On First Opening Marcel's Man Against Mass Society

I AM BOTH ticked off and ashamed to find that this late in life I wished that back when I was reading a lot of the then still fashionable existentialism that I never came by or bothered to find out about Gabriel Marcel, a French philosopher, playwright, critic, etc. who I now find out is sometimes identified as one of the first existential philosophers.  I will speculate that my early disgust for the approved, canonized (literally in the literary sense of the word) atheist-existentialists I read (and read of) probably had something to do with me not finding out about him earlier, though some of that might have had to do with which ones were placed more prominently on book store shelves and mentioned in journals and magazines.  I think it was sometime after I read Sartre in the original and realized his plays were stupid and his philosophy maybe even more so, his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir and found her as worthless a writer that I pretty much said adieu to existentialism.  

Apparently what became of the word "existentialist" was not what Gabriel Marcel would have chosen himself to be identified with later in his life because he wanted to distance himself from the more famously promoted existentialists such as a student of his work, Jean Paul Sartre and others in that camp.  

I'm not far past the first chapters of his post-WWII work translated into English as Man Against Mass Society and I want to start discussing it and encouraging People to read it.  Translated in the language of seventy years after he wrote it, it's as fresh as any of the more informed of current writing on our current troubles. In fact, it's a lot fresher than even most of that, mired as so much of it is in the kind of academic-journalistic abstraction he railed against.  

Most interesting to me in terms of what I post here is the section that starts here:

. . . On the other hand, this hostility of mine towards the spirit of abstraction is quite certainly also at the roots of the feeling of distrust aroused in me, not exactly by democracy itself, but by the sort of ideology which claims to justify democracy on philosophical grounds.  At no time in my life, for instance, has the French Revolution inspired in me anything at al akin to admiration or even attachment; one reason may be that, when I was still very young, I became aware of the ravages in French social life that are due to a sort of egalitarian bigotry.  But another feeling had its effect.  It was also when I was still very young that my parents - for what reason, I am still not too clear - compelled me to read Mignet's very dry history of that great event;  and the other feeling, which that reading aroused, was my innate horror of violence, disorder, cruelty.  

At that time, the glaring abuses in French social and political life which had dragged on until 1789 struck less feelingly hom3 to me than the crimes of the Terror.  Naturally, as time went on, I arrived at a more just or at least a more balanced estimate of the French Revolution.  But the feelings of indignation which the September Massacres and the other mass crimes of the Revolutionary period aroused in me in adolescence, were not, in the end, essentially very different from those much more recently aroused by the horrors of Stalinism or Nazism, or even by the shameful aspects of a purge nearer home.

Can there be any doubt, then, that a bent of mind so deeply rooted is the point of departure of my whole philosophical development?  But my readers, very naturally, will want to ask me if there is any connection that can be grasped between my horror of abstraction and my horror of mass violence.  My answer is that such a connection does certainly exist.  Even for myself, however, it existed for a long time below the level of conscious understanding.  It is, certainly, only at a fairly recent date that it has become explicit to me; since, as I hope to show in detail in the present volume, the spirit of abstraction is essentially of the order of the passions, and since conversely, on the other hand, it is passion, not intelligence, which forget the most dangerous abstractions. Now I can say without hesitation that my own thought has always been directed by a passionate love (but passionate at another level) for music, harmony, peace.  And when I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions;  though I grasped it, of course, in a form that had not yet reached the stage of conceptual elaboration, (In passing, the fact that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions is the deepest reason for the failure of the League of Nations, and of other pretentious organizations which resemble it.)  Perhaps also the sort of prejudice which I have always had in favor of Christianity, even during the very long period in which I could not envisage the possibility of becoming a practicing and confessing Christian, may be explained by the unconquerable conviction that I had that, so long as Christianity remained true to itself, Christianity could be the only authentic peacemaker.  

A reader may ask, 'But so far as that goes.  Christians of the Left think as you do;  and it is not perfectly permissible to suppose that Christianity of the Right will always remain conformist in spirit,  that its essence is to try to appease and to manage by tact those who hold power in the world, or even to lean on them for support?'  To that my answer would be that in fact I have always been extremely suspicious of a Christianity of the Right!  I have always thought that such a Christianity runs the risk of distorting in the most sinister fashion the true message of Christ.  (I have even been tempted to adopt as my own certain phrases of Pascal Laumiere's from the final act of my play.  Rome n'est plus dans Rome. [Rome isn't in Rome, anymore].)  Only I should like to add immediately that the men of the Right are very far from having a monopoly on the spirit of conformity and appeasement;  there is a conformism of the Left,  there are men of the Left who hold power in the world, there are 'right-thinking people' (in the conformist sense of the phrase) on the Left as well as the Right;  I remember one day before the war saying something of this sort at the Ambassadeurs,  thus greatly shocking Jacques and Raissa Martian.

One must add that conformism of the Left, not only because it has, if I may put it so, the wind behind its sails these days, but because it is in such glaring contradiction with the principles that the Left claims to be defending, must be denounced just as ruthlessly as conformism of the Right.  Not, of course - this hardly needs saying - that there is any excuse for allowing conformism of the Right, with all it to often implies of blindness and unconscious cruelty, to cash in on that weight of reprobation with which, on this count, one must load the shoulders of the Left.  One must recognize the fact that, in certainly countries of Europe and the Americas, the spirit of clericalism, with the hateful political connivances that it implies, is tending to take on a character that, for a truly Christian conscience, becomes more and more offensive.  The note of a truly honest mode of thinking in these matters, as in book-keeping, is to have a system of double entry, and to prohibit oneself from marking down-by an intellectually fraudulent operation - to the credit of the Right what one has to mark down to the debit of the Left.  I am thinking now of people who, because of their horror of the Soviet world, are today tending to regard Nazism with a certain retrospective tolerance.  That is an aberration - end a criminal aberration.  In any case, who could fail to see at once the simple mechanism of the mental conjuring trick by which we belittle a danger that is past, simply because it is past, or because we believe it past?  Is it really past?  Or may it not in fact appear again, and in a form not radically altered?  In this realm of discourse we must learn once more to express ourselves categorically and to denounce the errors of amoral relativism which is, as may be easily shown, radically self-centered.  Human nature being what it is, the movement which I condemn morally is too often the movement which hurts me personally;  and I am likely to go on condemning it for as long as (and just so long as) it is really able to hurt me.  

I hadn't expected to type out so much of Marcel's introduction but I felt compelled to go on once I started.  I will continue this in the coming days but I want to make several comments on the above.

One of the ways in which the Left and certainly the Right that Marcel wrote about in the late 1940s and early 1950s used to refuse to address what someone like him said was to dishonestly associate him with Nazism or Marxism or some other disfavored ism of the time.  I'm not aware enough to know what his detractors in France and in the English speaking world may have done in that regard to Marcel Gabriel's thought but I know it was the typical way of such discourse.  Something like that, today, is rampant in the attribution of "antisemitism" to any critic of Israel and its many crimes against humanity and in the almost comic clowning of the American Neo-Stalinist fanboys and gals (now uniformly Trumpian Republican-fascists!) calling the most conventional of moderate, democracy loving Democrats "communists" and "Marxists."  

There is fodder of that kind in some of what he says, such as his criticism of Jean Genet.

. . . the novels and characters of Jean Genet are a striking case in point.  From such a novelist's point of view, a middle-class hero practicing the dreary virtues of his retrograde social group is a much less brilliant character than a thief and pervert who has the courage to put into action those desires which, for the plodding bourgeois, never get beyond the stage of unadmitted day dreams.

I am sure that someone old enough to still have the rote-reaction against any criticism of Jean Genet - a hero of the mid-brow "left" who knew the name and that he was "homosexual" and risque and allegedly some kind of persecuted artiste.  I may have held that view of him myself until I did what so few of them bothered to do, read some of his work and I have to say, my reaction to what I read there was akin to my reaction to the crimes against humanity during the French Revolution.  Maybe it's because by that time I had been the victim of a violent crime, ironically, one committed on the basis of my sexual orientation.*

I'm sure many if they read him would be inclined to view Gabriel Marcel through the phony, stupid, left-right "which side are you on" pantomime of political identity which I rejected about fifteen years ago.  Or, more typically, those who might skim him to find the kind of dishonest grounds for launching such a leftist (or rightist) fatwa against him such as is mentioned above.

In regard to Genet and his then fashionable elevation of the gutter level of the demimonde of "perversion" and criminality, pretty much the only reason he ever became a championed figure of the fashionable "left" in France and beyond, I'd seen enough of that even in the pre-Stonewall gay milieu to realize it was a vestige of political and legal oppression and violence which was not sustainable or even desireable.  Ironically, thinking about this since reading the above on Monday, I think one of the most striking "artistic" portrayals of that is in the decidedly non-intellectual, decidedly of that genre John Waters movie Female Trouble in which a rich, thrill seeking couple go trawling through the demimonde of Baltimore, Maryland to thrill at the trashy criminality of the character played by Divine and her two cat thieving, probably prostituting "cheap girl" sidekicks, filming the perversity and violence they encourage, including her character murdering her daughter and (in her first star turn, members of the audience).  I mean, if the John Waters of that period saw through that kind of thing, how much more obvious could it get?  

Of course one of the things that will be grasped onto in that way by the several mid-brows who troll me is his mild semi-criticism of democracy and the phrase "egalitarian bigotry."  I will note that the "democracy" he almost certainly meant was the liberal democracy of post-WWII France, probably that of the United States (which had a long, long list of crimes committed by a government democratically chosen), which I have, as well, come to see as something to be overcome, not maintained.  His phrase "egalitarian bigotry" as well has to be seen in the context of the society and times in which he wrote it.  A society in which morality and virtue, even highest levels of those unattached to self-gain or even self-esteem, were disdained.  The popular literature of the 20th century, especially the most fashionable of it, reveled in violence and moral depravity and the virtue of the mentally and morally lazy, cynicism.  The value placed on spectacle, in line with what was in popular literature, and so depravity and violence, is the predominant strain in even what passed and passes even more, today, as high-art.  The kind of equality which I say is the actual foundation on which a genuine egalitarian democracy has to be founded is an equality of human beings, of natural living beings not an equality that covers their ideas or, really, their preferences generally based on their desires and self-gain.  That ties in with Marcel's condemnation of abstraction but it also figures highly into his skepticism of any democracy, any equality which values those things more highly than it does the lives of People and other living beings.  

My reading of the promoted, and so, in a way, approved atheist existentialists, Sartre, Camus. I suppose de Beauvoir, . .  had, by 1975 filled me with a disgust for the word that I'd pretty much stopped paying attention to it.  I don't see Gabriel Marcel as being anything like that, from the little I've read of him and I feel a kindred feeling with him, I could translate a lot of what he said into my own biography.  Even during my long, stupid and cowardly agnostic period I held to the morality of the Gospel and the Prophets and even much of the radical egalitarian economics of The Law.  I could never acquiesce to the elevation of abstractions over the lives and pain of any others, those who looked and spoke like me or those who I only read about in newspaper estimates of the victims of individual or mass slaughter and maiming.  Clearly the ersatz atheist saints of that time, such as Sartre could blithely support Mao as his regime was murdering millions of Chinese People, just as the Left talked about above could the millions already credibly reported on being murdered by Stalin and Lenin before him, just as D. M. Mackinnon in his Foreword to the English edition points out:

There is a deep, albeit unrecognized kinship between the man who in 1937 was denying Guernica, and the man who in 1947 is justifying, or denying Stalinist deportations and slave camps; ('progress' and 'tradition' are excellent examples of the sort of abstraction from whose tyranny M. Marcel would free us).  

The same kinship finds its banality right now in the American free press which recapitulates that in its "journalistic ethics" that excuse and normalize even the neo-Nazi ravings of Donald Trump and his camp with a monumentally lop-sided "even handedness."  But that will get me on to the dangers of viewing even freedom in the abstract as removed from the inconvenience of morality and the concreteness of reality.

I will try to continue this.

Trump using Pavarotti during his post-literate Nazi rallies confirms my dislike of his bellowing going back decades.  

This Is How Stupid Our Media Is

I HAVE YET to read anyone in the corporate or non-corporate media writing about the DOS attacks that have taken Archive.org off line for going on about a week,  if it happened to the organ of idiocy that Twitter(won't call it "X") is they'd be having hysterics over it. 

Archive.org deserves support and protection from its corporate (publishing) enemies as well as those who do things like this, we need it in ways that no one needs Twitter,  the social-disease-media that did at least as much to choke off the promise of online, non-profit journalism as Facebook.   I've got a couple of projects that are stuck because I didn't download books I needed before this happened.   Rachel Maddow, you need to get on this for tonight. 

Some Notes On The Failure Of Catholic Fromation Since JPII

OPINION POLLING is rank pseudo-science of the most obvious kind, there being no way to check the most basic act of it, "data" collection for accuracy or even honesty.   There is little more control over the honesty or validity of the method of structuring questions and asking them and anyone who has looked at the industry and its practices over the past half a century who came away without suspecting the various companies rig those to get results that those paying them to do it want is a chump.  Such chumps comprise most of the corporate media, much of the non-corporate media and huge numbers of those who should know better.

Still, for reasons of argument and because I think there is a real and dangerous phenomenon behind this,  I'm going to assume the reliability of this recent Harris Poll which shows that the Catholic Church and Catholics have a fascism problem, at least in so far as a small majority of white Catholics goes. 

Catholic voters in seven battleground states favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 5 percentage points, but the vice president leads the Republican nominee overwhelmingly among Hispanic and Black Catholics in those swing states, according to a new poll conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.

With just more than three weeks to the election, Trump leads Harris 50% to 45% in the closely watched battleground states, a margin that could be an important factor given the closeness of the contest. Most polls say the race is too close to predict, and margins are extremely narrow in the decisive states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Among Hispanic and Black Catholics in the battlegrounds, Harris has an advantage over Trump with nearly seven out of 10 Hispanics and more than three-quarters of Blacks favoring the sitting vice president. The lead among Blacks and Hispanics stems from a strong aversion to Trump as well as an alignment with the vice president on values and key social issues, the poll shows.

That anywhere near 45% of Catholics of any identity could support Donald Trump in 2024 is proof of a complete failure in the morality of Catholics,  when you concentrate on the fact that that 45% is identified as "white" focuses the problem even more on a particular part of the Catholic population.   As someone who would be identified as a "white Catholic" that fact troubles me a lot.  What is it about the past half a century of the Catholic Church that has led to something I'd have found bizarre back then when most of the Catholics of my experience were Democrats, most of them very solidly Democratic voters.  

I would expect the long papacy of the arch-conservative John Paul II would have a lot to do with it, along with the long reign of the even more right-wing "Mother Angelica" at her ETWN, which was sort of a Catholic FOX "News" before FOX "News" was much of anything.   The influence of that putrid outlet on the Trumpization of a large number of Catholics cannot be overestimated.   After her death it has, if anything, become even worse than it was when she ran it. 

I would like to know how much of that 45% are products of the affluent Catholic prep to Ivy Equivalent system.   I saw a little of that back in the 1960s as one of my sisters attended a Catholic Women's College where she was one of the few non-nun blue-collar students there.  I recently looked at the program of her graduating class and of those I knew something of, all the others were what might have been called "Catholic American Princesses."   At least one of whom was rumored to be the daughter of a mobbed up father.    I know at least a few of them were College Republicans.   More recently there is the current Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court with at least five Catho-fascists arguably from that class,  I will always remember Charlie Pierce pointing out that the prep that Kavanaugh went to was nothing like the blue-collar Catholic schools that those of my class attended.  I'm not unhappy that there was none in my town so I am a product of the public schools. 

What has happened to Catholic formation that could have produced such support for the most amoral materialist, overtly pagan to have ever run as a major party candidate?   One with his track record of mortal sin and crime, reveling in violence, reveling in theft and grift and the secular sins of treason and, that most serious of mortal sins hardly considered to be one LYING AND BEARING FALSE WITNESS.  How could that many millions of Catholics, no doubt considering themselves the genuine article favor him over Kamala Harris.   If other polls are to be believed a majority of that 45% would not have their support hinge on anti-abortion because a majority of it almost certainly doesn't hold the official US Catholic Conference of Bishops line on that one issue - they certainly don't fall in line with that line when it comes to their own sex lives and reproductive choices - as Trump certainly never has.  I mean, he's on record as having encouraged what became his second wife to have an abortion when she became pregnant, that is certainly relevant to any consistent anti-abortion voter, you'd think.  

The papacies of John Paul II and his chosen successor Benedict XVI were pastoral disasters, both globally and in the United States in particular.   Their appointments as bishop were notable for their incompetence, their pastoral indifference, their legalism and their unconcern with local parishes (which they shut down more than built) and the religious formation of Catholics.   The current make-up of the U.S. Conference is a moral catastrophe in many regards, including its support for Republican-fascism.  They embody the old anti-Catholic accusation that Catholic majority countries have a better record of producing fascism than democracy.    

It's not only white Catholics which produce these problems and questions, it's white Americans, especially white-male Americans, a group which, as it climbed in affluence went farther right, following other white sub populations in that.  Only you can't have it both ways, you can't both be an adherent to the Gospel and a Trump supporter.   You certainly can't claim to be faithful to Catholic social teaching and support the Republican-fascist party in 2024.   

Good Pope Francis has recently added Cardinal electors to the College of Cardinals, most of which will vote for his successor,  some are pointing out he is doing so as a means of getting ready for that event which will come sooner than later, most likely.   He has now appointed a very large percentage of them.   He is also replacing bishops here as the appointees of JPII and BXVI either die or reach the age of retirement.   That change, if it is change for the better, can't come soon enough.  I go back and look at the American bishops of the 1970s, many appointed by the disappointing Paul VI and it looks like an age of moral light instead of clerical darkness today.   His successor will be faced with the problem of the billionaire-millionaire AstroTurf anti-Francis establishment that is both well financed and entrenched, ETWN being only one part of that.   They will also have to address the Catho-fascists who have been installed in the Judiciary and who are in the Congress, now.  Many of those are the kind of converts who are about as sincere in their Catholicism as Henry VI of France.   Newt Gingrich,  Candice Owen, J.D. Vance, etc.?   There was a push to get fascists to convert and the reason had nothing to do with the Social Teaching of the Church.   The crypto-fascist priests and others involved with that should certainly be investigated.   A similar take-over effort has marred American Orthodoxy, which the Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart laments may as well be an arm of the Southern Baptists, now. 

Even The Best Possible Outcome Of The Election Will Be Inadequate In The Long Run

THE ELECTION has me so worried that I have been trying to avoid thinking too much about it.  So much is at risk if Democrats don't both win the presidency and the Congress that I can't sleep as it is.  I've been too ill to have much participation in the election, this time.  Which may account for why I'm so anxious.  Being involved, working on it in the past has helped to alleviate the anxiety about it, the feeling that what ever happens for the bad, it isn't my fault.  I can take some comfort in that my district in my state isn't likely to vote Republican though the Second District of Maine could there's little I can do from the other end of the state to have an effect on that.  

New Hampshire, the only state that Maine has a border with, is also believed to be more or less safely voting Democratic, at least for president.  

That leaves what little effect writing something here would be and I'm pretty certain most of those who read what I write will be voting a Democratic ticket.  My political writing has a far more radical agenda than would be effective on an electoral level, radical reform of the Constitution, including the sacrosanct First Amendment and the god-damned Second Amendment,  such a radical reform of the Supreme and federal courts as to find the recent proposal made in the Senate is inadequate.  Nothing less than a Democratic President and Congress imposing term limits on the sitting "justices" that would remove at least the three longest sitting Republican-fascists, a binding ethics code with criminal penalties on the "justices" and summarily nullifying Marbury vs. Madison would be enough to protect egalitarian democracy from what has in our history been the most corrupt of the branches of government in my reading of American history and the daily news.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another on the must-do list to save even the dangerous and inadequate liberal-democracy we have now.  And scrapping liberal democracy for egalitarian democracy - INCLUDING ECONOMIC JUSTICE - must be on the agenda of anyone who really cares about any real democracy in the modern sense of the word.  There can be no democracy worth trying for which is not egalitarian.  The modern stupidity that puts "liberty," "freedom" as the paramount virtue of democracy over equality is not only stupid, it is a proven flop.  Economic inequality under liberal democracy is the thing which has made us dangerously vulnerable to the billionaire-millionaire world-wide movement to impose oligarchic fascism.  If the Clinton and Obama administrations had made real moves towards real, effective economic justice to the poor, the middle-class and the destitute, the billionaires and millionaires wouldn't have found such fertile ground in which to plant Trumpian fascist rule.  Of course, what little they did being misrepresented by the "free press" was no help but the Ivy-league lawyer-presidents were never going to touch on that because of the false piety given to the First Amendment even as they were lied into impotence through the mass media feed to lie under it.  

The part played by the entertainment industry in this has to be faced in a way that the idolatry of the First Amendment prevents.  Trump as Reagan before him was a product of that industry.  The producers of The Apprentice, its directors, writers and others which created the phony Trump presented on it, the colluding mass media which presented him first as a clown-prince, then as an increasingly frightening dictator  are who gave us this national and world nightmare.  That the stupidest, sleaziest, liar, rapist, crook and con-man to have ever gained actual power in not only one of the states but over all of them was an As-Seen-On-TV fraud should be generating journalism and academic and political commentary and analysis of the dangers that "The Free Press" as entertainment media is stupidly called.  That all of those are afraid to take on the dangers imposed through the modern reading of The First Amendment, starting under Holmes and Brandeis but most of all through the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, and the vague 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights proves how far we are from saving even liberal democracy.   I attribute that failure to liberal democracy, itself, what gave us the 18th century structure of government under the Constitution, including all of its intentional corrruptions - the pro-slavery and pro-oligarchy aspects of it - and the false piety for things like the First Amendment.  I have written extensively over the past eighteeen years about the danger of "free speech absolutism" which is a product of the stupidly phrased First Amendment, something which has led even someone as well intentioned as Maya Wiley to foolishly talk about a "right to lie."  It is lies in the mass media, everything from what passes as journalism to the cesspools of "reality TV" which is as phony as can be to hate-talk media and comedy which have brought us here.   The numerous laments about the "death of truth" the profit from the lie machines that are Trump and the like of J. D. Vance have not dared to address the fact that it was the Warren Court, under that dangerously libertarian interpretation of The First Amendment which has produced the delusion that there can be a "right to lie" as granted to the great grey whore, the New York Times and which is the extremely successful business model for FOX Lies.  Murdochian media sets the pace for the rest of it, CNN, the DC and NYC punditry in all of their career polishing vileness.  

Any political or legal ideology which puts the welfare and freedom of words over the lives of People, even under the guise of liberal democracy, will eventually go for those lies which generate the most profit for those willing to lie.  That's as true for "journalism" as it is for hate-talk comedians and shock jocks, it is infamously what makes the legal professions, now judges and "justices" as well as for the jr. level of that in mere lawyers, so famously disreputable.  Judges and "justices" gave their fellow lawyers carte blanche to lie and playing let's pretend even before Holmes, Brandeis and the Warren Courts invented a "right to lie" for the New York Times and, so, all of media.  It's one of the lessons I've had from seeing the antics of the Trump lawyers before judges and "justices" the extent to which lawyers can tell the most transparent lies in legal filings and even before the bench without suffering any real consequences.  You can look at the status of the worst of them and how few of the worst of them have really been removed from the legal profession to see just how much lying is not only tolerated but given free reign in the Courts and the law profession, no doubt out of the professional interest of other lawyers who can expect to profit from that kind of lying while being paid by the billing hour.  You can see that in the career of what Trump took as his ideal advocate, the entirely corrupt and crooked Roy Cohn who was only finally disbarred in the fabled bar of New York as he lay on his death bed, dying of AIDS, even as he lied about even that.   

We are in need of so much reform that even if Kamala Harris gets a Veto proof Senate and a large Democratic majority in the house that most of it will probably not be attempted or even imagined as needed.   I've been considering the skepticism of "freedom" not in the terms that the materialist-atheist-scientistic cult talks about it but as it is asserted under libertarian-liberal democracy, raised by thinkers such as Marilynne Robinson, on one side, and David Bentley Hart on another.  I think the problem with that conception of "freedom" is that it is detached from moral considerations.  I don't mean what most Americans mean by "morals" or "morality," that is the restriction of what Women or LGBTQ+ People do with their own bodies, prohibiting those who want to smoke pot or resonsibly use hallucinogens, harming no one- often not even themselves, I mean the religious morality of doing to the least among us what we would do for God, of doing to others what we would have done to us, OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE TO THE POOR AND DESTITUTE, things like that.   The 18th century definition of "liberalism" as is embodied in the political conceptions of framers of the American Constitution was permissive of the most grotesque immorality of kidnapping and enslaving human beings, of treating them as chattels, of genocide against the Native Americans, of the rankest objectification and submission of Women, etc.  That is the "liberalism" that the prissy "classical liberals" and the tech-bro fascists mean when they talk about "freedom," the freedom of the richest to do whatever they want as the large majority of humanity goes to hell, useful to them only as masses to be manipulated through the lying, algorithm manipulative media can manipulate them, as can be seen in the idiocy of those panels of "undecided voters" who are willing to consider going with Trumpian fascism, yet again.  

But the "left" which is detached from the moral absolutes of religious morality aren't much of help, either.  Well before the tech-bros considered most people as mere "masses" that word was bandied about in such lefty talk, if you go back and read the literature of the American and European and other "lefts" you will find that they were as bad if not worse than the disciples of 18th century European "liberalism" in that regard.  It's no great mystery how they could witness the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. with the kind of equanimity as those who see the crimes of the Israeli government do right now, of the goddamned Green Party Republican-fascist tools like Jill Stein who can't bring herself to admit that Vlaidimir Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity.  

I think the only hope for egalitarian democracy is in that morality, whether it be in the Christian synthesis of Hebrew justice with the Gospel of Love from Jesus or the other monotheistic religions or in the equivalent moral holdings of other, non-Abrahamic religions - though so far in history, those have yet to produce a national government which is egalitarian-democratic.  It's not as if the United States has really accomplished that, either, despite all of the talk about it over the past two-hundred plus years.  Our 18th century Constitution is one of the major inhibitions against equality and real democracy, I think other countries which have more modern Constitutions and a parliamentary system of government have a better chance of taking that step.  You'll never get it under a regime of materialism, intellectual or the far more influential vulgar materialism which even the "intellectuals" of materialist-scientistic-atheism really follow.   You'll never get it under an ideology which puts the rights of words over the rights of living beings, which pretends that privileges granted to artificial corporate entities (such as corporations and "the press") are the same things as rights naturally inhering only to natural living beings, which values legal fictions over even the hardest and most exigent of lived realities, such as flourishes in our "liberal democracy."   If those worked we would never have gone from the exposure of the many crimes of Nixon, including his war crimes in South-east Asia, to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, to the Rehnquist Court imposed Bush II regime, to that of Trump in just over a half a century.  All of those crimes, all of them were not only permitted by but happened under the umbrella of what is really permitted under the American Constitution, as acquiesced in by the false-protection of the "free press" and the judiciary, all of them sold to a duped plurality of American voters under the anti-democratic and increasingly non-democratic Electoral College and the gerrymandered, rigged districting of Congress, fed by our lying media.  

Of course, I will be voting by next week for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and a straight Democratic ticket down ballot - I even do that in our local non-partisan elections, now.  I will never vote for a Republican-fascist or a phony turd-party or so=called independent (excepting those who caucus with Democrats, now).  But I am not optimistic about American democracy because the changes necessary to even keep the false substituent we have now won't be made during my lifetime.  But I will be pushing and protesting and pointing out the lies, the hypocrisies and the realities of what is needed.  Starting with the Gospel of Jesus, the radical economics of Abrahamic monotheism, the presence of those in other religious traditions.  I'm not wasting any more time pretending there is a non-religoius force that can substitute for those, there simply is none, including what is sold as an equivalent in our secular civic pieties.  Those have had more than two centuries to produce and they are worse than a flop.  They never really intended to produce equality or democracy.  They certainly have not produced economic justice.