My parents and others of their
generation had an expression something like, "Ten years after America
elects a Jewish president," meaning pretty much what the more secular and
sardonic of their parents and grandparents meant by "When Messiah
comes": that is, somewhere in the distant future, or never.
Now hold that thought while I repeat
a personal story from my days in the higher ed. biz and provide a link to a
Mort Sahl routine from a generation earlier.
After I'd worked at Miami University
(Oxford, OH) for a few years — let's say 1980 or so — I found myself at a
Faculty Senate meeting notably boring even by the high standards for boredom of
faculty senates. I couldn't just walk out because I needed to be there for what
was to be a close vote, but I could start a conversation with the guy next to
me, a US Navy officer from our NROTC
unit. If we'd been crass enough and clever enough to just ask, we probably
would've found out that our votes would cancel out, and we both could've left
and had a beer and not disturbed the slumber or stupor of the colleagues around
us. Anyway, we had a low-volume conversation that lasted long enough that we
exchanged names, and upon hearing mine the Navy guy said, "Oh — you're
Erlich! They told me about you down at the unit." And I said something
cool and sophisticated like, "Really?!? What did they say?" What they
said was, "There are two really big radicals to look out for on campus,
Momeyer in Philosophy and Erlich in English." And I repeated,
"Really?!?", at which point he pulled back, stroked an imaginary
beard, considered for a moment, and said: "Let's see, Jeffersonian
republican plus a dash of Jacksonian populist, modernized to the sort of social
democrat the CIA would support if you were foreign?" Assuming I could
modernize out the racist stuff with Jefferson and Jackson, I said, "Close
enough." And he said, "Yeah, I figured that's what a 'radical' would
be at Miami University.
Mort Sahl was a comedian and
social satirist who is relevant here for a routine in 1967 on US
mainstream TV giving a comic introduction to the US political system, labeling
the middle with the handy term from European politics, "social
democrats." I will repeat that: as just a handy label for the politics of
the middle of the US political spectrum — from Communists on the Left to the
John Birch Society on the Right — Mort Sahl in 1967 used for US moderates,
"social democrats."
Bernie Sanders is running for the
Democratic nomination for president on policies of a social
democrat, and if he is elected President with a miraculously progressive
Democratic Congress and a quick series of appointments to the Supreme Court,
the political "revolution" we will get is social democracy and not a more
literal by-God revolution!! that will
yield US socialism
more Leftist than that.
I'm writing in February 2016, right
after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, and there is still a good
possibility that the 2016 US Presidential race could be Bernie Sanders vs.
Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich — and there are
possibilities of "and/or," with more exotic combinations involving
third or fourth parties and a Hillary Clinton candidacy in the bargain. Kasich
is a member of a socially conservative Anglican
splinter sect who personally takes seriously Jesus's teaching on aiding
the wretched of the Earth and has governed in Ohio mostly as an old-style, Ohio
staunch conservative.
And Kasich would be the most
conventional Republican candidate against Bernie Sanders.
More interesting would be Rubio
against Sanders and most interesting — as in the curse, "May you live in
interesting times" — would be Ted Cruz or, for other reasons, Donald Trump
against Sanders.
Rubio has had a complex
spiritual journey — Roman "Catholicism
to Mormonism back to Catholicism to a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated
evangelical megachurch and finally back to Catholicism" — but now asserts
firmly, "I’m fully, theologically,
doctrinally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church," although the Pope may
have some objections on economic doctrine.
And
Ted Cruz is a Southern Baptist son of a born-again convert from Catholicism, the
candidate favored by religious-Right Evangelicals, and beautifully typified in
a section heading in an article that handles his use of religion with, "Forget 'dog whistle'
politics: Cruz has a trumpet."
Trump
is something else.
Okay,
Trump is something else in many ways,
but relevantly here Trump isn't directly offering religion — or a coherent
program — but the Leadership Principle, which is the translation of the German Führerprinzip but should not be limited to
Germans of the Third Reich. Get enough human beings together, and a significant
number will want strong leadership: a head-man, caudillo, the guy on the white horse who'll ride in and by sheer force of
personality get things done. And sometimes that's not a bad idea, as with Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator. Some of
Trump's ideas though, put into practice, would be fascistic: rounding up and
deporting millions of refugees, a religious test for asylum in the US, repealing
the 14th Amendment citizenship birthright by "soil" —
being born on US territory — and replacing it with citizenship by
"blood," and recently claiming enough toughness to order the torture of
prisoners, or maybe do it himself.
Any of these guys, but emphatically
Trump or Cruz, running against Sanders would make for a defining election in US
and perhaps world history. Not quite up there with the election of 1860, let us
hope — a US Civil War with nukes around would not be a good thing — but really
defining.
It's not so much that Sanders is
Jewish, but that he's not Joe Lieberman's brand of Jewish: Lieberman is religious,
Right-ish, and eventually became a fellow-traveller
with Republicans. Sanders is a secular Jew, which is not a contradiction in terms in
large swaths of the US Jewish tradition, but will make him even more alien to
the Christian religious Right — and to parts of the Likudnik Jewish religious Right
— than if he were religious. Against Trump's strongman populist appeal, Sanders
offers a democratic social-populism; against the Christian religious Right,
Sanders comes up empty: for sure Sanders does not accept Jesus Christ as the
Son of God and his personal savior. If America is a Christian nation, Sanders
may've been born on US territory, but he is by definition outside the American
nation, and his election would mean for many on the Religious Right a seal on
their loss of America as theirs.
(I'm old enough to remember formulas
of the US as an "Anglo-Saxon Christian nation" — with
"Christian" in the sense of a student of mine who said, "I used
to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — and then "White Christian
nation" to bring in assimilated Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants. The
election of Barack Obama undercut the White part of the old formulas; Sanders
threatens the "Christian" part of formulas still current.)
There wasn't "a vast,
Right-wing conspiracy" against Bill and Hillary Clinton, but there was
a relatively small group
of rich people, notably Richard Mellon Scaife, who worked to get dirt dug
up and flung at the Clintons. Such people will go after Hillary Clinton if she
is the Democratic nominee, and she's been around long enough to have made
legitimate enemies and get some people to just not like her.
A Sanders candidacy, though, has the
potential against Trump or Cruz to bring out some real nastiness, with accused
of being a godless commie, obviously outside the community of the Saved. And
however long Sanders lived in Vermont, he is guilty of being born and raised in
Brooklyn, learning enough Hebrew to be bar mitzvah-ed, and getting most of his higher
education at the University of Chicago, where he was an antiwar and
civil rights activist. Cruz may accuse Trump of New York values, but if
there was ever a Big City product living the stereotype of the secular Jewish Prophetic
troublemaker, it's Bernie Sanders.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater offered
Americans "A
Choice, Not an Echo" and lost went on to lose the Presidential
election to Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater's defeat, though, laid the groundwork for
a Right-wing backlash and resurgence that has gone so far that Mort Sahl's 1967
analysis of the American political spectrum seems downright weird. The American
middle as "social democrats"? No way! Except broken down by issues,
"Yes way," or, more exactly, issue-by-issue a lot of Americans hold
social-democratic views.
And a lot of Americans don't, as
John Kasich is learning when he cites Matthew 25.31-45, and that Jewish
Prophetic troublemaker Jesus's injunction to aid the sick deprived and even the
imprisoned ("You can at least pay a visit!" to paraphrase the last
point).
So: We are getting down to basic
conflicts in the 2016 election, and that will be clarifying and fascinating …
and very, very dangerous.
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