This post takes a time out from any Sanders vs. Warren contrast to look at the moral commonalities of their candidacies in opposition to the moralistic Republican-Christian intelligentsia, a matter of potential importance in the upcoming general election cycle. I’d be overjoyed with either Sanders or Warren as president, each of whom would be politically revolutionary to me because they would insist on a rights-based decent society for all. This is intended as something of a working paper for moral outreach by Democrats on the progressive left.
Is “God” really the wealthy forced-birthers’ Roy Cohn? Bill Barr, Ross Douthat, et al. try to make the case. Should we call them out? Is this too "divisive," especially if it includes never-Trumpers like Douthat? Should we suffer quietly their moralizing? Must we seek to have Douthats in our coalition? Should the Democratic Party stand for so little?
Questions such as these are subsumed within whether the coalition that would defeat Trump, keep the House, and take the Senate in 2020 should be merely broad but not deep. Many of us have Democratic friends or relatives on both sides of this question. Some of us are even divided in our own minds on this. And, while we are at it, can “depth” dare take into account morality without further dividing the opposition to Trump?
I hope you will tolerate my argument that the moral dimensions of this election are not only relevant but of paramount importance. They certainly are the primary unifier of Trump’s evangelical base. If we can confidently seize the moral high ground, including by standing proudly for Roe v. Wade, this could be kryptonite to the hypocritical professed moral supermen and superwomen of the right (www.dailykos.com/...).
If only a small percentage of the aging evangelical flocks abandon Trump the Democrats will prevail. Sincere but questioning in my own faith from an early age, raised by a sincere working class preacher father to be a Southern Baptist conservative Republican yet ending up a pro-choice Episcopalian socialist Democrat, I believe the younger financially precarious working class members of the flocks are not as complacent and energized for Trump as they might appear to be to outsiders. I think they are at least as likely to leak numbers to the Democrats as the viciously anti-choice never-Trump intelligentsia are to vote for a Biden.
But how to win “moral” arguments? For some of us any religious referencing would be highly objectionable (note: any bible versification below is not intended to be offensive or prescriptive). And isn’t any moral argumentation not only unwholesome but “divisive,” and doesn’t the center left tell us that “divisive” is a bad thing, politically if not morally? And if we really do jettison quietly tolerating the immorality of those on the religious right who are themselves religiously intolerant are we becoming just like those whose narrow-mindedness we reject? Oh, what to believe about beliefs?!!!
As an Episcopalian with a lesbian sister, part of me was excited when a gay Episcopalian running for the Democratic nomination announced his intention to recapture “morality” from the conservative zealots (www.rollingstone.com/...). On this I could agree. Trump is not, for instance, the second coming of Cyrus the Great, as much of the Christian evangelical leadership suggests, seeking for him authoritarian power to establish their preferred religious realm or at least trigger Armageddon (www.washingtonpost.com/...).
However, as a democratic socialist, I could not agree when this same candidate, heavily funded by wealthy people, attacked as divisive, oh my, Sanders for saying the same things he’s been saying for decades about the need for a democratic revolution. Mayor Pete is “not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the ’50s and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ’60s.” www.vox.com/...) That scenario sounds pretty good to me. But back to morality.
Certainly religious center-left Democrats are not the only religious non-conservatives who can cite and even sometimes find solace in scripture. Religious leftists can too. For example:
When is the acceptable time for a democratic revolution Mayor Pete? I take it his answer is never. It is not heavenly salvation, but I say now.
2 For he says,
“At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!
(2 Corinthians 6:2, NRSV)
This time of Trump-instigated hyper-division will not truly be “healed” by banal appeals to unite beyond a centrist anti-Trump candidate, but I will concede it is possible such a candidate could win. It might be tough, dependent upon winning never-Trump anti-choice Republican voters—which might be doable (on queue this morning Douthat made out the case for Biden, www.nytimes.com/…) but given the temptation to overrule Roe v. Wade by supporting Trump seems to make their supporting a Biden unlikely.
And much of the working class would feel betrayed by what would look to be an increasingly tech-oriented suburban-focused party. For most blue collar and low wage service sector people the sum total of their political-economic existence cannot be reduced to pro- or anti- Trump. The pain and suffering of the working class across our country and our world is real.
After years of Trump's blatant indecency, which has manipulated and enhanced already endemic societal injustice, the effort to "get under his skin" has itself become passe. No longer does this seem worthy of our focus, even as it once seemed more energizing to see the big baby inflating on a field near us.
What then shall we do?
We need to morally confront head on Trump’s unholy alliance with traditionalist purveyors of mass injustice present long before Trump ever thought of running for president. It is nothing new that these traditionalists do not advance true justice in statutes and decrees. Their own holy book points this out.
For thousands of years the economically powerful and their mercenaries, often cloaked in religion the better to exercise cultural hegemony, have generally enacted statutes and written decrees to serve their own interests. For the common people to democratically seize power to dole out true justice rather than continue to allow the powerful to pervert justice indeed seems almost revolutionary.
Perversion of Justice
[a]Ah! Those who enact unjust statutes,
who write oppressive decrees,
2 Depriving the needy of judgment,
robbing my people’s poor of justice,
Making widows their plunder,
and orphans their prey!
(Isaiah 10)
33 When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. 34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
(Leviticus 19)
19 “Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.” All the people shall say, “Amen!”
(Deuteronomy 27)
The importance of the Sanders/Warren 2020 message is that it critiques Donald Trump within the context of broad and deep societal indecency that is aided and abetted by grotesque perverters of justice like the Senate Majority Leader, the Attorney General, and the Senior Adviser to the President on Immigration, whose moral inversion is complete. We cannot ever hope to work with such people. Which side one is on concerning the ultimate political-economic question of liberty and justice for all is a matter of holistic intersectional urgency grounded in a quintessential American and indeed shared human concept.
But do we really need a political revolution?
The Sanders/ Warren indecency exposure is scary to many on both sides of the Trump divide. On the good side of the Trump divide, many incrementalist moderates sincerely believe that although, they agree, we will not get a decent society simply by throwing out the most extreme racist president of recent memory, at least we will live to fight another day for that decent society. The quest for a decent society is valued, but it is stymied by rational fear, often born of experience—currently of Trump but before him of a continual string of Republican nominees going back to Nixon who will always push, using the southern strategy and white privilege writ large, to subvert the fragments of a decent society that have been or might be achieved by incrementalism.
While completely sharing the incrementalist moderates' opposition to Trump, racism, sexism, and ableism, Sanders and Warren sincerely do not believe that an ever fearful quest for a decent society is enough. Don't get them wrong: Trump is a really bad person who is doing a lot of really bad things. He must be stopped—on that all Democrats and moreover all decent humans worldwide agree, including—up to a point—a few billionaires and friends of billionaires.
This point which must not be crossed is the politically revolutionary point of actually insisting on a rights-based decent society for all. We are not supposed to not take no for an answer. In desperately looking for allies we are supposed to not know which side we're on in this deeply democratic struggle. Sanders and Warren would have us really cross that point in the here and now, not merely preserve a distant quest for it. Repelled by the Sanders/Warren threat to cross this point, the guardians of "decency," including Republican never-Trumpers, cry "foul."
It is important to note that the plainly corrupt maximalist pro-Trump William Barrs of this world largely share the never-Trumpers vision of "decency." Their shared moralistic rather than moral vision of "decency" has been around for millennia. Their upside down version of "decency" has been justifying accepting as the will of God or the price of progress the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, as well as all manner of racism, genocide, and imperialism, since long before the first Natives of the Western Hemisphere were massacred and the first enslaved Africans were imported to take their place at the lowest rung of the working class.
Let's compare the recent "decadence" words of über-Trumper Bill Barr, who can justify serving philistine Trump because it serves his societal vision, with those of never-Trumper conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who is offended by Trump even as he shares virtually the same societal vision as Barr. Both the Republican Trumper and never-Trumper "moral" intelligentsia do not support a decent society for all; rather, they preposterously bemoan that economic problems exist because the government is allowing women to bring fewer babies into the world, which supposedly guts our entrepreneurial spirit, causing us to invent less, and when we do invent, to make less needed things. This is voodoo baby economics.
The Douthats of the world, just like the Barrs, clearly are on the morally wrong, not to mention pure nuts, side. Not only do they use their positions to oppose a decent society for all, they do not even recognize social decency for all as being a worthy goal of government. To them social decency is reserved for heaven and perhaps a few shining cities on hills, "God's" very own Trump Towers.
To them, government redistribution and regulation to ostensibly advance a decent society itself is the agency of the devil. To them, women should not control their own bodies. To them, “decency” is a convenient way to celebrate planet-destroying growth and the financially successful while justifying depriving of equality and looking down on those who are less fortunate. After all, the less fortunate, in need of things like school lunches, birth control and other medical care, education, jobs, and housing, sometimes develop as coping strategies "decadent" habits like running up credit card and student loan debts, defaulting on these debts and mortgages, watching raunchy Hollywood movies, playing video games, cutting, stealing, self-medicating, still having some sex outside of heterosexual marriage, using birth control, getting abortions, and watching pornography and masturbating prolifically, many of which are shared habits with the more affluent, laying back on nicer couches and living on borrowed time in the decadent manner to which they’ve grown accustomed.
In truth, the state of being "fortunate" is a moral choice, but one that since time immemorial often is made less by the individual or family and more by society for the individual or family—society which for the last two hundred years is primarily run by wealthy capitalists and their legislative organizing committees. Thus, who actually runs the society is critical. An inequitable society run by and for the wealthy few already privileges some but not others. To the privileged Barrs and Douthats of the world this truth is blasphemy because it exposes their own complicity in indecency.
Sanders and Warren threaten to have the state invade “God's” sophistic “libertarian” sovereignty, which has, Douthat and Barr implicitly contend in morally inverted language, ordained injustice for the poor, forced-birthing for women, and justice for the wealthy, in the name of liberty and justice for all.
The head of our Department of Justice (noted) spoke last week about his view of justice and the American way.
If you can’t bear to watch, TPM had a helpful account.
For Attorney General Bill Barr, the U.S. is beset by problems: non-believers, as well as liberals who believe in a “collectivist agenda.”
...
“Politics is everywhere. It’s omnipresent. Why is that?” Barr asked the audience.
The answer, he continued, was a political landscape dominated by conflict and strife between two incompatible visions of the country: limited government and a broader view of the state that clamps down on liberty by forcing a “collectivist agenda” on individuals.
(talkingpointsmemo.com/...)
Presumably we can cut down on the conflict and strife by hushing up about our divisive vision of a just society.
Last year the New York Times explained the Attorney General long has focused on ensuring government control of individuals’ bodies to promote traditionalist views:
Why is he giving the benefit of his reputation, earned over many years in Washington, to this president? His Catholic Lawyer article suggests an answer to that question. The threat of moral relativism he saw then came when “secularists used law as a weapon.” Mr. Barr cited rules that compel landlords to rent to unmarried couples or require universities to treat “homosexual activist groups like any other student group.” He reprised the theme in a speech at Notre Dame this month.
In 1995 and now, Mr. Barr has voiced the fears and aspirations of the conservative legal movement. By helping Mr. Trump, he’s protecting a president who has succeeded in confirming more than 150 judges to create a newly conservative judiciary. The federal bench now seems more prepared to lower barriers between church and state and reduce access to abortion — a procedure that Mr. Barr, in his 1995 article, included on a list of societal ills that also included drug addiction, venereal diseases and psychiatric disorders.
(www.nytimes.com/...)
He’s predicted since 1992 that Roe v. Wade will fall (www.businessinsider.com/...). Now he works every day to make this and the rest of his ultra-conservative Catholic agenda a reality. Are we to be forced to accept this “moral” agenda without a fight?
Meanwhile, Douthat has recently come out with an entire book on the decadent society as he sees it (books.google.com/...; kindly and gently reviewed by his newspaper here: www.nytimes.com/...). As his projecting subtitle implies, we are unable to get off our successful but decadent butts: “How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.” But again, it’s not really our successful decadent butts’ faults (whew)—it’s the government’s. If it only made our women reproduce more of our butts, there’d be more of us to get off our butts and be productive (unproductive, whatever).
He summarized his views of our decadence in a New York Times piece. As highbrow misogynists do, he somewhat subtly sets out his central theme of blaming women for controlling their own bodies by couching it in what he assumes is a bland enough version of replacement theory to not get called out as such.
In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm. This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent. A 2018 paper found that companies in younger labor markets are more innovative; another found that the aging of society helped explain the growth of monopolies and the declining rate of start-ups.
This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization. For much of Western history, declining birthrates reflected straightforward gains to human welfare: victories over infant mortality, over backbreaking agrarian economies, over confining expectations for young women. But once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.
(www.nytimes.com/...)
This is whom we are opposing, not a pool of potential allies. We the people in 2020 must democratically insist that our government ensure individual welfare, including women's rights, while also protecting the future from environmental catastrophe. Yes, Barrs and Douthats, that requires a progressive activist government focused on guaranteeing true liberty and justice for all, not fulfilling the dreams of wealthy, bored, spoiled, conservative white male social engineers. You, Barrs and Douthats, are the truly decadent, not the desperate working class.