The Crooked Timber of Humanity and The Secret

Political Commitment:
Progressive Politics as a Secular Religion

The decline of religion and loosening of family bonds has been much in evidence in the United States these past few decades. The rise of single-parenting and economic stress on the lower classes has weakened the family and led many young people to grow up without much support — they are left to fend for themselves, and it can be a confusing world out there for them. Many are the commentators to have remarked on this.

Many young people are lost and look for meaning. They look to belong to something greater than themselves, sitting there alone staring into their smartphones. They wish to partake in some effort to make the world a better place and give meaning to their lives.

So some of them become politically committed. They devote the better parts of their time, energy, and attention to a political cause.

It is a mistake.

It will not pay off. 

You will become disappointed; you will be disheartened

Politics will not give you that payoff. You are looking in the wrong place for fulfillment when you commit to politics.

What these misguided young people are doing is making politics into a sort of secular religion. I have heard them take this quote from MLK and turn it into collective eschatology: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Together we can defeat injustice and embrace justice. It is a quasi-religious argument from a person originally trained as a Christian cleric paraphrasing another Protestant minister from the 19th century. With people of good faith cooperating we will bring the kingdom of God down into the kingdom of man, sooner or later, or so goes the argument. Barack Obama supposedly founded his politics on this basis.

Traditional Chistianity has the good fighting against the bad, as co-religionists try to defeat hell and gain heaven at last. Those who make politics a secular religion simply transfer this language into defeating the “bad guys” and achieving some future world of “social justice” which resembles a “heaven.” Similarly, Karl Marx suggested that once private property (and the “evil capitalists”) were deposed, then a world of equality and therefore happiness would rule. “Heaven” would be achieved through communism through the agency of the “elect” which was the working-class, or at least that was the theory. The reality was something else.

I write this on the day before an important election is to take place in Georgia. Control of the U,S, Senate by either the Democrats or the Republicans will be decided in the two races there. If the Democrats win both seats, they will control the Senate, in addition to the House and the Presidency. If the Republicans win either race, they will control the Senate and can obstruct Democratic plans. President Joe Biden and Democrats will be greatly reduced in what they can achieve in the next two years. And the party which holds the presidency almost always does poorly during midterm elections, and so Democratic hopes will be reduced thereafter.

It is now or never for American liberals.

Would many American Democrats be heartbroken to see their high hopes crash down in the elections of the last month or two? Galvanized by anger towards Donald Trump and Republicans, they hoped to ride a “blue wave” into power. But despite their passions and efforts, about half the country voted the other way. Liberals are not about to sweep conservatives out of power with a mandate to reshape American government and society. In fact, about half the country hates their guts. I don’t see that reality changing anytime soon.

Converting electoral politics into a secular religion is expecting politics to pay off personally in a way it never will. You will be disappointed. Despite all your grandiose hopes and high ambitions, the messy world of political expediency will not conform to your wishes. There will be compromises and defeats. Even though you’re sure you know the best way forward, the only way to improve the world, others will continue to disagree with you. 

The miserable world is the miserable world. It can be improved here and there, but we will always have our feet in the mud. I read a recent review of Barack Obama’s book “A Promised Land” where supposedly Obama muses on whether America might arrive to this metaphorical/mythical place — make it through its difficulties racial or otherwise. For my part, I am not hoping for politicians to lead America to a promised land; I don’t believe in promised lands. I would be happy if politicians can just keep the roads paved and manage the country competently. (I would settle for semi-competently.) I am not looking for “heaven.” I am not looking for transcendence. I do not look for a national transformation. Politics is not a moral and spiritual crusade for me. Politics is not a secular religion. Politics is the art of the possible, as Otto von Bismark famously remarked. The “promised land” is pap for the credulous and for children, in my opinion. I read in the Bible that Moses successfully led the ancient Israelites to the “promised land.” But any study of the history of the Jews since then would dispute this notion.

I have a former student who chose to become a political organizer for a local ”progressive” group by the name of Lukas Zucker. He is obviously entitled to make his own decisions, but I can’t help but feel that Lukas has mostly wasted his time and talents in his choice of career. I’m disappointed in him, and more to the point I fear he will reach my age and look back disheartened and disappointed in how he spent his days and what he was able to accomplish. So much storm and thunder in calls for political this or that, so few real results in the concrete world. There are better things a person can do with their life’s work. There was some workers’ rights organizer in 1977 back when I was a kid who dedicated his life to empowering workers, overthrowing capitalism, and embracing socialism. And then Reagan came and the next forty years of conservatism and neoliberalism. Disappointment. His life was spent (mostly) in vain. Can you convince me otherwise?

But progressive liberals will not give up hope. if we just organize enough, work harder in the future, then the people will see the light and turn away from the darkness! We can win. We will win! History is on our side. We are right! The future is ours.

No, you won’t. No, you aren’t. No, it isn’t.

You might win here and there, but you will lose in another place or other. So goes electoral politics.

And those who oppose you politically are not “evil.” They are not the “bad guys.” Do not give them so much credit.  They simply see the world differently and will most likely continue to do so. They are people not unlike you. Don’t inflate your political differences into the religious world of the “elect” who are “saved” and the “damned” who stand in the way of “heaven.” It is just politics. It isn’t a religion. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

I read today that Portland State University President Stephen Percy claimed in an email the following: “My highest priority is sustaining and amplifying our commitment to racial justice.” It is not administering a workplace of professors and support personnel which give the best possible educational classroom instruction to PSU students, but a larger and partisan pose of political activism in a bitterly divided country. It is a remarkable claim, and it is instructive as to the current zeitgeist. Percy could have chosen the more limited, practical, and quantifiable goal of reducing debt and making tuition more affordable at Portland State in a time of spiraling college costs and the unaffordability of higher education for many young people. Or Percy could have focused on improving classroom instruction among professors who are more concerned about their own research than in teaching undergraduates— something almost every university should do. Instead Percy chose to genuflect at the altar of wokeness and promise to bring about nothing less than “racial justice.”

Such self-important, grandiose pronouncements by woke-folk like Percy reminds me of the First and Second Great Awakenings in American history where “all the world had grown religious” with massive open-air prayer rallies. Sinfulness was everywhere seen and condemned in emotional public meetings, and tears were shed and souls supposedly saved in a bout of religious mania. I always looked at these social movements more as a form of collective hysteria, and I suspect America was more or less the same before and afterwards. In places like Portland State and elsewhere we now suffer another Great Awakening — or a Great “Awokening” — with the sin of racism seen and decried everywhere, with tears shed and calls for redemption heard. It is a similar sort of bunkum. More collective hysteria. And when passions cool America will be pretty much the same before as afterwards. College costs as a result will probably be higher than ever: a new campus department of “inclusion” or “diversity” with partisan political goals, and the expenses that come with paying for it. But with just a bit more of a push, we shall root out the devil at last, or so the thinking seems to go — the promised land is within sight.

The enthusiastic will want redemption, or even transcendence of our usual struggling selves. But as we do not agree on the problems, we won’t find many solutions. We continue to look through a glass, darkly. People will disagree. That is natural.

Or would you demand everyone believe as you do? Denounce them if they don’t? This spirit of illiberalism is strong in places like Portland State University and other “educational” (indoctrinational?) institutions across the land. Yet it is easy for PSU and other university communities to be mostly on the same page: it is a political monoculture and almost 100% liberal. In fact, the conversation in a place like PSU is between traditional liberals and progressives so extreme on the political spectrum they barely qualify as “liberal.” Percy’s bark might sound much different if he had any substantial amount of conservatives in his audience. But he doesn’t. He is preaching to the already converted.

Therefore, if PSU President Stephen Percy didn’t make his racial justice pronouncements in a place like Portland State, he would be denounced and replaced. The mob on campus would demand it. Lots of mobs around nowadays. Angry mobs full of angry people. And as Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard said in his day it is today: “What is begun in anger will end in shame.” How about if Percy’s audience was different than it is in Portland? if he had made his “racial justice as the highest priority” comments not in an incredibly liberal area of the country but in a more conservative one, Percy would have been similarly denounced — and denounced in the most vituperative language. Mobs might even form outside where he was speaking. Percy might have needed a police escort for his protection in such a place. Conservative guest speakers while on “progressive” campuses have needed police protection for years. This is where we are as a country, like it or not.

But enough of fevered university politics which don’t matter much. Let’s look more at practical “real world” politics which do. Progressive liberals in 2016 called for almost a crusade to get rid of President Donald Trump and vanquish Republicans from public office. In the recent election they re-gained the Presidency, lost seats in the House but still control it, and the Senate is exactly evenly split. Divided government and continued political stalemate is the result. 

All the Tweets and Instagram postings. The hot tears and public declamations. All the energy expended countering Trump and trying to fight Republicans. The contumely heaped on friends, acquaintances, and even strangers via social media in political jeremiads. The ugly scenes where you confronted family members about their “racism” and pro-Trump views. All that passion and energy in the past four years to be a part of the anti-MAGA #Resistance. The wearing of Pussy Hats. The marching in protests. The gnashing of teeth. The continual rage.

And the result of all your political activism: four further years of almost 50/50 divided government and legislative gridlock. And more of the same most likely after that. Republicans versus Democrats, forever.

This is what politics will give the committed true-believer: heartbreak. Partial victories, at best. One step forward, one step back. Electoral politics, strategic compromises, half-measures. Messiness and incompletion. Half a loaf of bread, not a whole one. (Sometimes even no bread at all.) And for those most emotionally invested — grief and disillusionment. The more ambitious your goals, the worse the disappointment. Politics was worth your best hours and best energies? Are you sure?

And where are you left in your own life? Is your family any stronger? Do your political allies really count as “family”? Are you fulfilled by your political commitments? Are you “happy” and “loved”? Or are you just as lonely and unfulfilled as before? Staring at your smartphone alone at home? Has politics really made your life better?

Or has it just exhausted you? Made you angry?

Did you invest so much in politics to try and fill a hole you already had inside yourself? Was politics the answer? Did it fill the hole?

Or are you asking something of politics which it was not made to confer? Might you find what you need elsewhere?

Maybe you should try a real religion which might conceivably deliver on its promises of happiness and fulfillment? Or get a real family which will love and support you in good times and bad? Not a fake one of social media fellow travelers?

And this applies not only to progressive liberals who make a messiah out of Bernie Sanders, preach the gospel of redistributionist politics, or march under the farcical banner of “anti-racism” activism. It applies also to that lost and lonely soul who finds a savior in Donald Trump and conservative populism to lead him and everyone else to the promised land. A member of the “Proud Boys” gang, for example. Or Antifa. Or the “Boogaloo Bois” and Alt Right. Or the Bernie Bros and Chapo Trap House. The outsiders, the malcontents; the “low-rent low lifes,” as I called them earlier. Those young men — and they seem to be mostly men — still living in their mother’s basements, or close to it. What a bunch of assholes.

Or what about those so-called leaders themselves? How about Alexandra Ocasio Cortez? Or Donald Trump?

Political leaders like these will tell you they have the answers. They claim to know the way forward. 

The more ambitious the claims they make, the more they promise, the less you should trust them, in my opinion. The more you should be sceptical as to what they are selling and at what price. That they are using you. Especially a politician like that arch demagogue, Donald Trump.

Nobody is coming to save you, believe me. No one has the answer, in the end. Nobody knows the best way forward, for sure. The best we have are good questions and maybe a few tentative answers. Maybe, maybe. If we are lucky, on a good day. As Emmanuel Kant explains, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

“THE SECRET”
by Charles Bukowski

don’t worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and

nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be
it’s all a trick, an in, a con,
don’t buy it, don’t believe it.
the world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it’s not
what it seems, it’s just
another act to fool the fools
again.

there are no strong men, there
are no beautiful women.
at least, you can die knowing
this
and you will have
the only possible
victory.