New Communities for the Long Haul

        President Trump's obscene $110 billion arms sale agreement with the Saudis last weekend was accompanied by the farce of his belief that his Arab customer in Riyadh represented Islam.  This leaves out another 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who are not part of the deal, and of course some are not Sunni.   

        Not only is it a long stretch from local hegemony in the Saudi Arabian peninsula to the Taliban of Afghanistan but the weekend deal seemed determined to make war a priority as Trump strangely attacked Shiite Iran at the very moment 75 percent of its citizens had just elected Hassan Rouhani--- the moderate U. S. nuclear accords partner---to be their new president. 

        A 2010 Pew Research report demonstrates the absurdity of the Trump administration world view.

The Presidential Option for Violence

         In the sinister good old days foreign governments meddled abroad at long distance as when Stalin had Trotsky beaten to death in Mexico (1940) or Chile's dictator, Pinochet, ordered the assassination of his political opponent, Orlando Letelier, by a car bomb that exploded in Washington's  Sheridan Square (1976).

       These days lethal events bear the mark of personal intimacy as Monday's suicide bombing in Manchester demonstrated, and as Trump's intimate foreign policy also demonstrated with last week's riot on Massachusetts Avenue. A jelly bean trail ran from the White House meeting of Turkey's president, Recept Erdogan, to his embassy where he watched from the comfort of his limousine while apparently ordering his personal bodyguards and embassy staff to attack demonstrators across the street who were protesting his policies.  You can watch the shocking video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4hSrnri2qg

and here:

https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/865310629934112768

        No one has been charged so far but it's to wonder if Erdogan--who has jailed 40,000 of his fellow citizens without trial this past year--was giving us a preview of how he and his American partner, Trump, are able to freely use strong-arm tactics in broad daylight to suppress dissent with impunity. 

        Here's another preview:  Last May 1st this new intimate mode of lethal diplomacy via friendship was on view following a Saudi Arabian delegation visit to the White House. The President's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, invited delegates next door to nail down the $110 billion arms sale subsequently  finalized in Riyadh by President Trump.  In front of the awed Saudis Jared is reported to have even called Lockheed's CEO, Marilyn Hewson on the spot asking for a discount on the price of a "Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)" system the Saudis wished they could afford to buy. (She said she would look into it.)

Ending the U. S. Addiction to Violence 

        Of course, there's nothing new about American inspired political violence or U. S. corrupt and bloody deeds in international affairs.  Many precedents to the Trump era today include the sorry trail of a CIA in 1953 overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whose imperious alliance with the U. S. led to the Iranian revolution of 1978, the hostage crisis, and on to the American secret arming of Saddam Hussein's Iraq during its 1980's war with Iran (revealed by Seymour Hersh's reporting), followed by the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and our currently running fourteen year Middle East wars that created the rise of the ISIS caliphate. 

        Americans face a long slog to disown this history and define a democratic route to a civilized nation that practices both justice and peace. The immediate journey ahead includes a possible two term Republican White House, domination of a Right leaning Supreme Court for many years, and little sign of serious legislative initiative to dramatically reduce inequality. 

 The Impotence of Traditional Faith Communities

         Do faith communities have the will to set aside their instituitional priorities and stand against this rising tide of chaos and violence? Recent research by the Pew Research Center suggests not.  Their April 27th 2017 survey found that Trump's support from evangelicals is strongest among those who attend church regularly. "Eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants who attend church at least once a month approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, including 67% who strongly approve of his job performance." 

       Even when Pew's polling includes the entire theological spectrum--from conservative to liberal--fifty percent of White Protestants and Catholics of all degrees of persuasion approve of Trump's job performance. An earlier March 2017 Pew survey found that "more than half the states (28) have [congressional] delegations that are composed entirely of Christians."  Measured by demographics and opinion polls faith communities seem to offer little hope that they will be the bulwark against the rise of a Trump-like autocracy.

Forming New Interfaith Coalitions of Resistance 

       On the other hand the new Pew surveys found that 83 percent of African Americans and Latinos disapprove of Trump and this does offer hope for the future of a resistance movement. Multi racial interfaith PICO and IAF coalitions across the country are creating a more reliable bulwark against the rising tide of violence and chaos than mainline faith groups seem willing to mobilize.  

        Public witness for justice and peace in the public square is beginning to create the "new being" Paul Tillich once wrote about and that Rev. William Barber's Moral Mondays movement has activated: including new ways for people to unite around their shared ultimate concerns---becoming learning and witnessing communities of resistance while making institutional life and maintenance secondary; finding new common ground in the work of social repair and rebuilding that is ranging from housing and schools advocates to emergency response teams monitoring threatened ICE deportations, to progressive "political" action groups building cross-cultural, cross-class, trans- racial communities of resistance for the long haul.  

Quicker than Lightning

         This Tuesday's FBI massacre to the contrary, the Trump regime remains well-ensconced and difficult to dislodge with the President having taken hold of the government's investigative power and busily consulted, as of this writing, Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The corrupt interior nature of politics as practiced is on display and constitutionally implemented remedies could become closeted, making the times at this moment more dangerous than perhaps any other period of history. 

 

         While  questions about the President's competency have been growing in high places (The New Yorker May 8th) they're not shared by the supporters who elected him.   Mental health professionals have been citing instances when Donald Trump seemed confused about where his Navy was sailing or hazy on details of his own health care bill. He is obviously poorly read to the point of near-illiteracy as his recent confusion of Andrew Jackson with the Civil War illustrated. What continues to be missed in this picture, however, is his supporters who consider themselves in a fight to the death because their lives, their families and children have been destroyed by globalization.  It's no small thing unless you work in Silicon Valley.

          What this economically destroyed population that elected Trump sees is that he is lightning quick in his grasp of political opportunities-such as blocking the FBI's investigative power by firing Jim Comey and thus strengthening his hand. They see his intuitive genius for skillfully incentivizing opponents with promises that may be empty. The Rose Garden celebration last week was a case in point. There had in actuality been no passage of health care legislation, no change in Obama Care, and no new jobs to speak of, but it served Trump well as political showboating that, however fraudulent, further strengthened his momentum toward his personal goal: benefiting from the profits of the Wall Street system.

         A totalitarian tyrant, Hannah Arendt observed, claims to be "more obedient...than any government ever was before....pretending to establish the reign of justice on earth... without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior." That's vintage Trump.

        Essential to his success are these people, long ignored by the Democrats, who are the victims of the nation's vast deindustrialization, off-shoring, and subsequent inequality who are desperate and in their extremis see Donald Trump as their best and only hope for economic recovery.  Yes, they see his crudeness, his compulsive lying, but since that's often been how their own lives have been destroyed they count on his brutalism to do what the democrats haven't, which is to give their lives and their children a new chance. Whether by hook or by crook, no longer matters.

       The Rose Garden charade last week also made the President's congressional confreres happy (and faithful) because it provided momentum for their ambitious plan to reform tax policy which is actually another bullet aimed at the heart of abandoned workers.   Robert Greenstein for 35 years the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote an immediate reply: 

"the President's emerging fiscal agenda...features large increases in defense funding offset by cuts in a range of significant domestic programs, substantial tax cuts mainly for people at very high income levels, losses in health care for millions of low- and moderate-income Americans, and potentially deep cuts in entitlement programs outside of Medicare and Social Security, including programs vital to tens of millions of Americans of lesser means."

       Hannah Arendt's words ring true again. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she observes that the uniqueness of totalitarianism was its capacity to "explode the very alternative on which on which all definitions of the essence of governments have been based...between  lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power."

        Lightning quick, this is where we are today. We can see a Trump hegemony expanding internationally and exercising arbitrary power as the former Exxon Mobile magnate Rex Tillerson--now Secretary of State---announces drastically cutting jobs and streamlining his State Department to better represent a firm-handed manager; one prepared to use military threats and money for purposes of guaranteeing Trump's dominion amidst the starvation and growing violence from Afghanistan to Somalia to the Korean peninsula. A global oil executive knows exactly how to do such deals.

        Meanwhile, as noted, the Democrats remain missing in action while this Trump agenda unfolds.  Aside from their new found skill at chortling and jeering Republican missteps they seem no closer today to advancing a reformed agenda than they were on the day they eliminated Bernie Sanders and his reform campaign last June. Silence reigns, as it did in the Hillary Clinton campaign, with no  serious policy reforms offered that could deliver infrastructure job-creating programs, or Medicare for all, or justice-for-all foreign policy goals in regions where inequality is vast beyond imagining.  

        "Calculation" remains the lingua franca in both political parties, meaning the Democrats bear strong resemblance to their Republican adversaries in the art of turning access to money and power into policy-making that is personally advantageous.  In winning passage for Obamacare six years ago the Democrats created a system that never laid a hand on the health care industry---which grows today at an annual inflation rate twice the rate of inflation in the Consumer Price Index.  At its passage Obamacare could not find a bi-partisan coalition for ending such profiteering in health care, which is why it is so complicated and vulnerable in the long run.

 

        The question on this post FBI day is how the accelerating momentum toward autocracy, a totalitarian autocracy, can be stemmed. Many desperate people could care less.  Likewise many comfortable people, especially in faith communities, who are buying the idea that faith is about making them safe and comfortable. That's also one of Trump's promises. Of such stuff an Orwellian world can be made.