It's now possible to foresee that the nation faces a likely Trump presidency until 2024. The script is clear enough: Just in time, a conservative Supreme Court nominee may replace a retiring or dying jurist enabling a conservative court that could block any impeachment proceedings or indictments however concocted; a perceived PR triumph in Korea or Iran, or both, will swell the Trump base. Constant warfare helps, and with the economy booming the presumed Democratic takeover of the House next November could slip away.
It's not all bad news. With our brilliant techno-society caught in an unintended whirlpool of inequality and justice-focused faith communities struggling for reinvention a six year hiatus in the catacombs could be a gift. Time for rethinking and learning.
The first stage of that learning platform will be to understand that the Age of Trump is only a placeholder for the larger tyrannies of markets and powerful elites that have always subverted democratic practice. Most people know this instinctively from their own experience with politics as manipulation.
Six years underwater offer opportunities to organize new waves of critical thinking latent in lived experience. Like the innovative proposals in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society--just published by Princeton University Press. Defining property as inherently monopolistic, authors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl suggest determining ownership through public auctions and distributing voting power through a system of shares. If you own six shares you can strategically distribute your preferences, instead of one person one vote. No, it's not socialism. It's a new line of thinking that deserves careful analysis.
Important clarifications of both faith and technology are in order during this six years living underground. The Christians are notorious for folding in the fourth quarter, at exactly the point where dreams of resurrection offer an escape from the thicket where love requires justice. For many reasons other faith communities also have trouble universalizing that connection.
Then there are those other religions. Atlantic Magazine correspondent Franklin Foer challenges the dominion of Silicon Valley in World Without End: The Existential Threat of Big Tech(Penguin Press) citing the tyrannical potential of the big five technology giants (Google, Amazon, etc). The growing clamor in the tech world against hierarchy--not always as smart or as creative as claimed--especially male hierarchy, is a sign of hope; the sound perhaps of constructive revolution against life defined as data boiling up from the bottom of the pyramid.
There are precedents. Four hundred years ago devout Puritans like poet John Milton threw themselves heedlessly into Cromwell's 1645 revolution whose goal was to end the tyranny of kings and conform daily life and governance to the purposes of God. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexcercised" Milton would write,
"that never sallies out to see her adversary, but slinks away from the race that must be run not without dust and heat. "
He experienced plenty of both writing book-length "pamphlets" aimed at balky Parliaments and at Charles I's acusstomed tyrannies. Supporting a New Model Army that sang hymns going into battle, the reformers pursued nothing less than "regicide," the head of the king; and while they did put him to the axe the Royalist spirit of domination by the fittest survived and still does to this day.
Milton ended up imprisoned and on a track that for a time threatened to use the same axe on him. In the end, for better and for worse, the Puritans changed the world spreading some good seed, but the worst part of their creation became the global-wide systems of domination that claim to be "doing God's will" as Goldman Sach's CEO, Lloyd Blankfine, likes to put it.
Regicide II is a kairos time, perhaps as long as six years, when we may have opportunity to think well and deeply and faithfully toward an end to all killing. That would be time well spent.
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