1968 Redux?

Ross Douthat speculates on whether history is repeating itself and we are entering a period of American history not unlike the late 60s/early 70s.

History rhymes rather than repeats; we are not reliving the widening gyre that Didion discerned. But there are echoes and recurrences linking this difficult moment to the American berserk of two generations back.

 

Now as then there is urban unrest, a sudden rise in homicides, tensions between protesters and cops; even white nationalism is re-emerging from its post-segregation sleep. Now as then there is campus activism, the New Left reborn as Social Justice Warriors. Now as then there is a spate of domestic terror attacks. Now as then — much more now than then, in fact — there is a pervasive mistrust of institutions, a sense that the country is rotting from the head down.

 

Our personalities echo the past as well. Donald Trump as George Wallace. Bernie Sanders as Gene McCarthy. Hillary as the Democrats’ own Richard Nixon. Even Pope Francis, our era’s defining religious figure, is very much a character out of Catholicism’s 1970s-era civil wars.

Click through to read the whole thing, but Douthat concludes that we (probably) aren't about to experience 1968 redux. On the way to church yesterday I heard a speaker on NPR compare this moment with that one with the comment "our cities aren't burning, but the internet is burning." As bad as that is -- and if you spend any time reading comment threads you'll be profoundly depressed --  I fervently hope it remains that way.

Douthat on religion without renunciation

Ross Douthat's Sunday column argues that the one thing Pope Francis must do is restore the moral credibility of the Catholic Church hierarchy. In explaining why he delivers more of his typically clear-sighted cultural analysis:

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Such worldliness should not be confused with atheism. Our age is still religious; it’s just made its peace with human appetites and all the varied ways they intertwine. From the sermons of Joel Osteen to the epiphanies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” our spiritual oracles still urge us to seek the supernatural, the numinous, the divine. They just dismiss the idea that the divine could possibly want anything for us except for what we already want for ourselves.

Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.

So there are shadows on our liberated society, doubts that creep in around the edges, moments when scolds and moralists and even popes almost seem to have a point. Which helps explain, perhaps, the strange, self-contradictory defensiveness that greets the Catholic Church’s persistent refusal to simply bless every new development and call it progress. (Nobody cares what the pope thinks — and I demand that he think exactly as I do!)

How refreshing to read that -- in the pages of The New York Times no less! -- on the same day "enormously popular preacher and author" Rob Bell gave a mushy endorsement to same-sex marriage because: "I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs -- I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are."

I'm glad Jesus and the Apostles didn't have that attitude! I suspect the church they founded (unpopular teachings and all) will endure long after Rob Bell's fifteen minutes of fame have passed.

Reaction to Pope Benedict's resignation

This blog is very interested in ecclesiology, so I'd be remiss If I didn't note the big news out of the Vatican this week. The Pope's surprising announcement that he'd be stepping down sent shock waves thru the Roman Catholic Church as well as the wider Christian community. Actually, it's more proper to call this an abdication rather than a resignation. After all, Popes aren't supposed to resign! This is supposed to be a divinely conferred lifetime office more like a king or queen than a CEO. Or is it?

If I was a Catholic Christian I'd have some concerns about what Benedict XVI's decision says about the nature of the office. Ross Douthat -- who is Catholic -- expresses those concerns. He writes:

There is great symbolic significance in the fact that popes die rather than resign: It’s a reminder that the pontiff is supposed to be a spiritual father more than a chief executive (presidents leave office, but your parents are your parents till they die), a sign of absolute papal surrender to the divine will (after all, if God wants a new pope, He’ll get one), and a illustration of the theological point that the church is still supposed to be the church even when its human leadership isn’t at fighting trim, whether physically or intellectually or (for that matter) morally.

This last point is underplayed, but supremely important. Catholicism’s resilience has always depended both on the power of the pontiff to sustain unity and safeguard doctrine and on the power of the Catholic faith itself to survive leaders who are wrongheaded, incompetent, senile or corrupt. (There’s a reason why relatively few popes have been canonized, and why Catholics wear their faith’s ability to recover from the Borgias as a badge of honor.) And if papal resignations became commonplace and expected, I worry that they might end up burdening the papacy with a weight it cannot bear — encouraging Catholics to lay far too much stress on the human qualities of the see of Peter’s occupant, and encouraging the world at large to judge the faith’s truth claims on whether the Vatican seemed to be running smoothly, and whether the pope’s approval ratings were robust.

To be fair Douthat sees some possible benefits coming out of this, but I think he astutely sees how this "resignation" opens the door to some difficult questions about the papacy. Coincidentally, I'll be leading a discussion on Sunday about the article in The Apostles' Creed that states: "I believe in the holy catholic Church." This is an article of faith held in common by Catholics and Protestants, but I suspect if we drill down we'll discover some significant differences in how we define "the holy catholic Church" and those differences would revolve around the office that will soon have a new face.

Like the evangelical leaders quoted in this round-up of reactions I'm thankful for this Pope's steadfast stand on issues that all Christians should care deeply about, and I pray for the day when the spiritual unity of the one holy catholic  and apostolic church will be made more visible than it is now.

Makers vs. takers? Some post-election thoughts.

Prominent among the post-election breast beating on the Right is a counterproductive (and quite ugly) meme. It goes something like this. We've become a nation where half the population expects the government to take care of them, a nation where takers outnumber makers, where there are more people in the wagon than pushing the wagon. This metanarrative is counterproductive because it insults the very voters you need to win over to have any chance of ever having another Republican president, and ugly because it raises stereotypes about certain groups being lazy shiftless folks looking for a handout.

I'm not saying this meme is completely without credibility. Many sweeping generalizations have an element of truth in them. I'm sure there were people who voted for Obama simply because they think he'll protect some or another benefit they get from the government.

On the other hand, it's an oversimplification to say that Romney was the candidate of rich white people, but truth be told there are a lot of glum faces on Palm Beach island this week!

The counterevidence to the "takers for Obama vs. makers for Romney" meme is abundant for anyone with eyes to see. How about my former neighbor, a retired African-American postal carrier, with an Obama sign in his front yard. Is he a taker? Maybe his life's work is worth less since it was done for the federal government and not the private sector? How about the millions of Hispanics and Asian-Americans who exit polling indicates rejected Republican candidates? Are they all on the government dole?

Hopefully the answer is obvious. If anything these communities typify values of hard work and family more than some white communities.

Perhaps the answer to the GOP defeat is more complicated than one is led to believe by the likes of Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh? If you find those voices authoritative then you probably won't care what David Brooks has to say. He's a moderate and he writes for the liberal New York Times. Nevertheless in my opinion he's one of the sharpest commentators out there and if Republicans are going to learn from this defeat -- and if those of us social conservatives who care passionately about defending the unborn and traditional marriage are going to have a voice in Washington (my hunch is that a meaningful slice of the people who voted for Obama did so in spite of his social liberalism) -- we should listen to such as Brooks (and his colleague Ross Douthat) that the GOP's traditional "public is bad private is good, what's good for Wall Street is good for Main Street" economic message is hopelessly out of touch with the challenges faced by growing numbers of hard-working Americans.

Here's a relevant quote from Brooks' November 8 column The Party of Work:

The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.

For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.

Let’s just look at one segment, Asian-Americans. Many of these people are leading the lives Republicans celebrate. They are, disproportionately, entrepreneurial, industrious and family-oriented. Yet, on Tuesday, Asian-Americans rejected the Republican Party by 3 to 1. They don’t relate to the Republican equation that more government = less work.

Over all, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the six post-cold-war elections because large parts of the country have moved on. The basic Republican framing no longer resonates.

I'm not Asian or Hispanic, but I have the same reaction listening to cliche-ridden rhetoric about the evils of big government, etc. "He doesn't get me or people like me."

Sure, I understand the threat posed by deficits and runaway spending. But when I'm struggling to scrape together enough money each month to pay our bills, when I'm getting screwed by my insurance company, when I worry about how we're going to afford to send our boys to good schools -- with those things on my mind the priority of cutting the capital gains tax or reducing the size of government to below twenty percent of GDP leaves me cold.

I guess that's why for the first time in my adult life I didn't vote in a presidential election. Give me a candidate that represents my social values and economic values and I'll make the effort to vote.

More awesomeness from Ross

After describing the amazing transformation of Washington, D.C. and surrounding regions from blight to astonishing affluence (and employing a Hunger Games analogy that I'm clueless about) Ross Douthat ends his column on Washington Versus America with this analysis.

For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, what’s happened in Washington these last 10 years should be a natural part of the case against Obamanomics. Our gilded District is a case study in how federal spending often finds its way to the well connected rather than the people it’s supposed to help, how every new program spawns an array of influence peddlers, and how easily corporations and government become corrupt allies rather than opponents.

The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.

There’s a case that this president’s policies have made these problems worse, sluicing more borrowed dollars into programs that need structural reform, and privileging favored industries and constituencies over the common good.

But this story is one that Romney and his party seem incapable of telling. Instead, many conservatives prefer to refight the welfare battles of the 1990s, and insist that our spending problem is all about an excess of “dependency” among the non-income-tax-paying 47 percent.

In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.

When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.

My brother lives in Baltimore which is rapidly becoming part of the Beltway axis of power and money. Whenever I visit I'm both fascinated and appalled by the trends Douthat describes. Nowhere is the growing gap between the Two America's more pronounced (except maybe Palm Beach County where I live). This also points out the ideas deficit of the Romney campaign and Republican party who can't seem to do any better than recycle talking points from the 1980's that have nothing to do with the challenges of the shrinking middle class.

Does anyone really think that if Republicans take back the White House (and hold onto Congress) the growth of this Washington will stop? No. The benefits will go to another set of well connected insiders.

Once more on Christians and politics

Ross Douthat:

We only have two parties in America, and to be active in politics inevitably requires identifying with one more than the other, and probably becoming directly involved with one or the other as well. But given how unlikely it seems that a political party in a fallen world would have a platform that comports precisely with God’s intentions for human affairs, any serious Christian should assume that there are places where his or her party is getting some important issue wrong, or at the very least giving it insufficient attention. And just recognizing those places or issues is not enough: The Christian Republican or the Christian Democrat has the obligation to focus on them as well, to prioritize them and call attention to them even when it annoys or frustrates their co-partisans, in order to demonstrate where their ultimate loyalties really lie.

I realize some readers may not think it possible to be a "Christian Democrat" (if you're a conservative) or "Christian Republican" (if you're a liberal). If that describes you please read the above paragraph again. BTW the quote comes from a tribute to Chuck Colson who, Douthat argues, modeled a healthy Christian engagement with politics -- healthy meaning it was engagement informed more by the gospel of Jesus Christ than partisan loyalty.

Ross Douthat on Bad Religion

Ross Douthat is a writer I've quoted and linked to several times at this blog. He's just come out with a new book provocatively titled Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics -- which I hope to read. Douthat was interviewed about the book on NPR Weekend Edition.

It's worth a listen.

Gambling and social justice

Russell Moore arguing that legalized gambling (casino and otherwise) isn't primarily a moral issue. . .

But gambling isn’t merely a “values” issue. Neither is it primarily a “moral” issue, at least not in terms of what we typically classify as “moral values” issues. Gambling isn’t primarily a question of personal vice. If it were, we could simply ask our people to avoid the lottery tickets and horse-tracks, but leave it legal. Gambling is a social justice issue that defines how it is that we love our neighbors and uphold the common good.

Gambling is a form of economic predation. Gambling grinds the faces of the poor into the ground. It benefits multinational corporations while oppressing the lower classes with illusory promises of wealth, and with (typically) low-wage, transitory jobs that simultaneously destroy every other economic engine of a local community.

In the end, the casinos will leave. And they’ll leave behind a burned-over district with no thriving agricultural, manufacturing, or tourism economies. In the meantime, they leave behind the wreckage of “check-to-cash” loan sharks, pawn shops, prostitution, and 1-2-3 divorce courts.

Conservative Christians can’t talk about gambling, if we don’t see the bigger picture.

Moore goes on to write that the best way for Christians to undercut the appeal of gambling is to faithfully and compassionately preach the gospel to those vulnerable to the allure of the slots. Read the whole thing!

On a related note I'm not surprised to see that the billionaire bankrolling Newt Gingrich's campaign is a casino magnate. How telling that he's prepared to spend millions to stop Rick Santorum because he doesn't like the Pennsylvanian's social conservatism. I wonder how those South Carolina voters that gave Gingrich his big moment in the sun feel about that? Say what you will about Santorum, he's a principled conservative in the traditional sense of that oft-corrupted word. I'd love to see him debate the President on some of the major social issues that divide our country right down the middle, issues of more lasting significance than budgets and taxes (though budgets and taxes can effect those issues).

As Ross Douthat wrote recently:

From election to election, politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse — which is as it should be. But the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the debates over human life and human rights, public morals and religious freedom – culture war debates, that is, in all their many forms.

Douthat: "Return of the Repressed"

Once again Ross Douthat proves to be one of the few conservative pundits who gets it re the economy. Granted, he writes for The New York Times which gives those living in the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh alternate universe an excuse to dismiss him as a RINO.

In the course of the 2000s, under a tax-cutting, business-friendly Republican administration, middle class paychecks grew much more slowly than the economy as a whole, upward mobility for the poor continued to lag behind parts of Western Europe, and the combination of unfunded tax cuts and deficit spending worsened the country’s fiscal picture just as the Baby Boomers were poised to retire. Then came the financial crisis, touched off in part by gross recklessness on Wall Street. Then came the Great Recession, which threw millions of Americans out of work, hit downscale workers much harder than it did the college-educated, and sent the deficit spiraling upward to unprecedented heights.

It was a sequence of events that seemed to call into question certain commonplace Republican assumptions — that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, that marginal tax cuts are a sufficient method of generating broadly shared prosperity, and that supply-side economics usually pays for itself. And many of the candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination have made halting, tentative attempts to respond to these developments. . .

Read the rest

The death penalty

I've written before about my conflicted feelings about capital punishment. Some of the reasons for my ambivalence could be seen in the case of Troy Davis -- executed last week in Georgia -- such as witnesses changing their story, jurors having second thoughts, lack of forensic evidence, and a defendant going to his death insisting he was innocent. Of course none of this proves definitively that an innocent man was put to death, but it raises questions. Does the Davis case (and others like it) raise enough doubt to justify abolishing the death penalty? Ross Douthat says no and if I was to support the continuance of capital punishment it would be on the basis he lays out.

If capital punishment disappears in the United States, it won’t be because voters and politicians no longer want to execute the guilty. It will be because they’re afraid of executing the innocent.

This is a healthy fear for a society to have. But there’s a danger here for advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.

Instead, he received a level of legal assistance, media attention and activist support that few convicts can ever hope for. And his case became an example of how the very finality of the death penalty can focus the public’s attention on issues that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.

Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked. We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the larger problems with crime and punishment in America.

Also related to the death penalty was an incident at a recent GOP presidential debate where Texas Governor Rick Perry claimed he'd never had a hard time sleeping at night in view of the 234 people executed under his governorship. Perry's answer was met by loud cheers from the audience. I was happy to see this response from Chuck Colson.

Now, I have to admit that I was deeply troubled by the governor’s response. I recall the life-and-death decisions I participated in when I was in the White House. Some nights I would go home deeply concerned that I might be putting people in peril. I know that I lost sleep — it’s hard to imagine anybody not being troubled by having to make those kinds of decisions.

What’s more, my experience with the criminal justice system, which, like any human institution, is capable of grave errors, doesn’t instill in me a level of confidence anywhere approaching that of the governor’s.

Let me be clear: I think that there are times when capital punishment is necessary and justified. But the thought of taking another person’s life, however heinous their crimes, should give us pause. It’s never to be made lightly or causally [sic].

And it certainly shouldn’t be the occasion for cheering as the crowd in California audience did twice. If the governor’s response troubled me, the crowd’s cheering chilled me.

Colson goes on to express his hope that the folks doing the cheering weren't Christians. Indeed.

Marking 9/11/01

The week leading up to the solemn 10-year-anniversary on Sunday has elicited boatloads of commentary, etc. Here are some links I've found worthwhile. I'll be updating this list as I find more. Check back.


9/11: The Week Before (In Focus with Alan Taylor) - This is a photo essay of events taking place around the world on the week before that unforgettable day, including some poignant shots of the twin towers. Do you remember what you were doing on the days before everything changed?

Prayer at Ground Zero (Michael Horton) - Horton reacts to the outrage of some Christians over NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision not to allow prayers at the official ceremonies. Whether you agree or disagree this fine piece will prompt you to think more deeply about the Christian understanding of prayer and the role of religion in public life.

New York's Post-9/11 Church Boom (John Starke) - A terrific piece of reporting on the surprising resurgence of evangelical churches in the Big Apple.

It's Still the 9/11 Era (Ross Douthat) - One of my favorite columnists asks Reagan's famous question: "Are we better off than we were 10 years ago?"

In an odd way just about any New York City movie made after September 11, 2001 is touched by that day. Though Spike Lee's 2002 film 25th Hour isn't explicitly about 9/11 -- the novel and screenplay were written before -- the events hang like a spectre over it, and I find the opening credit sequence (embedded below) to be the most beautiful cinematic remembrance I've seen. I was moved when I first saw it in the theater in 2002 and still am today.




Simply Evil (Christopher Hitchens) - Here's Hitch at his best calling the perpetrators of 9/11 what they were. Evil.

Simply Incoherent (Douglas Wilson) - And here's Doug Wilson pointing out the irony of Hitchens (the guy that wrote God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) calling anything "evil".

Slain Priest: 'Bury His Heart, But Not His Love' (NPR) - A remembrance of Father Mychal Judge by the police lieutenant who carried his body out of the North Tower and the priest who gave his funeral homily.

The obligation of Christian politicians

I know I linked to Ross Douthat already this week, but this is too good to not pass along.

There is no definitive Christian approach to politics. There are lines a believer cannot cross and ideologies that cannot be embraced, but a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim a Christian warrant for their approach to political affairs, and likewise a neoconservative and a realist, or for that matter a monarchist and a republican.

But the diversity and open-endedness of Christian political thought doesn’t absolve Christian politicians of the obligation to think seriously about the interaction between their personal faith and their public duties. Instead, it sharpens that obligation: Precisely because there is no single model for a Christian politician, every Christian in politics has an obligation to be a model — to make it clear, in words and deeds, how their faith informs their activism, and to constantly test their political convictions against their theological worldview.

Read the quote in context here.

Palin and the media

Conservative Ross Douthat attempts an intervention in the increasingly co-dependent marriage of the liberal media and the relentlessly self-promoting Sarah Palin. This grim spectacle reached new lows in the wake of the Tuscon shooting. The title of his column ("Scenes From a Marriage") is a nice Ingmar Bergman reference too!

Palin, meanwhile, officially despises the “lamestream” media. But press coverage — good, bad, whatever — is clearly the oxygen she craves. She supposedly hates having her privacy invaded, yet her family keeps showing up on reality TV. She thinks the political class is clueless and out-of-touch, but she can’t resist responding to its every provocation. Her public rhetoric, from “death panels” to “blood libel,” is obviously crafted to maximize coverage and controversy, and generate more heat than light. And her Twitter account reads like a constant plea for the most superficial sort of media attention.

It’s a grim spectacle on both sides, and last week’s pointless controversy was a particularly low point. So let me play the relationship counselor. To the media: Cover Sarah Palin if you want, but stop acting as if she’s the most important conservative politician in America. Stop pretending that she has a plausible path to the presidency in 2012. (She doesn’t.) Stop suggesting that she’s the front-runner for the Republican nomination. (She isn’t.) And every time you’re tempted to parse her tweets for some secret code or crucial dog whistle, stop and think, this woman has fewer Twitter followers than Ben Stiller, and then go write about something else instead.

To Palin: You were an actual politician once (remember that?), but you’re becoming the kind of caricature that your enemies have always tried to make of you. So maybe it’s time to turn off your iPad for a while, and take a break from Facebook and Fox News. The world won’t end if you don’t respond to every criticism, and you might even win a few more admirers if you cultivated a lighter touch and a more above-the-fray persona. Oh, and when that reality-TV producer sends you a pitch for “Sarah Plus Five Plus Kate Plus Eight,” just say no.

Read the whole thing.

Best filmmaker of his generation?

Ross Douthat makes a strong case for the gentleman pictured at left.