Tag: Donald Trump

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Gratitude, Grace, and the Biden-Trump Handshake

Fresno Bee, Nov. 24, 2024

This post-election Thanksgiving, we all have the power to soften our hardened hearts.

One of the strangest scenes of this odd political year occurred when Donald Trump and Joe Biden exchanged pleasantries in the White House in front of a roaring fire on Nov. 13. Trump said “Thank you” four times within that minute-long meeting, while Biden said “Welcome,” “Welcome back” and “You’re welcome.” The men smiled and shook hands.

For a moment, you might imagine it was possible to forget the acrimony of the past. But one minute of staged courtesy is unlikely to heal a broken republic. As soon as the moment ended, the spark of grace was extinguished. The pundits were quick to remind us that Trump did not invite Biden to the White House for a similar handshake in 2020, and that Trump did not attend Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Partisan animosity continued apace. And this strange ritual was revealed to be a show for the cameras, lacking in sincerity and depth.

As we gather for Thanksgiving, the Biden-Trump handshake provides food for thought. During the holidays, we hope that gratitude, forgiveness, hospitality and love can work wonders. We don’t have to hate each other. We are not bound to return tit-for-tat. Human beings are free and creative. We can choose to forgive, to forget and to turn a new leaf.

There is an important difference between ritualized civility and a deeper spirit of sincere gratitude and generosity. One could, after all, give thanks mechanically or as a matter of courtesy without actually feeling grateful. The deeper spirit of gracious generosity is not a ritualized performance. Rather, it is a way of being.

But the rituals of civil society are important. Symbolic gestures like handshakes are powerful, and virtues are developed through practice.

A student of Confucius once asked the master how to learn to be good. Confucius replied, “Overcome yourself and return to ritual.” We learn to be good by setting aside our egos and playing along with the customs of civilized life, even when we don’t want to.

We teach young athletes to shake hands at the end of a game, whether they win or lose. And we encourage our children to say “please” and “thank-you” at appropriate moments. We model civility by saying and doing these things, even when we don’t feel like it. During the holidays, these rituals reach a climax. At Thanksgiving, we ought to give a prayer of thanks, even if we don’t feel particularly grateful.

While rituals are useful, they are not enough. A deeper engagement is required for genuine spiritual development. For swords to become plowshares, profound spiritual transformation is needed. This transformative growth may depend upon what Christians call “grace” — a mysterious and renewing gift of God. It also depends upon the hard work of wisdom.

None of this occurs in a moment. Saying “I’m sorry” does not instantly make everything better. A handshake cannot magically undo animosity, nor does a kind word eradicate decades of hostility. Love takes years to develop even in the best of circumstances. Trauma, anger and guilt are not easily overcome. And resentment is a powerful poison.

It may be too much to hope that enemies can become friends, but we can become less hateful and more civil if we choose to do so.

We do have some choice in the matter: It’s not possible to force someone to feel grateful, nor can we be compelled to love or to forgive. But we can choose to extend a hand or to say “thanks” and “you’re welcome.” We can also choose to keep our egos in check while we play along with the rituals.

Things won’t get better unless we choose to make them so. As the larger world careens about us, it is important to remember that we have the power to soften our hardened hearts. We can discipline our egos and return to ritual. We can extend a welcome hand to those we have written off as enemies. We can forgive those who have wronged us. We can offer thanks, even to those we think do not deserve it. And if this proves to be too difficult, we should at least encourage our children to be more gracious than we are.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article295924914.html#storylink=cpy

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The Second Coming of Donald Trump and The Temptation of Hyperbole

Trump 2.0 will no doubt be as chaotic as Trump 1.0. But despite the hyperbolic effusions of the political class, the country will likely stumble along, divided among red and blue partisans and another third who simply don’t care (as I discussed in a recent column). The American Republic will not collapse with Trump’s political resurrection. Nor has the messiah returned with Trump’s second coming.

We would be wise to avoid hyperventilating and to keep things in perspective. On both left and right, the tendency to exaggerate can undermine critical thinking. 

Trump is among the worst of those who exaggerate and embellish. In his victory speech Trump said, “God spared my life for a reason.” And, “This will truly be the golden age of America.” Trump’s Christian followers were even more direct. Christian nationalist firebrand Charlie Kirk saw in Trump’s victory the “Grace of God.” And Trump’s former spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain said of Trump, ““I declare tonight that your victory is found in Jesus Christ! Rest in Him – He has you, in the name of Jesus!”

Among the less zealous right-wing commentary, there was a tendency to exaggerate the significance of Trump’s victory. Consider, the smug conclusion reached by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, who claimed that Trump’s victory meant that “America, after its long journey through the 2010’s and 20’s, is becoming more conservative again.” 

On the other side, Trump’s victory brought forth lots of dire doomsaying. In The New Republic a column by Edith Olmsted proclaimed, “Americans just elected a fascist to the White House.” Another column by Ray Marcano said democracy “died on Nov. 6, 2024. It was 248 years old.” 

Pundits and politicians are often loose with their language. Everyone can be tempted by hyperbole. But it behooves us to be more careful and precise, and to avoid the Trumpian trumpet.

I’ll leave an extended critique of the theological bluster for another column (and my forthcoming book on Christian nationalism). But suffice it to say that the American Constitution is a secular document whose First Amendment prevents the establishment of anything like Christian nationalism. I might add that God must work in quite mysterious ways to have hand-picked someone like Trump as an instrument of His will.

Now let’s think critically about the hyperbole of the secular press. Consider Peggy Noonan’s claim about the triumph of conservatism. To say that Trump’s election is a conservative victory requires lots of qualification. Conservatives like Mike Pence  and other never-Trumpers refused to endorse Trump, whose lack of moral fiber and indifference to truth is far from conservative.

The hyperventilating of the left-wing commentariat is also problematic. To say that democracy died as a result of this election is absurd. This election was fair—despite the fact that it was Trump who kept warning of rigged elections and who threatened the existence of democracy when he disputed the 2020 election. His victory in 2024 was a democratic result.

I understand the fear that Trump will undermine this system. He certainly challenged our democracy in 2020. He was wrong then. But so far, the electoral system continues to work. Trump left office then. He returned now through a legitimate process. We ought to have faith that this system will continue to operate in the future. Trump has made threats that may undermine the Constitution. The Supreme Court has offered a broad kind of immunity that might facilitate wrongdoing. And Trump will most likely prevent further investigation into his first administration. This is dispiriting. And we should remain vigilant. But democracy ain’t dead yet. 

Left-wingers also ought to be cautious in invoking words like tyranny or fascism—and the idea of “resistance” to Trump 2.0. In a post-election column Robert Reich called for “peaceful and nonviolent” resistance to Trump. He said, “We the people will resist tyranny.” And, “We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.”

In my book on Trump and tyranny I argued for caution with the T-word. Trump was at most a would-be tyrant with a flawed personality. But he was (and is) constrained by our Constitutional system from consolidating power into full-fledged tyranny. 

These Constitutional brakes may be wearing thin. But the system worked to prevent Trump 1.0 from subverting democracy. I agree when Reich calls for a peaceful and nonviolent response to the threat of tyranny. But it would better to describe this simply as adherence to the Constitution and its anti-tyrannical fundamentals. The separation of powers was designed to resist tyranny. This system should be embraced and strengthened. But we should be careful with loose talk about tyranny and resistance, lest our thinking become less peaceful and more extreme.

Which brings me to the F-word. During the 2024 campaign each side accused the other of fascism. The term has become a catch-all pejorative divorced from its original significance. Fascism is an authoritarian political movement that desecrates fundamental liberties in the name of ethnic-nationalist ideology. It is militaristic and state-centered. And it is dependent upon fanatical true-believers and ideologues.

It is true that Trump called his opponents (including the press), enemies of the people and that he hinted at violence and threatened his enemies with revenge. That essay in The New Republic that said a fascist has been elected to the White House lists a long litany of Trump’s dangerously transgressive language. There may be some MAGA true believers who want to see Trump embrace violent ideas that even he described as “dark.” And some Christian nationalists do in fact dream of overthrowing our secular system.

But I doubt that the majority of the Americans who voted for Trump are fascists who would support a Trump regime that tore up the Constitution, fomented violence, and persecuted religious minorities. There are Christian nationalists in our country, as well as sexists, racists, and other sordid characters. There always have been. But it is hyperbolic to suggest that the majority of Trump’s voters would support or tolerate the creation of a MAGA gestapo or the overthrow of the Constitution. 

I could be wrong. History and human nature are unpredictable. In a symposium on my Trump book, a number of my critics suggested I was naïve and overly sanguine in my analysis of the Trump era. With Trump’s second coming, those critics might prove to be right. So let me conclude by saying that while I think we ought to be moderate and careful in our language, we also ought not be naïve. The danger of tyranny is as old as Plato, who pointed out that the moronic masses can end up voting a tyrant into power. This problem is real. No democracy lasts forever. Nothing human does. 

But there is stability in the American system, which was designed to prevent tyranny. It also helps to know that many conservatives agree with liberals that Trump 2.0 will be dangerous. I suspect that those conservatives would also agree with me that the theological fervor around Trump is both blasphemous and un-American.

Democracy is not dead yet. But we must remain vigilant. 

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The rule of law vs. the will of the tyrant

Fresno Bee, Nov. 3, 2024

This week, an arsonist burned ballot boxes in Washington and Oregon. This attack on the vote is, thankfully, a rare occurrence. But it is an ominous warning of threats to our rule-governed democracy.

Our country has established an orderly, rule-governed process for elections. Unfortunately, the rules have been recently disputed, specifically when Donald Trump challenged the idea of a rule-governed process when he refused to admit defeat in 2020. Some Americans are now confused about why the rules even matter to begin with.

Sadly, a number of Americans seem to admire a willingness to break the rules. A Marist poll from April of this year found that 41% of Americans agreed that “America has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.” Fifty-six percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, as did 28% of Democrats.

This result was reiterated by a more recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute which found that a third of Americans, and 55% of Trump supporters, agreed with the need for a “strong leader willing to break the rules.”

This attitude is Machiavellian and authoritarian. What matters, from this perspective, is gaining power. It does not matter how this is achieved because the end justifies the means.

This cynical idea is morally disastrous. It can be used to justify cheating in the whole of life. The cynic thinks rules are for suckers. And for some arch-cynics, rule-breaking becomes a way of life. What matters to the Machiavellian is outsmarting the saps who follow the rules.

Tyrants think that rules are made by the powerful for their own self-interest. From this standpoint, if you can rewrite the rules to maximize your own power, you’ve won. Not only have you defeated the old system, you’ve also created a new system in your own image.

In response, we ought to reassert the value of a rule-governed world. Rules create stability, structure and order that benefit everyone. Shared allegiance to a system of rules defuses violence and helps establish the possibility of social trust and cooperation. Shared rules allow us to plan for the future and develop common projects.

We rely upon rules to think, communicate, create and build. Grammar, logic, music and mathematics are fundamentally systems of rules. The sentence you are reading now makes sense because it follows the rules of the English language. The rules of language are mostly a matter of custom and habit. They are arbitrary but also important.

Games are like that, too: You can’t make a forward pass beyond the line of scrimmage in football, despite there being no necessary reason for that rule. Someone made it up long ago, and now we just play along. But if you break the rule, you’ll be penalized. And if you refuse to play according to that rule, you are not really playing football.

The legal system is presumably less arbitrary. Some laws appear to reflect the necessary “laws of nature,” as the Declaration of Independence put it, including the self-evident right to life, liberty and happiness. But the legal system also includes conventional and arbitrary elements, including laws about driving, paying taxes and voting.

The electoral college and our winner-takes-all system of voting does not reflect a law of nature. Rather, this system is a social and historical construction. This means that the system can be changed. But there are rules for changing the system, as defined by the Constitution and its amendment process. Burning a ballot box does nothing to change those rules. Nor does refusing to concede an election.

The American system of checks and balances is supposed to prevent a tyrant from corrupting the system of rules. But that system depends upon public trust. Beyond institutional checks and balances, we, the people, need to remind ourselves that rules matter.

The Machiavellians are wrong. The end does not justify the means. And those who are willing to break the rules to gain power are a threat to the very idea of a rule-governed democracy.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article294831724.html#storylink=cpy

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Democracy and Its Discontents: Trump, Harris, and the need for wisdom

Fresno Bee, October 27, 2024

No matter who wins in November, we must remain committed to wisdom, virtue and truth.

Our democracy is in big trouble. Each side fears the apocalypse, should their party lose the presidential election next month.

Some never-Trumpers, like Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, have stated that, if Trump wins, they will leave the country, given that Trump has repeatedly promised to prosecute or punish his enemies if elected. The other day, a friend of mine said he was hoping to leave the U.S. no matter who wins, since this election shows that our democratic society is doomed.

Republican partisans believe Trump has been unjustly persecuted by the deep state and “the enemy from within,” as Trump puts it. They think Trump’s felonies are fake news, and that a Democratic victory would empower “Marxists, communists and fascists” to ruin the country. They agree with J.D. Vance that “big tech rigged the 2020 election,” and they agree with Trump that the Jan. 6 convicts are really “political prisoners,” “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.”

The other party warns that all of this represents a fundamental threat to our republic. Vice President Kamala Harris recently said that Trump “admires dictators and is a fascist.” The Democrats complain that Trump stacked the Supreme Court with partisan hacks and warn of authoritarianism, nepotism and corruption should Trump and his cronies return to the White House. At a fundamental level, Democratic partisans find it hard to believe that any sane person could support Trump.

For the partisans, this election represents an existential crisis of historical proportions. But while the partisans fret, a sizable minority of people don’t even bother to vote. According to the Pew Research Center, a third of the voting-eligible population did not vote in 2020; one in three Americans did not participate in the election that gave birth to endless controversy, insurrectionist activity and ongoing angst.

For those unmotivated voters, the past several years — and maybe democracy itself — is a mug’s game, not worth their time. And so we have a fundamental impasse: A third of the people don’t care enough to vote. The rest are polarized and paranoid.

This is no way to run a country.

The philosophical take-away is that there is no perfect social or political system. That’s because human beings are fundamentally flawed — we lack wisdom and virtue. A few people are evil and corrupt, while many others are lazy, ignorant and self-interested. On occasion, a few rare souls rise above the muck. But there are always more sinners than saints.

This recognition of our flawed humanity is what led the Founding Fathers to set up a Constitution with checks and balances and a separation of powers. But this system is frustratingly imperfect, and we should not forget that Americans fought a bloody civil war as we struggled to form “a more perfect union.”

Approximately 2,500 years ago, Plato argued that democracy was among the worst forms of government, as it empowered the moronic mob. His solution was a government ruled by wise and virtuous philosopher-kings. But we know now that monarchic power is as dangerous as mob rule. Which leaves us, frankly, without a perfect solution. As they say, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

But democracy can be improved. We do that by educating citizens in virtue and wisdom.

In the ideal world, citizens would vote out of a sense of duty. Voters would use the cool light of reason to assess the merits of each candidate, guided overall by a common sense of truth and value. They would put the common good above their own self-interest, and honor and respect the sincerity and rationality of other voters — even those with whom they disagree. And when the election was over, they would accept the results and remain committed to the fairness of the system and the rule of law.

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. A fortunate few may imagine leaving the country as our democracy founders. But in reality, there is no better place to go. Human nature follows us wherever we are. And there is no perfect political system.

The task at hand is to learn from our present crisis, to work incrementally to rebuild a broken society and to remain committed to wisdom, virtue and truth, no matter who wins in November.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article294485719.html#storylink=cpy

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Alienation, Marxism, Trump, and Harris

Fresno Bee, August 31, 2024

Labor Day is a good time to reflect on ethics and the economy. Honest, hard-working people should be able to earn enough money to live decent lives. There is something corrupt about wealth that is divorced from work. And rich people don’t deserve more social and political power than the working class.

These common sense ideas might sound socialist. Unfortunately, the mere mention of the “s-word” or Karl Marx can provoke outrage. Socialism and Marxism are anathema to many Americans, having become terms of insult in our culture wars. And, recently, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Kamala Harris of being a Marxist — he calls her “comrade Kamala.” “We’re not ready for a communist president, okay?” Trump recently said of Harris.

This is ridiculous. Harris is a mainstream liberal proposing moderate help for consumers on housing, health care and food costs — proposals that are popular among voters. Harris even seems to agree with Trump about eliminating taxes on tips.

Harris is not proposing a communist revolution that would abolish capitalism or centralize production in the hands of the proletariat. And yet she is absurdly accused of being a Marxist.

The accusation is occasionally linked to an insinuation about her estranged father, Donald J. Harris, a former Stanford economics professor who did, in fact, publish work on Marx.

But this kind of ad hominem and innuendo is silly. It’s as bad as the argument made against Trump regarding the fact that he inherited his wealth from his racist father. What matters is a candidate’s current views and policy proposals — not something dredged up out of their biography, over which they have no control.

At any rate, one wishes there were a candidate who addressed alienation and inequality head on. This would ring a bell for many Americans who feel that the economy is rigged against them, and who are disenchanted with the whole social and political system.

Notably, alienation is a Marxist idea. A young Marx coined the term “alienated labor” in the 1840s to describe how labor produces surplus profit that goes into the capitalist’s pocket. Marx says this empowers the wealthy, while impoverishing the worker.

Things have changed for the better in the past centuries. Economic regulations prevent the kind of exploitation and miserable conditions that afflicted workers in the 19th century. But the general concept of alienation remains useful: Drudgery, poverty and inequality remain problems, and people are disillusioned with politics and the economy.

The Harris Poll’s “alienation index” has tracked this for decades. A majority of Americans report a deep sense of alienation when asked whether elites care about them or whether the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

Hard-working people often can’t afford adequate housing or other basic goods. The working poor lead precarious lives, earning low wages doing unpleasant and dangerous jobs. They find themselves in debt, unable to get ahead or even imagine retirement. An accident or health crisis can throw them into homelessness.

Meanwhile, some lucky stiffs inherit wealth or otherwise hit the jackpot. The truly wealthy put their money to work in the stock market, earning millions without breaking a sweat. The wealthy are able to pull strings and gain access to a world of luxury and power that the poor can only imagine.

This difference of life prospects and social power produces instability and resentment. Different classes of people inhabit different economic and political realities. When social classes are estranged from each other, they grow suspicious. The wealthy pull away from the masses, retreating into gated communities and luxurious clubhouses. And those on the bottom are alienated from the system itself. They give up on voting or caring, since they think the whole thing is rigged by the rich at the expense of the poor.

To name alienation is to echo Marx. This is not to say that Marx was right about everything or that a communist revolution is needed, but alienation remains a significant social problem. Too many workers live precariously. The average Joe resents the fat cats in first class, and lots of people distrust the system. These are profound and perennial issues. Our leaders need to address these problems. And they might even learn something from reading Marx.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article291660565.html#storylink=cpy