding. Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, and Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson authored Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Both highlighted how Biden decisively damaged the Democrats' chances, first, by irresponsibly deciding to run for a second term, and, then, by resisting removal from the ticket for weeks following the June 2024 debate debacle. Now 2024 also retraces some of that familiar terrain, but it especially also highlights the amazing success of Trump's political comeback from an initially seemingly unfavorable position.

According to the authors, "the election hinged on accidents and incidental decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way."

At the beginning, Trump surely looked like a loser. But he ran a relatively well disciplined campaign - focused heavily on matters which made sense to voters, like the economy and the cost of living (even in spite of how Trump often preferred to speak and conduct himself). The authors give a lot of credit to Susie Wyles' decisive influence on the management and conduct of the Trump campaign.

Another very important aspect of Trump's comeback was the politically foolish policy of indicting him (multiple times), which forced his potential Republican rivals to rally around in support of him, which further undercut the possibility of any other Republican emerging as a viable alternative.

On the Democratic side, in contrast, there were conceivable potential alternatives to Biden waiting in the wings prior to the 2022 midterms, who then largely gave up after the relatively successful midterm results, which Biden, with his long-term resentment at being underestimated (and his personal chip-on-his-shoulder against Obama), erroneously was enabled to interpret as a sort of vindication. Meanwhile, Biden's team worked hard to prevent effective opposition to Biden from competing against him, while no one really ever told Biden not to run - until the summer 2024 crisis. As other authors have also revealed, even the pollsters had been excluded from direct access to the insulated Biden.

Trump proved to be an authentic messenger for his message. In contrast, Kamala Harris'  campaign, which was effectively a continuation of Biden's, struggled to articulate a clear message of what the campaign was for as well as whom it was against. The account highlights how she struggled with how to deal with Biden's legacy, and how. much harder he made it for her to portray her own distinct identity.

Strangely, after running against rump for almost a decade, the Democrats, according to this account, seemed still unclear on how to run against him. Trump, on the other hand, remade and transformed the Republican coalition into his instrument.

Isaac Hecker's Catholic Vision for America

 

On this date in 1858, Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) and three companions founded the Congregation of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle, known commonly as The Paulist Fathers. All four were converts to Roman Catholicism, who had subsequently become Redemptorist priests and had participated in parish missions. The Redemptorists (the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemeer) had been founded by Saint Alphonsus Liguori in the kingdom of Naples in 1732, originally in order to do missionary work among the neglected poor who had become marginalized from the mainstream life of the Church. In the mid-19th-century United State, the Redemptorists ministered mainly to German-speaking immigrants. As natural born American citizens and Catholic converts, Hecker and his colleagues, Augustine Hewit, George Deshon, and Francis Baker had expanded their missionary activity to native-born English speakers, non-Catholic a well as Catholic. Dispensed from their Redemptorist vows in March 1858, they founded the Paulist Fathers on this date in 1858 in order to continue their work of American evangelization.

A central aspect of Isaac Hecker's own religious journey to Catholicism, which would inspire his missionary efforts first as a Redemptiorist and then as a Paulist, was his personal conviction that Roman Catholicsm was the answer both to everyone's Questions of the Soul and Aspirations of Nature (the titles of his 1955 and 1857 books) and also, more broadly, the solution to social and political polarization in U.S. culture. Thus, in his first audience with Blessed Pope Pius IX  in 1857, Hecker assured the Pope that "the Catholic truth ... once known would ... act like oil on troubled waters" to overcome political polarization and "sustain our institutions and enable our young country to realize its great destiny" [Letter from Rome, December 22, 1857].

At that time, such sentiments could only appear aspirational. Hecker's insights were in fact quite culturally counter-intuitive, as indeed he had considered his own personal journey to Catholicism.

Hecker himself claimed to have had no formal religious affiliation prior to his conversion to Catholicism in 1844, a situation he saw as itself symptomatic of the fluid state of American religiosity at that time. Actually, thanks to the Second Great Awakening, the U.S. was becoming a much more religious country, what G.K. Chesterton would later famously call "a country with the soul of a church." That said, Hecker's initial interests had been more in the area of political reformism. Gradually, however, his priorities had evolved from political to social to religious concerns. The former were never completely forgotten, but the latter definitely took precedence. Like Saint Augustine in the fourth century, Hecker took time, sampling as many as possible of the leading contemporary religious ideas and trends, until finally finding his spiritual home, where he had least expected, writing in his Diary, "I have not wished to make myself catholic but it answers to the wants of my soul."

As a priest, Hecker's priorities were primarily pastoral and missionary work, pioneering in person and in print a renewed missionary commitment to his unique time and place, the still young mid-19th-century American republic. He was confidently convinced that the same Holy Spirit who spoke in human hearts simultaneously spoke with authority through the Church, and that therefore the active evangelization of American society would ultimately benefit both the Church and civil society.

This was, as already stated, culturally counter-intuitive, at a time when the Church in Europe was still recovering from the destructive ideas of the Enlightenment and the destructive politics of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Surprisingly, however, Hecker was not alone in appreciating an alternative set of possibilities for Catholicism in the United States. The most famous observer of early 19th-century American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), also appreciated the fundamentally fragmented character of modern democratic society with its fragile connections among citizens and the dilemma of how to create an authentic community capable of uniting such citizens consistent with liberal democratic institutions. Already, however, in the 1830s, de Tocqueville had discovered American democracy's utterly unexpected compatibility with Catholicism.

At a time when the Church in Europe was struggling to survive as an institution against an increasingly secular liberal political order that sought to constrain it, the Church sought to counteract the social fragmentation associated with secular liberalism and democracy and to reconnect increasingly isolated individuals by repairing and restoring traditional religious bonds. This commonly found expression in efforts to re-secure traditional political arrangements (e.g., the. union of throne and altar). Hecker's American alternative enthusiastically supported the Church's spiritual authority over its members, but envisaged a social solution in which citizens, converted to Catholicism as the answer to their deepest human aspirations, would be empowered to influence the development of society. His was a thoroughly religious form of discourse, uniquely adapted to addressing social and political concerns, combining Catholic universalism and a distinctly American self-understanding of the relationship between religion and society in a providential perspective, which could re-engage with the framework bequeathed by Lockean liberalism. His was less a political solution to the problems posed by liberal individualism, but a social solution to the underlying religious problem that he believed afflicted classical liberalism.

Whereas, for Hecker's famous contemporary Karl Marx (1818-1883), religion meant alienation and its survival in society showed the inadequacy of its purely political separation from the modern state, for Hecker Roman Catholicism was the overcoming of alienation through the providential fulfillment of the authentic aspirations of human nature. And its power to transform society through the conversion of citizens more than compensated for the Church's loss of political power.

Of course, much of what Hecker had observed in and admired about America, including the egalitarianism and sociability which had also struck a secular observer like de Tocquevlle, no longer characterizes the post-industrial, late capitalist, centralized state which the United States has since become. The American he aspired to evangelize is gone forever. Likewise, American Catholicism - the religious remedy he posted for the social fragmentation and political polarization the United States experienced (and still experiences) - has changed as well. While the individual conversions which were so central to the practical implementation of Hecker's program have never occurred in the numbers necessary to make the kind of social impact Hecker had hoped for, what did make an impact (then and now) has been immigration. Indeed, Hecker's spiritually mature thinking in The Church and the Age did at last incorporate immigration into his providential vision for America.

With immigration again curtailed, however, U.S. Catholicism will once more change its face. In a secularizing society which increasingly resembles religiously the United States that preceded the Great Awakening (minus that period's egalitarianism and aspirational politics), what is left of Hecker's Catholic vision for America? While conversions continue, of course, the most public and apparently influential conversions may actually be contributing to the our cultural division and political polarization within both the Church and society, the opposite of how Hecker had imagined that both would develop.

Absent Catholic immigration and given the increasingly polarization within the U.S. Catholic Church itself, Hecker's Catholic vision for America may depend more and more on another important aspect of Hecker's program.

Already as a Redemptorist missionary priest, Hecker had recognized the need, in a famous 1851 letter to Orestes Brownson, for what he called "a higher tone of catholic life in our country," without which "we shall do nothing." Hecker understood, early on, that for Catholicism to solve the problem of America, American Catholicism had first to get its own. house in order, so to speak. Hence, any successful evangelizing ministry must first presuppose an effective mission and ministry addressing the divisions within the Catholic community. 

"The Catholic faith alone," Hecker wrote to Brownson in that same 1851 letter, "is capable of giving to people a true permanent [and] burning enthusiasm frought [sic] with the greatest of deeds. But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves." [Letter to Brownson, Septmber 5, 1851].