“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
Thomas Aquinas
In many ways, perhaps even in its most important aspects, America is a religion. And like any other theological discipline, for the exercise to be fulfilling and meet its lofty expectations, adherents must always mix a great deal of patience with an abiding faith that all is possible.
If US democracy rests upon and is perpetuated by religious components like, for example, being constantly informed by its bible – the Constitution – then it seems logical the practice of its tenets must be guided by the devout citizenship they require. To consistently offer less makes one more secular and not guided as much by the preoccupations more rigorous practitioners entertain and act upon. I suppose at some point enough of a dearth of care or concern amounts to blasphemous abandonment of the entire enterprise. Yet and still, through it all there must exist faith… good faith.
Faith can be lost in any number of ways and in all proportions. One can be a Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman and, after discovering the father you adore is capable of infidelity, lose all hope about what the future holds with one crushing disappointment. Germany required a disastrous war and a draconian peace to reach the abyss all the world would regret. Or perhaps it’s a thousand cuts that does the job instead of a single epiphany, a Watergate here, a Monica Lewinsky there. Maybe days and nights on end of Rush and Bill O’Reilly. Who knows?
Either way, without faith one becomes rudderless and begins to also lose hope. If hope is merely the promise of a better day, losing faith means a growing belief that day won’t come. Bad faith is when one couldn’t care less if it doesn’t. Millions of Americans now feel this way about their government and its institutions. Worse, they empower one of the principle custodians of our national life, the Republican Party, who now abjectly fails to lead them to a better place, instead consciously opting to wallow within their mire. This is an existential crisis to our church of democracy.
Another critical manner our political system resembles a religious narrative is the binary choice it offers between good and evil, heaven and hell. Winston Churchill addressed this lack of options succinctly when he averred democracy was the worst system he knew of, except all of the others. Whatever warts pluralist government suffers, the alternative is blight. Many a national story reflects the difficulty of getting back to the light once its flock has wandered too far over to the dark side. The purgatory of authoritarianism can be long indeed. Atonement for the sins a mob can bestow is not so simple, redemption can take generations.
In the mid-60s England elected socialist Harold Wilson as Prime Minister and many believed he would destroy the nation. The Crown on Netflix is about as good as historical drama gets, and season three devotes an entire episode to what is aptly titled “coup”. While some liberties with the actual record are taken, the episode couldn’t be more instructive to our current situation.
Wilson’s Labor Government faces economic crisis as trade imbalances and deficits force a devaluation of the pound. After being sacked by Wilson as Chief of Defence, Royal family member Lord Mountbatten is wooed by a cabal of bankers plotting to overthrow Wilson and asked to head an emergency cabinet. Mountbatten, ever the preparer, plunges into study of history’s long list of government overthrows, concluding the most critical element to success is public legitimacy, which only Queen Elizabeth can provide.
When the Queen is informed of the plot there is never a doubt as to her position; the scene in which she takes her uncle to task seems tailor made as a foil to our predicament right now. Mountbatten beseeches her to appreciate the incompetence and danger Wilson’s government poses. The Queen is having none of it and declares her obligation is firmly to the democratic process, as bad as Wilson may be, there is an electoral remedy around the corner. And so the coup is strangled in its crib.
No doubt many a present-day Trump normalist will take heart in the show’s conclusions, which reinforce the viewpoint that patience and faith in our system is all that is required. Better days will surely be delivered by the American electorate. Until then, keep the faith. The church of democracy will sustain itself. Sadly, it’s become easy to doubt such hope precisely because it fails to take into account how damaged near half our congregation has become, how close so many are to disqualifying themselves from US democracy’s essential prerequisites.
While it’s surely true Trump offers incompetent corruption like we’ve never seen it; the fouling of his followers’ beliefs is what really accents his menace. Trump is Fox/AM’s Howard Beal, its minister of hopeless anger, of dystopian cynicism. Harold Wilson believed in his form of government, and the process that would elevate or ruin him, so did the Royal Sovereign. What does Trump believe in? A question with less than inadequate answers, previously unthinkable for an American President. Trumpism’s false prophecy is the delusion that “nothing,” defined as undoing the tyranny of progress, beats whatever we’ve done before and will suffice for what we’ve yet to do.
That’s the heart of it. That’s what faithless looks like, what hopeless faithlessness embodies. When millions can no longer believe in a system’s ability to promise better days, and don’t care to even consider the premise as history, current event or future aspiration, they turn to idols instead. Despair is hope’s greatest challenger and mankind’s gravest threat. With it the dark side beckons; it’s beckoning now…. from an East Wing couch, in between Fox and Friends and rounds of golf. BC