The Empire Strikes Back

I started writing this in response to the news that the Republicans will have a majority in the House of Representatives. So, it’s a clean sweep: the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and of course the ongoing 6-3 revanchist majority on the Supreme Court. Come January, the Republicans will be able to start implementing their agenda.

One very detailed possible version of that agenda is Project 2025. Here are just the section headings from the American Civil Liberties Union’s summary of the project: Gutting abortion access. Mass deportations. Abusing warrantless surveillance. Unleashing undue force on protestors. Severely limiting voting access. Censoring critical discussions in classrooms. Rolling back trans rights.

That doesn’t even include ideas like defunding government departments and agencies, or firing and replacing civil servants with political cronies, or repealing the Affordable Care Act. It says nothing about holding the Netanyahu government’s coat while it flattens Gaza and expropriates the West Bank.

I wrote a few years ago about the weakness of the American social contract. Now, if Project 2025 is anything to go by, the tatters of that feeble social contract are about to come under sustained, direct assault. And notice that the people who are going to launch that attack have also insisted, loudly and ad nauseam, that the menace facing American society is “socialism”.

Any attempt to negotiate an update to the social contract, they deride as “socialism”. They sound the alarm, they man the barricades. In reality, it’s a giant exercise in cognitive dissonance. They act as if collecting a bit more in taxes from corporations or the wealthy, perhaps spending a bit more on affordable housing and providing universal school lunches, maybe even making sure that everyone has health care, will put us on a bullet train to Stalinism. Meanwhile, numerous allied countries have governments that collect more tax than we do, provide more public benefits than we do, and continue to enjoy private property, free market economies, and civil liberties. The current American social contract is not, in fact, the sole or best definition of “freedom”, and in a democratic society, we should expect an ongoing discussion and negotiation, election by election, about the policies that we want to implement in order to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”, as the preamble to the U.S. Constitution says.

Instead of crying “socialism” and ruling out-of-bounds these attempts to diagnose and ameliorate the problems with our social contract, we need to be able to admit the possibility that the policies we have in place may not be doing what we need. We need to care about each other enough to notice that our social contract may not be working well for all of us, and to be willing to change it. Indeed, the evidence is all around us that it is not working: unhoused people and yet countless houses with no one living in them, people amassing vast wealth while other people struggle to survive on two or three jobs, people living without access to health care or electricity or clean water. The evidence is school shootings, for-profit prisons, deaths of despair. We should be trying to update our social contract. We should be trying to solve problems and to make our society a better place for all of us, especially those for whom it is not a nice place at all.

Nevertheless, as a friend of mine astutely observed, “Conservatives will call $800 billion to help people ‘socialism’, but $800 billion to fight and kill people ‘patriotism’.”

Conservatives will call $800 billion to help people “socialism”, but $800 billion to fight and kill people “patriotism”.

Mabon Finch

At heart, society is a kind of technology that we devised in order to improve human life. By working together to pool our resources and to solve collective action problems, we get to live within a more robust, more secure, more prosperous system than we would be able to create and maintain as individuals or as small kinship groups. We find ways to cooperate at a larger scale, and our living conditions improve. More of us survive. We live longer. We learn more. We build more. We have and enjoy things that we would never have been able to have and enjoy if we were living in isolated, mistrustful bands: hospitals, sewers, schools, libraries full of books that other people wrote, art that other people made, food that other people cooked, devices other people invented.

We can have nice things.

But now, they’re going to attack the very idea of a social contract that does much more than drop bombs and protect wealth, most especially the wealth of the most prosperous cisgender, heterosexual white Christians. I saw someone online aptly call this the “Ayn Rand Bioshock dream of total deregulation”.

Don’t believe it? Consider the kinds of people being nominated to important positions. Some of them, sure, they’re basically normal sorts of appointees, like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for Secretary of State. But others are pure trolling.

Matt Gaetz for Attorney General? He iswas arguably the member of Congress most despised by the rest of Congress, including most of his own party. In comparison to prior Attorneys General, his experience is laughable. The House Ethics Committee heard witness testimony to the effect that Gaetz had been observed having sex with a minor.

Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence? Numerous of her former colleagues consider her likely to be a Russian intelligence asset herself. She parrots Russian propaganda, embraces conspiracy theories, and has no actual experience in the world of intelligence.

Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense? He has no defense policy background, no experience in government, no relevant experience in the defense industry, and has not risen to a high rank in military service himself. That is, he has none of the priors that can make for a well-qualified Secretary of Defense. What he is, is a weekend Fox News television host and a vicious culture warrior known for inflammatory, white Christian nationalist views that are laid out in his book American Crusade and reflected by his many Crusader-themed tattoos.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services? He’s an anti-vax activist and, like Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove, he wants to end fluoridation. He implausibly accuses the Food and Drug Administration of a “war on public health”.

We are not talking about competent, well-qualified people who I just happen to disagree with. We are talking about professional trolls who are being nominated solely to “own the libs”. And the fact that many, many Christians are on board with this program is deeply alarming. It’s a reflection of what I have previously called “the Moloch worldview” and its worship of power and hierarchy is anathema both to Christianity and to life in a democracy.

Theologian Howard Thurman diagnosed this ailment with exquisite precision in an essay in 1946: “The bitter truth is that the Church has permitted the various hate-inspired groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching of the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity and human worth.”

As was the case in 2016, those of us who are appalled are being told that we need to do more to understand those who voted for this, to be nice to them, to turn down the temperature. Those who spent the last four years saying “not my President” and worse are now badgering us with Romans 13. Meanwhile, people who know they are targets of the worst intentions of Project 2025 are understandably afraid. But the right wing does not care. Though they will demand that we understand them, they do not care to understand us. I suppose they are too busy destroying that boogeyman “socialism”.

As it happens, I believe I do understand them, and it saddens me.

Mary Oliver wrote a fit epitaph for this pitiable society, held in thrall to the broligarchs and the chaplains of empire. It was published in her collection Devotions in 2008. We can hope that a better society may yet follow this one.