My hope for productive discourse is waning after decades of working hard to keep channels open.
I am reminded of that poignant moment in The Chosen when, toward the end of World War II when Jews around the world are hearing unrelenting news of horrors in the Camps, the Orthodox boy turns to the Zionist and says, shockingly, "You are worse than Hitler. He killed the body of the Jews but you kill the soul."
The second boy has already enlisted to fight Hitler and later dies in the War. Chaim Potok treats both sides gently and generously, but having the boy die fighting Hitler makes his point clearly enough.
A first impulse is to be repelled by the Orthodox boy's egregious characterization of the Jews who wish to protect Jews in the disapora from another Holocaust by establishing a Jewish state. To say they are worse than Hitler is so outlandish as to seem insane.
But that's where my memory gets traction this morning. That Orthodox boy, for all his vitriol and hyperbole, was not insane -- at least not at the individual and clinical level. What he said would appear insane on an individual level, but it actually made sense GIVEN HIS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. For the Orthodox believe that a Jewish state must await a Messiah, and rushing it to avert a Holocaust is, in their sacred texts, an insult to God -- and thus harmful to the souls of the patient sufferers awaiting God's intervention.
Is productive discourse possible when people are made "insane" by religious upbringings? I am not naive and neither am I uneducated. I am also not so wedded to one political affiliation that I live in an information ghetto; nor am I so wedded to personalistic analyses that I reject good thinking done by imperfect people -- casting aspersions on good arguments because the author once kicked his dog, cheated on his wife, or even supported an immoral war. So I have no problem recalling that the young Henry Kissinger, when still a teacher at Harvard, published his work on the Congress of Vienna and noted that international and intercultural negotiations broke down terribly when religion was brought to the negotiating table. For Kissinger, the ongoing instability of 19th and 20th century Europe -- and the brutal catastrophes caused by that instability -- was in large part caused by the introduction of uncompromising religious beliefs to the negotiations for peace.
We see this in the Christo-Fascist influence on the Tea Party. They proudly (and ignorantly -- but not insanely, at least not clinically) tout their unwillingness to compromise. When they think God whispered something in their ear, they are willing to take us all to oblivion rather than compromise on it. Of course, negotiations fail when agents on both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table. I have negotiated for companies and countries in my consulting career, and I know that when the other side is uncompromising on something, they will pay too much to get it -- so my side does not object. But when both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table -- specifically, when those two positions directly conflict with one another -- there is no peaceful, stable resolution.
Religious beliefs do just this. Hence they must stay out of the negotiation. They must stay out of the policy discourse. They must remain in the private sphere.
The Founding Fathers in the US were brilliant. They Churches around them pressured them to create a State Church -- and Churchmen to this day compile mountains of falsified history to advance their greedy case to make their own sect the State Religion. Yet the Founding Fathers wished to permanently resist a State Church, separating them from the political sphere, insisting on freedom of religious belief as a foundation stone in the American Republic. Too bad they did not anticipate the centuries long struggle among the illiterati to misconstrue the First Amendment. For if they did, they would have written in no uncertain terms: freedom of PRIVATE religious belief, not the "freedom" to impose one's religious beliefs on others -- which is ludicrous on the face of it, but consistent with the behavior of perhaps half of American Christians.
These lessons sadly must be hard fought and learned slowly. It took until the 1960s for the Civil Rights movement to FINALLY gain enough momentum for the Supreme Court to articulate that prejudices (a subset of beliefs) are private matters -- you can be a racist and never invite a black family to your home, but in the public sphere, you must respect the civil rights of all human beings, and seat anyone who wishes at your lunch counter. If your "club" is a place where business (public sphere) is conducted, it is not private and thus not free from the obligation to behave decently.
Of course, these lessons are being unlearned by the uprising of Tea Party/ Christo-Fascists -- key: uncompromising -- movements which have provided tools to their evil child -- the White Supremacist/Neo-Nazis -- and the newly engaged cousin, the Putin/Russian Eurasianist Fascists -- who never apparently imagined that so many Americans would so foolishly invite them into the Oval Office and defend them so feverishly.
If you thought the ultimate sacrifice by our fathers and grandfathers to stop the Fascists in the 30s and 40s would be enough, you were wrong. If you spent a lifetime wondering how so many Germans allowed the Nazis to commit such horrors, you were as naive as was I.
Fascism at one extreme and statist Communism at the other have something in common and that something -- strongmen doing the bidding of the zealots against the rest -- is natural to humankind. Do you still believe that serfs were all oppressed by brutal Lords and would have voted them out if they had the chance? You may be watching too much Braveheart. Think that Patriots fight over monarchical or dictatorial overtures with life-sacrificing courage? Now I think you are a Mel Gibson fan.
Some thoughtful Libertarians may have once supported Trump when they imagined he would dismantle inefficient regulatory frameworks, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of statism their patron saints, Von Mises and Hayek, warned them about.
Some thoughtful Conservatives may have once supported Trump because they imagined that HRC represented too much of a challenge to their core beliefs, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of Constitution-burning that the Founding Fathers warned them about.
Yet some continue to defend this takeover from within, this impeding Coup. Why?
Ah, yes. You have failed, as did I, to learn this lesson: once the UNCOMPROMISING values are interjected into the negotiation, it is all over. Christo-Fascists (and their even more dangerous cousins, the Russian Eurasianists) have infiltrated the Conservative and Libertarian movements and polluted what were once well-reasoned camps with UNCOMPROMISING talking points and values. Once the reasonable conservatives abandoned reason for the "insanity" of compromise-free, religious dogma, only the best and brightest and most reflective Conservatives and Libertarians abandoned that toxic platform. Many have, of course, to their credit. But others, like Rand Paul, who apparently adopted without sufficient reflection his father's Libertarianism, have jumped on board the Putin train.
Just because people mimic rational discourse, it does not mean that they are reasoning. I know I have been as naive as any, so this warning may merely be an apologia for taking so long to acknowledge that our country will be saved from the Coup not by reasoning with the Center (especially given the theft of about 8% of the vote by GOP gerrymandering), but by uniting the Left and the disenchanted to believe that the American Experiment, despite all its flaws, is worth saving. It is essential for old, liberal Patriots to keep in mind that for many on the Left, the American Experiment has NOT been good to them, so exhorting them to help us save it will not be an easy task. But Putin's plan for destabilizing the EU, NATO, and the US, and installing a permanent kleptocracy that impoverishes us all is a far worse scenario, even for the youngster with college loans and a minimum wage job, so we must make the case -- well and soon.
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