The Resilience of the White Right

I recently read the book, The End of White Christian America by Robert Jones. He's the CEO of PRRI, a institution in Washington that researches public attitudes toward religion. The book traces the history of political involvement in politics by White Christians and their institutions. He covers the Mainline and Evangelical streams as two parts of the same whole. and sees the same demographic and political pressures facing them both; the two streams are following the same trajectory of waning numbers and influence, with the Mainline about 20 years ahead of evangelical Christianity in terms of timeline.

The two issues he traces in detail are gay marriage and race. He shows how White Christianity was on the wrong side of both of these issues, and that the attitude - and the laws - of the country have moved faster and farther than White Christianity wanted to go.

2 mindfulness practices

Lately I've been trying to note behaviors mentally, as opposed to berating myself for them (mentally). With this in mind, here are 2 mindfulness practices I've been using lately:

Phone practice. I mentally note every time I take out my phone when I'm doing something else. This happens a lot when I'm cooking (put the water on to boil, open the phone), and when I'm walking the dog – two activities I've been trying to do more with more attention. I often find that when I take out my phone I'm already at the end of a long strand of distracted thinking – that is, I was already distracted before I took out my phone. 

Irritation practice. With three teenage kids I get a lot of chances to practice this. Irritation, leading to anger, is one of my primary character defects. Usually with anger or irritation the response follows immediately on the heels of the stimulus. So my goal is to mentally note rising irritation, and (hopefully) to be able to pause between feeling the feeling and reacting. So if I get irritated after the sixth stimulus, when last week I would have gotten irritated after the second stimulus, that's progress.  And when I get to 1,000, I win! 

Use the Oxygen Mask First

As a follow up to my previous post about non-hatred - about opposing Trump and Trumpism with everything we can, but not by being motivated by hatred and anger toward them - and in response to the many many people who are reacting to the election results with fear and a sense of helplessness, I would like to posit what I think is the very first thing we should do as we develop our strategies and commitments for the future.

And that very first thing, our very first response to Trump and the disastrous results of the elections is: work on your spirituality.  

Non-Hatred

In the current version of the “stump sermon” that I deliver in congregations, I begin my delineating Kansas Interfaith Action's four mission areas (racism, poverty, violence, climate disruption) and conclude by proposing four corresponding values that can guide our work as we try to bring the voice of faith and conscience into public policy advocacy.

This last piece has gone through numerous iterations since I first gave the sermon on MLK Sunday of this year. (Shout out to Rainbow Mennonite Church in KCK.) For one of these values in particular I've had trouble finding the words that capture precisely the tone and meaning I'm trying to set.

Election Postmortem

Before I move on to What Comes Next, I want to spend a little time on a postmortem on the election. First of all, I want to own that I was completely wrong in my predictions about this election. My crystal ball was really cloudy; my "realpolitik" analysis did not accommodate what was clearly a paradigm-shifting election. There were others, particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders, that were more aware of what was really at stake than I was. I was tepid about Bernie because I thought Hillary was more electable, and I was convinced as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago that she was going to beat Trump like an orange, Many of Bernie's supporters are now saying, See, we told you so, if you had nominated Sanders you wouldn't have President-elect Trump right now. I have my doubts, as I always did about Bernie. But it's a counterfactual anyway.

I'm pretty hesitant to blame the results on Hillary Clinton's failings as a candidate. Over time she became much better than I thought she was capable of. She wiped the floor with Trump in each of the debates. Certainly in my bubble there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who wanted to see that glass ceiling broken, and toward the end (after voting began) there was an outpouring of emotion (#pantsuitnation) that could be compared favorably to Obamamania.

Hillary's Feminism

And now, a little radical theory for you all:

Hillary Clinton's imminent election serves as both the crowning achievement, and the last hurrah, of the kind of Second Wave feminism she represents.

Clinton's feminism is of the classic variety: a white-woman, glass-ceiling focused feminism that was the main force of the movement in the early 1970s, but which has since been superseded, and put into some amount of disrepute, by the intersectional feminisms that came later. (This analysis is complicated by the fact that she became prominent in large part because of the achievements of her husband; I'm going to put that to the side for now for the sake of clarity.) 

Clinton's form of feminism has the same flaws as integrationist racial and gay activism of recent decades: It focuses on the inclusion of women (affluent women mostly) into the economy and society as-it-already-exists, never asking it to change its priorities for having them. That is, women are now to be included at every level of boardroom, executive suite, etc., but completely on empire's terms - no change is demanded of capitalism's priorities or practices, save solely for the inclusion of the formerly marginalized population. 

It's interesting to see how having Trump as her opponent has served Clinton in this regard. Because he is so misogynistic, it puts her type of feminism into its best light. She is able to play the "champion of women" role to the hilt because he makes her form of feminism look both necessary and sufficient. Critiques of her approach are stifled because of this. 

More recent radical activists would not be satisfied with the kind of inclusiveness-as-sole-goal that Clinton represents. Even in capitalism's own terms, the fact that childcare, healthcare etc. are not taken as givens this long into the process shows the limits of the Second Wave approach. All the more so anything more radical, such as calling into question the demands of empire and capital themselves - which Clinton is not likely to do, as she has never done it before. 

Thus, Clinton's ascension is both the culmination of the Second Wave's goals, and their eclipse, as more radical feminists ask for more than the slice of the desiccated pie that Hillary's model offers. 

One thing Clinton has shown herself to be in this campaign, however, is open to pressure from the grassroots. Like Obama, she will do the right thing if she's forced to do so. It's up to us to do the forcing. 

State Politics

If what you've always wanted is my take on Kansas politics, well, this is your lucky day.

Context for those who don't live here: The Republican Party here is split in two: moderates in the traditional businessman mode (whom I'll call Mod Rs), and right-wing conservatives of the tea party variety (whom I will call UltraCons). They have always cohabited uneasily, usually with the Mods in charge, until the election of Sam Brownback in 2010. He took it as his business to purge the legislature of Mod Rs so that he could get the votes for his "experiment", and most of the Mod leadership, especially on the Senate side, was purged in 2012. This year, in the aftermath of the dismal failure of the Brownback experiment, many of the leading UltraCons were defeated in their primaries, leaving the fall campaign in those races as the Mod versus Democrat.

Being primarily an issue advocate and not very active on the electoral side, once the Cons were defeated in the primary I didn't much care what happened in those races. To me the difference between a Mod R and a Dem is pretty nominal. Both are likely to vote in favor of the positions that my allies and I would take. So I turned the limited attention I have to devote to electoral politics to races where the remaining UltraCons were facing Dems, figuring that the rest would take care of itself.

However, what has happened in these cases is that the Dem, who expected to run against a Con, has to differentiate themselves from the Mod that they are in fact facing - a task that, as I say, isn't always easy to do. Therefore, things tend to get a little personal. One of the favored approaches is to criticize the Mod as being "from the party of Trump and Brownback," which is true as far as it goes, but depends on the voter not knowing that the Mod actually opposed and defeated Brownback's candidate.

A lot of this is played out on social media. There was a fundraiser that some of the Mods attended with Congressional Representative Kevin Yoder, some pictures of which went around Facebook and Twitter with comments along the line of "You see! They are Republicans!" As election day gets closer the level of venom gets higher, which to some extent is par for the course, but is also unfortunate, for the following reasons:

First of all, it's only in the fevered imaginations of Democratic partisans that the label "Republican" is, in and of itself, disqualifying. Most Kansans who are registered to a party are Republicans, and I would venture to guess that there are very few districts in which the Democrat could win without at least unaffiliated voters, who are, almost by definition, not going to care that much about party affiliation. Also, as I say, the Mods who remain defeated UltraCons, and anybody who pays the least attention to politics will know that, so the Dem claiming the Mod is a Brownback lackey will mostly serve to make the Dem look manipulative and dishonest.

Then there is the matter of incumbents. Advocates have a category called "friendly incumbents," which means people who have supported our issues in the past. We all have lists of them, and for the most part we support them, against any opponent, no matter what the opponent's position on our issues. When the friendly incumbent is a Mod R, it tends to drive partisan Dems a little crazy, as they say, Why would you support a Republican when a Democrat would be a more reliable vote? Well, there's three reasons, the first two being that that's not always the case (I have issues I work on where some of the Mod Rs have been more reliable supporters than some of the Dems), and second, you always need Mod Rs to win any vote in the legislature.

But the third reason is that you have to understand the context these people have been working in. The leadership of their party made it clear that they weren't welcome. They got terrible committee assignments, and every one of them was working under the expectation that in any cycle they would get primaried by an UltraCon and that every reasonable vote they ever took would end up on a inflammatory postcard. Yet they continued to stand for what they believed in. They're a gotdam profile in courage, if you ask me.

I happen to live in a district where, in both the rep and the Senate race, a Dem is running against a Brownback stooge, so my choices are easy. If I lived in a district where that wasn't the case, I would probably make my decision based on who I thought was more qualified, based on their experience. In some races that would be the Dem, and in some it would be the Mod R. Whether they got their picture taken with Kevin Yoder would be a fairly insignificant data point. (Full disclosure: I have had my picture taken with Kevin Yoder.)

Ultimately, I'm concerned not so much with what happens in November as what happens in January, and throughout the 2017 session. Mod Rs and Dems are going to have to work together in some form or fashion to start to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and all's-fair-in-politics aside, the more that happens between now and election day that makes that harder to arrange, the less I'm going to like it.