Tag: Hillary Clinton

Trump Voters: This Is On You

There is a point I keep trying to make, that I’m not sure I’ve made very clear yet. It has to do with President Trump, and it popped in my head again last week during his morally (and intellectually) vapid response to the Nazis in Charlottesville. Here it is:

Brought to you by President Trump. Just like we predicted.
If you voted for Donald Trump last year, then everything crazy that’s happening in our country right now is on your shoulders.

All of it – Neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching in the streets, the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, Russia buying an American election, and most of all, the emotionally stunted man child in the White House who has the approximate attention span, moral compass, and anger management skills of a 2-year old- that’s all on you, folks.

Now, I know what you are saying: “But this isn’t what I voted for!” Baloney. This is exactly what you voted for; stop acting all surprised that Donald Trump continues to act like Donald Trump in office. This isn’t a big shock; we (those of us who opposed him) predicted every last thing about him. The temper tantrums. The appalling lack of moral direction. The non-existent attention span. The failure to grasp even the most rudimentary policy ideas. The disregard for any and all American institutions and governing norms. The intense self-absorption. The tweeting. (Oh god, the tweeting.) The war mongering. The coddling of racists, extremists, Nazis, and criminals. The skin so thin you can see the overbearing insecurity cower beneath. The overall failure of this presidency. We saw it all coming, and honestly, we spent the better part of two years yelling about it. And now you want to act all surprised? Nope.

And how, might you ask, did we know? Because we had eyes and ears to see and hear! The way the president acts today? It’s the exact same person he was throughout his campaign! All this bullshit about how if elected, he would become more presidential? We saw it for the bullshit it was, and we warned you.

But you didn’t care. Because you were convinced that his opponent was somehow worse. I’m not sure in what way. I guess abortion?

And maybe you still believe the long-discredited and absolutely nuts Clinton conspiracy theories, about murder in Arkansas? It’s insane. During the course of the 2016 election cycle, you allowed yourself be hoodwinked, by a life-long scam artist, into thinking that a well-known woman politician – probably the best known and most transparent (thanks to the intense media scrutiny over the last 30 years) politician in America- was somehow unfit to hold the office of the President of the United States because of what server she saved her emails on. And, not only that, but you believed this to disqualify her despite the fact that he opponent was the kind of guy who openly bragged about sexually assaulting numerous women!

I mean, can you wrap your mind around that for a second? You made the calculus last year that a private email server was worse than sexual assault and blatant ignorance and racism.

Again, all because of, mostly, abortion.

Because you wagered that pinching your nose and voting for Trump would bring an end to legalized abortion in America. The same long right-wing con you’ve been falling for since Reagan. “Supreme Court justices!” you screamed.

And you’re right, Trump did appoint a right wing justice in Neil Gorsuch. But guess what? You still don’t have the Supreme Court votes. There are still four liberals and Anthony Kennedy standing in the way, and if you think Kennedy or Ginsburg are gonna let themselves be outlasted in office by President Cheeto – if you really think they are gonna let their legacy be overwritten by an in-over-his-head reality show hack- well, you’re gonna be surprised. I know the Notorious RBG is 84 years old, but I guarantee she has the force of will to keep on going until at least 2020.

To act like there was some kind of moral equivalency between Trump and Clinton – to continue to insist that, yeah, Trump is bad, but Clinton would have been bad, too – is to engage in willful ignorance. It’s like equating Neo-Nazis with those protesting Neo-Nazis. I mean, what kind of monster would do such a thing?

Anyways, back to my original point. Trump voters – strong Trump voters, reluctant Trump voters, bargaining Trump voters, GOP-loyal Trump voters – this is all on you. You don’t get to wash your hands of this presidency. You don’t get to act surprised and shocked by what is happening. Because we warned you. And, apparently, you just didn’t care enough about your fellow citizens to care.

Why am I insisting on this? Because it’s important that you realize that your vote has consequences for the lives of other people. It’s not a game. It’s not all about you. When you go and vote for someone like Trump, you have to own up to the consequences of that vote, you have to realize it matters, and you have to learn from it, so that we can avoid this kind of thing happening again in the future. Want to make America great again, like for real? Then realize you have blame in this, and that you have a responsibility to your fellow citizens to help make it right by making sure it doesn’t happen again.

So understand: everything that is happening right now, all the craziness and anger and insanity: this is the fruit of Trump support. Even if this isn’t “What you voted for,” it’s what you voted for. Own it. And next time, when you enter that ballot box, do better. You owe the rest of us that now.

Democracy Is Not Always Right

My delve into Hauerwas’ Christian criticism of liberal democracy coincided very well with one of the most depressing electoral results, and everything since then, that I can imagine. What better time to contemplate the futility and utilitarianism of democracy that at the time when America is electing a woefully under-prepared proto-fascist to be the most powerful man on the planet?

elections_palestineI actually think the election of Trump reinforced the message I was getting from Trump; namely, that democracy is not inherently moral. This isn’t to say that it is immoral. Rather, democracy is a morally neutral system, a tool we humans use to order our governance of our selves. Self determination, self government: those are moral ideals. Democracy, as the tool used to achieve them, is not.

One of the ideas that so many people struggle with (and I admit I did for a long time) is that we expect democracy to produce the “right” answer. We expect, no matter our ideology or political party, that in the medium to long-term, regardless of the outcome of various immediate elections, that the democratic process will conform itself to Dr. King’s moral arc of justice. And sometimes it certainly feels that way; for me, 2008 was one of those times. It was hard for so many people to not perceive the election of Barack Obama as not just a good thing, but the morally inevitable thing that democracy promises us.

But this just simply isn’t the case. In and of itself, democracy is no more moral that any form we use to govern ourselves. Now, democracy comports itself better to the ideal of self-determination better than republicanism or oligarchy or even Plato’s rule of the elite does. But, in the end, democracy facilitates the ability of the mass of people to make a certain choice, regardless of the moral weight of that choice. Another way to say this is, we get what we vote for. And sometimes, that is a Barack Obama, or an Abraham Lincoln, or a Solon, or a Nelson Mandela. But, sometimes, it’s a Donald Trump. In democracy, the right choice isn’t always the moral choice. The right choice is just whatever we decide it is. Democracy is only as moral as we are as a people.

The equation of democracy with morality is one of the original sins of American political engagement. Because we have allowed our democratic experiment to so often be equated with the Kingdom of God – because we like to entertain the notion that American democracy is a divinely ordained institution – we accept the logical conclusion that American democracy must be a force for good in the world always. It’s not.

Democracy is another tool for ordering this world. And it is a particularly good tool, compared to so many of the others we humans have tried. Churchill’s rumination on the merits of democracy is quoted often today, but rarely taken to it’s logical conclusion. Those of us who identify ourselves as Christians have an obligation to not identify our faith with that of something as human – and thus as fallible – as democracy. Our hope is not found in such things. Democracy can be useful, and can do good things. But the redemption of our world – the coming of the Kingdom – is found in ideals beyond simply the logistics of choosing new leaders. Our hope is found in the radical love that is our God, and that was lived by the man whose example we follow.

That’s an important reminder in a world that just elected Donald Trump. His elevation to the White House is disheartening, frightening, and dangerous. We have a lot of work in front of us, in terms of standing with and for those who need our love and solidarity today. But, frankly, that would have been true, albeit on a less severe scale, even with the election of Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders. This is what we would do well to remember in the heat of the next electoral cycle: the election of a candidate we favor doesn’t mean our work is needed less. On the contrary: the election of Hillary Clinton would have made our work just as important, because rather than working to hold ground (as we are going to be doing for the next four years), we would have been compelled to move justice forward – and that is just as vital and hard of work as we are facing now.

The promise of democracy is not the same as the promise of love. We shouldn’t forget that, and we should never equate the two. The right answer will never be the one supplied by democratic promises; the right answer is the hoped-for Kingdom, the one we have the power to bring here, not at the ballot box, but in loving those we meet everyday.

Vote For The Losers

Elections are about winning.

That’s an obvious thing to say. Of course they are. Candidates, for the most part, are running to win. And while they may see the writing on the wall, or they may know they are a long shot, or even they may understand that in the end they won’t, in fact, win, they are all out there every day trying to convince their fellow citizens that they need to win, for very real reasons.

This Election season, in particular, we have heard a lot about winning. One of our major party presidential candidates has made the idea of winning – at all costs, no matter who or what gets left behind, destroyed or dehumanized in the process – the center of his campaign. We have heard that the only real Americans are the winners; that those who are different, who are having a hard time, who speak a different religion or encounter God in a different way or hold different ideas about how to make America great, are the losers. 

And you don’t want to be a loser, do you?

Losers aren’t what make America great again. Losers are worthy of our scorn, our hate. They are the scapegoats. They only want to take, not make. Losers deserve nothing, not a vote or a voice, or the means to live a minimally-comfortable life, or even a place in OUR country. Losers should self-deport, should be cordoned off behind a wall. Losers aren’t real Americans.

This how the world works, right? Winners win. Losers lose. Be a winner. Give a little to Salvation Army bell ringers for the losers, but don’t worry too much about it. They probably got just desserts anyways.

This is not the message of God.

God is the God of the losers. The God we see experienced in the man Jesus was not a God that came to reward to winners and punish the losers.

Instead, in Jesus, we see God experienced again and again the losers of society. We see God found in lepers, in immigrants and foreigners, in unclean women, in enemies, in those society forgot and left behind.

God was experienced not in a victorious army riding into Jerusalem, destroying the Romans and the corrupt Temple priests, and establishing a conquering kingdom that never fell.

God was experienced in death and defeat. Jesus lived the Way of the Divine by failing, by being captured, tortured, humiliated, and executed.

Rob Bell writes of this in What We Talk About When We Talk About God:

…there’s a moment when Jesus first tells his followers that he’s going to be killed. They don’t get it: they push back, they resist his prediction, because they assume that he’s come to win, not lose. To prevail, not surrender. To conquer, not hang on a cross.

They say no because they’ve come to believe that he is in some way God-among-them, and what kind of God fails?

It’s all upside down,

backward,

and not how it was supposed to be.

And that, we learn, is the point.

God wins not by conquering, by getting the most votes. God wins by showing us the futility of our earthly conceptions of victory. Victory is not found in honor and glory that builds us up individually. Victory is found in self-sacrifice. Victory is found in concern for others before self, even unto death. Victory- real, God victory – is found in understanding that we win by loving others- loving radically and irrationally and against our own interests, even when that means getting poorer or ridiculed or killed.

It was, basically, just like Jesus said: “The first will be last.”

Like Rob says, that’s point. We go to the polls every two or four years with the intention of making our country, and by extension, the world a better place. And sometimes we do, in small ways. But there is only one way to make the world a truly better place, a way modeled by Jesus two thousand years ago. That way is the way of putting others first, of doing everything we can to spread unconditional love and pulling up the least and the lost so that there is no first or last, but just US.

No matter what happens tonight- no matter who “wins” and who “loses,” we will still have a lot of work to do. America won’t become a “Christian nation” by voting someone to victory. America won’t win because of strength or our military or the perfect public policy initiatives, no matter how important all that is.

America, and the whole world, will “win” when we realize that winning means looking out for one another, making the world better for all people, and especially those who are oppressed and in need of liberation. We win when we feed the hungry and quench the thirsty, when we invite in the immigrant, when we clothe the naked, heal the sick, and free the oppressed.

Go vote. Vote for the person who you think will improve people’s lives the most. Vote not just for president, but for Senate and House and state office and local officials and ballot initiatives.

And then, remember: there is much much more work to be done, work that can’t be done in the ballot box or by elected officials.

And then, go do that work. The self-sacrificial work of love.

Be a loser.

That’s winning.