Labor Day’s Inequality Flood and the Roots of Authoritarianism

         The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for today’s unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism. Flooded Houston, the epi-center of a fossil fuels empire that created enormous wealth by turning land into unlimited concrete for profitable development is now the scene of immeasurable human catastrophe. As with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the disaster scenes in Houston pulls back the curtain on a city whose people live only on the margin of the empire of oil.

        Houston ranks as the 15th most unequal city among the nation's 50 largest according to the Brookings Institute. On April 7^th 2016 the Houston Chronicle reported

“The richest 5 percent of households here earn nearly 12 times more than the poorest 20 percent. About 156,000 of the city's households have an income under $18,759.

     

       The current state of public policy about this income inequality in the U. S. persistently avoids such realities.  State government in Missouri is cutting back minimum wage increases approved by St. Louis city voters. New Trump tax policies announced four days ahead of Labor Day prescribe “reforms” that primarily help the rich and add to the national debt.  The real “wall” supported by big money players is their strategic investment in primary elections that look toward the mid-terms of 2018. Their clear purpose seems not about  improving wages and working conditions but how to extend the warp of the economy in favor of their peers at the top of the income pyramid. The top 1 to 5 percent.

       A positive alternative strategy from faith communities concerned with the common good will require unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliances with secular organizations who share a high moral purpose to meet the needs of the common good.  Bonhoeffer's "saints without god."

      

       How religion—so popular in America—and  endemic inequality have come to share the same boat is not a pretty story and begins with the slave economy that built the first several hundred years of the very Christian Americas; a continent whose conquerors were  comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy. 

      

       Even at the founding of the U. S., although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton detested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived…[he]clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

       While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, there was a dominant belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made for 90 hour work weeks, child labor, and 12 hour days in sweat shops employing immigrant women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

      

       It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   

       The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

·                     The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.     

        Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

      

        Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits; leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  

          Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

      

          The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

      This tragic system of racism and religious-based classism handicaps the potential today of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to exist separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices locked denominations into a sociology of segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  

        The fateful pattern of church-based class division developed from the same inequality that now divides Houston and the rest of the U. S.  People then and now who worked mostly with their hands and backs could not be comfortable in churches where their bosses were sitting. It was reciprocated by the managers of the dominating class.  Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

      There are better angels in this history.  The 19th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   

       It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years of this Progressive Movement that reflected a coalition between religion and secular humanitarians such as Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull house.  This reform era created major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

      

       The tragedies of the 20th Century interrupted this momentum. The Soviet Communist Revolution put the Capitalist era on high alert and gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and limit the power of unions to organize.  WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s global-wide inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

      

        There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  And the younger generations care little about the segregated life of congregations, They’ve moved on and mostly outside organized religious life.

       

         In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    The new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

      

        Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief.

Labor Day and the Roots of Authoritarianism

The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for the unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism in the U. S.  Becoming part of the answer could mean a metamorphosis beyond reach in the same sense that halting the rise of autocracy could be beyond reach.  A positive answer surely means unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliance with the communities and organizations of high moral and ethical purpose.   Bonhoeffer’s “saints without god.”

How religion and inequality share the same boat is not a pretty story. A slave economy built the first several hundred years of the very religious Americas that was comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy.  At the founding of the U. S. although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton destested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived….No founder of this country more clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, more important was a belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20^th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19^th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made 90 hour work weeks, child labor and sweat shops employing poor women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.

Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits, leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

This tragic system of racism and religious-based  classism handicaps the potential of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of the Trump era authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to form separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices have locked denominations into a sociology in which they represent a normative segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  The pattern grew from people who worked mostly with their hands and backs feeling uncomfortable in churches where their bosses worshipped. Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

There are better angels in this history.  The 19^th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20^th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbush to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years, creating major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

The tragedies of the 20^th Century led to a failure of further development toward an equitable world.  The Soviet Communist Revolution gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s inglorious inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  

  In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    Because the resources are not evenly divided and the stakes so high, the new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will be the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief. 

The Twilight of the Gods

        While it's not yet known whether the President's large body of critics will finally run him to ground the other question is how the Republican leadership will make their stand on tax reform, the budget and Affordable Health Care Act amendments after the Labor Day recess.  In spite of the outpouring of rage over the President's behavior over racism in Charlottesville he is not without many allies who are content to see the status quo of missing infrastructure jobs programs and anemic education funding continue--under cover of "traditional," racist values.  

        

         The clearly uncertain future for the nation and its stability will need more than the current emphasis by progressive young people on righteous resistance. After stalwart resistance, what's the strategy on single-payer, housing for moderate and low income families in the big cities and what about international partnerships for peace, justice and the environment?       

        Famous community organizer, Saul Alinsky, used to begin speeches to faith leaders by sharing his wonderment at just how they folded up those wings on their backs to be able to lie down to sleep.  He was calling for more than vestments of good intentions.  In this summer of popular defenestration of old idols like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee the larger challenge comes from whether we even recognize the monuments not made of marble or bronze but who claim to be our fulfillment.  There is among the Silicon Valley gargantuan corporations more than a little resemblance between themselves and that old Canaanite god of biblical reference: both claim to exist for your own good!

       With progressive community organizations sponsoring programs they describe as training  for "righteous resistance" at least one lesson of history is how the good is defined, by whom and for what purpose.  Critical thinking will be required to answer that question. It's always complicated.

    

        Here's a little known example drawn from Stephen Kinzer's book: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles and their secret world war," [Henry Holt, 2013]...described by John Le Carre as "an essential allegory for our own times":

        The Cold War now in the process of re-start was born not after WW II but before it when Wall Street firms like Sullivan and Cromwell (S & C) put the financing packages together that enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler, first by freeing it from its WW I debt burden and by issuing in 1935 the bonds to re-finance the German steel, and weapons manufacturing titan, Krupp; and further enabling a chemical and rare metals cartel that included I. G. Farben, subsequent producer of the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi death camps to exterminate millions. 

       Later to be Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles was managing partner at S & C in those pre-war years and was a defender and advocate for Adolf Hitler. He saw Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against Bolshevism. The Germans with their great achievements in language, science, theology and the arts were kinfolk.  Dulles was fixated on communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular as enemies of Christianity. He never saw any difference between making money at S & C and the high purpose of Christianity.

        After the Second World War Dulles and the Allied High Command saw to it that the Nazi war record of hundreds of German scientists were wiped clean--even Werner von Braun's, who created the Nazi V-I and V-II  rockets that reigned down on London, was put to work creating the U. S. space program.  Dulles advocated for a global civilized society and interacted  in World Council of Churches meetings attended by  Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and others. But after the war he gradually developed a Devil theory of theology at about the same time that he became Dwight Eisenhower' Secretary of State.  In that role he led and enabled others such as George Kennan to launch and define a Cold War that sponsored the overthrow of democratically  elected governments such as Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and others.  It was this definition of evil that was championed by many (not all) faith leaders and led sequentially to millions of deaths in the long fight against the devil, the Soviet Union and China, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

                

        The moral of this history is that the youthful advocates of dramatic change in the current direction of the Trump White House toward an era of righteousness face the necessity for critical evaluation of complex initiative and promises; challenging every step of the way how the promises of the rich and powerful affect the common good; identifying and critiquing the interplay of their own self-interest. Constantly making sure they've not been captured by a new attractive idol

The Limits of Enthusiasm

        In the wake of Trump's presidency the Democrat's political crash in Atlanta remembers the Hindenberg; the blimp that after 60 successful Atlantic crossings crashed and burned.  Atlanta has positioned the Republicans not only to pass a regressive health care law but to break past the Mueller investigations.  Aside from likely indictments of the strange collection of Michael Flynn-Paul Manaford and a few others over their Russian connections, near universal Republican control is likely to insulate the President from either impeachment or indictment.

       The future of Democracy and any path toward overcoming the inequality gap now come to the fore with a vengeance, hanging on whether people can discover sources of political participation beyond their enthusiasm.  Both the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democracy struggle and Rev. William Barber's drive for spiritual and moral renewal draw heavily on emotional energy.  The giant Sanders rallies in New York City and around California last Summer demonstrated that mere fervor does not translate either into voters or even a political strategy. Similarly, Rev. Barber's movement rooted in minority communities--but growing strong alliances across race and class--still must deal with the task of translating a moral focus into micro-politics. 

        Both traditions have been made more passive but for different reasons.  The grim and endless string of juries who cannot convict a White policeman for killing young Black men underlines the meaning of centuries of oppression and lack of financial resources.  The White middle class workers whose world has been in crash mode for at least a generation has inherited a religious and political tradition of dependency on someone else's power, whether of God or Wall Street.

       Facing the long haul of a Republican domination that may be in place by this Fourth of July the energies of new younger generations of voters must find a way out of the traps of both political and spiritual dependency. Less inclined to hymn-singing and straightened by the new disciplines of technology; idealistic about translating a life of service to the needs of others as the power of love, their problem (our problem) is how to marry the practical and the pragmatic with the transcendent goal of universal fairness and justice. 

        Among the largest obstacles is an American culture averse for religious reasons to civic engagement and the struggles over inevitably imperfect policy solutions. The irony of ironies is how the wealth of Americans has been seen as a sign of divine blessing and the decline of wealth as a sign that it's all in divine hands even as your life and community collapses economically.  This is the savior complex that makes Trumpism so attractive.  Since the rise of an industrialized and technologically awesome world--now on a global scale--most Americans have lived within the dominion of some sort of hierarchy. While this hierarchy has been challenged and modified when workers have organized to bargain for their rights it is now infinitely more complicated in a global economy. In most workplaces it's a "stay out of trouble" passivity largely ingrained in popular practice.

      This is another reason why young generation energies must redirect their enthusiasm by giving new life to the struggle for love, power and justice.  If these three are kept together then struggles with hierarchy can become trans-class struggles that engage the whole community for the common good.  That's how to end the crash and burn era of the blimps.

The Baseball Game

        Like a wound that will not heal the Comey-Sessions Intelligence Committee hearing produced a theater of the absurd marching under the banner of the fired FBI Director's foreign policy: "It's not about Republicans or Democrats," it's that the Russians are "coming after America....That's what this is about, we remain that shining city on the hill. And they don't like it."

        It's hard to say with a straight face since the hearings have barely raised a sweat over the Russian threat. A thousand ships have not been launched. We're at Defcon V not Defcon II, and the leisurely pace of multiple investigations make clear that the Congressional fight is over control of resources among the comfortable classes not foreign policy. There's lots of money to be made under cover of the Russian threat: tens of billions in defense contracts, hundreds of billions more to fund virtuous American allies such as the Saudis, Egypt, the Arab Emirates and Israel.  It's the business transactions that move the moral tone of foreign policy idealism into the realm of the preposterous. 

        While it's clear that if President Trump falls at least in Washington the ground will not be soaked in tears, yesterday's shooting at American congressmen  and lobbyists at play exposed the rising tide of violence over inequality. The Gun Violence Achieve website (http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/last)  reports 14 other shootings the past 72 hours.  As the shaken Congressional leaders courageously announce they will go forward with their annual baseball game, they so far have un-courageously made clear they have no plans to convene in special session to adopt gun control or pass a public infrastructure program. 

        The hard question veiled by Washington theatrics is whether anything can lure American leaders to abandon the nostrum sounded by injured Texas Congressman Roger Williams last evening that "America is the greatest nation in the world."  This conceit in the face of American usual and customary racism and the rising new world powers of China and India make clear how grateful we must be for the other rising at hand: a trans-class, post-racial younger adult movement sweeping both the country and around the world.  Notable for its absence in churches, synagogues and temples, clear-eyed about all the customary theatrics of the political pros, this younger generation's spirit will need the cautionary tale of Jacob at the Jabbok River who discovered  that after wresting with God his blessing was the broken hip that would ensure his humanity.

        That's what the latest cover-ups want to cover-over.  In the midst of the current uproar about impeachment and a desperate search for solid ground the new times call all people of faith and serious purpose to write a new story about lessons learned and a common humanity embraced.  There's no time left to waste.

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.