Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of the hand of our enemies. So the people sent to Shiloh, that they might bring from thence the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts, which dwelleth between the cherubims: and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God. And when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again.
. . . And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen. And the ark of God was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.
1 Samuel 4
RMJ posted a link to a fascinating article by Hilde Eliassen Restad laying out how Trump has shattered the basis of post-war American leadership among the democracies and non-democracies. It is a far broader article than I am going to deal with so you might want to read it for yourself, Whither The "City On The Hill"? Donald Trump, America First and American Exceptionalism. I expect to be re-reading it and thinking about what it says a lot.
For now, in regard to my point about the unusual status of Israel in the Old Testament as a People, a nationality originating in and defined, not primarily by blood but by an act of obedience to God and then, hundreds of years afterwards, saved from slavery and genocide by God and sustained by allegiance to and practicing The Law, the radical economic and social justice in the Mosaic Law. This passage laying out a similar understanding of the United States, though in a materialist-modernist-secular form seemed to be something like confirmation of what I wrote the other day. This is a too hastily written set of observations on it. I'll plead family issues and responsibilities.
American exceptionalism is a set of ideas, not a set of observable facts. As Richard Hofstadter famously observed, the United States does not have an ideology, rather, it is one. These ideas define the United States as “an extraordinary nation with a special role to play in human history; not only unique but also superior among nations.” The belief in American exceptionalism is an “enduring identity narrative” in the United States, and sets the parameters for how political leaders can and will narrate the story of “America” and its place in the world. It is a narrative with a long pedigree. In the colonial era, British ideas of exceptionalism, which included a religious as well as a racial component, contributed to what would later become American exceptionalism, with specific claims to political exceptionalism made during the founding era.
Today, this narrative defines the United States not as a country like many others, built on a blood-and-soil identity, but rather as an exceptional Enlightenment invention built on liberal ideas and ideals. It is a narrative so strong and so pervasive it would be fitting to argue, as Anatol Lieven does, that “‘American exceptionalism’ is just another way of saying American civic nationalism without using the word nationalism.” Significantly, historians as well as constructivist and liberal scholars of international relations see this narrative as not only influencing rhetoric, but also having played an important role in influencing U.S. foreign policy throughout U.S. history.
American exceptionalism, however, is a malleable concept and has been taken to mean different things throughout its history. This is especially clear when considering the role race has played in the definitional struggle over the meaning of “America.” There are three ideas that contribute to the master narrative of American exceptionalism. The first is that the United States is superior to the rest of the world. The second is that, because of this superiority, the United States has a special role to play in world history — it has a moral mission to pursue abroad. The third is that where other great nations and indeed empires have risen to power only to fall, the United States will not — it will resist this law of history.
That last definition of "American exceptionalism" notably focuses on its role in foreign policy with all of the opportunities for promoting the ideals of democracy for the benefits of all people, everywhere but also with all of the temptations to rig that for the benefit of the rich and powerful of America working in cahoots with corrupt people on other lands that that inevitably brings with it. Elsewhere in the article it identifies the thing which Donald Trump has shattered as the "liberal international order" based in "liberal ideals," as the abstract of the article puts it:
In order to understand Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, we must examine the master narrative that underpins it. Trump breaks with all modern presidents not just because he challenges the postwar “liberal international order,” but because he rejects its underlying master narrative — American exceptionalism. America First relies instead on the narrative of Jacksonian nationalism. What makes America great, according to this narrative, is not a diverse nation unified in its adherence to certain liberal ideals, but rather ethnocultural homogeneity, material wealth, and military prowess. In this view, the United States is unexceptional, and therefore has no mission to pursue abroad. By shedding light on this alternative master narrative, we can better understand Trump’s presidency, his grand strategy, and why a return to the status quo ante after Trump is unlikely.
The author defined the Trumpian view of things
In this worldview, making America “great” means making America economically wealthy, militarily powerful, and safeguarding the white, Christian cultural heritage of the United States. In other words, Trump’s America First foreign policy platform is grounded in a master narrative perhaps best thought of as what Walter Russell Mead calls “Jacksonian” nationalism.
The most obviously false part of in that accurate description of what Trump and his followers claim is "Christian cultural heritage" because there is nothing Christian about it, you have to not only distort but invert the meaning of the term to get to Trump as a goal. What among many, THOUGH HARDLY ALL of those "white evangelicals" we're always reading about as presented through polls and the obviously pseudo-Christian "leadership" of grifting hucksters and the vile children of previous media stars of TV and radio "religion".
The thing which she says Trump has rejected is defined:
Specifically, Trump’s embrace of an “America First” foreign policy entails a rejection of the moral mission that has been central to modern U.S. foreign policy: promoting (in theory, anyway) liberal internationalism through democratization, free-market economics, and human rights.
"In theory anyway" is an all important caveat in regard to what I said above about the frequently given into, no, make that most often given into temptation to cover the worst actions with the most idealistically stated intentions - if you want the perfect example George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's invasion of Iraq, in which a dodgily Supreme Court anointed loser of an election in the United States lied us into an invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, imposing "democracy" (which no one with any information ever believed for a second would be the result) on people by a foreign power. And everyone knew that the real goal was to grab the oil. When Trump was honest about that it certainly didn't count as a virtue because he endorsed the actual motives that the hypocrites among the Bush-Cheney clique and their designated liars in the media-foreign-policy establishment.
I would also call your attention to the use of the word "liberal" in the article because though it finds one common element with what I've endlessly referred to as "tradtional American style liberalism" the rejection of racial, ethnic, religious and other uniformity. That is the one part of the liberalism I hold is worth preserving but in that international order it is certainly most often another pious expression.
I would specifically call your attention to the idea that "free-market economics is compatible with the rest of real, traditional American style liberalism because I don't believe it. I think "free-market economics" inevitably is damaging to it., fatal to it if not checked.
I think that it is the secular liberalism which is divorced from those moral absolutes of equality, of equal justice, of radical economic egalitarianism, of moral practice at home and abroad, an insistence that truth be privileged and not lies, especially that LIES NOT BE ENDOWED WITH A RIGHT TO TRIUMPH OVER THE TRUTH, which has given Trump and those who created, promoted and sustain him in office, their chance to destroy American democracy. The role that the often criminal and amoral foreign and military policy engaged in by even real presidents who were entirely better played in that is complex but I think studying what the First Testament has to say about that would hold a lot of important information for us. One of those is that we've been set on this course for a long time, now. If not in the immediate post-war period talked about in the article, certainly after Reagan vilely misused the phrase "City on a hill." in the way that, almost always, it is misused.
Though he was a Calvinist and I certainly am not, it's worth going over what John Winthrop said as he stated his ambitions for the new community that the Massachusetts Puritans envisioned. Winthrop's speech would not be given by an American politician, today, it violates many if not all of the secular-"free-market" libertarian replacements for virtue that have led us to where we are in the name of "freedom".
Far from being a crowing, preening exaultation of Hollywood or novelistic individualism and mythic rugged masculinity. For a start, the sermon was called "A Model of Christian Charity," promoting one of he virtues most scorned by the perversion of Christianity that is ubiquitous in the United States, certainly among such "evangelicals" who can endorse Trump and the Republican-fascist party.
The sermon was as a warning that moral failure by the Massachusetts Puritans to follow an entirely different liberality, the one that would generate the abolitionist and other reform movements of the 19th century, would be seen by all the world, making them as infamous as the United States is becoming under Trump, as previewed in previous presidencies.
How un-Reagan like was it? How non-Trumpian? How unlike the secular-liberal post-WWII economic "liberal" order that, chronologically, I would say causally led us to Trump was that vision founded in the Mosaic economic law and the practice of the followers of Jesus in Acts? Here is part of the economics of Mosaic generosity Winthrop
Here are the consequences predicted by Winthrop in that speech Reagan and so many others know one phrase of.
. . . but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
You tell me if that does't sound like a good description of how we got where we are. John Winthrop's model was obviously drawn from the ideal of what the nation made of The Children of Israel was supposed to be, if it was to be worthy of its existence, it would be based on following a morality that was in most ways the opposite of what the United States became and has become to the point of the suicide of democracy, today.
As I said, I'm not a Calvinist, I would point to the first few sentences of the sermon that imply a predestined inequality as the will of God in that, but that's for a different post. But I have to honor the means through which the radicalism of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospels that were the spark of the original Amerian liberalism in New England and the United States were introduced. I would certainly have to note that in many ways the ideals of Winthrop were rather quickly taken over by far worse claims, what happens almost always with the assumption of secular power - much of which generates the secular-more "enlightenment" style of liberalism that is so confused with the original thing.
I think that confusion underlies a lot of the inability of us to get out from under the things that led us to this terrible situation we are in. I think it is one of the most important things we can do to distinguish a "liberalism" that allows grotesque inequality in privileging the rich over the poor, their corruption of the legislatures and courts - all of that done under the slogan of "freedom" and "The First Amendment". We have to reject a "freedom" to lie, especially by "the press" a "right" to lie such as the Supreme Court has used in a series of disastrous rulings from Sullivan and Buckley v Valeo to Citizens United, the doorway to the corruption of our elections by foreign as well as domestic billionaires.
No comments:
Post a Comment