You're Killing Me -- the GOP and Its Quest for Pure Republicanism

When I begin these posts, I really have little idea where they will lead me.  For the few people who might actually read them, that's probably apparent.  Having said that, I am convinced that secular rationalism, along with the liberal secular state, is withering.  I am not sure of the cause -- perhaps because we are still too much in the muck of it -- but I am also convinced the vacuum it leaves behind is being filled with a form of religious authoritarianism.  I use the term religious rather loosely, seeing it more as the archetypal patterns associated with religious thought, than any particular brand of theocracy.  The muslim fundamentalist is not much different than the christian fundamentalist, and the radicalized versions of both are equally dangerous and pernicious.  It differs from secular rationalism in a couple of ways.  The most important difference, perhaps, is the once-and-for-all religious comprehensiveness of a revealed truth -- the sense that THIS is the truth, it has been revealed by "god" or his "prophets" or a "man of genius," but it has been and always will be THE truth, and so the final truth.  Any thought to the contrary is not only wrong-headed, but apostasy and evil-minded.  Any state sponsored comprehensive doctrine, to include the revealed truths of Marxism, is inherently coercive and authoritarian, if only insofar as it demands conformity to the dictates of the doctrine.  After three millennia of recorded history, we know that conformity to the dictates of doctrine quickly devolves into conformity to the dictates of those empowered to interpret doctrine, and the door to corruption is opened wide.  

The founders had a sensical fear of comprehensive doctrines, and one can trace it throughout the debates that led to our government, though John Rawls articulated it most succinctly for me.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines his basic idea:

even in a society of reasonable pluralism, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to endorse, say, a reasonable Catholicism as the basis for a constitutional settlement. Reasonable Muslims or atheists cannot be expected to endorse Catholicism as setting the basic terms for social life. Nor, of course, can Catholics be expected to accept Islam or atheism as the fundamental basis of law. No comprehensive doctrine can be accepted by all reasonable citizens, and so no comprehensive doctrine can serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power.

There is a lot of room for circular, chicken and egg sorts of argument here.  Our "values" can (and perhaps should) serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power, and then one is faced with the pressing question "from whence come values?"  Many would answer "from god," but most have a particular notion of "god," and so we quickly find our way back to a very particular comprehensive doctrine serving as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power.   Our values are christian (not muslim) -- protestant (not catholic) -- evangelical (not unitarian) -- et cetera.  Personally, I value pluralism, and so I would answer differently.  I would say our "values" come "from biology" -- that is to say "from deeply engrained survival needs associated with social cohesion," which itself is a two edged blade.  It gives us not only the "group think" and "group norms" that make religion and acceptance of comprehensive doctrine possible, even when those values obviously fly in the face of experience, but also the ability to empathize, to see the world from multiple perspectives, demonstrate compassion for others.  From my perspective, a secular morality overcomes the group think of the former to enact the compassion and altruism of the latter, particularly on behalf of those who are marginalized within the group, however arbitrarily the group might be defined.  From my perspective, the pressing question is NOT "what does the bible or koran or even the constitution  demand?"   Rather "how might we demonstrate compassion for the betterment of all?"  

Secular rationalism fails on a number of fronts, but mostly because it cannot provide definitive, once and for all answers to that very question -- how might we demonstrate compassion for the betterment of all -- and it more or less refuses, on principle, to do so.   It wants to make things better.  It wants to find solutions to problems, but the solutions to problems, even the most successful, tend to be domain-specific, incremental and tentative. It is progressive, but the very notion of "progress" suggests that, while things might be somewhat better, we have still not arrived, and things could be better still.  Secular rationalist are confident in their progress, but they also recognize that the solutions themselves may be fraught with unintended consequences, side effects that themselves will require attention and call into question the very notion of "better."   Moreover, as modernity inches forward, it's truths, such as they are, become ever more recondite, available only to specialists and experts, not all of whom have or want a "common touch," and appear arrogant, supercilious, dismissive of those who lack their expertise, and entitled to command, at least within their domain.   Modern medicine is a case in point, both literally and metaphorically.  As I have said before, few would want return to and insist upon an understanding of medicine that prevailed in the late 18th century.  Most would admit that today's medicine alleviates more suffering today than it did then, most would insist on the latest and most effective treatments, and so our family physician, if we even have such, shuffles us off to a specialist within a speciality, who prescribes a drug that cures our ailment, but leaves us with a number of side-effects, some worse than others, some perhaps even worse than the disease.  Clearly, modern medicine hasn't solved all problems.  The treatment of cancer remains, well, barbaric.  And, as my wife points out, we have gone a long way toward increasing the quantity of life without doing much to improve the quality of life, particularly in its latter stages.  While the family physician, if one still has a family physician, might have the Dr. Wellby touch, more often than not, we're quickly shuffled off to a specialist, perhaps even a specialist within a specialty, few of whom are renowned for their bedside manner.  Still, things are better today than they were even in my childhood, and there is good reason to hope for an even better tomorrow.  It is progressive, and cautiously optimistic.  

For the secular rationalist, the same pattern of thinking prevails across other domains of thought, but for those domains deeply implicated in government, it has consequence, particularly for what we might think of as democracy.  Consider, for example, the domain of economics.  Not unlike modern medicine, as modernity inches forward, it's truths too, such as they are, have become ever more recondite, less and less available to a lay public, and yet it remains central to public policy. Clearly, despite its dependence on advanced mathematics, it is less exact as a science than physics, or even medicine, but our understanding has advanced and we are better able today to take necessary steps to avert disaster than we were in 1929, but those steps often seem counter-intuitive to the lay public, very often (one suspects) only dimly understood even by the experts.  The news media, for their part, have reduced economics to shibboleths -- e.g. "the federal reserve today raised interest rates to counter inflationary pressure" -- but if you were to ask the man on the street to explain that statement, the more honest would shrug their shoulders and walk away.  Having said that, every two years, the lay public is expected to vote for candidates whose policy and budgetary prescriptions will have significant impact on "the economy."  Economists turned pundit, particularly those like Paul Krugman with a secular rationalist approach to the economy, tend to grow shrill and alarmist at election time because they know, with some certainty, despite the political posturing, that many of those policy and budgetary prescriptions reflect the interests of the people as a whole, but only a narrow self interest of a monied class.  They know, with some certainty, that the people are being sold a bill of goods, and those doing the selling, not unlike the snake-oil salesmen of yore, are laughing all the way to the bank.  It drives them absolutely bonkers, as experts, to watch the American populace vote against their own interest, and do so against all their expert advice, not unlike the doctor who shakes his head at the obese, sedentary, chain-smoking patient who continues to act against expert medical advice because he read an article -- well, part of an article -- on the internet.  

Despite all the regret expressed that candidates don't delve into "issues," their solutions to particular problems, people don't vote "issues," they vote values, and most derive their values from one or another or an amalgam of comprehensive doctrines.  Quite a few, including perhaps our most recent supreme court nominee, for example, want a return to and an insistence on an understanding of government that prevailed in the late 18th century -- the so-called originalists.  Implicit in such thinking is a pattern that we recognize in the fundamentalist's approach to the bible -- the assumption, in other words, not only the divine (or at least the divinely inspired) origin of the constitution, but also its literal, once-and-for-all finality as the last word on government.    What secular rationalism fails to provide, the religious authoritarian provides -- definitive, once and for all answers.  History holds any number of ironies, and one way of looking at the dynamic of American history, the conflict that drives the plot of our story, is the tension between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian train of thought.  Hamilton, on the one hand, is a more or less pure representation of secular rationalism and Jefferson, on the other hand, is a more or less pure representation of religious authoritarianism.  There is nuance, and reason to disagree up front.  Jefferson was perhaps the least religious and least authoritarian of our early presidents, at least in conventional ways of thinking.  He more than others insisted on the first amendment and the sort of pluralism described by Rawls above, but Jefferson had what Joseph Ellis called a "strange attachment" to the "myth of the Saxon past," and he sees in this "an early ideological manifestation of a characteristically Jeffersonian cast of mind."  He describes it as follows:

It represented his discovery -- in truth, his invention -- of an idyllic time and place that accorded with his powerful sense of the way things were meant to be.  And any compromise of that seductive vision was a betrayal of one's personal principles.  Back there in the faraway world of of pre-Norman England, prior to the feudal corruptions, men and women had found it possible to combine individual independence and social harmony, personal freedom and the rule of law, the need to work and the urge to play.  Throughout his life, Jefferson was haunted by the prospects of such a paradise and eager to find it isn bucolic pastoral scenes, distant Indian tribes, well-ordered gardens, local communities, or new and therefore uncorrupted generations.

The corrupting influence was government, and Jefferson released his "formidable energies" first against "a British government that, as he saw it, was threatening to disrupt and destroy the patch of potential perfection that was forming on the western edge of British Empire, then later as secretary of state and president against the malignant influence of Hamilton who threatened to overcome that patch of paradise with a corrupted copy of European monarchy, particularly the encroachments of the English crown.  Ellis goes on to note that this strange attachment, the theory of "expatriation," was "utterly groundless as history," but "it possessed all the compensating advantages of an unequivocal moral commitment driven by an unsullied sense of righteous indignation."  The original of the originalists was himself an originalist, who believed that the best society was one "which managed itself without any formal government at all by remaining small and assuring the internalization of common values among all members."   The irony, of course, is that Jefferson, who was the least religious of the founders, was perhaps the most fundamentalist when it came to his "secular" version of religion. 

One should note, implicit to his "assuring the internalization of common values," there is an "if only everyone" imperative -- that is to say, "if only everyone saw the truth I see, then what a wonderful world this would be."  Ultimately such thinking is unrealistic and utopian, though one hears the imperative expressed in all the varieties of fundamentalist thought.  One hears it, for example, in the wishes of the INC christians when they say things like "society would have biblical morality, people would live in harmony, there would be peace and not war, there would be no poverty."  Religious authoritarianism always promises an "if only" paradise as a reward for the "internalization of common values,"which devolves quickly to conformity to the dictates of doctrine -- and one has to admit there is a sort of tautological logic to it.  It's true that, if only everyone conformed to a certain way of being in the world, harmony would prevail, by definition, but such tautologies have little bearing on reality.  It should be apparent that "if only everyone" thinking fails in the way that utopian thinking of any sort always fail, when it bumps up against the reality of human diversity.  There is, of course, the obvious observation that not everyone can or will internalize "common values," much less conform to the dictates of any specific doctrine, and Jefferson himself recognized this failure in his abhorrence of a state sanctioned religious doctrine proper, just not the failings implicit in his own version of a secular religion.  The Jeffersonian imperative that drives conservative thinking -- government is best which governs least -- is fundamentally dependent on an homogenous environment, an idealized world in which everyone has internalized and conforms to common values, but the Jeffersonian imperative immediately bumps up against the pesky problem of what to do with those who don't conform.  Although Jefferson seemed to prefer avoidance to conflict, the rhetorical to the physical, the answer most in evidence throughout history is the use of genuinely coercive political power.  The irony, heaped on an irony, is that a doctrinal commitment to small government, "pure republicanism," itself opens the back door to coercive political power -- the need, if not to punish apostates, then to exclude them, to excommunicate them. It opens the back door to the sorts of policy we see emerging from the Trump executive orders, the Muslim bans, the border wall, and the general putsch against "diversity."  

If secular rationalism fails because it refuses to give comprehensive, once and for all answers to our ills, then religious authoritarianism fails because it does.  When I began this post, I had no idea how the ACA would fare with a GOP dominated congress, but I feared the worst, and the worst was the repeal of the ACA and its replacement with a bill worse than no replacement at all.  The repeal and replace effort failed, not because it would have decimated even the meager benefits of the ACA, that would have (even Fox news seems to admit) diverted more money to the rich.  It failed because the "freedom caucus," the cohort of house members who represent a brand of "pure republicanism," would not support it.  They wanted a bill even more austere than the one supported by the core of the GOP and were willing to scuttle their own party's repeal and replace to achieve it.  With that in mind, this morning while scouting the news, I came across this headline in Vox: "Why the white middle class is dying faster, explained in 6 charts."  The authors reference "a new 60-page paper, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st Century,” out in draft form in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Thursday.  In it "the researchers weave a narrative of “cumulative disadvantage” over a lifetime for white people ages 45 through 54, particularly those with low levels of education." The first chart references what they call "deaths of despair" -- those resulting from suicides, alcohol, abuse and drug overdoses.  Deaths of despair are increasing all across the nation, not just in urban or in rural areas, and the researchers find the cause, not in income per se, but in ever diminishing expectations.  They do so because of the differences in mortality among those with and without college degrees.  For those with a four year college degree or more, the death rates have been relatively stable.  For those without, the death rates have been climbing precipitously and account for most of the over-all difference.  Consequently, “It looks like there are two Americas,” the researchers said, “one for people who went to college and one that didn’t.” They go on to write, "The middle-aged whites with less than a bachelor’s degree saw “progress stop in mortality from heart disease and cancer, and saw increases in chronic lower respiratory disease and deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.”  Part of the reason progress in mortality from heart disease might have stopped comes back to "despair," an increase in obesity among the same cohort, which contributes not only to heart disease, but also to diabetes, which is also seeing an increase.  There doesn't seem to be a correlation to income, because non-white groups at comparable incomes are not seeing the same increase in mortality, but rather "the life you expected to have relative to your father or grandfather — it’s just not there anymore."  By way of example, they suggest that, "in the past, people with low levels of education could get a job in a factory and work their way up the chain of command. 'You could graduate high school, work at Bethlehem Steel, get more money every year as you get more experienced, and turn yourself into one of the famed blue-collar aristocrats of the 1970s.  Now, there’s a feeling that life has gone, and remainders of that life are getting less and less for each generation.”  That life no longer exists.  

The Brookings researchers, of course, write from a purely secular rationalist point of view.  Though their analysis leads to policy prescriptions that the GOP would find heretical, they do not have a particular ideological axe to grind, so much as a desire to solve the particular problem of increasing morbidity among white middle class males.  I suspect that, if the answer had been pure republicanism -- cut taxes and deny access to basic health care needs, further stigmatize unemployment and economic irrelevance -- then the researchers would have made those policy prescriptions.  It seems unlikely, however, that pure republicanism provides an answer.  Nevertheless, the cohort they describe, those literally suffering an increase in "deaths of despair," are at the very core of those who support Trump.  I shouldn't delegitimize their suffering, but clearly Trump and the GOP policy prescriptions are not the answer and their continued support for Trump and the GOP allows one to make a Pontius Pilate sort of response -- they are bringing it on themselves.  The budget proposed by the Trump white house is a case in point.   Under a headline that reads "Eyeing Trump's Budget Plan, Republican Governors Say No Thanks," the NY Times points out that "Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama said he intended to push back against planned cuts to the Appalachian and Mississippi Delta economic agencies, as well as to the community development grants.  'The Appalachian Regional Commission, the Delta Regional Authority and the Community Development Block Grants are important resources that provide funding that benefits rural projects such as infrastructure improvement, job creation, technology upgrades and school programs,' Mr. Bentley said in a statement.  'Along with my governor colleagues in the A.R.C. and D.R.A., I look forward to sharing with Washington how vital these assets are to our poorest and smallest communities.'"  

The first irony here is not so much their vocal support of Trump -- he is after all the leader of their party -- but the recognition that the programs being cut are a Keynesian, social democratic response to their states' economic woes.  They are the sorts of responses favored by secular rationalists because, well, they tend to work for the sorts of things ostensibly desired by republicans, not least among them the "job creation" that allows individuals to exercise individual responsibility, the sort of jobs that provide health benefits.  The irony, heaped on irony, is that they are being cut for the very same ideological small government reasons they espouse.  They are after all federal handouts that make the smaller, more regional state governments dependent upon the maligned leviathan of the federal government.  The states themselves should accept responsibility for their own problems and be accountable to their own people, particularly their poorest and smallest communities.   Nevertheless, as the republican governors recognize, the federal programs help create jobs, real jobs with benefits and economic security, and those jobs would go a long way toward alleviating the economic and human death spiral.  Cynically speaking, to the horror of those trapped within a comprehensive doctrine at odd with reality, these governors want the federal handout because, as champions of small government, they do not want to pick up the slack at the state level.  They most assuredly do not want to grow state government to compensate for the shrinking federal government.  They absolutely do not want to increase state taxes, especially not enough to actually compensate for the shrinking federal tax base.  Nevertheless, as the Brookings researchers point out, "if America wants to turn the trend around, then it has to become a little more like other countries with more generous safety nets and more accessible health care," at least the expansion of medicare and medicaid promised under the ACA.  There again those federal benefits are being capped for future cuts, not because they are ineffectual, but because they don't fit within the ideological drive to the right, doesn't mesh with the comprehensive doctrine of the GOP of pure republicanism.  Moreover, as the researchers go on to point out, "Introducing a single-payer health system," and taxes "that support a stronger safety net would be top of their policy wish list," but "America right now is, of course, moving in the opposite direction under Trump, and shredding the safety net."  The shredding will fail because they deny reality for the sake of ideological purity, but the damage will be significant.  As Trump might say, "trust me."