I’m at North Myrtle Beach with my five grandchildren this week so my posts will be short. I share this Walt Whitman poem from Leaves of Grass that someone posted on Bluesky. While the poet is addressing the States—”or any one of them, or any city of the States”—his poem extends to the current day GOP, whose Congressional members overrode whatever inner qualms they had about the Big Beautiful Bill because have become fully enslaved by the cult leader.
The rest of us must “resist much, obey little” if we are not to lose our remaining liberties. Continue to do what you can.
To the States By Walt Whitman
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
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Sunday
For this Sunday that follows on the heels of July 4th, I share a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that was written during the Civil War. The poem has God speaking to the Plymouth Rock pilgrims, both of the promise America represents and of its descent into slavery and war. “I am tired of kings,/I suffer them no more,” God says at one point and further on, “My angel,–his name is Freedom,–/ Choose him to be your king.”
Sometimes sounding like the Old Testament prophets, sometimes like Jesus, “God” articulates the democratic vision of a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” (to borrow from Lincoln):
And here in a pine statehouse They shall choose men to rule In every needful faculty, In church, and state, and school.
The poem then turns to the issue of slavery, with God promising to “break your bonds and masterships,/ And I unchain the slave.” In doing so, human potential will be unleashed:
I cause from every creature His proper good to flow: As much as he is and doeth, So much he shall bestow.
And:
Up! and the dusky race That sat in darkness long.– Be swift their feet as antelopes. And as behemoth strong.
Incidentally, Emerson puzzles us for a moment by seeming to embrace one proposal that some floated: conflict could be avoided if slave owners were paid to free their slaves. (In point of fact, there was far too much money tied up in slavery for this to have been economically possible.) By all means, Emerson’s God says, “pay ransom to the owner,” before clarifying that the only true owners of the slaves are the slaves themselves. Therefore they are the ones who should be compensated.
Since the poem was written while war was raging, God calls for Union hearts to “carry my purpose forth,/ Which neither halts nor shakes.” God’s eye, meanwhile, is on those who lay “hands on another/ To coin his labor and sweat.” Just as “Battle Hymn of the Republic” talks of God loosing “the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,” so Emerson’s God asserts,
My will fulfilled shall be, For, in daylight or in dark, My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.
In the Civil War, of course, both sides contended that God was on their side, and slaveowners twisted the Bible to serve their ends. Similarly, many of those who voted for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashes programs for millions, loudly proclaim themselves as Christians. Emerson has such people in mind when he echoes Isaiah and Jesus. “Today unbind the captive” alludes to Isaiah 61:1:
The Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners
Meanwhile Jesus’s declaration that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (Matthew 20:28) is taken up when Emerson writes,
And ye shall succor men; ’T is nobleness to serve; Help them who cannot help again: Beware from right to swerve.
Think what a different country we would be if these Congressional Christians really took Christ’s teachings to heart.
Here’s the poem in its entirety. It’s long but reads quickly and is worth the effort.
Boston Hymn By Ralph Waldo Emerson [Read in Music Hall, January 1, 1863]
The word of the Lord by night To the watching Pilgrims came, As they sat by the seaside, And filled their hearts with flame.
God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.
Think ye I made this ball A field of havoc and war, Where tyrants great and tyrants small Might harry the weak and poor?
My Angel,–his name is Freedom,– Choose him to be your King; He shall cut pathways east and west, And fend you with his wing.
Lo! I uncover the land Which I hid of old time in the West, As the sculptor uncovers the statue When he has wrought his best;
I show Columbia, of the rocks Which dip their foot in the seas, And soar to the air-borne flocks Of clouds, and the boreal fleece.
I will divide my goods; Call in the wretch and slave: None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have.
I will have never a noble, No lineage counted great; Fishers and choppers and ploughmen Shall constitute a state.
Go, cut down trees in the forest, And trim the straightest boughs; Cut down trees in the forest, And build me a wooden house.
Call the people together, The young men and the sires, The digger in the harvest field, Hireling, and him that hires;
And here in a pine statehouse They shall choose men to rule In every needful faculty, In church, and state, and school.
Lo, now! if these poor men Can govern the land and sea, And make just laws below the sun, As planets faithful be.
And ye shall succor men; ’T is nobleness to serve; Help them who cannot help again: Beware from right to swerve.
I break your bonds and masterships, And I unchain the slave: Free be his heart and hand henceforth As wind and wandering wave.
I cause from every creature His proper good to flow: As much as he is and doeth, So much he shall bestow.
But, laying hands on another To coin his labor and sweat, He goes in pawn to his victim For eternal years in debt.
To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!
Pay ransom to the owner, And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him.
North! give him beauty for rags, And honor, South! for his shame; Nevada! coin thy golden crags With Freedom’s image and name.
Up! and the dusky race That sat in darkness long,— Be swift their feet as antelopes, And as behemoth strong.
Come, East and West and North, By races, as snow-flakes, And carry my purpose forth, Which neither halts nor shakes.
My will fulfilled shall be, For, in daylight or in dark, My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Friday
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine memorably wrote in December of 1776, when the inexperienced American army was reeling from a series of defeats. On this July 4th, Paine’s words seem all too timely as we experience the greatest assault on our democracy since the Civil War.
Paine finds some consolation in having to struggle. “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,” he writes, seeking to galvanize “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” George Washington read the words to his troops prior to his daring Delaware River crossing, where he defeated Hessian troops on Christmas Eve.
What Paine says of his readers could be applied to those of us today who have esteemed our freedoms “too lightly”:
[I]t is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
Paine concludes his opening with charges that can be leveled, with very little change, at our own tyrant. In the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is on the verge of being passed, billions of funds are being directed towards ICE, which is increasingly functioning as Trump’s private militia:
Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.
Over this past half year, I have found myself returning to poems about the American Revolution that I encountered in grade school, which now speak with new power. I was unfamiliar, however, with Paine’s “The Liberty Tree,” which he wrote in 1775.
As I learned from a Smithsonian article, colonists protesting the Stamp Act of 1765 gathered around an elm tree standing on the Boston Commons, and the site thereafter served as a rallying point for demonstrators. The elm became known as the Liberty Tree and the surrounding ground Liberty Hall.
When the Stamp Act was repealed, scores of lanterns were hung from its branches. Protesters rallied again under the tree when they were protesting the Tea Act of 1773, and they even burned a custom commissioner’s boat following a mock trial. On a darker note that recalls Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” protesters tarred, feathered, and threatened to hang a British customs official from the branches unless he cursed the governor. (The Smithsonian article reports, “He didn’t, and they didn’t.) “This tree,” complained one loyalist, “was consecrated for an Idol for the Mob to Worship.”
Eventually, in August of 1775, loyalists cut down the Liberty Tree, using it for firewood. This was the direct occasion for Paine’s poem, who talks of the king and Parliament—”Kings, Commons and Lords”— “uniting amain/ To cut down this guardian of ours.”
As was customary for neoclassical poetry, Paine resorts to classical imagery in his poem, imagining a Goddess of Liberty bestowing the tree–excuse me, “celestial exotic stuck deep in the ground”–upon America. In what we can now read as a rejection of Trump’s preference for “the right kind of immigrants,” the poet says the symbol attracts people from all over the globe:
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came, For freemen like brothers agree; With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued, And their temple was Liberty Tree.
These immigrants at first found peace and willingly supported the British crown. Paine compares them to “patriarchs of old,” a reference to Abraham, who planted a tamarisk tree to commemorate the treaty he had forged with the Philistine ruler Abimelek. America, meanwhile, is framed as an Edenic paradise where the colonists at first ate “their bread in contentment” and were “unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold/ The cares of the grand and the great.” When the crown turned tyrannical and cut down Liberty Tree, however, they had no choice but to “blow the trumpet to arms.”
Here’s the poem:
The Liberty Tree By Thomas Paine
In a chariot of light from the regions of day, The Goddess of Liberty came, Ten thousand celestials directed her way, And hither conducted the dame. A fair budding branch from the gardens above, Where millions with millions agree, She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love, And the plant she named Liberty Tree.
The celestial exotic stuck deep in the ground, Like a native it flourished and bore; The fame of its fruit drew the nations around, To seek out this peaceable shore. Unmindful of names or distinctions they came, For freemen like brothers agree; With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued, And their temple was Liberty Tree.
Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old, Their bread in contentment they ate, Unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold, The cares of the grand and the great. With timber and tar they Old England supplied, And supported her power on the sea; Her battles they fought, without getting a groat, For the honor of Liberty Tree.
But hear, O ye swains (’tis a tale most profane), How all the tyrannical powers, Kings, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain To cut down this guardian of ours. From the East to the West blow the trumpet to arms, Thro’ the land let the sound of it flee; Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer, In defense of our Liberty Tree.
As we ourselves find our souls tried, Paine lays out our task. Liberty Tree was planted here, it became our temple, we have honored it, and now we must defend it. Happy July 4th.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday
While corresponding with one of my English readers the other day, I looked for silver linings in what is currently happening in the United States. To many Americans, what we are witnessing makes us unrecognizable to ourselves, with masked agents snatching people off the streets and sending them, all rights suspended, to concentration camps abroad and concentration camps and private prisons at home; with Trump threatening to strip American citizens of citizenship rights; and with non-stop assaults on universities, scientific research, life-saving vaccines, the media, law firms, foreign aid programs, the environment, public wilderness areas, Medicaid, food assistance, and on and on. Our GOP-controlled Congress and the Supreme Court appear to bend to Trump’s will at every juncture.
While pointing to the growing resistance, I wondered whether I was being “Pollyannish” in my search for optimism. The descriptor is taken from Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel Pollyanna, which I read as a child, along with some of the sequels. In it, the newly orphaned 11-year-old plays what she calls “the just being glad game,” in which she finds some reason to be glad in every situation, no matter how desperate.
Over the years, “Pollyanna” has taken on negative connotations as it is applied to those who are hopelessly naïve or who rationalize excessively. According to Wikipedia, Richard Nixon talked about the need to steer a course between Pollyanna and doom-predicting Cassandra, which is to say between ungrounded optimism and out-and-out pessimism (although Cassandra, one could point out, was always right). Others have expressed versions of the same. The ultimate takedown of Pollyannaism may be the concluding scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where Brian, as he is being crucified, is told to “look on the bright side of life.” The movie ends with six crucified prisoners cheerfully singing and whistling,
If life seems jolly rotten There’s something you’ve forgotten And that to laugh and smile and dance and sing When you’re feeling in the dumps Don’t be silly chumps Just purse your lips and whistle—that’s the thing
Chorus: And, always look on the bright side of life, Always look on the right side of life
As far as takedowns, I award second place to Professor “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide.
More on Pollyanna in a moment. First of all, a number of political commentators in recent years have been critiqued for excessive optimism. Poll aggregator Nate Silver accused Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg of being high on “hopium” (in response Rosenburg defiantly changed the title of his newsletter to “Hopium”), and Robert Hubbell has been charged with undermining Democratic resistance with such positive takes as (to cite Tuesday’s blog) Trump will not in fact be able to cancel the 2026 elections and the Democrats are not in disarray.
Hubbell notes, “Over the eight years of the newsletter’s existence, I have received a dozen or so critiques (usually from Never Trumpers) that my newsletter is too hopeful. These critics have often said that I need to frighten people by alarming them about how bad things can get.”
He also reports one grassroots activist leader complaining,
Your column today gave tens of thousands of readers a great excuse to think to themselves, “Hubbell says we’re going to smash the Republicans because of what they’ve done, so I don’t need to do anything.”
Hubbell’s response is that “part of Trump’s strategy is to dispirit and demotivate us. The media are gleeful accomplices in selectively bashing Democrats while overlooking the corruption and criminality of Trump. Our side needs some hope, perspective, and confidence.”
He concludes,
We need some confidence and swagger to counteract the self-assured pundits who are telling us all is doomed for Democrats. That is not true. We are strong, focused, and determined—and we have not capitulated to a wannabe dictator as has the entire Republican Party. That gives me hope in our future prospects—and it should do the same for you.
Back to Pollyanna, who says the “just being glad game” originated when she was hoping to find a doll in the charity barrel at the local Ladies’ Aid Society. The girl and her impoverished minister father—the mother has died—are dependent on such gifts, but instead of a doll, the society can only send over a pair of crutches that someone has left. Pollyanna explains to a skeptical interlocutor the gladness to be found in that:
“[T]he game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas,” rejoined Pollyanna, earnestly. ‘And we began right then— on the crutches.’
“Well, goodness me! I can’t see anythin’ ter be glad about—gettin’ a pair of crutches when you wanted a doll!”
Pollyanna clapped her hands.
“There is—there is,” she crowed. “But I couldn’t see it, either, Nancy, at first,” she added, with quick honesty. “Father had to tell it to me.”
“Well, then, suppose YOU tell ME,” almost snapped Nancy.
:Goosey! Why, just be glad because you don’t— NEED—’EM!” exulted Pollyanna, triumphantly. “You see it’s just as easy—when you know how!”
Pollyanna explains that the harder the game gets, the more fun it is, although she adds that “sometimes it’s almost too hard—like when your father goes to Heaven, and there isn’t anybody but a Ladies’ Aid left.”
The relentlessly upbeat Pollyanna goes to work on some of the hardest hearts in the town, starting with the embittered aunt to whom she is sent. In scenes that recall Francis Hodgson Burnett novels, the orphan is first put in the stuffy and cheerless attic room (Little Princess) of a large house (Secret Garden) but refuses to be put off by dour countenances (Little Lord Fauntleroy). Instead, she insists on playing the glad game with discontented housemaids, reclusive misanthropes, crabby invalids, fallen women, orphaned boys, and imbittered spinsters. They are thrown off balance by her focus on the bright side of things and lives are changed.
In such stories, there must be a development where the game is tested to the limit, which occurs when it is feared Pollyanna will never walk again after she is hit by a car. Even she appears to give up. Although housekeeper Nancy reminds her of the glad game,
the poor little lamb just cries, an’ says it don’t seem the same, somehow. She says it’s easy ter TELL lifelong invalids how ter be glad, but ‘tain’t the same thing when you’re the lifelong invalid yerself, an’ have ter try ter do it. She says she’s told herself over an’ over again how glad she is that other folks ain’t like her; but that all the time she’s sayin’ it, she ain’t really THINKIN’ of anythin’ only how she can’t ever walk again.’
And:
‘Then I tried ter remind her how she used ter say the game was all the nicer ter play when—when it was hard,’ resumed Nancy, in a dull voice. ‘But she says that, too, is diff’rent—when it really IS hard.”
What follows are scenes that are reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life in that the town tries to gladden Pollyanna with stories of how she has gladdened them. In addition, people start behaving in ways that they know will gladden her, and an indirect consequence of one of these is a doctor emerging who knows of a cure. The novel ends with not only Pollyanna walking again but the doctor and Aunt Polly, no longer bitter, getting married.
As I was rereading the novel for the first time in over sixty years, I wondered if a relentless dose of Pollyanna might soften the stony hearts of the GOP, which has been taken over by a cult of cruelty. (We are witnessing the banality of evil, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said Tuesday night.) All around the country people are stepping up to defend beloved immigrant neighbors from being kidnapped—not that one must be beloved to have rights—and such acts might have a broader impact. How is Make America Decent Again for a slogan?
To be sure, GOP members of Congress seem prepared to override all moral qualms with their Big Beautiful Bill—fear, greed, and ambition can wreak havoc with the heart—and there may be limits to Pollyannaism. How would her “just be glad” approach to life have worked in Nazi Germany?
But we’re not Nazi Germany yet. Trump barely eked out a victory and, since then, many of his voters have turned against him. Numbers are on the side of those who believe in the country’s foundational values, which means that undiluted pessimism is not only counterproductive but out of touch with the facts on the ground. Sure, we’re experiencing things we’ve never seen before but that also gives us an opportunity, after years of complacency, to treasure what is good about this country and to fight for it.
In other words, maybe by being Pollyannas we can restore America to its senses.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
Poets and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s taught us much of what we need to know about fascism. Yesterday I shared poems by Bertolt Brecht, who had a front row seat for the rise of Hitler. Today I turn to one by William Butler Yeats.
I owe my awareness of “Leaders of the Crowd” to Greg Olear, whose blog Prevail I find indispensable, both for its political analysis and for its use of poetry and fiction in that analysis. Olear turned to Yeats for the title of his 2024 book, which warned about the dangers of a second Trump presidency (Rough Beast: Who Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Reelected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail). Olear, of course, has borrowed from “The Second Coming,” with the title (to our sorrow) proving predictive:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
In his most recent post, Olear shares what various close observers of fascism have identified as essential tactics for gaining and holding power:
–Demonization of domestic enemies –Preposterous lies –Contempt for democratic institutions
He also shares what Columbia professor Robert Paxon sees as the five stages of fascism, which is to say “the phases nations pass through on the road to establishing and expanding a fascist government.” Frighteningly, Trump has checked the boxes of the first four:
–Emerging out of disillusionment –Establishing legitimacy as a political party –Gaining power via right-wing partnerships –Using power to dominate institutions –Implementing radical reforms
It was during the 2024 campaign that Olear shared Yeats’s “Leaders of the Crowd,” which he says might more aptly be titled “Demagogues.” Note how closely the sonnet describes Trump, especially the way that he rallies his troops with his certainty and how he “pulls down established honor” with his “loose fantasy” (“they’re eating the dogs”). “Helicon” is the home of the muses, and while Trump’s supporters may see his pronouncements as divinely inspired, Yeats would characterize them as “calumny” dredged from the “abounding gutter”:
They must to keep their certainty accuse All that are different of a base intent; Pull down established honor; hawk for news Whatever their loose fantasy invent And murmur it with bated breath, as though The abounding gutter had been Helicon Or calumny a song. How can they know Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no Solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
There are two lamps in the poem. One is the lamp of truth, which is contemplated in solitude and which guides our great leaders. The demagogue, by contrast, isn’t interested in truth, preferring loud music and cheering crowds (“heartier loves”). As long as the crowds show up, he cares not for what may come.
It is in this sense that, as the poem puts it, hope is “every day renewed.” Hope seems to us a good thing but, in this case, it is a shallow hope. One could just as well say that despair is every day renewed. The crowds make him think that he is something whereas, without their adulation, he would see himself as nothing. It is in this way that the lamp that guides him is from the tomb.
Note how such insecurity makes the leader’s life unbearable. For all that he has achieved, Trump fears that he is nothing if he does not win the Nobel Peace Prize, if he isn’t considered greater than Washington and Lincoln, if his face isn’t carved into Mount Rushmore, if he doesn’t win every golf game he plays, if he is not flattered at every waking moment.
Meanwhile, those Republicans who have struck a Faustian bargain to remain in his good graces are being hollowed out. If voting for his Big Beautiful Bill costs many of them their Congressional seats, as pundits predict, what will they have to look back on? Those Democrats who were “shellacked” after voting for Obamacare in 2010 can look back at all the lives they saved whereas what will the GOP get? A few pats on the head from wealthy donors.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
As I write this, Senate Republicans are trying to pass Trump’s unironically named “Big Beautiful Bill,” which over the next ten years will take one trillion dollars out of the national economy and put it in private hands. In the process, Medicaid and various entitlements will be gutted. Millions will lose their healthcare.
Political scientist John Stoehr of the Editorial Board notes there will be other ramifications as well:
Higher prices, fewer jobs, less growth – or as one Federal Reserve official told Bloomberg TV recently, the question isn’t whether we’re going to see stagflation in the near future, but the magnitude of it.
Bertolt Brecht has poems for such occasions. For instance, there’s this one about him watching the wheeling and dealing on the Chicago Wheat Exchange—this during the Great Depression—which for a socialist primarily concerned with people getting enough bread to feed their families is a confounding experience.
Let’s just say that the dealers in wheat are not concerned with the issue of hunger:
Years ago when I was studying the ways of the Chicago Wheat Exchange I suddenly grasped how they managed the whole world’s wheat there And yet I did not grasp it either and lowered the book I knew at once: you’ve run Into bad trouble.There was no feeling of enmity in me and it was not the injustice Frightened me, only the thought that Their way of going above it won’t do Filled me completely
These people, I saw, lived by the harm Which they did, not by the good. This was a situation, I saw, that could only be maintained By crime because too bad for most people. In this way every Achievement of reason, invention or discovery Must lead only to still greater wretchedness.
Such and suchlike I thought at that moment Far from anger or lamenting, as I lowered the book With its description of the Chicago wheat market and exchange.
Much trouble and tribulation Awaited me
I’m a little confused by his remark that “every achievement of reason, invention of discovery must lead only to still great wretchedness” although it makes me think of the giant tech companies, many headed by Trump-supporting billionaires, who stand to rake in billions from the bill. Perhaps Brecht means that the more society becomes rationalized and systematized, the greater potential there is for exploitation.
Yes, these people live by the harm they do, not by the good. Much trouble and tribulation will indeed visit us if the big beautiful billionaires’ bill passes.
As for the white working class Trump voters who made this moment possible and who will suffer grievously, I turn to another Brecht poem:
When it comes to marching many do not know That their enemy is marching at their head. The voice which gives them their orders Is their enemy’s voice and The man who speaks of the enemy Is the enemy himself
The question is whether they will ever acknowledge this.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Monday
I’ve been looking for a literary analogue for our Supreme Court and have decided the rightwing members are a lot like Vernon and Petunia Dursley from the Harry Potter books: they spoil their son Dudley (Donald Trump) while forcing their orphaned nephew Harry (Trump’s opponents) to sleep in the closet underneath the stairwell.
The spoiling came most recently in their decision to prevent lower courts from issuing national injunctions against Trump’s desire to strip the children of immigrants of their birthright citizenship. Never mind that SCOTUS had no problems with lower courts issuing national injunctions against various of Biden’s policies, especially regarding student loans and Covid regulations. It’s only an issue when courts block Trump measures.
To overrule the lower courts in this case is particularly alarming since gaining citizenship upon being born here is one of our most fundamental rights, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The Trump administration can now go ahead and start stripping individuals of citizenship here or there with no court other than SCOTUS able to stop him. As Ruth Marcus notes in the New Yorker,
Friday’s decision means that courts are now hobbled from stopping any of the Administration’s actions, no matter how unconstitutional they may be, nor how much damage they will inflict. Once again, the Court’s conservative super-majority abandoned its constitutionally assigned role and dangerously empowered the President. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent, “its decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”
This is only the most recent instance of SCOTUS favoring Trump. Recently, it has allowed people to be sent to foreign prisons without any right to contest their deportations. And last year it decided to grant Trump immunity for all “presidential acts,” which apparently include instigating a coup attempt. Increasingly, Trump sees himself as having been giving blanket permission to break any law he chooses, and he has proven himself more than willing to do so.
To be sure, SCOTUS was already trending towards to the extreme right even before Trump, especially with its Citizens United decision, which allowed corporate and foreign money to flood the political system. But with Trump in the Oval Office, the trend has accelerated.
Think of SCOTUS’s gifts to Trump as the presents than Dudley receives on his eleventh birthday:
The table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley’s birthday presents. It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the second television and the racing bike. Exactly why Dudley wanted a racing bike was a mystery to Harry as Dudley was very fat and hated exercise—unless of course it involved punching somebody. Dudley’s favorite punching bag was Harry…
Once one starts comparing Dudley to Trump, the resemblances don’t stop. For instance, there’s Dudley’s physique and his hair:
He had a large pink face, not much neck, small, watery blue eyes, and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel—Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.
Dudley even has the same insatiable appetite that Trump does:
Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell. “Thirty-six,” he said, looking up at his mother and father. “That’s two less than last year.”
The three liberal justices, along with most lawyers and judges, are keenly aware of how Trump games the system. The rightwing justices, however, blithely ignore his legal shenanigans, doing a version of the Vernon-Petunia dance. After pointing out that Dudley missed one present, Petunia then promises him more goodies:
Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger, too, because she said quickly, “And we’ll buy you another two presents while we’re out today. How’s that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?”
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. Finally he said slowly, “So I’ll have thirty…thirty…” “Thirty-nine, sweetums, said Aunt Petunia.
“Oh.” Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel. “All right then.”
Uncle Vernon chuckled.
“Little tyke wants his money’s worth, just like his father. “Atta boy, Dudley!” He ruffled Dudley’s hair.
Think of Justice John Roberts essentially ruffling Trump’s hair. Atta boy, Donald.
One doesn’t need to be a child psychologist to know how bad this is for a child. Nor does it take an expert on authoritarianism to know that attempting to placate a tyrant never ends well. After receiving 37 presents, Dudley is upset that Harry will be allowed to join them on his birthday outing. His display of self-pity bears no small resemblance to Trump’s incessant complaints that “nobody’s been treated badly like me”:
Dudley began to cry loudly. In fact, he wasn’t really crying—it had been years since he’s really cried—but he knew that if he screwed up his face and wailed, his mother would give him anything he wanted.
“Dinky duddydums, don’t cry. Mummy won’t let him spoil your special day!” she cried, flinging her arms around him.
“I…don’t…want…him…t-t-to come!” Dudley yelled between huge, pretend sobs. “He always sp-spoils everything!” He shot Harry a nasty grin through the gap in his mother’s arms.
Thanks to such parenting, Dudley follows a Trump-like arc, at first becoming immensely fat and then, when he starts boxing, using his new-found strength to become an even bigger bully. The only difference from Trump is that Dudley does undergo a conversion of sorts, becoming softer and more friendly after Harry saves him from the Dementors.
The Dursley parents, however, never apologize for what they have done, nor does it appear that SCOTUS’s rightwing members will do so. John Roberts, even as he decries increasing attacks on the judiciary, does not acknowledge the role the 6-3 majority has played in delegitimizing the court. They were tasked with a sacred mission, to uphold the rule of law, and have been bending the law to suit their own political biases. One wishes that there was someone in a position of authority who could lecture them as Albus Dumbledore lectures Vernon and Petunia.
Telling them that their sacred duty was to care for Harry “as though he were your own,” Dumbledore continues,
You did not do as I asked. You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing but neglect and often cruelty at your hands. The best that can be said is that he has at least escaped the appalling damage you have inflicted upon the unfortunate boy [Dudley] sitting between you.
The damage SCOTUS has inflicted upon Trump is removing all guardrails to his behavior. And because he will appear to cry bitterly every time he is thwarted, it appears that they will not be changing their behavior anytime soon.
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Sunday
I report today on a forthcoming article, “The Greatest Story Ever Told: How Theism Predicts Christianity,” co-written by Robin Collins and Joshua Rasmussen. Collins, a close friend who teaches philosophy at Messiah College, shared it with me, and I love how it emphasizes the “story” part of the Christian story.
Collins and Rasmussen argue that the power of the story, rather than historical testimony, is the best evidence that the Jesus narrative actually happened. As Collins writes, “this argument has become the cornerstone of my Christian faith, with other arguments—such as the Apostolic witness to the Resurrection—serving as confirmation rather than foundation.”
Collins and Rasmussen start by noting that, while various scraps of historical evidence exist about Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection, an event so extraordinary requires more than scraps. After all, would we believe it if today someone claimed that “their leader, Achmed, was the Holy Spirit who was born of a Virgin and witnessed to be alive in the flesh after being executed for sedition in Iran”? It is because the Christian story has worked so powerfully on the world, the authors conclude, that it can be seen as something more than a fiction.
Their argument starts with the premise—which to be sure atheists will not buy—that God exists and that this deity is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. Robin, deeply knowledgeable about physics as well as philosophy and religious studies, has elsewhere made scientific arguments for the existence of God, being (as his Wikipedia entry notes) a leading advocate for the Fine-Tuning argument. According to this, life as we know it “could not exist if the constants of nature—such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant and others – had been even slightly different.” In other words, the universe is tuned specifically for life.
But set that aside to return to the story argument. The authors contend that
if someone believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God (or something sufficiently similar) and knew other relevant things about the world but had never heard the Christian story, they would have strong reason to expect that somewhere in the world a historical incarnation and atonement occurred, since these events develop great value in the greatest kind of story.
Why is this? Well, such a God would want to give “the greatest possible gift (God’s self) to us in the greatest possible way—specifically by providing a way for ourselves to be united with God so that our identity as a person is a finite expression of God’s self while we still retain our own individuality.”
So how would a deity provide us with such a gift given that God is infinite whereas we ourselves suffer from “lack of knowledge, limited powers, and moral fragility”? The mystery of the incarnation, where God became flesh and dwelt among us, speaks to this. As the authors put it, “for God to enact such a personal life, God would need to assume and act from a limited, human perspective.” Only if God makes God’s self accessible is it possible for humans to see the way clear to becoming at one with God. Christians call this becoming one atonement (at-one-ment).
At this point the article looks more closely into the shape of Jesus’s life, which comes to us in the powerful and very relatable guise of story. If our unity with God requires some sort of identification, then we must see God undergo our own experience “of profound suffering—something like (say) a humiliating death by crucifixion.” After all, only if we see God enacting the virtues under the “most extreme type of circumstances” can we imagine taking that path ourselves. Otherwise, as the authors point out, we would not see those virtues as “strong enough for the most difficult life situations people face.”
It is by sharing in these virtues, the authors write, that “we are freed from the forces that hinder moral and spiritual growth (i.e., are “saved from sin”), since living in alignment with the highest virtues is incompatible with destructive tendencies.” The transformation that is subsequently brought about “restores our connection with the divine and brings us into deeper harmony with ultimate reality.”
And further on:
God takes on finite form in a unique way in each one of us. Thus, each person becomes a unique expression of God’s infinite being within the constraints of their finite life. In this way, as we grow in relationship with others, we also grow in our participation in God’s life.
In a passage that brings to mind Dante’s Paradiso, the authors imagine this individual participation continuing on in the afterlife:
Like a great story, this vision of the afterlife is not static but endlessly dynamic. Rather than a mere continuation of earthly existence, it is an eternal deepening of divine participation. Each person, reflecting an inexhaustible aspect of God, will continue to manifest and experience divine beauty in ever-greater ways. This view aligns with C. S. Lewis’s conception of the heavenly state, in which each person will eternally know and praise God, communicating some infinite aspect of divine beauty that no other creature can fully express. Since divine beauty is infinite, this process of knowing, praising, and participating in God’s life will never be exhausted.
Lovers of fiction will notice that confronting trials, experiencing suffering, overcoming evil, and growing into maturity is the template for many of our greatest stories. It also conforms to the journey of the hero myth that Joseph Campbell has found in every world culture. If what Collins and Rasmussen say is right, then, when we read such stories, we seek confirmation of a deeper truth, one that takes us out of ourselves and puts us in touch with something transcendent. This is the case even when the stories are not overtly religious. As Lisa Simpson would say, they embiggen us.
Burrowing more deeply into the Christian plot, the authors note that a great story
provides hope—an expectation that suffering and struggle have meaning. Christianity offers this story element by framing life’s hardships as part of an epic journey, one filled with character development, unexpected plot twists, and, ultimately, the triumph of good. This perspective links earthly life with the afterlife, showing that suffering and vulnerability are not meaningless but serve a role in shaping us and deepening our connection with the divine.
Furthermore, just as we are not static as readers, nor are we static in the process of at-one-ment. By following Jesus’s example and precepts—especially (as Paul laid them out) faith, hope, and love—we participate in the great drama. The authors conclude,
[I]f God exists, we have reason to expect reality to reflect the greatest kind of story—one rich in meaning, transformation, and ultimate resolution. A great story involves struggle, character development, and the triumph of good over evil. We can see Christianity as a dynamic display of these elements in their highest form, including the Incarnation and Atonement, where the highest being enters history and overcomes the greatest kind of human suffering to provide the greatest kind of good (unity with God) in a dynamic way.
Here are Collins and Rasmussen recapping their article:
1. The highest good for human beings is union with God.
2. All else being equal, the greatest kind of story would include the highest good for human beings—namely, union with God—and achieve this in the most effective way.
3. Achieving these goods most effectively requires the Incarnation, in which God becomes human and exemplifies the highest virtues in the most challenging circumstances, inviting humanity to participate in these virtues, resulting in a participatory atonement. (For Christians, the highest virtues are faith, hope, and love.)
4. Therefore, all else being equal, the greatest story will include both the Incarnation and Atonement.
The authors touch on other issues, including why the Christian story occurred when it did (it has something to do with the reach of the Roman empire and the public nature of grisly executions) and how it relates to the stories of other religions. Given that “greatest story ever told” brings to mind those 1960s religious blockbusters whose triumphalism I’ve always detested—Hollywood glitz seems at odds with the Christian message—I hasten to point out that Collins and Rasmussen are fairly ecumenical in their claims. There are incarnation and atonement elements in other religions as well.
In the end, what I appreciate most about the piece is how it further enhances my appreciation both for the Christian story and for fiction in general. Truth is to be found at the core of both.
Further thought: Not all great literature, of course, conforms to the journey of the hero template that we see in the Jesus narrative. But all great literature honors the best in ourselves, putting us in touch with our full humanity. The arts, along with congregational worship and other means of acknowledging our inner divinity, guide us towards the atonement of which Collins and Rasmussen speak.
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Friday
“Why Fascism and Illiberalism Are So Seductive to Writers,” a recent Literary Hub article by Ed Simon, recently caught my eye as it goes against the grain. In my view, great literature is inherently anti-fascist because it honors and respects the full personhood of individuals whereas fascism reduces the Other to depersonalized caricatures. The greatest authors—Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—create characters who are so three-dimensional that they resist the ideological stereotypes upon which fascism relies. Even Shakespeare’s Shylock or Tolstoy’s Napoleoncan be used as political cudgels only if one ignores their complexity.
While Simon may not disagree with this, he goes at literature from a different angle. In the figures of Russian punk novelist Eduard Limonov, Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the rightwing Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, he sees authors for whom fascism is a logical extension of their art.
Simon notes that Limonov celebrated, as punk rock provocation, skinheads in Doc Martens with their Hitler salutes and Orthodox mystics ranting about a greater Mother Russia. Such art is not my cup of tea but, okay, there is a place for it. But although Limonov suffered for his art, fleeing the Soviet Union as a free speech martyr and later, when he returned to post-Soviet Russia, being imprisoned by Putin, his major target was liberal values. Thus, it’s not surprising that he would go on to embrace the genocidal Bosnian-Serb Radovan Karadžić. (You can read my comments on Karadžić, himself a poet, here. )
About D’Annunzio, who after World War I captured the city of Fiume and set himself up as the Commandante, Simon writes:
Always drawn between extremes of left and right, the author incorporated elements of corporatism and syndicalism into the constitution, but it was his own potent cult of personality that was the organizing principle. Bored by policy, D’Annunzio rather saw governance as a massive theatrical project, and to that end he introduced certain novelties, including black shirts and Roman salutes, balcony speeches and martial marches, with the man known as “The Poet” and “The Prophet” taking on a new sobriquet—”Il Duce.”
Simon adds,
A fantastical, filibustered country imagined into existence, governed not by reason but something chthonic, primal, and occult. Authoritarianism was D’Annunzio’s poetic theme and he blazed as the morning star of fascism, that nihilistic ideology the result of art for art’s sake pushed to its inhuman extremes.
Reading about D’Annunzio’s theatricality, I think not only of Donald Trump but also of Adolph Hitler. As I note in my book (I’m quoting Jonathan Gottshall’s The Storytelling Animal here),
Hitler essentially “ruled through art, and he ruled for art.” Citing Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, [Gottshall] notes that Hitler’s goals were more “broadly artistic” than military or political. According to Spotts, “Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism; to disregard the one is as profound a distortion as to pass over the other.”
About Mishima, who after the war wanted to return to an imperial Japan and who, with his followers, attempted to capture a Tokyo military base, Simon notes that he was a “body-building, Samurai-obsessed, ultra-nationalist, fascist paramilitary leader that masturbated to pictures of Catholic martyrdoms.” In his 1959 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Mishima notes that “his sense of beauty contained the ‘darkest thoughts that exist in this world.’”
Simon finds in all authors—not only these ones—a narcissism that has something in common with fascism. As he puts it, there is something
Janus-faced [in the] nature of writing, of thinking of yourself as a writer, of believing yourself capable of producing literature, which is to say of reorganizing reality. It requires a narcissism that’s the hallmark of the totalitarian. What is a totalitarian leader other than an individualist taking that creed to its cruel conclusions, erasing the uniqueness of every other person into mere characters in a drama?
The reason that authoritarians “court writers as easily as they oppress them,” Simon writes, is “because words are occult, they are magical, they make things happen.”
He also points out that fascists, like novelists and poets, are drawn to myth and fantasy and that the artistic temperament, at its most extreme, can be fascistic. Unlike poetic fantasizing, however, fascist fantasizing comes always “at the expense of our souls.”
One sees artistic extremism, Simon writes, in the Dionysian impulse that Nietzsche describes and celebrates in the Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche,
the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”
The Greeks would have cautioned that, while Dionysus must be respected, so too must Apollo. Both gods have a role in the artistic process, as the best authors understand. While I don’t know much about the three authors that Simon examines, I think it’s possible that their works are wiser than they are and that the authors would have had to distort and violate their works in order to weaponize them.
One can more easily weaponize lesser works—we see this all this time with novels like Atlas Shrugged and Camp of Saints—than greater ones. That because the best artistic creating is the opposite of narcissism, involving as it does the channeling of higher truth and beauty.
Take Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Height, for example, a work I choose because it has a strong Dionysian component. In fact, the all-absorbing passion that Heathcliff and Catherine have for each other destroys them both. But while the work provoked its society to such a deep extent that it took years for people to appreciate it—readers were especially scandalized that it was written by a woman—it is Apollonian as well as Dionysian. And while Wuthering Heights depicts narcissism, it is the opposite of narcissism because Bronte was looking beyond herself when she wrote it. As her sister Charlotte wrote in Emily’s defense, “the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.”
Rather than erasing the uniqueness of Catherine and Heathcliff or making them “mere characters in a drama,” Emily captured something essential about women and men that her society couldn’t recognize at the time. Art does this, fascism doesn’t.
