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Monday
A superb Washington Post article by Robert Kagan (gifted here) has put Donald Trump within the broader context of American history in a way I find very illuminating. When I sent it to my brothers, Jonathan said it put him in mind of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, which in turn got me thinking about the Grand Inquisitor episode is Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov. Hang on while I explain.
According to Kagan’s article, which is adapted from his recent book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again (Penguin Random House), America’s Founders based the new republic “on a radical set of principles and assertions about government.” These principles and assertions were
that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.
Because they recognized how radical their ideas were, they also knew that “a new way of thinking and acting” was required. This new way set up inevitable conflicts from the very beginning since most people of the time thought and behaved differently. The Founders, Kagan says, were well aware of this, knowing
that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office.
Because the Declaration of Independence was so radical, a significant number of Americans kicked back against it and have been doing so ever since. Believing that America should be governed by White Protestants, they felt and have continued to feel “under siege” by the Founders’ liberalism, which Abraham Lincoln later endorsed and backed up by force.
In Lincoln’s vision, the Declaration of Independence was the nation’s “standard maxim,” with a goal of “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere”—and it is this vision that some rightwing political scientists today call “liberal totalitarianism.” They claim they are being deprived of their “freedom” to “live a life according to Christian teachings” and that the government favors various minority groups (especially Black people) at their expense. Kagan observes,
Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, … but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.
Kagan turns to various rightwing intellectuals to flesh out this counter vision, including Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule. He reports,
The smartest and most honest of [rightwing intellectuals] know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government.
What they have in mind, Katan says, is a Christian commonwealth—which is to say (here he quotes Vermeule),
a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”
Since most Americans are not White Protestants—or even White Christians—these rightwing intellectuals believe that democracy must be overthrown. Kagan elaborates on their view:
The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”
In this view, Trump has been an essential albeit imperfect vehicle for counterrevolution. Kagan turns to Deneen to elaborate:
If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them.”
Kagan adds that this is “a most Leninist concept indeed.”
Now to The Brothers Karamazov although, interestingly enough, the Grand Inquisitor’s diatribe is directed against Christianity, not democracy. But there is a democratic strain within Christianity, and it is this to which he is objecting. In other words, parallels between the Grand Inquisitor and today’s Christian authoritarians hold up.
In Dostoevsky’s novel, the rational brother (Ivan) is debating with the spiritual brother (Alyosha) about the latter’s vision of God as loving and benevolent. Setting up a thought experiment where Jesus is arrested by the Inquisition when he returns to the world, Ivan argues that he makes inhuman demands on people. When Jesus rejects Satan’s temptations in the desert—bread, safety, and earthly power—and when he tells his followers that they must rely on faith rather than miracles—he is putting impossible and therefore cruel demands upon them. Only saints are capable of rising to the occasion, the Inquisitor contends:
Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejected finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou has done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems.
In Escape from Freedom (1941), the book mentioned by my brother, Erich Fromm uses a similar idea to explain why certain Germans embraced fascism over democracy. Individual freedom, he argued, causes fear, anxiety, and alienation whereas authoritarianism provides them with a kind of relief. The Grand Inquisitor makes the same argument against Christ’s challenge, asserting, “Thou has suffered for mankind and its freedom, the present fate of men may be summed up in three words: Unrest, Confusion, Misery!”
By contrast, the Inquisitor contends, the authoritarian church offers happiness:
We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song.
The Grand Inquisitor goes on for a while longer but you get the point. Christ’s vision that every individual is beloved by God—it doesn’t matter whether you are high or low, slave or free, man or woman—was as radical in Roman times as the Declaration of Independence was in the 18th century. In fact, Christ’s radical ideas helped make the democratic revolutions possible. So it is not only Founder liberalism that America’s contemporary rightwing intellectuals are objecting to but people finding their own individual ways to God.
These intellectuals, in their arguments for a new elite, don’t mention the potential for abuse and corruption, which we witness in every authoritarian regime. They appear to see themselves exempt from the truism that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Similarly, the Grand Inquisitor speaks as though the authoritarian church actually cares about the common people rather than, first and foremost, about its own concerns. One need only do a quick glance at the history of humankind to realize that “benevolent dictator” is an oxymoron.
Americans are beginning to get glimpses of what a Christian Commonwealth would look like as librarians, teachers, and doctors are threatened with prison, women are forced to bring non-viable fetuses to term, asylum seekers are shot, and threats of violence against political opponents are regarded as an acceptable means of maintaining order. If we are to judge by the questions asked at Trump’s immunity hearing last week, some rightwing members of the Supreme Court see presidents as above the law (at least Republican presidents). In their questions, they didn’t laugh Trump’s lawyers out of court when they argued that a president should be free to assassinate opponents or stage a coup.
I imagine Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh reading the Grand Inquisitor’s words and applauding.
