I don’t know if you’re up on Rod Dreher, who moans and groans with varying degrees of accuracy regarding the woke folks over at the American Conservative. Rod, a floridly passionate Christian, seems to have undergone several denominational makeovers, rejecting the Catholic Church to settle, I think, somewhere in the fields of Eastern Orthodoxy. Awhile back, Rod wrote a book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, pretty much suggesting that Christians need to emulate St. Benedict and create a separate community that will allow them to survive spiritually in a non-spiritual world. Since I am an atheist, I don’t see the necessity for that. On the other hand, I do foresee the need for something similar, a “Benedict Strategy, Spinoza Edition”, named for the great Jewish Enlightenment Philosopher Benedictus (or Baruch) Spinoza.
I think we liberals face the very real prospect of determining how to survive in a non-democratic world. As I see it, our hopes for the sort of law-abiding society that we used to take for granted less than 25 years ago rest on the frail and weary shoulders of one Joe Biden, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe that Uncle Joe will prove up to the task. Inflation is raging, the murder rate is rising, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is knocking what was left of our global economy half to pieces,1 and immigrants are swarming at our southern borders. Meanwhile, “liberals” are screaming with rage any time anyone leaves the “+” off of “LGBTQ+”.
I think the Democrats are going to lose big time in 2022, as they did in 1994 and 2010, and I think the “natural” gerrymander of the Senate and the Electoral College could easily guarantee a full return to power of the Republican Party in 2024, as Simon Bazelon explains, in morbidly complete detail here. And that’s only half the bad news, because with the long-term control of the Senate by the Republican Party almost guaranteed, and the presidency itself scarcely less so, Democrats’ one hope for power at the national level will be the House of Representatives, which they have held for 8 of the past 28 years. In other words, if the past is prologue, we are looking at a prolonged period of minority rule at the national level.
What will Republicans do with that kind of power? Will they realize that the population patterns of the U.S. render the traditional constitutional structure for the Senate and the election of the president deeply undemocratic and in need of nonpartisan reform? In a word, fuck no! As I have repeatedly explained, perhaps in most detail here, the Republican Party is the Party of Nihilism, the Party of Destruction for Destruction’s sake. As “true believers” like William Barr have demonstrated over and over again, they feel they are threatened by literally demonic forces, who must be destroyed at any cost, demons who, horribly enough, constitute a majority of the American electorate, an electorate that must therefore be prevented from exercising its will, by any means necessary!
There was a time, as recently as 2012, when “Reformecon” Republicans like Ramesh Ponnuru were embarrassed by the fact that Republican presidential candidates had lost the popular vote in five of the six most recent elections. Well, that was then. Now they glory in their corruption. Cheating is the mark of honor, for only by cheating can honorable men win!
The worst of the worst, of course, would be the outright return of Trump. In that case, openly fixed presidential elections—the discarding of popular vote totals by state legislatures on the basis of rumored “fraud”—could easily become the norm. An election wouldn’t be over until the Republican machine said it was over. “Informal” pressure for blatantly political purposes applied by state agencies would become the order of the day.
In such case, there would be no remedy other than a Democratic sweep of the nature of 2008, only generated, of course, in response to a staggering Republican screwup. And even that would require eight years of sustained Democratic competence once in office, which was not on display during the Obama administration. (I have lots to say about Democratic incompetence, perhaps presented in most detail here.)
I strongly doubt that the Supreme Court would take a significant stand against resurgent Trumpism. I think there are a minimum of four votes that would support virtually anything Trump could serve up. John Roberts might be embarrassed to see what his party has done to the rule of law, but whether he would find a consistent second is another matter. The simple fact is, Republicans who have a conscience are no longer Republicans. The reign of a thoroughly MAGA Republican Party, for at least a decade, strikes me as a very real possibility, an era of corrupt misrule unparalleled in American history. In that case, the America that would emerge, whatever it would look like, would not look like what America has been. The country will require re-invention to regain its former worth.
Spinoza lived from 1633 to 1677 in the Netherlands. He was famously expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his explicit rejection of Jewish teachings and thereafter took advantage of that city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere to cultivate relationships with a number of dissident religious groups. He was very cautious about publicizing his radical views on “God or Nature”, but did dare to publish a remarkable work, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which is not quite as formidable as its name, especially when compared to his masterwork, the Ethics.
Spinoza lived through a period of great turmoil—one of his close friends, the Dutch leader Johan de Witt, was murdered by a mob when his “moderate” policy was wrecked in 1672 after the Netherlands was attacked by both England and France. Not only did de Witt’s policy end in disaster, but his great opponent, William of Orange, would ultimately triumph as King of England (he married well) and defeat the French in a series of bloody conflicts that stretched into the early eighteenth century.
What “moral” does the life of Spinoza teach us? None, really. It is his work, which received little but abuse until more than a century after his death, which should inspire us to not lose faith in the power of reason to shape human life with an inherent dignity capable of surviving the moment, no matter how hopeless the moment may be.
Afterwords
It is very small comfort that what is happening in the U.S. is happening around the world: the center no longer holds, because there is no center. Barack Obama dreamed of bringing America together but in fact drove it apart, by insisting on establishing universal health care even though it was clear that a majority of Americans saw, correctly, that they would not benefit from the “reform”. Barack also insisted on high-falutin’ environmental goals that were massively oversold and were in fact irrelevant to most Americans’ lives.
Furthermore, particularly in the last years of his administration, liberals began increasingly to endorse views on sexual identity that varied widely from those of middle-class America. By and large, Americans accepted, but did not vote for, gay marriage, which, after all, directly affected only a small number of people. When non-traditional notions of sexual identity began to surface as matters of standard elementary school instruction, and when schools deliberately sought to discourage the significance of academic achievement in the name of “diversity”, liberals were far “ahead” of standard American opinion, in matters that directly affected the great majority of American parents. Unless and until the Democratic Party learns how to honestly understand and address middle-class concerns, which it currently seems unwilling to do, middle-class voters will turn to Trump, who offers bread for the few and circuses for the many.
1. Daniel Drezner, in a depressingly convincing post, The Biden administration’s zombie foreign economic policy, argues that the Biden administration is very largely continuing all of the errors of the Trump administration. Even more depressing: the strong possibility that everything Biden is doing is “smart” as far as domestic politics goes. The emotional reaction against globalism is, well, “global”.
