Cleaning up a bit of a mess

A reader yesterday, complained (understandably):

By repeating the denigration of the tea party movement as provided by both the liberals and by the sort of conservatives who cannot take advantage of it, you are actually helping to make the situation worse, if only just a little bit.

The tea party movement could be a force for good in the current situation. It could also be a force of disruption.

Hmm. I can see that. My purpose wasn’t particularly to denigrate the Tea Party movement, but to remark on the general impression of kookiness that is emanating from the Right at present. Birthers, nutjobs with guns at town hall meetings jabbering about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, the incessant and tedious refrain that Obama is a Nazi, a Commie, an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of civilization, the hysteria over Obama giving a little “stay in school/study hard” chat with students. It all reminds me of Code Pink crazies. And now, lunatics like Beck, channeling nuts like the author 5,000 Year Leap are mainstreaming Mormon apocalyptic kookiness as serious political conversation.

It’s sort of like AIDS. I’m protesting a) the destruction of the “conservative” immune system that used to be able to marginalize nuts and keep discourse on a reasonably even keel and b) the opportunistic infections like Beck that are now invading the weakened body of conservatism with all sorts of destructive ideas that aren’t being marginalized but broadly accepted.

That said, my general attitude toward the tea party folks is actually sympathy. The great mass of people in the United States put me in mind of nothing so much as the passage from the New Testament about Jesus looking at the crowds with compassion because “they were like sheep without a shepherd”. That’s why I feel bad about my comments yesterday. My attitude toward politics and, most especially, politicians and large political movements is profound wariness and skepticism. I’m good at the “be wise as a serpent” part of life. Deeply disinclined to be a joiner, my default setting about political movements is “How is somebody trying to exploit me here?” And when I look around at the frustrations that engender the Tea Partiers, I see lots of victims of exploitation venting their pain. They seem to me to be a people that our ruling classes have every interest in exploiting and no real interest in regarding as human beings. For the Left, they are largely an obstacle to overcome and then tax to the hilt. For the Right, they are a useful political chip to thwart the Left.

The Tea Partiers recognize dimly that while the GOP was busy telling them “deficits don’t matter” and selling them a huge, costly and unnecesary war, they were also grossly mismanaging the common good and somehow making it end up that we ordinary slobs would wind up paying huge sums of money in bailouts to save the asses of a few extremely wealthy people. They seem to dimly recognize that the GOP had eight years where *they* could have done something about health care, but opted to do nothing. So the sudden GOP claim to care about it, seems pretty phony. They smell that GOP has no actual interest in fixing the system (any more than most Dem politicos, who are simply using the opportunity to gain more power for themselves). They recognize that there are winners and losers coming out of the past decade and that our ruling classes on both sides of the aisle in both DC and Wall Street are the winners and we are the losers. They are starting to intuit that nobody was really looking out for their interests under Bush and that this is not really changing with Obama. They have an inchoate sense of the major themes of what’s wrong. And so they are in good healthy revolt against a state and economic system that is hurting them, scaring them, stampeding them here and there, and browbeating them for feeling afraid and angry. All this I see and appreciate and even empathize with.

My (rather limited) point is this: Very little of what is being done by this inchoate populist fury is going to help, I think. Largely because nobody (including me) has a very good idea what to do.

I am basically a cynic about politics. I think its power to do good is profoundly limited while the ease with which it does mischief is astonishing to behold. I regard it as essentially a struggle for the One Ring: a deeply corrupting force that is necessary evil due to the fact that anarchy is worse. I recognize that there exist real statesmen and women who do go into the practice of governance out of a genuine desire to safeguard the common good (I would name Ron Paul as one of these). I recognize that Caesar has his place. But I think such selfless people are rare in government and rarer still among the rich and powerful and that, when it comes to the centers of power in bloated, corrupt and rapidly de-christianizing nations, the smart money is on assuming that the heights of government, industry and culture are largely in the hands of principalities, powers, the “world rulers of this present darkness”, and the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”. Such powers do not care much about the actual needs of harrassed and distressed sheep without a shepherd. They are wolves, not shepherds.

And this is where my mea culpa comes in: in my cynicism about politics, I generally let that “wise as a serpent” part rule the roost here in my political discussion. I adopt a tone of flippancy because so much of what I see in the daily blues is heart-breaking. But that’s dangersous. Flippancy is, as Screwtape notes, the finest armor-plating against God that hell has devised. The other part of the instruction from our Lord is to be as “innocent as a dove”. That I’m not so good at. My hero Chesterton had a high regard for what he called the “awful authority of a mob”. He didn’t believe in mob rule any more than he believed vox populi, vox Dei. He remembered very clearly that it was The Wisdom of the Voter which had cried out “Crucify him! Give us Barabbas!” So he did not confer automatic sanctity even on the crowds for whom Jesus had felt such compassion.

But he also had, in general, a much higher regard for ordinary people than for elites. He saw that man is still in the image of God and to be revered before he is feared for being fallen. And he saw that powerful fallen men were more likely to hurt your (and more to be held responsible for the ills of the world) than powerless ones. Most of all, he did understand why Jesus felt compassion and he had much the same compassion. I often fail in this regard, commenting flippantly on the headlines of the day, because so much of what our leaders are doing is so obviously (to me at any rate) about manipulating the fortunes and passions of harrassed and distressed sheep without a shepherd to their own ends. I find this frustrating and heart-breaking, and my reflexive response is humor and flippancy as a kind of shield. The problem is, I wind up communicating to the harrassed and distressed sheep (of whom I emphatically count myself one as a lower middle class wage earner with no health or dental care, a son with huge college debt, a mortgage, and a little house in the burbs) that I think their frustration is wrong.

I don’t think it wrong. I think we have every right to be frustrated. I think we are ruled and manipulated by government, industry and the manufacturers of culture everyday. And I think that until we really start to internalize actual Catholic social teaching and not get the bulk of our formation from pop culture and tribal political allegiances, little of that will change. But I deeply regret giving the impression that I don’t empathize with the general sense of frustration and the perfectly just impression that the main program for our ruling classes is exploitation and the common good is largely a side hobby so long as it doesn’t get in the way.

Oh! And while I’m clarifying things, let me also state for the record (for the benefit of those who have somehow gotten the impression that I am, as one reader put it “blind to the threat of Islamic terrorism”) that I witnessed 9/11 like everybody else and I am perfectly aware that Islamic terrorism is a huge threat. That’s why I think we have to fight it well and with the weapons of both reason and the Spirit. Torture and unjust war is not among these. I have never opposed fighting Radical Islam. I have opposed the Iraq War and I am starting to wonder a great deal how the war in Afghanistan really advances the goal of destroying Radical Islam. But I still think Radical Islam must be defeated and that Radical Islamists must be, where they cannot be rendered harmless, killed.

That’s the thing: I’m not a pacifist. I believe in Just War. That’s why, when a war (like the Iraq war) does not meet the criteria (as two Popes and virtually all the bishops agree) I think it’s both wrong and irresponsible to fight it. You wind up with a government that says things like “deficits don’t matter” while spending us to death and then, shazam!, a few years later your economy is in the toilet, the party that should have acted responsibly but instead was deeply irresponsible is kicked out of power, and you are marching on Washington, deathly afraid that the new regime (which is continuing and expanding the Great Society for Foreigners Program (aka “nation-building”) begun by the previous Administration) is now going to apply itself to expanding government power on the domestic front too.

For myself, I have no Big Answers. Catholic social teaching is something I am presently trying to absorb and understand. I get some of the big contours of it. But mostly I don’t feel like I grasp it very deeply at all. When I can carve out time, I’m going to try to read the Compendium and see if I can get a sense of the shape of the thing. If I discover interesting stuff, I’ll let you know. It’s more or less what I do here.

Meanwhile, please accept my sincere apology for giving the impression that I thought the frustration of ordinary people over their abandonment by our elites is unjust. I don’t think anything of the kind. Nor do I intend to mock people in pain.