Who should we blame: an assessment of guilt in Trumpism

Mindless Pontificating: The persecution of French Jews and its lessons for Europe, the Left and the Nation-State

Mindless Pontificating: Remembering the “Endless Calvary” of Middle Eastern Christians

Over my Spring Break as a Bowdoin tour guide learning the subtle art of marketing, I comfortably experienced Catholic Holy Week. I easily strolled down to St. John the Baptist, a charming parish with a distinctively French interior, for Palm Sunday. Its Easter Vigil service lasted over three hours, but I was well rewarded as I likely heard many of the same readings and hymns as my ancestors from France, Spain and Ireland. On Easter morning, I was invited to join a generous elderly couple for a feast of ham, sweet potatoes and green beans. As Holy Week came to a conclusion, however, I was reminded that the Christians of the Middle East do not have the luxury of commemorating biblical events in peace. They are indeed reliving the Gospels, sharing in the persecution, isolation and abuse endured by the man they proclaim as Messiah.
In mid-March, the State Department finally concluded, after a considerable and troubling delay pointed out by the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea, that the actions of ISIS constituted genocide against Yazidis (by far the region’s most vulnerable group), Christians and other religious minorities. No doubt countless Syrians of all creeds have suffered at the hands of the Islamic State, but it is indisputable that these minorities face more severe persecution, experience far less protection from competing international powers and risk not only continual losses of life but their very survival as intact communities. The final genocide designation against Christians was certainly due after continual reports of the destruction of ancient monasteries and churches, the kidnapping and murder of clergy, the placement of both Christian and Yazidi women into sex slavery and the wholesale destruction of Christian communities.
We would be mistaken if we assumed this persecution of Christian communities was limited only to the hands of the Islamic State. With honorable exceptions such as Jordan, sincere religious pluralism is becoming all too rare throughout the region. Pew Center surveys have found substantial majorities in countless Middle Eastern countries favoring the criminalization of apostasy (i.e. the free conversion of a person out of Islam into another faith). Over the past century, thanks to policies pursued from Ataturk to Erdogan, the once enormous Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul has dwindled to 2,000. The Arab Spring and subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was hardly good news for Egypt’s Coptic Christians. The United States’ Quixotic scheme and execution of “nation building” in Iraq unleashed sectarian conflict that has seen the flight or death of two-thirds of country’s Christian population since 2003.
The potential end of a vibrant Christian faith in the Middle East, where liturgies can still be heard in Aramaic and churches trace their origins to Saint Paul, is more than a humanitarian tragedy. It holds profound geopolitical implications. Notwithstanding the discrimination faced under second class citizenship, Middle Eastern Christians used the historic tolerance of the Islamic world to become a creative and prosperous minority. Historians like Bernard Lewis have long recognized the role of the region’s Christians as catalysts for liberalism, reform and economic development. Both the Spanish Inquisition and the post-1948 persecution of Jews by Arab Nationalist states are obvious examples of how a loss of cultural and religious pluralism undoubtedly holds back freedom and prosperity. Furthermore, the existence of strong, flourishing Christian minority is the best empirical reply to the “clash of civilizations” narrative peddled by both our own Islamophobes and the Islamic State, of a total, irreconcilable demarcation between the “Christian West” and “Muslim East.”
The pressing need to protect the Middle East’s Christians and religious minorities while also creating a semblance of regional order will be the next great challenges of American foreign policy. As President Obama made obvious in his recent interview with The Atlantic, even partial steps towards a potential resolution are unlikely to come from his administration, given his reflexive, nearly ideological dismissals of more interventionist American proposals in Syria as simply false hopes of a Washington “establishment” unable to share in his grand view of history. Still less can arise from our country’s growing flirtation with isolationism, in either the peacenik or Jacksonian nationalist varieties offered by Sanders and Trump. Nor can it come from Ted Cruz’s schemes of apocalyptic carpetbombing. The last hopes for Middle Eastern pluralism and stability may indeed lie with either John Kasich or, barring my own personal delusions with a rational look at presidential betting markets, Hillary Clinton. Let us hope they and their Secretaries of States do not react to the collapse of Syrian Christianity—and Syria or the very region itself—with crocodile tears.

Mindless Pontificating

Who should we blame: an assessment of guilt in Trumpism

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Jimenez

Columnist

March 4, 2016

The night of Super Tuesday was, to put it mildly, a surreal one. There was the utter shock of returns showing a vulgar, ex-Democrat, three-times-married casino owner sweeping to victory in the heart of the Bible Belt. No longer could I hope that the mass of the Republican electorate would rightly discern “the wheat from the chaff.” Even the Cape Cod hamlet of Chatham, a place I assumed to be a bastion of Rockefeller Republicanism after a long weekend of barnstorming there for the Kasich campaign, went for the Donald.

The degree to which legitimate, if profoundly misdirected, anger drives support for Trump makes me less comfortable offering a sweeping condemnation of his voters. But the more unsettling question for our nation is how Trumpism is an indictment of us all. It has revealed our tolerance for civic illiteracy, crass moral utilitarianism and contempt for authoritative journalistic institutions. Globalization, racial prejudice and the allure of populism cannot alone explain the Trump phenomenon. At its heart, as Eliot Cohen points out in a stunning “American Interest” essay, is the “moral rot” of our republic.

Trump’s recent success is undoubtedly our nation’s “chickens coming home to roost” in our passiveness to the responsibility of education for citizenship. A 2012 Xavier University study found that one in three native-born citizens would fail the test required in citizenship applications. Strong majorities of Americans could not name their U.S. Senators, identify the role of the judicial branch, recall two amendments in the Bill of the Rights or define “the rule of law.” Only a nation with such civic illiteracy, covered as it still is with “Honor Roll student” car bumper stickers, could a mass of voters consider a candidate with expressed sympathy for foreign authoritarian strongmen, endorsement of “waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse” and a history of bullying through violence and lawsuits against those using their First Amendment rights to criticize him. Given our educational privilege attending Bowdoin, it is easy to snicker about this. But in all honesty, how much attention after graduation will we give to the condition of our local school boards? Will we even know the names of their members? How proactive will we be beyond social media about the state of education in our own communities?

The increasing warmth towards Trump by a range of Republican establishment figures sheds further light on a contemporary mindset of vulgar utilitarianism. I have little doubt that people like Chris Christie or Jeff Sessions feel uncomfortable with Trump’s racial pandering, vulgarity or incoherent policy proposals. But supposedly good ends prescribed by a person’s ideology, in this case the election of a Republican president and the defeat of Hillary Clinton, allow them to accept whatever means to achieve it. “Make America Great Again”—with as minimal moral qualms about getting there as possible. I too, like Hugh Hewitt, share his urgent concern about appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court. But even that good end, as the conservative evangelical essayist Matthew Lee Anderson writes, does not match the price of support “for a chronic liar who knows how to distance himself just enough from the racist underbelly of American life.” The Republican establishment’s potential Faustian pact with Trump might be extreme, but is their moral calculus about the supremacy of ends and flexibility of means much different from that of most Americans, particularly those in positions of power? And lest you think such a cult of utility is the work of evil Republicans—read about Clinton cronyism and the Democratic Party’s destructive, corrupt management of countless American cities and ask if “moral rot” cannot best describe these operations.

And if Trump were ever to be tried in court, the media would no doubt be his accomplice. Legitimate criticisms can be made of the elitism or privilege of the media of 50 years ago, but no one could ever imagine Walter Cronkite degrading his programming into a circus special on Trump. The slow decline of established periodicals and their readership has not led to a flourishing of more open discourse, but rather informational chaos with minimal interest in good taste, objectivity or disciplined research. On the right, the Wall Street Journal and National Review vanish for Breitbart and talk radio. On the left, the New York Times recedes into BuzzFeed and Huffington Post (though thankfully the recent flourishing of the Atlantic offers a kernel of hope). This decline in our intellectual life was exemplified in the recent destruction of the New Republic by Facebook CEO Chris Hughes, who tried to turn one of the nation’s pillars of liberal intellectual thought into a profit-driven “digital media company” modeled on Silicon Valley rather than the magazine’s own history. Only Donald Trump could be the perfect bard of a media age where no standard is too sacred to uphold and no story too ridiculous to ignore.

I am as much a victim of these three vices as anyone. I do not know the Constitution as well I should. I apply a results-driven calculus for far too many of my choices. I accept brief daily scannings through my news apps on my phone as evidence of “being informed.” All of us have quietly contributed to the monstrosity of Trumpism that will forever tarnish America’s rightful mantle of global leadership.

Anderson movingly writes that “the Trumpian disregard for the truth and the virtue is a cancer that has beset us all: Trump is a candidate for our time, a fitting judgment upon us who magnifies our sins and our vices. He may be a caricature; but he is a parody of us, a morality tale whose meaning we should heed.” Trumpism reminds us that the American experiment’s survival cannot depend alone on the achievements of any politician or movement. It is instead, as Jefferson wrote, “in the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour.” Let us indeed heed Lincoln’s warning, that “if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

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