The Lincoln Project (Showtime Version)

The Lincoln Project is a five-part Showtime docu-series, focusing on an assortment of fairly well known Republican consultants, strategists, and operatives who famously bolted the elite Republican club that they had been charter members of to oppose Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP and defeat him for reelection in 2020. For this they founded the Lincoln Project. For whatever reason, they permitted cameras to record the group's frenzied efforts to defeat Trump, thus providing an unusual and interesting insight into the activities of a successful contemporary super-PAC.

For avid politics watchers, this show is irresistible. (I found it riveting enough to watch it twice in its entirety in the run up to the midterms.) The principal characters, however, are somewhat less so. They are, after all, all former Republican operatives in various stages of repentance for having helped elect Republicans in the past and thus having helped bring about the party's and the country's current condition. Somewhat more sympathetic are the younger staffers - most (although not all) of them also Republicans of some sort or other - who seem likewise to love the game of politics but also are determined to put their valued skills to work to defeat Trump.

The series opens a window on the extensive media effort which was the group's main form of direct involvement in the campaign and how the different participants - principals and staff alike - coped with the stress of the effort. Towards the end of the campaign as election day nears, we begin to sense that the stresses may go deeper than initially expected.

Just as the election didn't quite end the campaign, it likewise ended neither the Lincoln Project nor the filmed account of it. Very quickly, however, even as the country was coping with election denialism and January 6, the Lincoln Project itself began to unravel from its own internal stresses. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise that high-powered, successful political operatives should end up competing against each other. Perhaps it was an inevitable power thing, Perhaps a money thing. Perhaps both. But the camera recorded it all.

No sooner had the election been called than the somewhat self-righteous rhetoric of the Lincoln Project appeared to be exposed as possibly something else. An Axios story said some of the Lincoln Project's founders were planning to turn it into a lucrative media company after the campaign - dividing the group's factions against each other and opening the Lincoln Project up to the charge that they were just Republican grifters. Meanwhile the camera kept filming.

Then, as if that weren't enough to undermine the organization and its cultivated righteous self-image, the NY Times revealed what, as it turned out, at least some of the leaders apparently already knew that one of the founders had long been promising young men career advancement in exchange for sex. Not for nothing is the final episode int he series entitle "Icarus"!

The Lincoln Project is a study in successful political media operations and offers insight into the kinds of people who are attracted to this work and are good at it. It identifies the trajectory in political consulting in general and in the Republican party in particular which have led our country to its current sad state of affairs. It also illustrates the very same patterns of unaccountable abuse of power, which the Lincoln Project members decried in Trump, but which seem to be so broadly characteristic of so many institutions and structures in our society.

Election 2022

 

The 2018 midterms have finally come and gone (and good-riddance to them). For months, more than half of my daily emails have included pseudo-personal political ads and candidates' requests for donations, none of which will be missed. Neither will the multitude of TV attack ads be much missed either. Pity the poor people of Georgia who have to go through another month of that!

That said, this election may prove to have been among the more consequential midterm elections. In a refreshing break from the historical determinism which so obsesses social scientists and political pundits alike, there was no "red wave," barely a red trickle. For months, we have been deluged by historical analogies, which suggested - indeed demanded - a Democratic loss of many House seats. But history has been put on hold by our changed world. At this point, it looks almost certain that the Republicans will win the House, but by only a small majority, which likely will mean that the extreme Republicans' crazy caucus will make the Speakership a (well deserved) living hell for Kevin McCarthy as they did for his recent Republican predecessors. As for the Senate, we still don't know - and perhaps will not know until the Georgia runoff in December. A Republican House will mean no serious legislation and lots of harassing investigations and even possibly impeachments. But a Democratic Senate would mean the Administration could still make executive and judicial appointments.

We still don't know the final outcome in Arizona and Nevada, but elsewhere it was not a good night for Trumpist election-deniers. Yes, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist J.D. Vance won in Ohio, but Ohio is a hopelessly red state. Tim Ryan ran an admirable campaign and would be a great candidate somewhere else, but Ohio remains a red state. Likewise Texas. Democratic fantasies about turning Texas blue may come true some day, but that day is still off in the future somewhere. Democrats should get over such fantasies and focus their resources in what have been shown to be the true battleground states. A fortiori, that applies to Florida, a permanently red enclave utterly unrepresentative of the rest of the United States. 

One of the great success stories of the election was, of course, Pennsylvania, where John Fetterman overcame the effects of his stroke - and Republican calumnies about his being "brain damaged" - to defeat the elitist carpetbagger Trump had foisted upon them. Apart from such obvious lessons like not to run in PA if you live in NJ, yesterday's election seems to have confirmed the general good sense of blue-state American voters who saw through the vacuous Republican narratives about inflation and crime and showed their abiding commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

The polls were probably correct in suggesting that many voters were  unenthused about the country's direction. But the election results suggest that they were even less enthused about the Republican alternatives.

LBJ Was Right: Abolish the Midterms!

56 years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a constitutional amendment to make House terms four years instead of two, running jointly with the president's term and thus, in effect, ending the midterms as we have known them. At that time, he said,  "the nation, the principle of democracy, and each Congressional district will be better served by a four-year term." 

It is hard to argue against LBJ's logic. At the time the constitution was written, the prevalent notion was "where annual elections end, tyranny begins." So, it was already progress of a sort just to have a two-year term for congressmen (let alone a four-year term for the president). But that was nonsense then, and it remains nonsense now. What that idea definitely does do is encourage an electoral reaction against the incumbent president midway through his term, which makes a mockery of the idea of a four-year mandate and encourages (if not ensures) deadlock, inaction, and political dysfunction instead of legislating and governing.

Synchronizing presidential and congressional terms would not give the U.S. a parliamentary system, but it would makes us a little more like one - to our benefit. In creating our uniquely American alternative to the parliamentary model of government, the U.S. constitution has hobbled government in the name of limiting it. Like most Americans, I am all for limiting government in the sense of constitutionally taking certain topics off the table and limiting the government's reach - e.g., prohibiting it from establishing a religion as the first Amendment does. 

But constitutionally limited government in that sense that is not the same as institutionalizing a system which encourages voters to make governing impossible for the second half of each presidential term. When voters vote for the opposition to "balance" the president, they in effect are voting for deadlock and inaction, which may be what they think they want, but is actually the opposite of what may be needed. At present, there is widespread discontent with a politics that produces very little by way of perceived tangible benefits for many people. But "balancing" one party by empowering the other in the House only increases the very inaction and partisan dysfunction that is one of the reasons why the system produces so little by way of perceived tangible benefits for its citizens.

With the horrifying prospect of divided government again staring us in the face after tomorrow's midterms, LBJ's proposed constitutional amendment looks even better now than it did in 1966!

Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson delivers his State of the Union Address, January 12, 1966

Just To Continue

Although the Annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations is in April, National Vocation Awareness Week in the U.S. begins today. Perhaps, this is just another instance of American Exceptionalism!

At her silver Wedding Anniversary speech at London's Guildhall in November 1972, Queen Elizabeth II famously said,  "If I am asked what I think about family life after 25 years of marriage, I can answer with equal simplicity and conviction, I am for it." After 27 years of priesthood (and 40 years in religious life), I too am happy to affirm "with equal simplicity and conviction, I am for it." Like many, maybe most, priests, I have never felt more happy and more fulfilled than in my life and work as a priest. Like the religious priest quoted in The Catholic Project's October 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests, "I'm happy in my life. I find true joy. I love what I do."

That said, he and I are obviously not among the ones in need of being persuaded to consider responding to a call to priesthood and/or religious life in the Church in the United States in 2022. For reasons, I can opine about, but cannot claim to understand or to explain fully, making that case has become considerably more challenging. Yet, without sufficient vocations, the Church can hardly continue its mission in the U.S. Put positively, the Church needs vocations just to continue. 

I am not a "generational exceptionalist." I do not believe younger people today are uniquely different from all previous generations of human beings who have inhabited our planet. But I do recognize that both religious and secular society have changed almost beyond recognition in the past 50 years. As a result, my knowledge and understanding of those who are 50 years younger than I am is, at best, very limited. I suspect that members of my generation probably had more in common with those born 50 years (or even 100 years) before us, than most of us have with those born 50 years after us.

So I do not presume to understand, let alone explain, why priesthood and religious life seem to have so much less appeal to young people today than they had in some previous times. Let others, better situated than I, attempt to address those questions. Even so, I do think that there are also some external, easily recognizable, societal factors that can be cited as also relevant to our present situation.

First, the Church and its personnel much are less visible today than they were when I was of an age for vocational discernment. I grew up in a "Catholic ghetto." The heart and center of the neighborhood was the church. I went to Catholic school, where I was taught by Sisters in elementary school and by religious-order priests in high school. Whose experience even remotely resembles that today? Obviously, that experience cannot be replicated in today's world, and perhaps we might not want to replicate it even if we could. But the fact remains that - not unlike the late Queen who famously said, “I have to be seen to be believed,” - the Church (and, by extension, priests and religious) likewise have be seen to be believed. 

Second, somewhat complementing the above, the society inhabited by most young people in the U.S. today (transformed and extended infinitely by technology) is much more religiously and socially diverse and pluralistic, offering a multitude of possibilities and choices, including persuasive and compelling intellectual and moral alternatives to religion. It is increasingly easy for people - of any age - to imagine journeying through this life quite satisfactorily without any resort to religion. In a world in which any lifelong commitments appear increasingly incomprehensible, how hard must it be to make a case for a lifelong commitment to something so seemingly marginal as religion?

Third, the American "public square" is increasingly secular and attractively post-religious, while the religious elements resisting this development and presenting themselves as alternatives have done an amazingly poor job and may actually appear increasingly unattractive politically and morally. Is religious identification increasingly seen as less and less about a new life in Christ and more and more as an identitarian marker for political tribalism? Far from being the unifying factor it has sometimes aspired to be, religion in America may actually appear to be becoming an increasingly divisive force, with accordingly diminished appeal.

These are just a few of the external headwinds that may complicate the mission of the Church and obviously the specific task of inviting people (of any age) to respond to a possible religious vocation in the United States right now - as indeed they complicate more broadly the future prospects of the Church in the United States and elsewhere in what we traditionally call the "West." At the same time, there is unmistakable evidence of religious growth and spiritual intensity elsewhere - especially in some parts (not necessarily all) of the so-called "Global South." Perhaps, that is where the Church's future increasingly lies. Perhaps the "Global South" will become for the Church's future what the "New World" once was for our past. I am reminded of the famous conclusion of Winston Churchill's June 4, 1940 Speech in the British House of Commons (sometimes referred to as his "Dunkirk Speech"), which may offer an analogy from the political past to our present spiritual situation: "until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

It's About Time

Thanks be to God! Or, rather, thanks to the politicians and the bureaucrats, who presume to regulate our clocks, that Daylight Saving Time will finally come to an end tonight, which means that there will be light again instead of extreme darkness when I have to get up in the morning tomorrow.

Despite the way it is sometimes presented, Daylight Saving Time does not give us an extra hour of daylight, as is so often alleged. It just reallocates the daylight, giving us darker mornings and brighter evenings - fine for wealthy golfers but terrible for farmers and schoolchildren who have to wait for the bus in dangerously dark streets. Modern society has in so many ways de-linked us from nature and our natural biological rhythms. Daylight Saving Time just makes it worse, a further de-linking of our official, social, civilizational time from natural time.

Obviously we cannot live our modern lives without standardizing time. What is called "Standard Time," to which we will return tonight, remains the closest availably approximation to "natural" time and to the biological rhythms that are part of who we are as human beings.

Modern Daylight Saving Time was first widely adopted as a wartime measure during World War I. It reappeared again in World War II, when it was known as "war time." After that, it was adopted in some states and not in others. The system of summer Daylight Saving Time was codified in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Since then, the beginning and end of Daylight Saving Time have been expanded slightly at each end, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Of course, there has never been any clear or convincing evidence that Daylight Saving Time actually does anything to save energy. It is, however, a good symbolic substitute for enacting any concrete policy that might actually do so.

Some states (Hawaii and Arizona) have opted out of Daylight Saving Time and stay on Standard Time all year. It is alleged that some individuals experience significant distress due to the semi-annual clock change and require time to readjust biologically and psychologically to the change in time. The frequent occurrence of Election Day just two days after the autumn clock change has even been blamed for lower voter turnout!

Daylight Saving Time was invented in an era when humans hoped to leave the constraints of the natural world behind as much as possible. Since then, nature has begun to exact her revenge. The continuity of human civilization now requires renegotiating that relationship in a way which respects natural limits on human hubris. Recalibrating our clocks to be closer to natural time is one very modest and imperfect but still symbolic step in that direction.

I have never seen any significant advantage to adding the unnecessary additional artificiality of Daylight Saving Time. I pray I may live to see the day when we are never again required to spring forward, thus obviating tonight's corrective of falling back.