Well meaning as I'm sure a lot of them are, the series of former Department of Justice lawyers, lawyers connected to it and in that general orbit who have gone on the radio or MSNBC to express their shock at William Barr and Rod Rosenstein etc. who turn out to not be the stalwart "institutionalists" that they had always believed them to be and to turn out to be sycophantic enablers of the levels of Trumpian fascism on display in the stonewalling letter issuing out of the Trumpian legal arm this week is wearing entirely thin.
You have to wonder why Rosenstein's exposure as providing Trump his obstructive excuse to fire the equally but differently compromised James Comey - whose ethical bona fides we had been assured of from the same crew - didn't clue them in that the little creep was the self-serving little creep he's turned out to be. How many of these Republican thugs and punks do you get to be wrong about before you question your own judgement?
You have to wonder why someone with Barr's known history of facilitating the obstruction of justice with the Bush I pardons and suppressing documents surrounding Bush II's torture program from Congressional oversight WHILE PROMOTING THE FASCISTIC THEORY OF THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE didn't clue these guys and gals in that William Barr was a seriously amoral danger to democracy in any form.
I seem to have wandered in to a long discussion of some fundamental truths and mandatory prerequisites of democracy as those relate to a belief in God and the impossibility of discovering those fundamental moral principles in the absence of a belief in God. Or, at any rate,the impossibility of otherwise finding them as something sufficiently strongly believed in to make an effective difference for the good. I have to wonder if the most astonishing lack of moral probity in the matter of moderate to liberal lawyers who have worked with and observed Barr and Rosenstein isn't due to their acculturation and education into a devotion to secularism and the dereligionization of the public sphere.
Perhaps the even-handedness in removing such inconvenient things as hard holdings of such inevitably religious morality from the law, from the administration of government and, as the Republican-fascist majorities in the Congress and, perhaps, on the courts, from law making, has led to a situation in which their substitution with mere professional ethics and mere predilection and habits of expression have proven to be entirely inadequate to keep us from disaster in the form of what might be called "anti-democracy" in which there's a vote that results in fascism.
I will throw in that any expression of them that doesn't match that interesting turn of phrase that Thomas Jefferson came up with, that such moral absolutes must be "self evident" in the terms in which they are asserted will almost certainly prove to be unsustainable and likely immediately found to be ineffective.* I suspect that anything that is not in the form of a religious commandment to be held to have the status of an axiom will be ineffective.
Marilynne Robinson's succinct and deep analysis of Jefferson's foundation of legitimate government, founded in the rights that he asserted were a self-evident and equal endowment of God contained the entirely sensible but brilliant insight into Jefferson, that if he, one of the smartest of politicians in the history of western culture, had been able to find that foundation anywhere else, in the new innovation of science which he was so devoted to, he would have given that explanation of it.
What is also certain is that the committee that was assigned with the task of editing Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence which contained men such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman,included those who quite likely would have preferred to find that foundation in other than religious terms (Franklin, Adams) and they definitely could not find them, neither could the rest of the members of of the Continental Congress who adopted the Declaration. Neither has anyone else who I've ever read. The atheists who like to troll me have not come up with any who I don't know.*
I think it's safe to say that those absolute foundations cannot be found in any other than the religious holding that rights sufficient to make government by the consent of those governed legitimate are an equally bestowed gift from God.
That word, "legitimate," "legitimacy," which saturates the discussion of whether or not Trump will be our dictator or the mere executive officer of a representative democracy, means nothing if, ultimately, it doesn't reference absolute holdings of morality that are more durable than the transient holdings of rationalistic schemes like utilitarianism, the transient social consensus as substitutes.
Without a holding of something more durable than human beings are capable of artificially constructing the very concept of law, legitimacy is unable to hold up democracy in any reliable manner. As can be seen in the repulsive spectacle of the obviously insincere, fraudulent trappings of something called "evangelical" Christianity and an Orthodox Judaism able to work with neo-Nazism covering up the Mammonist debauchery and crookedness of the Trump regime, even when you call it "religion" it can twist any moral holding to support their opposites in reality.
That prostitution of religion is something that is certainly no surprise, it is something that has been held up to discredit religion for centuries. It's practically a stock-routine in the routine, repetitive pantomime that easily 90% of literature, theater and entertainment inevitably is.
What is a shock to the prim and proper advocates of secularism, non-religion, anti-religion is that if the human institutions of religion are so morally corruptible, the merely secular and even more human institutions of secularism are as corruptible and their adherents - even with that secular substitute for religious instruction, advanced degrees and law licenses - are as corruptible and readily duped, as those whose Christianity is caught up in cultural racism and bigotry, the cult of toxic masculinity (and toxic femininity) the movie-TV melange of horse-operas and violent sex and the overriding substitute for Judeo-Christian-Islamic morality that issues out of every venue of secularism, the worship of wealth and things and violent sex.
William Barr is a high-end fascist, the lawyer of a fascist strongman thug. Fascism is a political ideology that favors unequal rule by gangsters. All of the elite lawyers servicing the Trump regime, the Trump family in these matters, Democratic as well as Republican fixtures inhigh-power law that don't actively oppose them, are serving Trumpian fascism. All of the perfumed, well-manicured, highly educated advocates of the unitary executive spewed out of Harvard and Yale and their equivalents, all of the creepy little toadies who can live with that like Rod Rosenstein are what you get when you suppress those truths which even the seriously morally compromised Jefferson found inexpressible in any but religious terms. If we want to have a country that does better, we're going to have to just admit that you won't find those truths in an effective form anywhere else.
Secularism may be an administrative necessity to prevent the corruption of religion and government that tends to come with sectarianism but if the common holding of The People doesn't hold those truths to be self-evident and based in the will of God, the results won't be egalitarian democracy, they won't be legitimate.
* What we can be certain of, it will be attacked on the basis of scientism, materialism and because of the inescapable implication of the reality of God and God's character as benevolent enough to equally endow people with those rights.
Note:
For me, Marilynne Robinson's observation that Jefferson held that people were doubly blessed, first with the privilege of being created, of being granted existence, and then being endowed with rights is an especially deep observation. If we hold that then we can hardly avoid the idea that God also endowed our fellow creatures, all of creation with blessing and, perhaps, rights. Though that's way past the step that people are willing to take. It might be the last lesson humanity learns that it made a big mistake in not aspiring to such an Edenic view of reality as they concentrated on the merely utilitarian and materialistic. Materialism is as human an invention as Mormonism is, so is science which was invented in utilitarian aspirations.
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