“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” – Immanuel Kant, 1784
To someone who grew up in post WWII America, I see the evolution of today’s Republican politics as the end of a peaceful idyll – a time when the conflicts and brutality of 20th Century Europe momentarily ceased, and science and philosophy of all kinds flourished. We questioned the validity of a government that took us to war in Viet Nam. Many of us were schooled in Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Nazi Germany – in the notion of “the banality of evil”. And we were raised with the lesson of the Nuremberg Trials and the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Defense: “I was just following orders.”
We scrutinized the morality of patriarchy as it applied to women’s civil rights, and the civil rights of minorities. We questioned the nature of reality itself, and we took on the moral burden of our past genocides – of our government’s policy of Manifest Destiny during our westward expansion. The Trail of Tears became a metaphor for our history of justifying the brutalizing, looting, and murder of those who stood in our way. We began to accept the moral crime of slavery, and we changed our laws in order to form a more perfect union among a cacophony of voices demanding to be heard. We rejected the absolutism of ancient religions and, instead, fought vigorously to sustain the secular government that was mandated in our own Constitution. For me, it was a moment when we sought to realize Immanuel Kant’s ideal of “Perpetual Peace”. https://www.researchgate.net/…/298047098_Idea_for_a_univers… and the post WWII Democratic Peace Theory.
It was an inspiring time to be young.
But today, solutions have been stripped from the problems presented by the pluralistic nature of democratic government. Today, the impulse to reform government has been replaced by the drive to collapse it. Being angry is sufficient self-expression to achieve what being passionately earnest did in the past. And intense religionists like Donald Trump’s Attorney,William Barr, are standing in the vortex prepared to take the reigns and establish the inflexible theocracies of ancient civilizations.
William Barr sees this period in American history through the eyes of Girolamo Savonarola, the 15th Century Italian Dominican monk who preached to Florence the glory of a new state, the need for repentance, and the destruction of secular art and culture through what is known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. Savonarola couched his asceticism in a fundamentally populist message, and he became dictator of Florence smack dab in the middle of the Italian Renaissance. His anti-establishment views caused him to be excommunicated by the Church in Rome and ultimately burned at the stake by the Medici family.
William Barr isn’t merely a smugly self-righteous co-conspirator of Donald Trump’s. William Barr is the doughy golem of our tribal past. The raw material of an “unfinished human being” who cannot adapt to change, much less modernity. He speaks in the language of religious fundamentalism and the idea that his religious beliefs are irreducible and universally true. He would make a terrific Savonarola and a proud Medal of Freedom recipient in the Nazi Party. He rides the brakes of art and culture, technology and pluralism – and sees the functioning of democracy as the blasphemy of the Tower of Babel – an effort to thwart God’s laws and his retributions. And yes, he will undoubtedly use the Nuremberg Defense to escape his culpability in Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy our American Democracy.
In a speech entitled “Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks to the Law School and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame” – which is currently posted on the Department of Justice website – https://www.justice.gov/…/attorney-general-william-p-barr-d… – William Barr unambiguously outlines his contempt for a secular democratic American government – and rails against modernity in general. Everyone should read this speech and consider the man who has assumed the role of Donald Trump’s, Roy Cohen in this horror story.
We underestimate the power of those who comprise Donald Trump’s administration and his base of supporters. With them, the foundations have shifted beneath our feet. Trump’s enablers in the White House and in Congress are marginalized status-seekers – they are the Florentines who lit Savonarola’s book-burning bonfires in the town center. They are the self-declared Übermensch of society and the embodiment of totalitarianism. They have climbed out from under our beds, and they now run America with the full support of the Republican Party.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, provocative, or controversial, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs