Trumpocracy (the Book)

A decade ago, who would have thought that "conservatives" and Republicans would seem to be okay with Russian misbehavior but be filled with righteous indignation against the FBI? Such is the strange world we now inhabit - in consequence of the presidency of Donald Trump and the underlying evolution of Republican tribalism that facilitated his assent. One of the leading "conservative" figures who opposed Trump's rise - and has continued to oppose Trump since his election - is David Frum, onetime speechwriter for President George W. Bush, now senior editor at The Atlantic, and author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (Harper Colins, 2018).

Corruption in ordinary English often refers to financial chicanery, but it also can refer more classically to the  undermining of representative constitutional institutions by authoritarian (particularly "populist") institution-demeaning authoritarian-type politicians.  Frum is a classic "conservative" constitutionalist. Hence his focus is primarily on "corruption," institutionally understood - on how democracy "dies by degrees."

Appropriately, therefore, Frum begins by recalling modern, pre-Trump, political rule-breaking, undermining what Frum considers the foundation of constitutional democracy "a commitment first and foremost to the rules of the game."  Frum's examples include Republican threats not to raise the debt-ceiling, President Obama's unilateral move on DACA, and, of course, the conspiratorial claim that President Obama was not born in the U.S., which, Frum suggests, "revealed that as the country diversified, its conservatives would insist ever more militantly that no matter who might reside within the United States, the country's institutions and identity should belong only to those recognizably like them." As a "conservative" intellectual, Frum is very sensitive to how little Trump has delivered "by way of an affirmative conservative agenda," but how his supporters are instead "locked in by their cultural grievances," by Trump's "successful exploitation of conservative anger and alienation."

Frum traces the process by which "Enablers" and "Appeasers" facilitated Trump's political rise and then considers the consequences in chapters charmingly entitled "Plunder," "Betrayals," "Enemies of the People," "Rigged System," and "America Alone," chapters titles which effectively summarize their content. Frum's primary concern is institutional and constitutional damage. So (in the chapter "Autoimmune Disorder") he also worries when, to prevent presidential misuse of power, other abuses and norm-breaking may come to seem acceptable, with long-terms harmful consequences 

Of course, Trump did not rise to power primarily because of anyone's disenchantment with traditional constitutional norms. He rose to power primarily by his successful exploitation of the contradiction that has long been at the heart of the modern Republican party, which, as Frum recognizes, has been "built on a coalition of the nation's biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes. Wile the party elite coalesced upon more immigration, less secure health coverage, and one more Bush, the rank and file were frantically signaling: less immigration, better health coverage, and no more Bushes." This insight is so important, I think, because the institutional and constitutional concerns that excite and inspire Frum's panic will never override ordinary people's anxiety and anger - as the history of populist authoritarianism illustrates. In his chapter, rightly entitled "Resentments," Frum quotes Dale Beran: "Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them."

This is notably relevant in relation to religion. In the late 20th century, "conservative" religion seemed to have been captured by the political right. More recently, however, religion seems increasingly to be in political eclipse. How else to interpret the supposedly religious voters' rejection of the lifelong, devoted Methodist Hilary Clinton in favor of Trump? Frum quotes an acquaintance's observation that Trump is "the first postreligious conservative of my lifetime. The first who doesn't hate gays, doesn't care if women have abortions - the first who talks about things that matters now."  Central to the transformation of American "conservatism" that has empowered Trump has been "this stripping away of religiosity, to reveal a politics of resentment and domination ungrounded in any traditional moral claim."

Related to this is another significant insight of Frum's, which is how Trump has "accelerated the divorce of political power from cultural power," as illustrated in the contrast between the Republicans of the 1920s, who "drew strength from the country's more economically and culturally dynamic places" and the opposite situation today. Frum's fear of a conservative rejection of democracy pushes him to advocate for an alternative "conservatism that  can not only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and US leadership internationally."

Frum notes that baby boomers have become more "conservative" (42% so labeling themselves in 2011 as opposed to only 35% in 2000). But their "conservatism" is neither pro-business nor anti-government, but rather what Frum calls "the politics of generational self-defense."

But what about "conservative" ideological self-defense. Frum is strongly committed to constitutional and democratic norms; but as the contemporary conflict over voter-suppression, for example, illustrates, the "conservative" threat to traditional constitutional and democratic norms is a real one and one independent of Trump. As Frum admits, "the great threat to constitutional democracy has not been the demands for largesse by the many, but the fears for their property of the few."

What might Frum's analysis suggest for the primary policy issue of the moment - immigration reform? "in a multiethnic society economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution," writes Frum, who notes the obvious "reality that human being most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity." It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that part of any process of rebuilding political and cultural trust in our society may require some lowering of the temperature on the immigration issue through some at least temporary reforms that reexamine the immigration policy priorities of the last half century. Whether and  how that can be accomplished in a way which both calms the cauldron that has been stirred by the economic and cultural costs of immigration without losing all the incontrovertible economic and cultural benefits of immigration remains to be seen.

Frum's final chapter ("Hope") considers what "gifts may be gained from this bad moment in American politics." Most obviously, Trump the candidate highlighted "issues neglected by more conventional politicians: the ravages of drug addiction, the costs of immigration, the cultural and economic decline of the industrial working class." And, he admits, "there is no denying now the outdatedness of the dogmas that gripped the Republican Party over the past decade."

Donald Trump's presidency poses unprecedented problems for constitutional democracy because of his indifference to and apparent contempt for traditional institutional norms and restraints. Even so, as Frum acknowledges (with some legitimate procedural concerns) many of those institutional restraints remain in place. What may be undermining those restraints' ability to be effective in checking Trump is the unholy bargain by which a backward looking political party, its leadership still stuck in 1980s ideological fantasies, has enabled Trump's personal agenda in return for his enabling his party's political agenda.

Pio Nono

Today in some calendars is kept as the feast of Blessed Pope Pius IX (1792-1878), popularly know as Pio Nono, who was Pope from 1846 to 1878. Pope Saint John XXIII was sufficiently devoted to his 19th-century predecessor that he wrote in his Journal in 1959: "I always think of Pius IX of sacred and glorious memory and, by imitating him in his sufferings, I would like to be worthy to celebrate his canonization." Pope John did not live to do as he had hoped. It was Pope Saint John Paul II who finally beatified Pius IX (together with John XXIII) years later on September 3, 2000.

Unfortunately for his memory Pius IX continues to be in the news nowadays, largely because of the lamentable part he played in the regrettable Edgardo Mortara affair, which still haunts the Church's relationship with Judaism and with the modern world. More than enough has been said and written about that tragic event. There is no need to say anything more here - except to recall that Christian anti-semitism has had a long and pernicious history persisting into the present and manifested not just in the 19th-century Mortara incident but in the 20th-century Holy See's resistance to recognizing the state of Israel until Pope Saint John Paul II belatedly did so in 1994. The residual power of such anti-semitism still shows itself in the strange hostility of some to Israel's efforts to survive as a state in an implacably hostile neighborhood.

Growing up, I knew nothing about the tragic story of Edgardo Mortara (1851-1940). For me and my schoolmates in the 1950s and 1960s, Pius IX was best known for his dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854), for the First Vatican Council (1869-1970), and for his final years as "Prisoner of the Vatican" (1870-1878) after the Italian conquest of Rome. E.E.Y. Hales' biography, Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (P.J. Kennedy, 1954), which I read in high school, filled in some more details. But it was Vatican I and the Pope's failed fight against Italian unification (and the politics of the subsequent "Roman Question") that most interested me at that time. From Hales, I learned more of the pre-history of the "Roman Question" - e.g., the 1948 revolution which temporarily exiled Pope Pius IX from Rome. In a sermon celebrating the Pope's return to Rome under imperial French auspices, New York's mid-19th-century Archbishop John Hughes analogized the Pope's exile to Christ's passion, expressing the deep devotion to the person of the Pope which would become a hallmark of American Catholicism for the next century or so. 

Another prominent 19th-century American Catholic deeply devoted to the person of the Pope was Paulist Fathers' founder Isaac Hecker. Father Hecker had famously met twice with the Pope during his eventful 1857-1858 Roman interlude, and they seemed to have made a positive impression on each other. In April 1871, after the Italian conquest of Rome and the Holy City's absorption into the newly united, secular Kingdom of Italy, Hecker wrote to Orestes Brownson: "Every day my admiration increases at the attitude of the Holy Father in his defense of those principles which underlie the political order and natural morality." Pius IX, Hecker argued "is resisting the destruction of all human society." As "Prisoners of the Vatican," Pius IX and his successors served as strong symbols of the Church's resistance to the encroachments of secular society, for which the anti-clerical but otherwise largely conservative to moderate Italian monarchy had become an unlikely flagship.

Interestingly, the ideological devotion which the papal cause so inspired among the (non-Italian), American Catholic Establishment contrasted somewhat with the more ambivalent attitude of actual Italian-Americans. Italian immigrants were sometimes seen (by other American Catholics) almost as if they were victims of the new secular Italy, which was true to the extent that the new secular Italy had nothing much to offer them except emigration, but a dubious argument insofar as the intractable problems of southern Italy obviously predated unification (and had nothing to do with secularism). On the other hand, Italian immigrants in the U.S. themselves notoriously held public services and processions mourning King Vittorio Emmanuele II in 1878 - in spite of strong objections from the (as always non-Italian) American Catholic establishment.

An Italian himself, Pius IX proved much more sympathetic and accomodating - allowing the King to be reconciled to the Church just before his death and permitting him to be buried in a noteworthy Roman church (the Pantheon). That stands in significant contrast to the barbaric behavior of the Roman mob that subsequently tried to throw Pius IX's corpse into the Tiber, while it was being transferred to his final resting place at Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls.

The pontificate of Pius IX, no less than the man himself, exemplified the pluses and minuses, the authentic religious devotion and problematic political obstinacy, that at  various times has characterized so much of the Church's relationship with the modern society and its secularized state. It illustrates the still unresolved dimensions of some of that tension that 140 years after his death Pius IX's memory is still a matter of contention - so virulently attacked by ideologues on one side and so obstinately defended by ideologues on the other. The reality is that he was in fact one part of the uncomfortable encounter between religion and modernity, and that some aspects of that encounter remain unsatisfactorily unresolved even today.

(Photo: Tomb of Blessed Pius IX, Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls in Rome, photo taken by me in 2012.)

Superbowl Sunday

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.  (George Orwell, "The Sporting Spirit," 1945)

That great holiday of our capitalist entertainment culture, Super Bowl Sunday (which used to be in January but has since migrated to February) has arrived. Its ritualistic over-the-top observance will undoubtedly dominate the media, (even without the more recent innovation of a presidential interview). It is, after all, a very big business. 

The first "Superbowl" was played on January 15, 1967. I remember the day.  At the time I payed no attention at all to the game itself, but I can remember lots of other people doing so. If I had had the words of Orwell's memorable essay on the tip of my tongue then, I would perhaps have expressed them They seem, if anything, more pointedly relevant now than they were even then or when Orwell himself first wrote them.

Growing up, I was more or less compelled to attend Baseball games at Yankee Stadium. Looking back at the experience, I think my main recollection would be boredom. But that was baseball, after all.  In my first year of graduate school, I and some of my classmates went to a football game - the Princeton-Harvard Game - mainly to enjoy (or at least experience ) the spectacle and soak in some Ivy League sensibility. Having enjoyed some Lower Manhattan Ticker Tape Parades for World Series winners, I can certainly appreciate the sense of civic pride some people take in their local teams' victories - especially when the things which we probably really ought to be taking civic pride in seem so much less so! Still, as pseudo-religions go the modern cult of competitive sports, seems rather more, not less, problematic all the time. 

If Orwell focused mainly on the moral costs connected with the cult of competitive sports, more recent attention has highlighted the physical costs associated especially with football. 

If competitive sports (football most especially) do physical and moral damage in the first place to their participants, what more pervasive moral damage must they do in and to a culture that thrives on them?

Candlemas

The familiar carol stops at 12, but today is actually the 40th day of Christmas and the definitive end of the Christmas season. Whereas Christmas comes at the mid-point of the winter’s darkness, with the year’s shortest day and its correspondingly longest night, Candlemas comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one ancient way of reckoning the seasons) from winter to spring. This is a very ancient religious feast, which incorporates several interrelated themes, reflected in the different names given to this day. All these different names illustrate how full of meaning this festival is, and how much it has to teach us.

What is officially currently called the Presentation of the Lord, was for several centuries called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Gospel story [Luke 2:22-40] recalls how. when Jesus was 40 days old, Mary and Joseph journeyed to Jerusalem according to the law of Moses, that is to say, in obedience to God’s law, in order to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the obligation of a new mother to be purified 40 days after after childbirth. This reflected ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood. Life was believed to reside in the blood, which was, therefore, something sacred and mysterious. Hence, any direct contact with blood required ritual purification. The second concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus).

Whether officially titled the Presentation of the Lord or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, however, the most common popular title for today’s celebration in the West has consistently been Candlemas Day, because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early pre-dawn procession and until the 1960s a penitential procession in purple vestments – with which today’s Mass begins.

The name Candlemas calls attention to the blessed candles, but more pointedly to their light – and to the One whom that light symbolizes. The Church’s official ceremonial says that “on this day Christ’s faithful people, with candles in their hands, go out to meet the Lord and to acclaim him with Simeon, who recognized Christ as ‘a light to reveal God to the nations.’ They should therefore be taught to walk as children of the light in their entire way of life, because they have a duty to show the light of Christ to all by acting in the works that they do as lighted lamps.”

A secular version of Candlemas is, of course, “Groundhog Day.” Not so long ago, everyone in the western world knew about Candlemas Day. Today, most seem to have forgotten. As I wrote yesterday, even in the vibrant Catholic counter-culture of my 1950s parochial school, Candlemas made no major impression. How much less can we expect it to do so now that the Church's liturgy and ordinary life have become almost completely disconnected?

Yet even people who have never heard of Candlemas can relate to the folklore connected with this day and connect it with the change of seasons. While the weather is still wintry, the days are noticeably getting longer.  Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. So this last of the winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these winter light festivals are meant to symbolize.

Today we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: and suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek [cf. Malachy 3:1]. At the same time, we hear, in wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. So, even as we take a last loving look back at winter and Christmas, Candlemas looks ahead to spring and Lent, and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter. Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.

When Simeon and Anna experienced in the infant Jesus the human face of God, they spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. They hastened to proclaim and share their good news. That remains our task today – to take the light of these candles out into our spiritually still so very dark world, and so to share with all the light reflected in our own lives from the brightness of the human face of God.

February

February, the shortest month of the calendar year, was added (along with January) to the old Roman calendar by King Numa Pompilius around 713 BC, ending the anomaly of treating winter as some sort of month-free interlude. When the order of the months was altered to make January the first month, February then became the second. It seems to have taken its name from Februa, a Roman festival of washing and purification held during it. 

The Julian Calendar standardized the practice of Leap Year, originally inserting an extra day between February 23 and 24 (technically doubling February 24, the sixth day before the Kalends of March, which is why in Latin a Leap Year is called an annus bissextile). But, since 2018 is not a Leap Year anyway, something we will not have to face again until 2020. that is enough said about that topic!

Growing up, I loved February. In the then operative school calendar, it usually marked the beginning of the second term of the school year. And it included at least two school holidays – Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12) and Washington’s Birthday (February 22). It also included Saint Valentine’s Day, a romantic occasion, the observance of which seems silly outside of a genuinely romantic context, but which nonetheless we invariably celebrated with "valentines" and parties at school.

Liturgically, one of February's most important dates is, of course, Candlemas on February 2 – the 40th Day of Christmas - which simultaneously looks back at Christmas and forward to Lent and Easter. Although we were certainly made aware of it in school, Candlemas had no noticeable impact on our lives. Unlike the practice in Catholic countries where the Christmas Crib routinely remains on display until February 2, common American practice has long been to dispose of Christmas much earlier. But, if Candlemas made little impact even in 1950s parochial school life, the following day was much more fun, for it was when we got out threats blessed, a beautiful sacramental which has thankfully survived the slings and arrows of post-modern fortune.

Then, sometimes in March but more often in February, comes Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which falls right in the middle of the month this year – on Valentine’s Day. Lent may or may not make much of an impact on most people today, but Ash Wednesday seems as popular as ever, maybe more so.

Valentine’s Day has become big business. But of greater commercial and social significance nowadays may be that great holiday of our capitalist entertainment culture, Super Bowl Sunday (which used to be in January but has since migrated to February). Its observance this year on February 4 will undoubtedly dominate the media, with or without the more recent innovation of a presidential interview. 

(Photo: February from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is generally considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination)