The Election/Cynicism Cycle

One of my favorite lines in all of literature is the narrator’s assessment of the Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel:

He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much.

Confronting those lines for the first time, I felt like my soul had been laid bare. The cycle from home and eager expectation to cynicism and bitterness and sharpness of tongue is one that I have known far too often.

Enter the presidential election cycle.

Every now and then a candidate casts a captivating vision of the future.

I confess to being deeply compelled by the Barack Obama who ran in 2008. I thought that a president who was capable of forming a coherent sentence might be our best bet for a foreign policy that looked to diplomacy first and military destruction as a last resort. But seriously, has the Nobel Prize committee ever made a bigger mistake than in giving its peace prize to the king of the drone strike?

This year both Republicans and Democrats have someone who is casting exciting vision. Trump promises to make America a place where the bully finally looks out for the little people lost on the shores of the rushing river of cultural change. Bernie Sanders promises to speed that river’s flow.

Trump has helped me to see how people like Hitler come to power. It’s truly terrifying.

Clinton does not appear to have any idea how Israel’s countless violations of U.N. mandates, its wall building and land grabbing, has terrorized the Palestinian people. I do find the amount of money she has received from the banking industry to be a frightening disclosure of who has her ear, despite the fact that she was allegedly the one speaking. And then there is the history of her support of the crime bill in the 90s—something I would not really care so much about if she would just say that they tried something and it has proved to be a colossal mistake.

And, as someone who leans Democrat (when I’m not voting for a Libertarian)—is there anything more cynical making than those “super delegates” who get to decide the nominee with complete disregard of the will of the people? Talk about a power grab!

A couple weeks ago a friend told me that he thought Cruz was more dangerous than Trump. His rationale: Cruz actually believes everything he’s saying. Trump is just saying whatever he thinks people want to hear. Trump is the parody of what Cruz truly is. Nearly the same thing has now been said by Robert Reich (in less than compelling terms, I thought). Be that as it may, I am generally as principled against the things Cruz is principled for as to find the thought of a fiscal-cliff-diving Cruz presidency to be terrifying.

And I seriously can’t believe that two guys named Cruz and Rubio are embodying the racism and xenophobia of the conservative party right now.

Sanders has recently shown me why he cannot muster any core constituency of black voters. His liberal idealism is the liberalism of the northeast and, dare I say, places like my own San Francisco and like Portland, Oregon: the liberalism of white people for whom the lives of African Americans are more theoretical than an aspect of daily reality.

I wanted to believe. I confess that for a few months I was really starting to feel the Bern.

But the calendar has done this weird thing to us. It has punished us by making the presidential election happen on leap year, just so we have to deal with it for one more day. That day has made all the difference for me.

The cynicism has set in. None of these candidates is going to be our messiah.

Sigh.

The Mirror

My cynicism cycle will now go from shaking my head at this whole thing to wanting to retreat to wanting to fix it with my voice and my one mighty vote for some third-party pacifist.

I’m not sure that any of those are faithful for me. But there does seem to be one important thing that’s been bubbling up around the election, despite itself.

More and more, people are recognizing that this election is a mirror. These are not alien others risen up in our midst to destroy us from without. These candidates are showing us who we are.

We are a people who love our money and somehow can’t seem to learn that most of us don’t have it and never will.

We are a people who like to know that the God of the Bible is on our side and can’t seem to learn to hear the ways that the Bible would correct our politics.

We are a people who love power and control. We want it for our in-groups, we want it for our country. And we try to dominate other people and work our will as much for the sake of exercising power as for obtaining any noble end.

We believe that we, and our people, are right. About everything. And we are very good at maintaining this fiction against seemingly insurmountable evidence to the contrary.The cult of personality (look for people who are running with themselves rather than their convictions and plans as their main message) is a version of our cult of tribe.

We construct self-serving definitions of justice.

Not a Window, a Mirror

Here’s something I am forever telling theology students: the easiest thing in the world is to read a biblical text and determine what the significance or application should be. The hardest thing in the world is to get someone sitting in the pew to understand that the change you’re calling for applies to them and not the person sitting next to them.

That’s the challenge before us in this election cycle.

It is easy to look at the other party and see how “those people” are being snookered by the base instincts of “their” candidate. I’ve seen much more in mainstream media about how Trump or Cruz supporters are somehow falling in line with various repulsive values than how Sanders or Clinton supporters incur similar guilt. It’s “them,” not “us” in the media narrative.

So maybe that’s the best place for us to start: to treat the horror show that’s developing as a mirror with which to better see and understand ourselves rather than as a mirror through which to see our neighbor.

People today are prone to say that if you want to love your neighbor as yourself you need to truly love yourself. Jesus said something more like, If you want to love your neighbor as yourself you need to get that log out of your eye so that you can help her with her speck.

Hope

Cornell West has said of himself, “I cannot be an optimist, but I am a prisoner of hope.”

Maybe one of the most basic ruts we have, so many of us, fallen into is in placing our hope in a political process. I am not enough of an Anabaptist to think that we should withdraw from the process completely, but maybe we are looking for our deliverance and the salvation of the world too much from human hands.

Hope is powerful. Hope is also dangerous. Hope can be the agent of cynicism. Hope can defeat it.

The Christian story is one of hope. It is hope engendered by the conviction that we have the right kind of leader. We have a Lord who refused to lash out at his enemies. The earth has a master who cannot be bought with gold, sold by gold though he may have been. We have a Lord who promised to sweep up all of creation, and all of us, into the better future that he has already entered into.

There’s our hope.

If God can redeem and save from literal, physical death itself, then perhaps God can even redeem our election cycle. Perhaps God can even redeem us, we the people, who have created it.