What Does "Being Presidential" Mean?

Will Donald Trump now start "being presidential"? Can he? These are the curious questions commentators keep asking. But what exactly does "being presidential" mean? Sometimes it sounds as if all it meant were using a teleprompter instead of ad libbing at the podium! But those are jus the dignified externals of presidential behavior - important certainly - but basically somewhat superficial, as if the Presidency were just a role, as if "being presidential" were just acting a part.

If that is all that is meant, then we should expect candidate Trump to be very "presidential" indeed. He is, after all, by background and temper, a celebrity reality-show performer. What better background - in this mindlessly superficial entertainment culture - could one have for playing a role, for playing  at "being presidential."?

Obviously, like dressing respectfully for work (which fewer and fewer people do nowadays), those externals (like being able to give a proper speech) do in fact matter. But they matter mainly insofar as they say something about how seriously one sees one's job, how seriously one understands its multiple requirements, and how seriously one respects the job's constituencies. And that is true, whatever the job. I suspect the expression "being presidential" is really intended as a surrogate for whether one has the attitude and temperament to be our Head of State.

So far, Donald Trump has demonstrated - somewhat to inside-the-bubble elite commentators' surprise and chagrin - that he most certainly has the character and temperament to be a successful candidate. And, of course, as JFK supposedly said, the first duty of a good president is to get elected. There are any number of people who  have the intelligence, grasp of policy, interest in issues, and overall seriousness to make very distinguished presidents, but who lack the personality and skills to get themselves elected, and so by definition can never be president - let alone be "presidential." 

It remains to be seen whether candidate Trump really has what it takes to get elected in a General Election. We'll now in November. Even a good candidate can lose to a better candidate, after all. And he will be running against someone who is one of the most qualified candidates in recent history in terms of the above-mentioned "presidential" qualities of intelligence, grasp of policy, interest in issues, and overall seriousness.

On the other hand, an election is a competition, in which the candidates appeal more to our emotions and feelings, than to our intelligence, grasp of policy, interest in issues, and overall seriousness. We have to hope, election after election, that the winning candidate (and the country with him or her) can somehow navigate the transition from focusing on emotions and feelings to intelligence, grasp of policy, interest in issues, and overall seriousness.

"For there is no apprenticeship a man can serve for the Presidency, no book nor any guide to the creative powers of the individual who leads the greatest of the world’s free people, no instructive analysis of an office bound and defined not so much by law as by the nature of men and the pressures of history.” (Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960). 

Ascension Thursday

This is the 40th day of Easter, which since the 4th century  has been observed as the feast of the Ascension (in keeping with the clear chronology of Acts 1). In the calendar of the Universal Church, that is still the case. But in many places around the world - including much of the United States - the Ascension has been postponed to next Sunday, which some may see as as way of keeping the Ascension visible in an era of decreasing holy day attendance, while others may see it as signaling that Ascension just isn't quite as important as it used to be when we were expected to make room for it in our ordinary schedules.

Of course, in the long run it may not matter much whether we celebrate Ascension on Thursday or on Sunday. As Sunday Mass competes increasingly unsuccessfully with Sunday Brunch. soccer, and any number of other alternatives, the Lord's Day too no longer seems as important as it used to when we expected to take time to observe it. But that is another issue for another day!

Back to the Ascension, whatever day we celebrate it, I think we do ourselves a disservice when we ignore its importance. It is no accident that the Roman Canon treats Ascension as one of the five most special feasts of the year (along with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost). And, in its ancient Roman way, the Canon also highlights why Ascension is so important: Celebrating that most sacred day on which your Only Begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself.

We can easily fall into treating Ascension - and Pentecost, with which it is so closely related - as just historical commemorations. The Risen Lord ascended to his Father and stopped appearing on earth. Then 10 days later his disciples received the Holy Spirit and began the Church. There is nothing wrong with that formulation. But is very incomplete. It minimizes our appreciation of why Ascension and Pentecost matter now.

Whether celebrated on its proper day or on Sunday, Ascension is about where the Risen Christ is now, enthroned at the right hand of the Father, where he lives forever to intercede for us (Hebrews 7:25). The Church today lives on, continuing Christ's life and mission in the world, in that intercessory dynamic. The Church's participation in that dynamic is facilitated by the Triune God's outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, not just on some long-ago Pentecost and not just on some moderately memorable Confirmation Day, but here and now, and now and forever.

Thus, the practice of observing the 9-days' interval between today and Pentecost as a Novena for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit is not just some historical play-acting but an earnest identification with the Church's founding for the sake of her ongoing life and mission in the present.

After Indiana

Well, it is done. The Republicans will be nominating Donald Trump in Cleveland, come July. Watching Trump's victory speech last night, one might well have wondered whether he ever expected this when he launched his campaign. Clearly much of the country didn't - at least the cultural and political establishment certainly didn't. Watching the pundits comment on Trump's victory speech, it seemed that they too were still trying to get a clear handle on what has happened.  I found most of the commentary unenlightening, as one pundit after another expressed this or that disappointment with how his speech failed to measure up to the moment - apparently forgetting or ignoring the fact that Trump's appeal and success have largely come from his not following the conventional political playbook and that his rivals who did conform to more standard establishment expectations are now off the stage.

In Indiana, the ultimate hard-right ideologue went down to defeat - and with him ended the conservative movement's modern conquest of the Republican party. That can change, of course, as things so often do change in politics. The various strains of ideological conservatism that have allied in the modern Republican party are not going away. But it seems unlikely that the Republican party's promotion of policies aimed to benefit the top tier of society will be able to recover the widespread support of working class voters whose real interests the party has habitually ignored. Each element has finally been forced to see the other - and what motivates the other. And they really don't like each other. 

We used to pray in the Litany of the Saints  Ab ira et odio et omni mala voluntate, libera nos, Domine ("From anger and hatred and all evil will, deliver us, O Lord"). It is a petition we would do well to retrieve! Anger, hatred, and evil will are powerful forces and may well have more to do with deciding elections than we sometimes care to credit.

And therein lies a message for the Democrats. It remains to be seen what, if anything, the Democrats may make of this opportunity. It remains to be seen whether they can emerge from this election as America's natural governing party, instead of just another alternative identity group politics party, complicit with the Republicans in promoting anger, hatred and evil will.

Trump and Plato

Fresh from his quintuple landslide victory in last week's "Acela Primary," Donald Trump seems poised to do it again today in Indiana. If he does, he may well be unstoppable. If, somehow, "Lucifer in the Flesh" (a.k.a. Ted Cruz) were to beat him, Trump's path to the nomination would be more challenging, but by no means impossible. Either way, the political class finds itself increasingly paralyzed. And this is increasingly the case for all political elites, not just the deservedly demeaned Republican "Establishment."

Much has been said and written about the Trump phenomenon - much of it insightful, some not so. Increasingly, elite commentary has come to recognize the root of the Trump phenomenon in the simultaneous moral and economic collapse of "blue-collar" culture, the so-called "white working class," who were once the "base" of the Democratic party's FDR coalition, but were undeservedly abandoned by the Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, abandoned and left to become "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s. These voters were successfully appealed to by religious and cultural demagoguery, despite the evident conflict between their economic interests and those of the economic elites served by conservative ideology and policies. That monumental moral and economic collapse, paralleled by a contemporaneous rise in new media and celebrity culture that has trashed whatever remained of traditional values and traditional authorities, has fostered the rise of Trump.

True enough, but that awareness still skims the surface of our political distemper. The time is ripe for even deeper analysis. At times, watching the players on this year's stage, I have inwardly thanked my long-ago formation in the school of political philosophy for having at least provided a conceptual vocabulary with which to understand - and to judge - the plethora of phenomena that have paved the path for Trump's ascendance.

So I was more than edified to read Andrew Sullivan's eminent contribution to this discussion in yesterday's issue of New York Magazine, "America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny"

(See http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html.)

Sullivan's masterful analysis, which is really less about Donald Trump and more about post-modern America, is simply summed up in his subtitle: "Democracies end when they are too democratic. And right now America is a breeding ground for tyranny."

Sullivan takes us back to Plato's Republic, where Socrates traces an inevitable deterioration of democracy into tyranny, the progressive decline of all traditionally established values in an egalitarian libertarian free-for-all, until a demagogue (usually an oligarch) wins over the mob to make a tyranny. Sullivan finds it "increasingly hard not to see in Plato's vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of the first books about politics ever written."

Sullivan credits the Founding Fathers' familiarity with Plato for the safeguards they built into our constitution, "barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power." My own guess is that Aristotle and Polybius were more direct ancient influences, but the basic point remains the same. As is the fact that over time those well constructed barriers have largely been deconstructed. Simultaneously, our notion of qualification for office has correspondingly deteriorated. "Once," Sullivan reminds us, "candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded." 

Here I would add as an example par excellence how even the one reform that was an attempt to moderate this decline - the Democratic party's "Super Delegates" - is now under widespread popular attack. "Super Delegates," who are largely party leaders and those who actually have been elected to actual political offices with real responsibilities, were a reaction to changes in the process that had produced candidates like McGovern in 1972, who could never get elected, and Carter in 1976, who accidentally got elected (largely in reaction to Nixon's Watergate) but whose character as an "outsider" made him ineffective at governing and guaranteed his defeat in 1980.

Add to all this the modern media democracy, and Sullivan sees "precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness." 

Meanwhile, the stage was being set for a mass movement of the disenfranchised against the elites, led by an oligarch who remained culturally connected with the masses, who have been betrayed by global economic forces supported by elites in both parties. Meanwhile, too, the very fabric of social life at the bottom has frayed as religion, the family, and traditional social groupings have declined leaving those most at risk also the most isolated.

"And so," Sullivan warns, "late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain - and has actually helped exacerbate."

Sullivan strongly denounces the elites' "demonization of the white working class world" - whether by elite students at Ivy League colleges who tell the struggling white worker to "check his privilege" or "the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes."

Back to Plato, we are reminded that the tyrant is typically unable to control his own self. Unable to control his own passions, he unleashes the violent passions of others. Provocative behavior at political rallies that in the past would have been perceived as disqualifying someone for high office no longer does so. "It would be disqualifying," Sullivan suggests, "if our hyperdemocracy hadn't already abolished disqualifications."

Sullivan pulls no punches. He considers Trump "an extinction-level event." He castigates Sanders for "playing into Trump's hands." And he offers some parting advice to the likely Democratic nominee and her party: "She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class - and Democrats must listen."

Forty years ago, when I was teaching political philosophy, it was still possible for students to grasp the significance of Plato's and Aristotle's and others' warnings over the centuries about moral and social collapse and consequent political dysfunction. I don't know how many still study such subjects any more, but hopefully their timeless lessons will not be lost when they are most relevant.

Quicumque vult

Today's feast of Saint Athanasius (297-373), Bishop of Alexandria, vigorous opponent of Arianism at the Council of Nicea (325) and after, and Doctor of the Church, seems a suitable occasion to recall (and even recite) the so-called "Athanasian Creed." More properly referred to by its title Symbolum Quicumque Vult, the so-called "Athanasian Creed" was almost certainly not composed by Saint Athanasius at all. The Creed's apocryphal association with Athanasius no doubt derives from its very strong affirmation of orthodox (i.e., anti-Arian) Christian faith in the Trinity, the faith Athanasius defended so forcefully. 

Up until the middle of the 20th-century, the "Athanasian Creed" was traditionally part of the Sunday morning office of Prime, when it was said or sung after the psalms on Trinity Sunday and on all "ordinary" Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost (unless a Double feast or Octave occurred). The pre-conciliar rubrical reform of 1960 reduced its mandatory recitation solely to Trinity Sunday, and it disappeared completely in the post-conciliar Breviary.

I first encountered this so-called "Athanasian Creed" in our religion textbook as a high school freshman in 1961, and I vividly remember our reciting it in unison in class. Its origin is obviously as liturgical text meant to be sung, and I remember the chant-like, sing-song way we 30 freshman boys recited it with our teacher (who read along with us, translating from his Latin Breviary). Even now, i can recall some of its repetitive verses: 

The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.

The Father infinite, the Son infinite, and the Holy Spirit infinite.

The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.

And also they are not three uncreated, nor three infinites, but one uncreated and one infinite.

And so, on and on, it went, affirming the Church's faith in each Person of the Trinity.

So there is one Father, not three Fathers;

one Son, not three Sons;.

one Hoy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits.

The Creed continues after its long Trinitarian section with a strong Christological section, affirming the Church's orthodox faith in Christ, who is not two, but one Christ.

One, altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person.

For linguistically challenged moderns, for whom even the Nicene Creed's consubstantial with the Father is for some reason difficult, it is easy to see why the Church's third ancient Creed is increasingly unused. 

Which is sad, however, because the language really is wonderful. And who nows what contemporary revivals of ancient heresies we might be better equipped to avoid if we were all more fully steeped in the ancient language of Trinitarian and Christological orthodox faith?