Catholic and Enjoying It!
This is the ambient noise now being emitted by Trumpified Right. Listen to it:
Last week, Clinton made a factually accurate but politically bad choice to address the existence of this mob of howling savages and called them a “basket of deplorables”. It was like pouring water on a grease fire and the mob came unhinged, sobbing about the cruelty of the mean lady calling them a name (*sob*) and responding with still more torrent of unhinged abuse, calls for her death, and the usual behavior one has come to expect from the savages and wahoos of the Trump Right.
In the course of it, some people lost their patience. One of them was Jonathan Chait, who wrote a piece titled “Yes, Most Donald Trump Supporters are Deplorable and Irredeemable“.
Chestertonian Catholic that I am, I replied to the piece briefly on FB, saying “Deplorable? Yes. Irredeemable? That is a lie from the pit of hell”.
I had in mind a passage from Chesterton’s The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, in which he replies to H.L. Mencken’s scornful remark directed to certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers that, “They have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth saving.” Chesterton declares:
The Catholic theology has nothing to do with democracy, for or against, in the sense of a machinery of voting or a criticism of particular political privileges. It is not committed to support what Whitman said for democracy, or even what Jefferson or Lincoln said for democracy. But it is absolutely committed to contradict what Mr. Mencken says against democracy. There will be Diocletian persecutions, there will be Dominican crusades, there will be rending of all religious peace and compromise, or even the end of civilization and the world, before the Catholic Church will admit that one single moron, or one single man, “is not worth saving.”
I sort of assumed the “lie from the pit of hell” thing made it pretty clear what I thought about the human dignity of and salvific will of God for the awful people Chait was despairing of.
But I failed to account for the fact that “deplorable” had taken on a Pavlovian quality in the days between Clinton’s speech and Chait’s article. To acknowledge in any way whatsoever that Clinton had an obviously valid point (just rewatch the video above) was intolerable. And so I was suddenly beseiged with hand-wringing sobs of anguish from people demanding to know why I used the trigger word “deplorables”. After listening for *years* to conservative Catholics who spoke, by the thousands, about “Killary the Pure Evil Bitch and her Demoncrat Libtards, I was suddenly subjected to super-fine-tuned arguments to the effect that Hillary had made no distinction between the actions of Trump supporters and their persons and (O the humanity!) in failing to reject this woman’s mean mean words I was identifying these poor people with their sin and denying their human dignity.
I replied that I did not expect a politician to speak with the exacting precision of a moral theologian and that speakers of English (and other languages) typically did not make such nice distinctions in workaday discourse. So Pius XII did not take care to say that Hitler’s actions were diabolical. He went ahead and said that Hitler was diabolical–because that’s how normal people talk.
Indeed, all the people now being triggered and sobbing about their need for a safe space to protect them from Mean Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” line were remarkably mute a few years back when a hapless priest on Bill O’Reilly’s show made precisely the attempt to distinguish the man from the act. The poor padre (Fr. Edward Beck) found himself in a firestorm of Right Wing Culture War contempt when he said that he could not judge if Osama bin Laden was evil or not. What he meant, of course, was that it was not his place to judge the man’s soul and that, though his deeds were obviously evil and grave matter of sin, he could made no judgments about his culpability, knowledge, and freedom since those are known only to God.
Result: Glenn Beck sicced a good old Girardian scapegoating mob of righteous culture warriors on the poor man who feasted on his flesh for a couple of days in one of thousands of culture war panics du jour. The same culture warriors who are now calling for their fainting couch over “basket of deplorables” and weeping about how “people are not deplorable, actions are *sob*” were, just a couple of years ago, calling Fr. Beck a moral idiot.
So that’s the first absurdity of this latest Right Wing Panic du Jour. The second, and far more sinister one, is this. After complaining that there was something unjust about her characterization of Trump’s base as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” that base (65% of whom believe Obama is a Muslim, and 59% of whom think he was not born in the US) then began to take the name “Deplorables” as a badge of honor, not to deny it, but to embrace it.
Donald Trump, Jr., continuing Dad’s long habit of retweeting white supremacist and neo-Nazi material, passed this along:
Note Pepe the Frog. He is the adoptive mascot of the white supremacist Alt Right. The point is this: The Party of Trump no longer bothers to deny they are racists and think the Alt Right is da bomb. Hell, Trump made Steve Bannon is right hand man. Rather, they now boast that the deplorables–racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia–are cool *because* Hillary denounces them. White supremacy is awesome because Killary the Bitch Whore Demoncrat Libtard speaks against it.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
and shrewd in their own sight! (Is 5:20–21)
Trump’s way is poison. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is pagan logic, not the gospel. Seizing on evil merely because your culture war enemy hates it is folly. To all tempted to embrace the Alt Right: Christ died for you and rose for you. Turn away from the worldliness of racist filth and believe the good news. Trust and obey Jesus Christ, not the wisdom of this world is folly.
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