Abortive Politics

May 21, 2010

If the idea of the left-wing and right-wing parties joining to form a coalition government here in the UK isn’t weird enough to us Americans, a woman at church last Sunday pointed out to me another huge disconnect between American and British politics.  In Britain, she said, it’s an open question who Christians are going to vote for; most likely, in a sizable and reasonably diverse congregation, fairly equal numbers of the members will vote for the Tories, the Lib Dems, or Labour.  But in America, so far as she could tell, it was pretty much assumed that if you were Christian, you were voting Republican.  She recounted the bizarre experience some of her friends had had of receiving emails from American friends back in 2008 asking for prayer that Obama wouldn’t win.    I regretfully assured her that her impressions of the polarization were quite accurate.  But why?  

Why is it that Christians in the US are so politically partisan compared to their British counterparts?  Is it because good and evil are so much clearer in US politics than in the UK?  I must confess that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a clear division of good and evil between the Democrats and the Republicans.  Is it because Brits simply don’t take their faith seriously enough to apply it to politics?  I suppose there might be something to that, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism.  Let us pause to consider this, though.  A flexibility among Christians with regard to political affiliation could imply an underdeveloped sense of the Gospel’s relevance to political life; however, it may well simply imply a healthy understanding of the provisionality of politics.  In our modern societies, it is important for Christians to recognize that, although there may be in theory a robustly Biblical politics, none of the existing political options comes close to embodying it, but each of them does offer some prospects of achieving some provisional goods that Christians can recognize as genuine public goods.  In such a situation, complete abstention from voting is a legitimate route to take (and is more or less my own persuasion), on the grounds that each of the options represents a sufficiently flawed, unChristian, and untrustworthy platform that it would be wisest not to support any.  But it is also potentially legitimate to, acknowledging the essential rottenness of all the options, weigh up the provisional public goods of each option, and vote for the one that seems on balance the best, all the while granting that your Christian brother may well weigh things up a little differently, without this implying any fundamental disconnect between your ultimate values.  Such a sense of provisionality seems (so far as I have discerned in my very brief time) to dominate the thinking on politics among British Christians, but not among Americans.  American Christians, for the most part, have trouble letting go of the idea that political allegiances are matters of ultimate value, and should be a religious battleground.  

The chief cause of this religious partisanship, so far as I can tell, seems to have been the abortion debate.  Of course, that’s far from the only issue on which Christians line up with the conservative party line, but my sense is that it’s the tail that wags the dog.  Where would Christians have gotten the idea that all these conservative policies were Christian policies?  Why should love of gun rights be a particularly Christian political position?  Or opposition to immigration?  Or being perennially hawkish about military action?  Etc.  The closest thing I’ve been able to come to an explanation is simply this: when Roe v. Wade happened, the Democrats happened to be dominated by socially liberal leadership (McGovern), and so the Republicans were able to position themselves as the anti-abortion party.  Christians, fired with fanatical political activism over the abortion issue, flocked more and more to the Republican banner and began assimilating its ways, even if there wasn’t anything very Christian about them.  The abortion issue was one on which Christianity had a clear answer to give, and so it came to be the only one on which Christianity had any answer to give.  And, since Democrats are seen as the embracers of abortion, which is clearly wicked, they can be easily demonized in the popular Christian imagination--they must be wicked, filthy people, and so every political stance associated with the Democrats must be a wicked, filthy one...no need to investigate the matter much further.

In Britain, where the abortion issue never became politicized*, Christians never flocked to one party en masse, nor did they start attributing life-and-death significance to politics.  So, while we may allege that have not sufficiently put faith in politics in the sense of putting faith into politics, making their Christianity central to their political involvement, they seem to have thereby avoided our error of putting faith in politics in the sense of making an idol of politics and thus losing our grip on the Christianity that we were trying to bring into the public sphere.  

*Note: It is particularly odd, as this woman and I were discussing, that the abortion issue should have become politicized in the US and not the UK given that in the former, it was was a judicial decision, and in the latter, a legislative one.  Historically, an independent, unpoliticized judiciary has been seen as a chief bulwark of freedom, but American Christians have heedlessly chucked that ideal out the window in their single-minded pursuit of a political solution to the abortion problem, a problem that is not a fundamentally political problem.  And so, even while decrying “liberal activist jurisprudence,” we have aggressively and explicitly tried to turn our entire political process, at every election, into an attempt to stack the Court with politically-aligned judges to overturn abortion.  And so we have connived with the liberal activists for the destruction of an independent judiciary, so that we now regularly expect Supreme Court decisions to fall along partisan lines.  

The Idolatry Trap

Just a brief thought for the day.  A couple weeks ago in class, Oliver O’Donovan said, “The more you make the government responsible for everything, the more you call on the government to fix everything.”  This profound remark has stuck with me since, and will probably continue to haunt me for a long time.  

In this statement, he was playing on the two meanings of the word “responsible”: “guilty” and “in charge of.”  In other words, the more you try to make the government responsible for everything in the sense of blaming them for everything, the more you implicitly make them responsible for everything in the sense of being in charge of it all, and so invite them to own up to that responsibility and take it upon themselves to fix everything.  

This exposes the danger of the attitude on the far right and particularly among Christian conservatives and libertarians that the best way to fight the idolatry of statism is to almost obsessively decry the state’s sins, demonize the state, and try to prove that all of society’s ills (or at least a large chunk of them) are the state’s fault.  In the end, if O’Donovan is right, this attitude shares the left’s idolatry of the state even while claiming to oppose it.  

The left looks at society, sees a bunch of problems and says, “Aha!  The problem is that the state isn’t doing enough about this--they’re responsible for this injustice--they should fix it by getting more involved”  The right looks at society, sees a bunch of problems and says, “Aha!  The problem is that the state is doing too much about this--they’re responsible for this injustice--they should fix it by getting less involved!”  Now, the problem is that, whatever the goals of the latter stance, it has still functionally made the state an idol, by building it up in its mind into this huge all-powerful entity, which must be obsessed about and engaged with every day.  It is still calling upon the state to fix whatever problems it sees in society, and thus still making the state a saviour--although one that saves by self-denial, and so I suppose a more Christian saviour.  

Wouldn’t the truly anti-statist stance be one that focuses responsibility for the ills of society on the whole society, rather than on this abstract entity that has achieved quasi-mythical status, “the government”?  Or even better, one that focuses responsibility on the Church, which is called upon to bear the sins of society and purge them?

The Sludge of Drudge

February 25, 2010

Now for an incredibly petty personal vendetta.

I’ve finally had it with the Drudge Report.  I know I’ve said that many times before, but I keep finding myself going back there, either because it’s simply one of the best websites for linking to news stories available, or because I want to find out what the right-wing creeps are up to.  But the man never ceases to amaze me in the depths to which he will stoop to advance his highly partisan agenda.  

What he has managed to do is really quite remarkable--to assemble a tremendous engine of ideological propaganda without doing any journalism of his own, any writing of opinion, any altering of the facts, etc.  Everything on there is news that’s been reported by someone else.  Drudge has managed to harness the power of headlining as a way of distorting the truth even while telling it.  Recognizing that headlines often make a much greater impression on people than stories themselves (especially since many people are speed-browsing and will not actually read the stories), he has found three remarkably effective tools of turning his “news” into propaganda:

1. Headline prominence.  Drudge gets to pick what the most important story of the day is for those viewing his site, whether or not it is actually of any genuine significance.  If Joe Biden picked his nose during a press conference, that will probably be the biggest headline of the day, complete with a little snapshot of the incident, to leave his viewers with the distinct impression that the main thing that happened that day was that Obama’s VP further showed himself to be an idiot.
2. Headline wording.  Drudge often words his headlines in ways that are ludicrously out of line with the actual content of the stories to which they link.  He generally avoids outright untruths--if a story says that new home sales were down, his headline won’t say they were up--but he often comes quite close.  His preferred way of distorting headlines is simply by making them overstated and over-dramatized when it suits his purposes: a small glitch becomes a crisis, a misstep becomes a huge blunder, a small decline becomes a plunge, etc.
3. Headline placement.  Drudge recognizes that by putting next to one another two headlines that are about stories having nothing whatsoever to do with one another, he creates a link between the two in the readers’ mind, which means that together they now mean something quite different from what each story in and of itself communicates, something which is most likely meaningless or untrue, but which suits Drudge’s purposes neatly.  A favorite of his in this regard is putting side-by-side headlines like “Global warming alarmists clamor for immediate action” and “Record cold in New York City this week.”  But he has recently become particularly fond of using this in his disinformation campaign about Obama’s health-care proposals.  The most egregious example came this morning, where in a sequence of headlines (at the top of the page) regarding Obama’s newest attempt at health-care reform, there was a headline about the appalling neglect of hundreds of patients and filthy conditions at a British NHS hospital, implying, of course that we can expect the same if Obama's plan succeeds.  It’s true that this week, formal inquiries have been launched regarding an egregiously ill-maintained and poorly-run hospital in Staffordshire, but this has nothing to do with Obama’s healthcare proposals.  It’s fine by me if you want to object to Obamacare, but for Pete’s sake, can we stop pretending that he’s trying to introduce the British system (never mind that most Brits seem quite pleased with their system)?!  Even the earlier form of the plan with the public option had very little in common with the British socialized healthcare system, but the latest version being proposed is a thoroughly privatized scheme, making comparisons to the NHS frankly absurd.

So, I am swearing off the Drudge Report.  I mean it this time. :-D

Conservative Totalitarianism

February 13, 2009

Oliver O'Donovan suggested in class yesterday that Burkean conservatism was, to a large extent, responsible for the development of the totalitarian nationalist state.  Not, of course, that Burke caused the totalitarian nationalist state (O'Donovan is rightly skeptical of all claims of historical causality), but the lines of development and logical connections are certainly clear.  By renouncing universal abstract claims about the nature of rights and the state, and focusing attention on the historically contingent character of individual states, which ought to reflect the national characters of their own people, and create institutions suitable thereto, Burke's conservatism paved the way for an understanding of the State as embodying the personality, the soul, of the nation.  What feature of national life, then, lay outside the legitimate scope of the State?  

A jarring narrative, but a persuasive one.  Perhaps then the recent mutation of conservatism into fiercely patriotic nationalism is not such a mutation after all.  

Top Ten Conservative Heresies of the Past Generation, Pt. 5

So, we come to Gardiner's last four films. As I said, I haven't seen any of these myself, though I know a bit about two of them. So I will primarily confine myself to remarking on Gardiner's descriptions and the shallowness and appalling priorities they display.

#7, The Hurt Locker. This, I understand, is a recent portrayal of the Iraq War, and one which, by all counts, is a very well-done film. Also, by many counts, it is by no means as pro-war and pro-America as Gardiner seems to think (he seems to think here along similar lines as he did for Black Hawk Down), but in any case, the most troubling thing here is Gardiner's rationale for his endorsement:

"What is refreshing about the film is its willingness to portray the US military presence in Iraq in an overwhelmingly sympathetic light, and the al-Qaeda-backed enemy as barbaric and fundamentally evil. There are no shades of gray in The Hurt Locker, and this is a strikingly patriotic motion picture that has been embraced by an American public weary of the anti-Americanism churned out by Hollywood in its portrayal of the War on Terror."

Aside from the fact that his last statement is simply false--the film was a total failure at the box-office, ranking 128th among 2009 releases--this is one of the most ridiculous sentiments I have ever read in a movie review. So we're supposed to think of our enemies as "barbaric and fundamentally evil" and to place ourselves in an "overwhelmingly sympathetic light" without any "shades of gray"? Not only is this blatantly un-Christian, it is also irrational and unrealistic--the world doesn't work that way. There are shades of gray...the good guys are usually riddled with bad motives and bad decisions; the bad guys are often motivated by laudable and sympathetic goals. To call them "barbaric" is to dehumanize them in a way that can be used to legitimate any kind of behaviour against them, Nazi-style. To think so uncritically of one's own forces is naive and unwise, certain to lead to an embrace of any number of atrocities. This kind of talk is just foolishness.

#8, Hotel Rwanda. This too, from what I understand, was an exceptionally fine film, but its conservative credentials are dubious. According to Gardiner, we are to embrace this film because "it demonstrated the impotence and moral bankruptcy of the UN’s leadership in the face of genocide as well as the limits of multilateralism, and ultimately made a compelling case for the use of force by the free world to act against evil."

Wow, is that all that conservatism has left to stand for? Opposition to the United Nations and multilateralism? I've got my share of criticisms for the United Nations as well, but that hardly makes me a model conservative. And while multilateralism certainly has its limits, any sensible person should agree that it has less than unilateralism, and is certainly a more Christian course of action.

#9, The Lives of Others. This East German film won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2007, but, like Hotel Rwanda, its claim to fame as a "conservative" film seems to depend on an isolated and arbitrary criterion--namely, its opposition to Soviet-style communism. This is just silly; almost anyone on the political spectrum is quite aware of the evils of the totalitarian East German regime, and a film that exposes them does not thereby plant itself firmly on the right. Humorously, from Gardiner's description, the bad guys in this movie sound more like the Bush-Cheney government than any leftists I know: it "is a damning indictment of the totalitarian surveillance society run by the Secret Police in East Germany. Set in East Berlin in 1984, the film tells the ultimately redemptive tale of a conflicted Stasi officer tasked with spying on a dissident playwright." The most totalitarian surveillance regime in US history was inaugurated by the Patriot Act, and the dissident playwrights of American culture have generally been hard leftists.

#10, 300. You have got to be kidding me. You mean the comic-book style violent action extravaganza that came out a couple years ago, based on the Battle of Thermopylae? Wow. This really proves that all a movie needs to do to be a "conservative" masterpiece is to be bloody and militaristic. Gardiner's first line here is particularly fatuous: "Any film that prompts howls of indignation from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his brutal acolytes in Tehran deserves recognition." I'm sure that American Pie and its sequels would prompt howls of indignation from Tehran, too, but that is hardly a reason to recognize them as great films. The conservative lesson to take from this film is this: "As he contemplates how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Barack Obama should ditch his failed appeasement strategy and take some tips from the Spartans about standing your ground in the face of an evil tyrant." Never mind that, in terms of relative power and the history of the conflict, Iran is much more analogous to Sparta and the US to Persia than the other way around. It's rather juvenile for us to pretend like we, the United States of America, most powerful empire that the world has ever seen, are the hopelessly outnumbered, overmatched heroes standing our ground and facing certain death in the face of an enormous enemy force that wants to conquer and colonize our homeland. But, the Iranians might reasonably enough identify with the Spartans in their long struggle against the U.S.'s military ambitions.

Gardiner lists for "Honorable Mention" the following 10 films: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005); Cinderella Man (Ron Howard, 2005); Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008); Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007); The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004); Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006); Tears of the Sun (Antoine Fuqua, 2003); United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006); We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002).

Although this list is slightly better, now I, as a Christian, am insulted. In the previous movies, Gardiner made no pretense of identifying conservatism with Christianity, even if many Christians have themselves foolishly done so. But by throwing in Narnia and The Passion, and the pro-life Juno, Gardiner lumps Christian values (which were admittedly completely stripped from the film version of Narnia) together with his bloodthirsty pagan militarism. In any case, this listing, aside from Juno and The Passion, shows the same idiosyncratic selection of values--a vague but uncompromising conflict of good-vs.-evil, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism, and a gory appreciation of martial bravery.

Wow, that was all rather too easy. But people actually believe this kind of thing, so presumably someone has to take the time to tear it to pieces. One hopes that we are finally reaching the point where conservatism has become so shallow, self-refuting, violent, and pagan that Christians will stop hitching themselves to its wagon and stand up for the Gospel.