The Biden Pardon

 

"Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel." So wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 74.

It is hard to challenge the President's view that his son has been excessively targeted largely because he is the President's son.  It is hard to believe that right-wingers have suddenly become converts to strong enforcement of gun laws - apart from this one case, where the target is the President's son. Hunter Biden has obviously not behaved admirably over the years, but President Biden is not the first (nor likely will he be the last) president to be encumbered by embarrassing relatives. (The incoming former President famously pardoned his son-in-law's father, whom Chris Christie had prosecuted, whom the President-elect plans to send to France as Ambassador.)

That Hunter Biden may have been "guilty" of the "crimes" in question is somewhat beside the point. After all, a pardon presumes guilt. The pardon power is also a useful corrective when one has been unjustly convicted. But, in most cases, those who are pardoned are at least somewhat guilty of whatever they may be charged with. That is the point. A pardon is noit an exoneration. It is an exercise in clemency. And its use, as Hamilton rightly wrote, is a good corrective to the severities of the justice system. Even today, more than two centuries after Hamilton wrote, American justice still wears "a countenance too sanguinary and cruel." Presidents should pardon more, not less. I hope President Biden exercises his pardon power in more cases in the limited time remaining.

"Rule and Ruin" Revisited

 

Recent developments have inspired me to re-read Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, by Geoffrey Kabaservice (Oxford U. Pr., 2012). I wrote about the book here at the time I first read it, but the re-election of Donald Trump and his complete takeover of the Republican Party have motivated me to want to reexamine the half-century-plus story of the decline of traditional "moderate" Republicanism and the transformation of the party into its present, post-conservative, quasi-cultic character.

It is a very good history of the modern pre-Trump Republican Party and – by extension at least – of American party politics in the half-century plus since World War II, with particular emphasis on the earlier period. That, of course, is the era my Boomer generation so well remembers and – more than just remembers – the era so many of us were fundamentally formed in: the peaceful and prosperous decade of the 1950s, followed by the tumultuous and exciting but ultimately catastrophic 1960s, leading directly to the onset of national decline in the 1970s. (That decline would go into apparent remission somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s but then become almost inexorable in the first decade of the current century). From the way Kabaservice tells the story, Moderate Republicanism’s fate fairly parallels that larger trajectory of American political time. Given that, as recently as when I studied American Politics in graduate school in the 1970s, it was still taken for granted that American political parties were inevitably more or less broadly-based coalitions, the novelty of the current situation (in both parties) cannot be overstated.

Kabaservice emphasizes that the merit of Moderate Republicanism wasn’t just facilitating compromise (which is what it sometimes tends to get reduced to when its absence is lamented today) but real programmatic political substance. Indeed, one of the merits of this book is to highlight the important part played by Moderate Republicans in advancing much of what we retrospectively see as a progressive agenda – especially in the area of Civil Rights. At the same time, he describes in sometimes chilling detail the machinations by which the party was totally transformed, tactics which in some ways anticipated the norm-breaking behaviors of the present party.

The book concluded on a somber note, with "moderate" Republicanism virtually extinguished and even "conservative" Republicans being challenged by the new forces represented by, for example, the Tea Party. In his conclusion, he warned: "As the Republican Party continues to reject its own heritage and forgets the hard lessons of the 1960s, it seems increasingly likely that right-wing activists may prevail over the party professionals and nominate  an extreme presidential candidate."

Kabaservice was more prophetic than he knew. However, his prediction envisioned another Goldwater-like debacle, followed by a reconstruction of the Republican party "along more moderate and electable lines." He even cited the British Conservative Party under David Cameron. Well, we know how that ended!

Thus, while the first part of the author's prediction came true crashingly in 2016 with the nomination of Donald Trump and his complete evisceration of his "establishment" opponents in the party, both the party and the country had so thoroughly changed since the Goldwater debacle that not only did Trump completely take over his party, but also - in the 2024 election - the country.

Trump is a uniquely charismatic figure, whose success was not easy to predict and was never obvious - until it became so. Nonetheless, Rule and Ruin remains perhaps the best analysis available of how the ground was well prepared for Trump's takeover.

"Raise Your Heads"

 

 

The last time I lived in New York, back when I was in full-time pastoral ministry, the afternoon of the first Sunday of Advent often saw me visiting the beautiful Church of Saint Thomas on Fifth Avenue to celebrate the beginning of the Advent season with that church’s wonderful tradition of Anglican choral music. More recently, a combination of health concerns and laziness have led me to do so from a distance, via the contemporary miracle of livestream. That may be something of a loss, perhaps, but access to that traditional advent music still enables me to enter the spirit of the season in a special way.

 

Advent is a strangely spiritual season. Almost totally overwhelmed by the surrounding secular holiday season (which is wonderful in itself), Advent is visible, if at all, only in churches. Yet Advent still has spiritual power when and wherever it is allowed to exercise it.

 

Advent originated not as the festive season it has somewhat degenerated into, but as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day. Somber sentiments such as those of the great medieval sequence Dies Irae served to concentrate people’s attention on Christ's final coming at the end of time as judge of all the world.

 

Notably, one of the constants in American history has been the periodic appearance of movements and people preparing for some sort of impending calamity, real or imagined, including even the end of the world. Usually, they are fringe groups at the margin of mainstream society, although sometimes the anxieties are more reality-based and more widely shared. I think back, for example, to the fallout shelter movement in the early 1960s, which was actively promoted here in New York by no less mainstream a person than Governor Nelson Rockefeller and was also taken seriously and discussed within the Kennedy Administration, as well as in the pages of the weekly Jesuit magazine America. Worries about nuclear war may have diminished salience today, but recent events have highlighted how dangerous our world is. We hardly need Advent to warn us of what is coming upon the world (Luke 21), when we have the calamities created by our changing climate - among them  500 wildfires and brushfires in New Jersey and New York City this year.  

 

Anticipating an actual and total end to the world may be more than most contemporary disaster-worriers really care to contemplate. But it does have a long history. Add to that the prospect of divine judgment (an especially salient theme as one grows older), and we can get into some really scary stuff! No surprise then that the early Christians – who took both the end of the world and divine judgment very seriously - prayed, in the third century: “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end” [Apologetics, 39]

 

To us today, living in a world that appears increasingly as dangerous and disorderly if not more so (and where we hear right away about every terrible thing that happens almost anywhere in the world), to us that sounds like a familiar enough list – except for the final petition, which we seldom give much thought to, even while we pray every day at Mass for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.  Yet that “end” is precisely what the Church calls on us to contemplate today, as indeed we do every Advent. 

Advent acknowledges the fears we have always felt about what lies ahead. As Jesus himself said in today’s Gospel [Luke 21:25-28, 34-36], People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world. Advent, however, is also about hope. The same Jesus who said all those scary things also said, when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.

 

Thus, it seems somehow so especially fitting that at this time of national and international tension and worldwide worry, that the Church is about to celebrate a Jubilee Year of Hope, inviting us to put our fears behind us, to stand up and raise our heads, as Jesus said, and go on pilgrimage together literally and spiritually. Pilgrimage, as Pope Francis pointed out in his proclamation of the Jubilee Year, “is traditionally associated with our human quest for meaning in life.”

 

That quest for meaning seems so much more of a challenge – and so also that much more vital – this Advent, when so much that has been taken for granted has been upended, and the future seems even more menacing. In his proclamation of the Jubilee Year, Pope Francis warned against the temptation “to think ourselves overwhelmed by evil and violence.” Like Jesus, he directs us to discern “the signs of the times, which include the yearning of human hearts in need of God’s saving presence.”

 

As I used to say, back when I had the privilege of preaching about Advent, this season challenges us to discern the coming of Christ bringing light into anxious lives and a worried world, which is why I like to describe Advent as simultaneously fearful and hopeful, as we experience both the passing of another year and our hopes for a new one, both the darkness of winter and the living light of Christ coming to make everything bright and new, both the end of this world and the coming of God’s kingdom. 

 

None of that is to deny or diminish the reality that, in our conflict-ridden world and a painfully politically polarized country, there will be plenty for all of us to worry about in the new year. And that is in addition to all our ordinary anxieties, unfulfilled longings, and painful memories of lost opportunities and ruptured relationships, all of which seem to haunt us even more intensely at this festive time of year. 

 

Advent is a winter wake-up call to face up to our renewed responsibility to live our lives like people whose God really has come and whose coming actually matters to us. 

 

In the words of Paulist founder, Fr. Isaac Hecker, There is little or no hope at all of our entering into the kingdom of heaven hereafter, if we are not citizens of it here. If Christ is to be to us a savior, we must find him here, now, and where we are; otherwise he is no Christ, no Saviour, no Immanuel, no “God with us.”