After the Election - The Democrats

Yesterday, I reflected in general on the surprising 2016 election results - and more particularly on the Republican party. Today, I want to look instead at the defeated Democrats, now unexpectedly frozen out of all three branches of the federal government. It should be noted, however, that, as in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections, the Democrats did win the popular vote. Hillary Clinton won 47.7% of the popular vote to Donald Trump's 47.5%. 

Since World War II and modern polling, only two presidents - Eisenhower and Bill Clinton have been more popular in their final year than Barack Obama is. But the Democrats were unable to translate Obama's popularity into a Democratic "third term." (To be fair neither did Eisenhower and Clinton, but their party's candidates, in 1960 and 2000, foolishly did not utilize the incumbent president's popularity very effectively, unlike Hilary Clinton who worked with Obama to make the most of his - and his wife's - popularity.)

So how to explain this? The conventional wisdom in 2016 has always been that Hillary Clinton was actually a weak candidate - personally unpopular and a poor campaigner saddled with an aura of scandal. Personally, that never convinced me. Hillary Clinton was an effective Senator from New York and Secretary of State, whom many thought would have made a better President (especially in the international arena) than Obama. In an alternate political universe in which voters cared about things like experience and qualifications, she should easily have beaten an inexperienced outsider like Trump. But, of course, this is not that universe, and what most voters seem to have wanted was change - even change of any kind and at any price. 

To be sure, Hillary Clinton lacks her husband's natural political ease and has become personally very guarded after decades of attacks both from Republicans and from the media, which have always been especially hard on the Clintons. That and the media's perennial obsession with horserace and pseudo-scandal (her weakness) rather than with substance (her strong point) elevated the relatively minor matter of Hillary's emails into a preoccupation the media was forever unwilling to let go of. 

That said, I think the decisive blow came from the strange campaign of Bernie Sanders, who successfully damaged Hillary in the eyes of many would-be Democratic voters and further weakened her in the eyes of the media. While it is true - and to his credit - that Sanders supported and actively campaigned for Hillary in the general election against Trump, it is as true - and to his eternal discredit - that before that he spent months discrediting her in the eyes of those who for whatever weird reason followed his banner. Who would ever have imagined that a cranky old socialist and his anachronistic ideology would so successfully play Pied Piper to mobs of millennials?

Much has been said and written about the supposed similarities between Trump's and Sanders' core constituencies. What they apparently did have in common was a shared hostility to establishment elites and a willingness to blow up the entire political system if necessary. There is not much that is admirable or substantively effective in that, but it does highlight a widespread popular dissatisfaction with government and institutions in general - and with the unresponsive elites who have managed those institutions by which so many feel they have been so ill served. This is a serious reality - and a very serious problem.

It is a serious problem because stable democratic politics presupposes social institutions (both governmental and societal institutions, including churches) that both function effectively and are broadly respected and valued as legitimate. And we know from history what happens to a society when its vital social institutions lose legitimacy.

To the extent that the destabilizing forces of globalization, the principal beneficiaries of which have been educated elites, have been undermining our families, our communities, our churches, and our other social and governmental institutions, therein lies a lot of the blame for the current crisis.

To the Democrats belongs a significant share of blame for this. If Republicans have largely supported the socially corrosive forces of global capitalism, Democrats have correspondingly applauded the corrosive forces of social and sexual individualism that have wreaked havoc upon families and communities - and especially non-elite level families and communities. What does it say, for example, when a President seems so much more concerned about the issue of transgender bathrooms than about the catastrophic collapse of rural and working class communities and families? (And, in any case, shouldn't a just and compassionate society be able to respond to those individuals experiencing gender dysphoria in a humane and helpful way, without having to undermine hitherto universally valued axioms of human society?)

Political parties often regroup and rethink after a serious defeat. Maybe this tragic upset - and the fact that there are as yet no obvious, uncontested heirs to Obama and Clinton could create an opportunity to blow apart the modern Democratic party's obsessions about identity and autonomy and open the field for some substantive rethinking. The Republicans sort of tried something like that at the elite level with their post 2012 "autopsy," which was then radically rejected by the party's "base." Perhaps the Democrats can do better.

The Democrats' alienation of - and from - their historic working class base began with the 1972 McGovern debacle. It took 20 years - and the ascent of Bill Clinton - to reconnect the Democratic party with the American mainstream. What Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council did for the Democratic party then shows it can be done - if a defeated party is willing to ask why it was defeated and is willing to hear and learn from actual answers.

As the popular vote totals show, the country as a whole is almost evenly split. The operative theory up until now has been that demographic change is on the side of the Democrats. Eventually that may work out that way. But, at present and for the immediate future, the Democrats' failure to connect with traditionally Democratic working class voters in formerly manufacturing states is fatal and must be remedied.

Victory will challenge the Republicans to break with their present patterns of obstructive behavior and relearn how to govern. Defeat can do something similar for the Democrats and make them capable of governing again by learning how to win again.

After the Election

The ugly 2016 presidential election is now over, and in a year of amazing surprises the voters have now dealt the country and the world the biggest surprise of all - President Donald Trump.

So it is time to don what is left of my old political science hat to reflect upon this momentous event and what it may say about our present and portend for our future.

Increasingly, demography seems to be destiny, as voters seem to be sorting themselves out according to their separate "identity politics" silos – rural, white, male, older, and less educated silos for Trump, urban, non-white, female, younger, and college-educated silos for Clinton. These divisions represent a deep, dramatic, and ultimately dangerous pattern of permanent polarization in our society.

Much of the coverage of this election has focused on candidate Trump himself, his personality and “temperament,” and his supposed character flaws as a candidate and as a potential president.  Conservative David Frum recently called Trump “the most anti-constitutional personality ever to gain a major party nomination of the U.S. presidency.” Presidential candidates typically try to run on aspirational, hopeful themes “morning in America,” “a bridge to the 21st-century, “hope and change.” In contrast, Donald Trump offered a vision of contemporary America as a Hobbesian state of nature from which we could be rescued only by investing him – “I alone can fix it” - with absolute sovereignty. Of course, the actual American reality may be really much less bleak than Trump’s peculiar picture of it. But the voters obviously bought into Trump's dark vision.

Since the take-over of the Republican party by the “conservative” movement (and the consequent extinction of moderate “Eisenhower Republicans,” who at least for a while had dominated the mid-20th-century party), the modern Republican party has struggled with some fundamental internal political contradictions. The Republican “establishment” has been a coalition of economic libertarians, socially traditional conservatives, and “neo-conservative” intellectuals (the last group mainly more concerned with foreign policy), all originally somewhat artificially held together by their shared anti-communism (a much diminished motivator since the end of the cold War). William Buckley’s attempt to unite traditional social conservatism with pro--free-market economics, while quite successful at times, has always been inherently problematic, for capitalism has always been the greatest destroyer of traditional community values and relationships. Hence the party’s ultimate awkwardness about the “social issues” so often emphasized by certain segments of the party.

But the party’s principal political problem has been that the establishment’s primary policy goals – tax cuts for the rich, for example - have consistently favored the already wealthy at the top of the economic pyramid. In a democratic system with virtually universal suffrage, however, such a program is obviously not an easy recipe for electoral victory. So for years now the Republican electoral strategy has simultaneously been about advocating the pro-rich agenda of the party’s establishment and also appealing to considerably less well-off constituencies on “cultural” issues – cultivating “conservative” white voters, many with a heightened sense of grievance, many responsive to racial appeals and religious rhetoric. But while campaigning on “cultural” issues to whatever extent necessary, the Republican elites have largely remained committed to traditionally “conservative” policies, expressed ideologically as a commitment to lower taxes for the rich, smaller government, de-regulation, free trade, etc.

While right-wing populist zealots have been around at least since Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, both the conservative movement and the Republican party establishment have long labored to keep them somewhat at bay, even while benefitting from their votes at election time. But the increasingly shrill anti-government rhetoric of Republican politicians, encouraged by right-wing talk radio and social media, combined with the weakening of both political parties’ capacity to control either the selection of their candidates or the behavior of their members in office, have, especially in the last quarter-century, fired up the Republican party’s increasingly disillusioned white-nationalist “base.” The result has been obstruction and an attempt to delegitimize, first, the Bill Clinton presidency and, then, that of our first non-white President, Barack Obama, whose election was such an obviously threatening portent of the changing demographics and culture of the country. 

But all this obstruction, negativity, and hate-mongering offered no positive alternative to address any of the actual anxieties and concerns of the party’s downscale white “base” voters. The eventual result was revolt – the “Tea Party,” the Congressional “Freedom Caucus,” and the amazingly successful anti-establishment presidential campaign of Donald Trump - a revolt directed as much against the Republican "establishment" as against Obama and the Democrats. From the perspective of the party’s free-market elites, Donald Trump was an outsider who took over their Republican party. But from the perspective of the party’s downscale white “base,” so ill served by the establishment elites’ ideology of lower taxes for the rich, smaller government, de-regulation, free trade, etc., it was their anti-establishment take-over of the party. Just as the foreign-policy neocons had been widely discredited among the party’s “base" voters by the Bush Administration’s failed adventure in Iraq, the economic collapse of 2008 likewise contributed to discrediting the party’s traditional leadership among its justifiably disgruntled, downscale “base” voters. 

But, in committing themselves to Trump, those disgruntled, angry voters picked a man and not a party. They found someone who says and does what he pleases and thus represents the freedom from the constraints elites seem to be imposing upon them. Of course, Trump was able to be so unconstrained because he was born to wealth and privilege. Everything about his life and his career separates him the white "working class" that has so enthusiastically adopted him as their spokesperson. 

But, as Adam Smith observed centuries ago:

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

Indeed, just as American culture inordinately admires the rich and the economically successful, one of the peculiar perversities of American politics is the widespread belief that - of all things - a background in business somehow qualifies someone for political office! Trump's reputation (deserved or not) as a successful businessman, combined with his outsize, strongman, caudillo personality certainly strengthened his appeal and credibility with his constituency - much more so than any of his policy proposals, which even many of his supporters probably didn't believe or possibly even care that much about. During the campaign, billionaire venture capitalist and Trump supporter Peter Thiel famously said that “the media is always taking [Trump] literally but not seriously. I think a lot of the voters take him seriously but not literally.” I think Thiel got that exactly right!

His criticism of the media, which performed incredibly poorly even by its own flawed standards, again highlighted the growing disconnect between our political, social, and cultural elites and about half of the country's population. For example, last March (after Super Tuesday) NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff "interviewed" an imaginary Trump voter in one of his columns. Clearly what was really much more needed was for everyone in the media to interview - or, better yet, actually get to know and dialogue with - a real Trump voter!

So, now, what's next for America with Trump as President? During the campaign, stylistic (not policy) comparisons were occasionally made, comparing Trump to Italy's Benito Mussolini, for example. Whatever the superficial stylistic similarities, the fact is that Mussolini never enjoyed absolute power. There were all sorts of checks - Italy's family culture, the independent and greater charisma of the Catholic Church, the military whose primary loyalty was always to the King, and the King himself, who eventually removed Mussolini and probably could have - and certainly should have - done so sooner.

But Trump will have a Republican Congress and a Republican Supreme Court and so should enjoy a great deal of effectively unchecked freedom of manoeuver. Not caring that much about Republican party ideology himself, he'll likely happily sign the Paul Ryan budget, At minimum, we should expect tax cuts for the rich and the end of helath care for the poor and otherwise uninsured. Social Security and Medicare are safe - because the Republicans depend heavily on the votes of older Americans. On the other hand, i am not very hopeful about the future of Medicaid. Getting what they want domestically, the Republican Congress can be expected to leave him lots of freedom in foreign policy - freedom to tear up trade agreements, to undermine NATO and our other alliances, and to cozy up to his friend Vladimir Putin. 

On his signature issue, immigration, who knows what will happen? Will he really try to deport millions of undocumented people? And what effect will that have on our fragile society and our economy (which depends on immigrants for so much necessary work)? The reality may prove less than the promise. But we cannot underestimate the symbolic centrality of the immigration issue for Trump's constituency, a good illustration of which was right-wing commentator Ann Coulter's infamous comment: I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper. 

The reference to abortion highlights how the unique character of Trump's "populist" candidacy put party elites in an unusual quandary, compelling them to abandon many of their ostensibly “conservative” principles to support Trump’s “populist” campaign. 

And a particularly noteworthy casualty has been the one other major component of the Republican coalition - one of the party’s most paradoxical constituencies - the “Religious Right,” a curious alliance of conservative white Evangelicals and conservative white Catholics. (Note, of course, that not all white Evangelicals are conservative, and that African-American Evangelicals are reliably liberal and Democratic. Likewise, not all white Catholics are conservative, and the majority of US Catholics will in any case soon be non-white. Latinos, the largest growing Catholic constituency, are also increasingly liberal and Democratic.) In supporting someone like Trump, the Religious Right demonstrably prioritized Republican party politics over its ostensible religious principles. As Russell D, Moore, the current president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, recently observed, “The religious right turned out to be the people the religious right warned us about.”

In the aftermath of the election, Moore commented: “This means that conservative evangelicals are politically homeless — whether they know it or not.” It remains to be seen whether or not they know it and what choices are made as a result!

Maybe more than ever before, in this time of dramatic cultural and social change, American society needs the authentic witness of vibrant Christian communities, faithful to the challenge of living and proclaiming the Gospel both within their own communities and in the public square. Such witness suffers serious damage when undermined by the contamination of too close an identification with the partisan political agenda of any faction or political party. Again Russell Moore expressed it well when he called on the faithful “to dethrone politics as a religion and as a source of identity while at the same time remaining engaged in our responsibilities as citizens.”

An Ambrosian Advent

Because Christmas Day falls on Sunday this year, the Advent season will be the longest it can be in the Roman Rite - a full four weeks from November 27 to December 24. This is good for those who like Advent, who like the season's beautiful textual and musical treasures and appreciate how this time more than any other in the liturgical calendar corresponds to the sense and feel of the natural season. 

But, if Advent is your thing, then even better that the Roman Advent is the Ambrosian Advent, which begins always on the Sunday after the feast of Saint Martin of Tours (November 11) and thus has six Sundays instead of the Roman Rite's four. So in Milan and those other places where the Ambrosian Rite is still followed, Advent begins this coming Sunday, November 13. (Photo: Antiphon from Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent in the Ambrosian Rite.) 

The Ambrosian Rite of Milan is an ancient Latin Rite, which has evolved over the centuries (as all rites do), but which has survived - and indeed thrived - as a distinctive Latin Rite up until the present time. When Charlemagne tried to suppress its use in favor of the Roman Rite, the then Archbishop supposedly persuaded the Emperor to allow a trial in which a Roman and an Ambrosian liturgical book were left closed for three days on the altar of Saint Peter's in Rome. The theory was that at the end of the three days the one which God preferred would be found opened. As it happened, they were both found opened. So it was resolved that God found both rites equally acceptable!

In the same spirit, the Second Vatican Council declared that in faithful obedience to tradition, the sacred Council declares that holy Mother Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal right and dignity; that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4).

Anyone who loves Advent knows all too well how filled with difficulties its contemporary celebration has become. The commercial Christmas, which used to begin with Thanksgiving and now begins right after Halloween, has crowded out all alternatives. Advent's solemn opening notes on "Doomsday Sunday" are submerged in the Thanksgiving "holiday weekend," while by the time we get to the second and subsequent Sundays it is already Christmas for all practical purposes. The great classic Advent hymns are always worth singing - even in a church already all decked out with trees, wreaths, lights, and poinsettias. But their message barely penetrates the already anticipated feast that formerly marked Advent's end.

There is no point fighting any of that. In any competition between Advent and Christmas, clearly Christmas will always win. Nor should they be in competition. 

But what if we effectively moved Advent back into November, a month already identified with the end-of-time theme? A limited liturgical horizon might think this rather radical. But then the Milanese have done this for centuries with their six-week Ambrosian Advent! And even in the Roman tradition, there was a obvious continuity - rather than a break - between the final weeks of the old Time after Pentecost and Advent. (The modern notion that Advent "begins" the liturgical year is simply an inference from the fact that printed Missals and Breviaries have to start somewhere.)

What I am proposing isn't going to happen, of course, for all sorts of institutional reasons. But what if we moved Christ the King back to the last Sunday in October, restoring its original connection with All Saints Day? Then perhaps the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica could also be moved permanently to the Sunday following All Saints and All Souls - uniting the four celebrations in a single Fulfillment-of-the-Kingdom mini-season? Advent, beginning so soon after, would again stand in evident continuity with the preceding weeks of what we now boringly call "Ordinary Time." Then, by December, the second half of Advent would naturally flow right into the contemporary anticipation of Christmas.

Just a suggestion.

Resurrection and New Life

As everyone knows, Tuesday is Election Day. But there is another holiday this week, Veterans’ Day – the 98th anniversary of the end World War I, a day dedicated now to honoring all our veterans of all our wars. North of the border, where I served for six happy years, it is observed in Canada (and in other Commonwealth countries), as Remembrance Day. You always know Remembrance Day is coming when you start seeing practically everyone wearing an artificial poppy. In Commonwealth countries, the poppies, the parades, the solemn laying of wreaths, and above all the ritual two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, all these rituals are ways to remember those who have died.

Back when I was a seminarian in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated. People come constantly to that wall of names to find and honor the name of someone they knew and loved. They’re just names, of course, but there is something very special about them, because someone has written them – and someone remembers them. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, I saw something similar in New York – in makeshift shrines in front of firehouses and other places – names and pictures of people being remembered.

Surely, our ability to remember is one of the things that makes us most human. When we remember those who have died, we recognize the humanity we share. We remember that, like us, they also lived once, and that, like them, we too will surely die.

The famous story in today’s 1st reading [2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14] of the seven brothers and their mother, who were willing to die rather than to disobey God’s law, was written to remember those heroes from the great war which Israel fought for its freedom in the 2nd century before Christ. In remembering those martyred heroes, the story also celebrates their faith that God would raise them up to live again forever.

In our Catholic tradition, this time of year is focused in a particular way on the end, and the month of November is dedicated in a special way to remembering and praying for those who have died. 

Our faith challenges us to treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect our duty to pray for those who have gone before us. Hence, the importance of a proper funeral - an especially privileged moment when the entire Church visibly intercedes on behalf on the recently deceased. (Sadly, one study I read recently suggested that only about 66% of US Catholics who have died in recent years have had a full Catholic funeral.) But especially in this Holy Year of Mercy, we have been reminded that praying for both the living and the dead is one of the seven spiritual works of mercy, while burying the dead counts as one of the seven corporal works of mercy. 

Recently the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a new Instruction “Regarding the Burial of the Deceased and the Conservation of the Ashes in the Case of Cremation.” The Instruction does not teach anything really new. Rather it represents a timely restatement of what, not long ago, would have been the common Christian understanding, but now needs to be restated due to the increasing acceptance of secular and neo-pagan, post-Christian beliefs and practices about death. Thus, we are reminded that:

Following the most ancient Christian tradition, the Church insistently recommends that the bodies of the deceased be buried in cemeteries or other sacred places.

Burial is our tradition, but the church recommends it not just as traditional but also because:

Burial in a cemetery or another sacred place adequately corresponds to the piety and respect owed to the bodies of the faithful departed who through Baptism have become temples of the Holy Spirit, and it encourages family members and the whole Christian community to pray for and remember the dead, while at the same time fostering the veneration of martyrs and saints.

While traditional burial remains the norm, nowadays the alternative of cremation can also be permitted, but the conservation of the ashes of the departed in a domestic residence is not permitted. Nor may the ashes be divided among various family members. Nor is it ever permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewelry or other objects.

Two centuries after the Maccabean martyrs [Luke 20:27-38], there were those (notably the cultured priestly elite known in the Gospels as the Sadducees), who lived without any hope of future resurrection – just as there are many today, who live their entire lives believing that this is all there is and all that there will ever be (for, indeed, as St. Paul pointedly acknowledges in today’s reading from his 2nd letter to the Thessalonians [2Thessalonians 2:16 – 3:5], not all have faith.)

If, in fact, this life is all there is, then, of course, your only immortality will be your children. In such a world, the worst thing would be to die leaving no one behind to continue your name. Hence, the special provision in the Old Testament Law, that required the brother of a man who had died childless to raise up descendants for his brother. The Sadducees invoked what they saw as the implications of this law to ridicule the very idea of a future resurrection.

The Sadducees’ problem, however, was precisely their inability to imagine any life from this present life - a life limited, indeed defined, by death. But, as Jesus pointed out, the resurrected life will be different. We will still be ourselves. We’re not going to change into somebody – or something – else, as reincarnation alleges. We will, however, be living a new and completely different kind of life, no longer limited and defined by death.

The Sadducees illustrate what happens when we try to imagine in too much detail what that will be like, because, of course, the only life we can actually imagine is the one we already know and live, here and now. Jesus, however, has himself already risen from the dead and is now living that new life. And in him we get a glimpse into that new life God has in store for us, not as some continuation of the way things are now, but as something totally new, a new life we hope, because of him, to live with him forever.

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 6, 2016.

Fall Behind

Last March - the last time we engaged in our bizarre semi-annual ritual of moving the hour hand on the clock forward and backward - I said more or less all I had to say about that absurd custom. 

(See: http://rfrancocsp.blogspot.com/2016/03/spring-forward-tonight.html).

As I noted then, the idea behind "Daylight Saving Time" is not new. Benjamin Franklin famously proposed rising earlier in summer to take advantage of the extra sunlight. In effect, of course, that is what we do now with Daylight Saving Time (DST) - except we alter the clock in order to maintain the satisfying fiction that we are still rising at the same time.

The merits - and demerits - of this semi-annual ritual of "spring forward" and "fall behind" have been debated for as long as people have been doing, which goes back at least to World War I in some places. Personally, I prefer "Standard Time." It too is artificial, of course, compared with the actual local time according to the position of the sun, but it is at least a lot closer. It satisfactorily reconciles keeping time by the actual position of the sun with a modern society's need for a certain amount of standardization. "Daylight Saving Time," in contrast, arbitrarily moves us one hour ahead of actual sun time - to little real advantage. 

So I look forward to tomorrow and to it being brighter in the morning when I must start my day.

That said, I guess I have come to appreciate the ritual of these twice-yearly time changes as a season-signaling ritual in a society, which has sadly lost most of its seasonal markers and other rituals. With Global Warming, even the seasons themselves seem to disappearing. Here it is November, and we have been suffering from prolonged summer weather until just this week. "Indian Summer" is one thing. Endless summer is quite another!

It used to be that all sorts of things - from the opening and closing of school to the  kinds and colors of the clothes one wore in public - were determined by the changes in the seasons. The traditional liturgy - rooted as it was in natural seasonal rhythms - reflected that as well, especially in the Divine Office (which was even printed in four seasonal volumes) and in some of the rules regulating the attire of prelates. That too is all gone - as befits a society of climate-controlled church buildings!

In the absence of that world we have lost, all we have left is this silly semi-annual ritual of changing our clocks to remind us of the seasons and the dependence on nature which we once acknowledged but now have foresworn - with less the satisfying consequences in the form of a changing climate and an even  more artificial relationship with the world around us.