PART I
Recently I posted a piece titled “A Possible Urgent New Reason Why AG Barr Must Be Impeached.” In it, I pointed to what I see as danger signs that Barr and Trump may be working together to develop the tools to overturn the election if it goes against Trump. (Signs that Barr is being groomed to function as an American “Interior Minister.”)
One commenter reinforced the warning I’d sounded, calling attention to the pit of “Nobody could have imagined” into which the Democratic world has repeatedly fallen as things on the right have become darker and darker.
And I, in turn, appreciated his calling attention to that pattern: i.e. the pattern of Liberals being repeatedly surprised over these many years as a dark force has gained ever-greater power on the American right.
You Can’t Hit What You Can’t See
This failure of American Liberals to “imagine,” I have maintained since 2005, is the result of shortcomings in the dominant worldview – the main way the world is perceived -- in the liberal universe of thought in our times. That worldview provides no space for the reality of WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST. (That’s the title of my 2015 book—available here as a pdf free of charge).
Over the past 16 years – but especially in that book -- I have tried to show that WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST (in today’s Republican Party) is best understood
- as a coherent force that consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness (a force which arises naturally out of the web of cause and effect operating in the human world, and that displays certain identifiable properties and ways of operating).
Or, if we look at this “force” not in social scientific terms, but in terms that capture the place and meaning of this drama in the moral and spiritual dimension of human reality,
- as something that acts in the human world very much like what has traditionally been called Evil. (Something, that is, that has the consistent effect of making things worse, that consistently promotes injustice over justice, conflict over peace, lies over truthfulness, hatred over love, etc.)
But over the years, Liberal America, failing to see the nature of the force that’s taken over the right, has repeatedly been surprised. “Nobody could have imagined” – because the contemporary liberal worldview has shown itself
- neither comprehensive and integrative enough in its search for understanding to enable the construction of the mental maps necessary for perceiving something so Big Picture as “forces” spreading “patterns” of “brokenness” through cultural systems over time.
- nor tuned in deeply enough, at the spiritual level, to believe that anything like “the Battle Between Good and Evil” could correspond in any meaningful way to how the human world operates.
Not understanding the nature – the utter destructiveness -- of the force that’s been taking over the right for the past generation, Liberal America has continually underestimated just how deep into ugliness and corruption and lies and betrayal the extraordinary Republican Party of our times might go.
Caught By Surprise
“Nobody could have imagined” that
- the Party of Eisenhower and Gerald Ford could become the party of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Karl Rove— sociopathic rogues all.
- a Republican Party in Congress would decide to make their top priority the failure of the newly-elected President — even at a time when the whole world economy teetered on the edge of an abyss.
- the Republican Party would nominate — and choose to be the servants of -- probably the least well-put-together person we’ve seen on the national stage, or on the world stage in our lifetimes, broken in almost every way.
- That a Republican Senate (with but one Republican dissenting) would all rally to protect an extraordinarily lawless and destructive President in violation of their oath of office, and to the serious endangerment of the American constitutional system.
All of that is unimaginable, so long as one is deluded – as the Democrats seem to have been for years – into imagining they were dealing with a Republican Party practicing “politics as usual,” imagining that they needed to maintain – with their “friends on the other side of the aisle” – relations friendly enough that it remains possible to work together for “the good of the nation.”
But this is not politics as usual, and has not been for a generation. In this Republican Party, the Democrats have been dealing with something far darker, something not often seen in the world in such a pure form. (Never, to my knowledge, in a major party in this or any other established democratic polity.) Hence that phrase from earlier: “the extraordinary Republican Party of our time.”
So the Democrats failed to recognize that the far darker thing that had arisen on the right doesn’t give a damn about “the good of the nation,” so possessed is it by an uncannily consistent impulse to make things worse. Extraordinarily consistent in making our world more broken:
On not a single issue of conflict between today’s Republican and Democratic parties does the Republican position make America better, more whole. This very consistency is evidence of the coherent nature of the “spirit” that drives this broken Republican party.
Consider the implications of this extraordinary consistency. Nothing — not Barr’s and Trump’s imaginable coup d’etat, or any other destructive course from today’s GOP — should be beyond our imagining.
[Tomorrow I will post PART II of this piece, beginning with The Value of Seeing What We’re Up Against For What It Is]