Wildland: the Making of America's Fury (The Book)

 

Journalist Evan Osnos writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow at Brookings. Before that, however, he spent a decade reporting first from the Middle East and then from China. (His first book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith, in the New China won the National Book award in 2014). In 2013, he and his wife returned from China, and he set out to investigate how America had changed in the 21st century. There are many books - many good books - about the Trump era, but Osnos' analysis stands out precisely for his highly personal approach, which focuses primarily on people in three particular locations - wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, where Osnos grew up, Clarksburg, West Virginia, a small but once thriving Appalachian industrial town where he worked his first newspaper job, and Chicago, Illinois, where he became a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. 

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) presents Trump's presidency less as the primary cause of our deep national divide but rather as the fruit of developing divisions into separate and significantly unequal components. In many ways the beating heart of his account is the stories of characters encountered along the way who personify what has happened to America in this century. There are parallels in the experiences of the characters, all of whom in varying ways embody some element of isolation from the larger society, but also radical difference due to our increasing economic inequality and America's perennial problem of racial disparities.

On a macro-level, this is an account (another account) of how wealthy Americans have used the system to advance themselves at the expense of society, and of the failures and complicities of our supposedly democratic political system - the same system that empowered Republican senators representing a mere 14.5% of the country's population to acquit the impeached President Trump. With an acute appreciation of immediate relevance (aided by his familiarity with West Virginia), he highlights the problem posed by someone like Senator Joe Manchin, who famously shot at climate-change legislation in a campaign ad when he ran for the Senate in 2010. "For decades, politicians had been photographed with guns, but this was the first time anyone had assassinated a piece of proposed legislation on film."

Literarily, the book is a treasury of memorable phrases describing an America "losing a habit of mind, a capacity to envision a common good." Trump's fans are "a confederacy of the frustrated - less a constituency than a loose alliance of citizens who were breaking faith with the institutions of American politics and economics." Trump's "ideas were riven by contradiction ... yet that was a reflection of voters' often incoherent sets of convictions." Trump "mastered the national iconography of politics and divorced it from the actual conditions on the ground." Trump's rise was less "a hostile takeover," than "a joint venture, in which members of America's elite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power." Trump "exposed the personal ambition that drove so many in Washington." Then came the pandemic "revealing the full scope of America's institutional disrepair - the cruelties of the economy, the disparities of systemic racism, the skittering, malleable minds of a public trained to doubt the 'body of fact'." The country's failure to confront the pandemic was "a malfunction of elite imagination." Meanwhile "a mutant definition of freedom fueled a resistance to social distancing." The mob on January 6 "was a maskless congregation of the rebellious, the devout, the bored, and the bitter." Trump's departure on January 20 was "like his presidency, a hasty, fractious improvisation."   Some of "America's most powerful people" shared "a blindness to the ways in which we had supercharged our capacity to do harm."

Don't Look Up (The Movie)

 

Its production having been delayed by the pandemic, Don't Look Up is a newly released satirical sci-fi film, advertised as an allegory about climate change and about government and popular culture's inattention to this problem and generally endemic lack of seriousness. It stars Leonardo DiCapiro and Jennifer Lawrence as two midwestern astronomers who discover a new comet and who then try to warn a Trump-like President (Meryl Streep) and the rest of the country about the comet, which is on course to hit the earth in six months' time and possibly extinguish human life (or at least human civilization) when it does so. As of last week, Don't Look Up was the third most watched Netflix film ever, which may say something about the film's appeal but perhaps also about its topicality - not only as an allegory about the climate crisis but also about our more immediate experience of the global pandemic and cynicism about governments' inadequate responses and the wider failure of much of our ambient popular and elite cultures in confronting this crisis - and presumably any crisis of comparable seriousness.

As satire it certainly works, if somewhat formulaic and unsurprising in its extreme cynicism about everything from the sheer silliness and mind-numbing stupidity of daytime TV to capitalist greed and the corrupt character of the rest of our elite culture, including legacy prestige institutions and science aligned with government, and finally to how the zone gets flooded (to adapt a Steve Bannon phrase) with misinformation and disinformation and even (in this case) comet denialism. In an especially apt nod to our present predicament, it even illustrates the pattern of elitist contempt that underlies the manipulation of populist rhetoric.

It also offers some serious stuff about what matters most in life, and about how different people deal with disaster and die as they lived.

A troubling but entertainingly suggestive film for this terrible time in which we now find ourselves!

Heaven Has Opened

 

Traditionally, churches have been built facing east, and the standard location for the baptismal font has been the northwest corner. For various reasons, this church was built facing a different direction; but internally the traditional alignment was followed for the font (designed by the great American artist  John LaFarge in 1891). So the baptismal font was originally located in what is actually the southeast corner (but which would be the northwest corner if the church faced east). In the 1980s, the font was moved, but the original site can still be immediately identified by Alvin Alfred Lee’s copy of Bellini’s painting The Baptism of Christ, portraying Jesus’ Baptism by John, the theme of today’s feast.

At Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River, God the Father officially identified Jesus as his Son, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him. Analogously, at our baptism, through the gift of the same Holy Spirit, we in turn identify ourselves with the Son, and so share in our own way in his relationship with his Father. So Jesus’ baptism anticipates the baptism that has elevated us to a new status in relation to the Father and so empowered us to continue Christ’s life and mission in our world though his Church.

That said, the focus of today’s celebration is primarily on Jesus’ baptism, not ours - and actually mainly about what followed after Jesus had been baptized and was praying, when heaven was opened for a revelation of his status as the eternal Son of God. While God the Father’s words themselves seem to have been addressed directly to Jesus alone, the event itself has been recounted for our benefit. In this revelation, in this “epiphany,” we get a glimpse of the hitherto hidden, inner life of God, now suddenly revealed in what God is doing, for us, through Jesus’ mission as messiah.

Something really new and wonderful is happening here. Heaven has opened. The barrier between heaven and earth, between God and us, has been breached, and the (until now) invisible God has not only spoken, but has become visible for us as his Son, who has revealed God to us in a way we would never otherwise have known - in what Saint Paul, writing to Titus, called the kindness and generous love of God our savior. We are invited to accept God’s kindness and generous love ourselves, as his own people, prepared to be transformed, as Saint Paul put it - eager to do what is good.

It is no accident that we heard the very same words of Saint Paul on Christmas itself. Although the cycle of Christmas-related festivals doesn’t completely conclude until we celebrate the Presentation of the Lord on February 2, today celebrates the fulfillment of the Christmas season. Measured by the secular time by which we rule our lives, today may seem like some sort of post-holiday afterthought. Actually, however, the identification of Jesus as the Son of God and the revelation of the kindness and generous love of God our savior in Jesus’ public mission are what the whole Advent-Christmas season has been leading up to.

Those wiser than I about such things say that Isaiah’s words, typically translated as speak tenderly to Jerusalem, may more literally mean “to speak to the heart” – as in, “to convince.” The human heart was understood by Isaiah’s contemporaries as the organ of thought and reasoning, God is here being spoken of as trying to convince Israel of the reality of his concern.

It wasn’t just ancient Israel that had a hard time and so needed convincing, of course.  Even the most cursory look at the state of the world – one year after the insurrection and entering the third year of this covid pandemic -belies any credible “happy days are here again” fantasies. If something new and wonderful really is happening here, it is going to take some convincing. It requires nothing less than the kindness and generous love of God our savior appearing personally in God’s Son.

In my opinion, the biggest stumbling block to faith is not so much science or evolution or any of those sorts of things (important though those issues may genuinely be), but rather the all-too vivid contrast between what we actually experience and what we profess to believe - between the seemingly endless cycle of human suffering so many actually experience and this seemingly contrary-to-fact belief in a future full of hope, and, more personally perhaps, between my ordinary somewhat self-absorbed life and being part of a people eager to do what is good, the belief that something new and wonderful really can happen and is happening, that the kindness and generous love of God our savior really have appeared. The fact is that we would never have had any reason to believe in such a thing, to hope for such a thing, even to suspect such a thing, if God himself had not told us, if God’s Son had not actually shown us - by becoming one of us. And that is what the Christmas season celebrates so seriously. We would never have experienced this, had it not been for the mission which the Son of God began on our behalf at his baptism, the same mission he challenges us to continue in our world today through his holy Church.

Homily for the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York, January 9, 2022. (The scripture references are to the proper readings for this feast in Year "C" - Isaiah 40:1-5. 9-11; Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22.)

Photo: Baptism of Christ (c. 1500-1502), a painting by Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) in the Chiesa di Santa Corona, Vicenza, Italy.

Our Fragile Polis

 

It was one year ago today that the trajectory of American history changed - perhaps permanently. Unexpectedly for many, January 6, 2021, revealed the radical fragility of our republic.

Of course, the warning signs were actually already abundant - signs warning about the immediate insurrectionist threat, and signs warning about the underlying, long-term decline in constitutional norms and our increasing "democratic deficit." History tells us, however, that we are seldom prepared for challenges we have not yet experienced and hence don't explicitly expect.

History also warns us of the fragility of all political systems. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were well acquainted with ancient history and with classical political theories about the almost inevitable decline of political systems - in particular the decline of democratic constitutions into populist-based tyrannies. They were well acquainted as well with the historical attempt to remedy that dynamic by means of what has traditionally been termed a "mixed constitution." Hence, their move to counterbalance the revolutionary radicalism of 1776 with the stabilizing constitutionalism of 1787. At its best (as my onetime academic mentor wrote), "Aristotelian constitutional theory might be defined as the attempt to encourage political stability and moderation, not by denying class rule, but by ameliorating or restraining class power by the rule of law and by 'mixing' the basic elements so as to promote inclusiveness, lessen resentments, and moderate the exercise of power" [Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded edition, 2004, p. 404].

Historically, the Roman Republic (at least as memorialized by political theorists like Polybius) had been the classic example of this effort. In the end, however, even the Roman Republic proved insufficiently equipped to cope with the challenges of having become an enormous empire. It was left to James Madison to reimagine a large republic as actually an advantage. "Extend the sphere," Madison famously asserted in The Federalist, 10, "and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other."

The challenge of 21st-century political space is very different, however, from that of 18th-century political space. Modernity has outpaced the supposed advantages Madison inferred from size, and it may be therefore that 18th-century institutions are proving less fit for the task - not unlike the Roman Republic's failure to cope with the challenges of an increasingly extended empire. Indeed, didn't Machiavelli himself, recalling Rome's experience, warn against the inevitable difficulty in trying to manage a republic that expands into an "empire" [The Discourses, I, 6]?

An important illustration of this is evident in the fact that, whereas Madison and his fellow Framers worried about an out-of-control majority, our current predicament reflects rather the unbalanced power of an out-of-control, politically panicked minority. The faction that sought to overthrow constitutional government on January 6, 2021, both those who violently invaded the Capitol from outside and those on the inside who voted to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, represented only a minority - never a majority - of Americans. In fact, the Republican party has become so unrepresentative of this country that it last won the popular vote in a presidential election almost 20 years ago in 2004, and before that had not done so since 1988. So both Republican presidents who have thus been installed in the White House in the last 30 years have represented only a minority of voters and were installed contrary to the expressed will of the majority of those who voted (and, in one case, thanks also to the connivance of our out-of-control Supreme Court).

So, whereas Madison, et al., were worried about an imagined tyranny of the majority, the violent insurrection one year ago represented the opposite. It was, in fact, just the most dramatic manifestation of a much more clear and present danger, the tyranny of a minority, which being less and less capable of winning power by means of elections and less and less able or willing to attempt to persuade others, now seeks to delegitimize and corrupt the electoral process itself. The alienation of this minority from constitutional norms is culturally conditioned, of course, by numerous factors. But this increasing tyranny of the minority is facilitated by certain specific institutional defects, some rooted in the constitution itself. These defects have rendered constitutional governance increasingly ineffective, ultimately depriving it of its main sources of moral and political legitimacy, with obviously catastrophic consequences for constitutional government and for the society that constitution and government are supposed to serve.

Unlike the notoriously problematic Electoral College and the much more unjustifiable equality of states in the Senate, some anti-majoritarian institutional defects are not constitutionally mandated at all and actually contradict the clear intent of the constitution. Gerrymandering, while largely legal, goes against the clear constitutional intent underlying the House of Representatives, which was obviously intended to be the primary democratic element in the federal system. As for the filibuster, that largely 20th-century aberration directly contradicts the constitution's clear expectation that the Senate would make decisions by majority vote - with the explicit exceptions of overriding presidential vetoes, ratifying treaties, expelling fellow Senators, and amending the constitution. A two-thirds "supermajority" is required for such special activities, but for ordinary matters - e.g., lawmaking and confirming presidential nominations - the constitution presumes an ordinary majority vote (hence the provision for vice-presidential tie-breaking). The Senate's inability to eliminate the filibuster reflects not constitutional constraints but the majority's timid indifference to the intent of the constitution even in the face of the minority's increasingly unrepresentative character and dangerously despotic aspirations. The Democrats have deservedly been criticized for failing to try to reform the Electoral Vote Count Act, for example, but in fact no such necessary reform can be enacted without first eliminating the filibuster!

Admittedly, Donald Trump presented an almost unprecedented crisis situation. Even so, our sorry situation is more than - and worse than - the short-term aberrations of one particular pied-piper "populist" president.

These are serious, built-in, systemic, institutional failings which have been long-term problems for constitutional government's ability to serve society, with all that such failure implies for popular legitimacy and support. January 6, 2021, however, highlighted a more immediate fundamental crisis for American society. The Republican party authoritarian minority has set out on a dangerous path, the likes of which we have not seen before - at least not since the Confederate refusal to accept Abraham Lincoln's election. (Unlike Trump, et al., the Confederates did not deny that Lincoln had actually been legally elected. Even so, they experienced his victory as such an existential threat to their slaveholding way of life that they rejected the constitutional system and quit the country.)

It is dangerously tempting to dismiss some of what has happened and what is still happening, as just a Trump clown show, which it is in many ways. But the attempt to overthrow our political system was not, is not, funny. And Democrats and other non-Republicans continue to ignore or trivialize this threat to constitutional government at their - and the country's - peril.

And indication of our constitutional timidity and institutional inertia is the trajectory of constitutional amendments in the 20th century - from the 16th amendment in 1913 to the 26th amendment in 1971. The general trajectory of those amendments was an expansion of the democratic dimensions of our system - the graduated income tax, the poplar election of senators, the extension of the vote to women, to residents of the District of Columbia (at the presidential level), and to citizens aged 18-20, and the elimination of the poll tax. But then that trajectory stopped. The last such amendment took effect in 1971. Then came the disastrous election of 1980 and the 40-year process of diminishing the democratic dimensions of our system, which has brought us to where we are now.

The Pearl Harbor syndrome - an understandable inability to anticipate something that had never happened before - may explain some of the unpreparedness for January 6, 2021. But it cannot excuse unpreparedness on the way to January 6, 2025. Just as the Confederates' "Lost Cause" continued to corrupt American politics for a full century after the Civil War, Trump's "Lost Cause" will continue corrupting American politics until either it triumphs on January 6, 2025, or Democrats and other non-Republicans respond with measures to protect elections in particular and constitutional and democratic norms in general.

Post-Christendom?

One indication of an idea having entered the cultural mainstream is when it appears in The NY Times. In a "Guest Essay" (what used to be called an "Op-Ed") in The NY Times online on December 29 (and then in the January 3 print edition), contributing opinion writer Christopher Caldwell in "Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?" examined the contention of French Catholic philosopher and author Chantel Delsol, in her 2021 book La Fin de la Chrétienté, that the current cultural transition represents what she calls a "normative inversion," reversing the fourth-century "normative inversion" from Roman paganism to Christianity. I have not read Delsol's book, but I did find a recent English-language article by her online, entitled "The End of Christianity," which seems to summarize her argument. 

[Her article can be accessed at: https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture-society/the-end-of-christianity/]

As I understand it, Delsol does not contend that Christianity, per se, as a religious faith, is ending but what we commonly call "Christendom," what Caldwell calls "Christian civilization." That reality emerged from Christianity's replacement of Roman paganism in the fourth century and has been fighting for its survival since the 18th century. According to Delsol, the Dutch, British, and American revolutions "installed stable regimes and created societies where politics and religion supported each other." The French Revolution, however, "led to a perpetual war between church and state," leading to "sinister excesses" on the state side, while on the other side, "reduced to the status of a public enemy and perpetually in revolt against the new laws and customs," the church has been "slowly withering away."  

There is obviously hardly anything new in this analysis. What is interesting is her view that the 21st century is no less religious for no longer being Christian. "Other religions have taken over the scene." Indeed, she insists that "as long as humanity is imperfect and mortal (thus until the end of time, no doubt despite the fabrications of post-humanism), it will give itself religions, wisdom, and morals. Only the extreme and fleeting rationalization of the Enlightenment, detached from reality, could believe in the future of atheism." Moreover, "as soon as Christianity fell, all kinds of other gods took its place." 

This too is not necessarily a novel notion. One is reminded of Chesterton's comment: “When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in everything.”

What is happening now, she suggests, is a paradigm shift analogous to what happened in the fourth century, when Christianity replaced Roman paganism, a complete reversal that was both philosophical and moral. Since the 18th century, the dominant paradigm is shifting again. "The present tense tells the story of the return of the great Pan - we have come full circle." As an example she uses the practice of divorce, "quick and easy" in pagan Rome until banned by Christian emperors. The Revolution legalized divorce in France in 1792. The Restoration revoked that in 1816, but divorce was reestablished in 1884. Vichy restricted divorce in 1941, but in post-war France the divorce laws became progressively more lax until resembling the mutual consent divorce regime of pre-Christian pagan Rome. "Christendom defends itself, and mobilizes all its ardour to maintain the legislative and penal power of its mores. Yet whatever happens and despite some episodic successes, the tide has been rising for two centuries, always in the same direction, and never stopping."

Meanwhile, "the currents that defend ancient morals, although supported by many voters, have difficulty finding representatives or rather find only extremist representatives, such as Donald Trump. The fate of a current condemned by history is to become more and more extremist, to lose its most competent defenders, and finally, by a sort of disastrous process, to end up resembling the description of tis adversaries."

That last observation, obviously so relevant to the religious situation in the United States, highlights the danger to Christian religion itself whenever religion aspires to advance its imagined interests by alliance with secular political power. 

Against that, Delsol suggests a Christianity that abandons "the reign of force" inventing "another mode of being than that of hegemony," in which mission is no longer "synonymous with conquest."