From the start of his pontificate, Francis changed the tone of the papacy. He chose the name Francis — the first new papal name since Pope Lando (913–914). Many noticed that, by invoking St. Francis of Assisi, he was emphasizing mercy and compassion. They may also have noted the saint’s peculiar attachment to the virtues of poverty. What often gets missed, though, in glib discussions of St. Francis is that this emphasis on poverty wasn’t proto-socialism, but a fundamentally evangelical outlook: “ are the poor” — and not just metaphorically poor, but the actually poor — because they don’t have riches to distract them from God.

Ultimately, Francis’s whole papacy aimed to lead the church and the world closer to the love of God, not to turn the church into a political influence organization — although, of course, loving God and one’s neighbor, if one really means it, will always have political implications.

Political commentators love to reduce everything to interests and parties. “Pope Francis is a leftist, so he’s doing this to support…” “He’s doing that because he opposes…” But the church doesn’t work that way. It’s not an adversarial Westminster system, designed to generate passionate, sometimes productive, opposition between factions.Where there is love, there are no factions, though there may still be struggles. And Francis had his share of struggles. But through everything, animated all that he did:

“Let us ask the Lord to help us understand the law of love. How good it is to have this law! How much good it does us to love one another, in spite of everything. Yes, in spite of everything!”

A “left-wing” pope

In the United States, both conservative firebrands like radio host and supportive commentators like Vermont Senator called Pope Francis a “socialist” for preaching a gospel of justice for the poor. The world loves easy titles for what it cannot understand — and, it seems, it understands few things more poorly than the Christian church.

Francis came from the continent that spawned liberation theology — an attempt to harness the revolutionary impulse of Marxism while avoiding its atheistic materialism, but retaining its concern for justice for the poor. At this, the movement was only partially successful. Too often, it drifted into something more like a reskinned Marxism than a vision truly transformed by the Gospel. In practice, liberation theology was frequently little more than Marxist-Leninism with Bibles, openly praising the Soviet Union and Cuba and even receiving direct support from them.

The church’s concern for spiritual things forms her concern for material things. When Christians invert that order, they descend into worldly political struggles. Any political victory, however fruitful, remains ultimately temporary. To tie the church’s fortunes to those of a political party is as practically foolish as it is spiritually misguided.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis pushed back against this tendency. He steered the church between the Scylla of collaboration with the right and the Charybdis of identification with the left. This led a good portion of the Argentinean left to him as the enemy, while at the other end of the spectrum, Argentinean President Javier Milei would call Francis “a filthy leftist.”

To be hated by both left and right, so much the better. Still, plenty of rank-and-file Catholics who had grown up with Bibles Cuba as the promised land were relieved to hear the archbishop strike a different tone. So were a of cardinals in the 2013 conclave that elected Francis.

How quick we all are to brand someone as being on the opposite side the moment they disagree with us. If Francis doesn’t want my socialist party to win the next election, he must be a capitalist pig. And if he doesn’t want to bless a system that gives tax breaks to billionaires while working the poor to the bone, why, he must be a commie.

Let’s listen to the man’s own instead:

“The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies. At times, however, they seem to be a mere addendum imported from without in order to fill out a political discourse lacking in perspectives or plans for true and integral development. How many words prove irksome to this system! It is irksome when the question of ethics is raised, when global solidarity is invoked, when the distribution of goods is mentioned, when reference is made to protecting labour and defending the dignity of the powerless, when allusion is made to a God who demands a commitment to justice. At other times these issues are exploited by a rhetoric which cheapens them. Casual indifference in the face of such questions empties our lives and our words of all meaning. Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.”

“We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.”

Francis the antipope

Of course, the church is not free of parties either. Like any human society, it suffers from selfishness and dissension, and so it has factions. In heaven, there is no partisanship — save for .

Non-Catholic readers may not be aware that there is a growing community of people who are attached to an older form of the Roman Rite. The Roman Rite is the liturgy used by the majority of Catholics worldwide, excluding communities that follow other ancient liturgies, such as the Greek Catholics — including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — and others, like the Copts. Until Pope St. Paul VI published the current revision in 1970, the Roman Rite was celebrated almost exclusively in Latin.

Many harbor a mostly aesthetic and cultural attachment to the older form: the language, the bells and smells to which they or their ancestors were accustomed before the Second Vatican Council. For others, however, the Latin liturgy represents a bulwark against everything wrong with the world and the modern church — an antidote to the priestly worldliness and quiet atheism which they detect at the heart of today’s Catholicism.

This latter, dissident faction divides into two further groups. For some, loyalty to the Latin mass and to Catholic tradition requires disobedience to the pope. This is the position of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), the largest dissident group. Others go further still, rejecting Pope Francis’s legitimacy altogether. They regard him not only as a false pope but as a false Catholic. This position, known as sedevacantism, has been growing especially in online communities.

Pope Benedict XVI tried to reach out to these groups of Christians by allowing the older Latin liturgy to be used as an “extraordinary form” of the Roman Rite, while the 1970 Missal — still officially in Latin, though almost always celebrated in the vernacular — remained the ordinary form. This move helped ease tensions and enabled individual priests and laypeople to break away from groups like the SSPX and return to full communion with the Roman church.

After his election, however, Francis saw the Latin mass community morph into a full-scale internal opposition party to his papacy. This was especially true in the US, which has long taken an independent tack in its relationship with Rome — a tendency once condemned as the heresy of . Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the US was a center of theological liberalism, often resisting the perceived dogmatic rigidity of the Vatican. Now that the Vatican has become more open to modern currents of thought and has expanded the liturgy into the vernacular, the roles have, in some respects, reversed. In 2018, Francis that some of the most virulent attacks against him were coming from America.

Francis provokes these “traditionalist” Catholics because of his attempts to soften certain practices — something they regard as unsound or even heretical. Note that in principle, the doctrines of the church cannot change, because they come from Jesus — not from the authority of the popes, who could later revise what they had previously decided. Yet the application of doctrine to pastoral practice leaves many secondary decisions open to the pope.

One example case to illustrate this principle is the male-only priesthood. Jesus ordained only men as apostles. Ancient tradition maintains that the church has no more power to confer the sacrament of holy orders on women than it does to celebrate the Eucharist with rice cakes instead of wheat, or to baptize with beer instead of water. (Both of these have, in fact, been attempted at different times in church history.) This is a matter of divine law — which sometimes does deal in details this fine, because it is positive law.

But there is no divine law against allowing women to hold positions of authority in the Roman Curia. These roles, while traditionally filled by priests, do not inherently require priestly ordination. In 2022, Francis laypeople (and thus, women) to head offices within the Vatican bureaucracy. In this way, he sought to open up the church in the ways it could be fruitfully opened — and made more equal — without compromising a jot or tittle of divine law.

Does that sound like a difficult task? Of course. But so is every task that requires balancing two things that are both real values — rather than caring only about one and giving lip service to the other.

Francis earned a lot of suspicion from the Latin mass crowd for putting women in positions of power. Likewise, he earned their ire for a range of other decisions, including:

• , under certain circumstances, divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
• for the decriminalization of homosexuality.
• priests to say a prayer of blessing over gay couples.
• for the abolition of the death penalty.
• that the existence of non-Christian religions may be positively willed by God.

At its most extreme, traditionalist rhetoric branded the pope as approving adultery and sodomy, rejecting the moral teaching of the church and even denying the truth of Christianity itself.

I think my fellow Catholics who are rightly concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy need to take a deep breath, perhaps log off of social media for a while and ask themselves: Is the Pope Catholic?

And yes, bears do still poop in the woods.

In reality — and much to the dismay of liberals who would have liked to see the church’s stance on these things changed — Francis consistently taught:

• That the church does not have the power to redefine .
• That the church does not have the power to redefine .
• That both individuals and states may, in some cases, use when the protection of human life demands it.
• That Christians have a duty to with the whole world.

As Francis a somewhat disappointed gathering of representatives of nuns who had hoped he would open the door to ordaining women deacons: “We cannot go beyond revelation and dogmatic expressions … We are Catholics.”

Francis’s thirst for justice for the poor and forgotten defined his papacy. So too did mercy toward those who — like all of us — fall short of the Gospel’s demands. The that “truth is an inseparable companion of justice and mercy” grounded his ministry. Francis never compromised on the truth, even as he sought every possible way to meet people where they were and “ all things to all people.” In doing so, he embodied the so beloved by Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Pope John Paul II’s doctoral supervisor:

“The church is intolerant in principle because she believes, and tolerant in practice because she loves; the enemies of the church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe, and intolerant in practice because they do not love.”

For the first seven years of his pontificate, Francis continued Benedict’s policy of forbearance toward these traditionalist groups, even as they attacked him for extending mercy to others. In 2020, he consulted bishops around the world by letter, and from their responses, he concluded that the policy had failed. Given an inch, activists within the traditionalist movement had taken a mile, and the older form of the mass had become, in many places, a hotbed of agitation against not only Francis’s leadership but the Second Vatican Council itself.

Francis was forced to take repressive to forestall this growing schism. He prohibited diocesan priests from celebrating the older form of the mass without explicit permission from their bishop and from the Vatican, and he directed bishops not to authorize new groups devoted exclusively to the form. In addition, he required existing groups to use designated chapels rather than parish churches. These measures, while necessary, unfortunately caused a great deal of pain to a number of faithful Catholics.

Francis did not live to see the end of this new brand of Catholicism — a movement that, in truth, functions as a form of Protestantism. It has adopted a kind of sola scriptura hermeneutic that locates tradition in the texts and decrees of dead popes (to be interpreted, in the end, by the private reader) rather than in the living magisterium of the Apostolic See.

To the world, Latin-mass Catholics — both dissident and obedient — may seem like an extreme minority to be dismissed rather than encountered. Yet I recall how Francis, during the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016, even to the SSPX. He allowed their priests to validly hear confessions and, later, to witness marriages — a conferral of sacramental jurisdiction that Rome had long withheld.

That gesture did not immediately produce reconciliation. But it has not been forgotten. Perhaps some future pope will preside over the full reconciliation of the SSPX and other dissident traditionalist groups with the Roman church — hopefully soon.

Putin’s Pope

The principled mildness of Pope Francis ruffled far more feathers than just those of traditionalist Catholics. Never was this more obvious than when, in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Francis to take sides in the way many expected. He the invasion — even to express his displeasure to the Russian ambassador directly — but he also declined to reduce the conflict to a morality play or to cheerlead the Ukrainian war effort, even as nearly every other voice in the West seemed eager to do.

They called him “” for not calling for more killing.

According to Catholic just war doctrine, a defensive war can be waged — but only under very strict conditions. The infinite value of human life necessitates that fighting be permitted only in the most extreme circumstances. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

• The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.
• All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
• There must be serious prospects of success.
• The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

​Ukraine may well have had reasonable prospects for a partial success in the spring of 2022, when the nation was riding high after repelling the twin Russian assaults on Kyiv and Kharkiv. But once the hopelessness of driving the invaders out of Kherson Oblast became apparent that autumn — and especially after it became clear that the promised 2023 summer offensives would yield only blood and mud — the moral calculus changed. 

In a February 2024 interview, Francis committed political heresy by on Ukraine to display the “courage of the white flag:”

“The word “negotiate” is a courageous word. When you see that you have been defeated, that things are not going well — having the courage to negotiate. And you are ashamed, but if you continue like this, how many dead will there be then? And it will end up even worse … Negotiation is never a surrender. It is the courage not to bring the country to suicide.”

It took courage just to say it. Francis knew full well what the would be. Ukrainian and European leaders accused him of betrayal, of cowardice, of moral blindness. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, insisted: “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail.” Poland’s foreign minister scoffed: “How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army?”

Events came to prove Francis right. Russia proved far more economically resistant than Western sanction hawks had hoped. Its autarkic economy might not be booming, but it is now certain that Russia is capable of maintaining its war effort far longer than Ukraine or NATO can stand. As 51łÔąĎ’s Atul Singh and Glenn Carle noted at the time, the scales were already tipping quite heavily by the end of 2023. Yet most Western leaders and pundits kept their heads in the sand well after that point.

It was Francis’s moral clarity that allowed him to see the truth early, and his Christian fortitude that enabled him not to join his voice with the greatest and loudest number.

In 2024, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was still that it was in Washington’s “cold, hard, American interests” to “degrade the military of a major adversary without committing American lives to the effort.” That’s a lovely euphemism for “the more Russians die, the better for us.” A good proportion of the educated public believed that.

Of course, that means a similar number of Ukrainians dying — or far more, if you count civilians. Russian and Ukrainian lives are both cheap to McConnell. They’re both cheap to Putin. But they weren’t cheap to Francis, who begged, bled and wept for every single one of them. That’s the kind of man he was.

Just as he refused to sanctify political violence abroad, Francis refused to let the church become a proxy battlefield in the culture wars at home. Whether speaking to nations at war, to the disillusioned poor or to the self-styled defenders of orthodoxy, he told the same truth. The world is now so much the poorer for want of his apostolic guidance and steadfast witness.

I pray that the widowhood of the church will be short and that Francis will enjoy a worthy successor sooner rather than later. I have very little to say in speculation about who that might be or what name he might take. But I do know that then, as even now, Jesus will watch over His church and inspire the whole world with His example of love — a love that “ insist on its own way” but “bears all things,” that finds its victory in patient suffering, and yet conquers all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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With Trump’s vanishing, the long and tumultuous story of the American experiment has reached its final chapter, though its legacy is far from over.

Why did a rump state in Belgium call itself “Amerika,” anyway?

Trump XI’s dramatic end comes after centuries of struggle. The US — officially the Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika — persisted in its European heartland for nearly a thousand years. While it has long been moribund, little more than a small enclave around Brussels for the past several decades, the nation’s impact on modern culture has been inestimable. Its universities, hospitals and libraries were some of the only institutions in the world that preserved higher learning during the turbulent 26th, 27th and 28th centuries.

The origins of the US lie in the late second millennium, where a group of English colonies on the eastern coastline of North America declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, forming a republic based on the principles of democratic governance and individual liberty. Over the following centuries, it expanded westward across the North American continent, eventually becoming a global superpower by the 20th century.

That century saw the young republic increasingly drawn into European conflicts. After intervening in World War I (1914–1918) on the side of its English-speaking British ally, the US made an abortive attempt to settle European affairs under President Woodrow Wilson before the Senate intervened and enforced a more isolationist foreign policy. Europe would however soon erupt into war again, and after President Franklin Roosevelt I, better known as Roosevelt the Great, intervened in World War II (1939–1945), his successor Harry Truman established a more permanent American presence on the continent. American military personnel were stationed across half of the continent, ostensibly to preserve democracy and, later, to provide a deterrent against the Soviet Union. While European polities remained nominally independent throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, the US de facto controlled their foreign policies.

The decisive moment came with the outbreak of World War III in 2028 following the third Russian invasion of Ukraine. After this cataclysmic war, the United States established direct rule over parts of Europe, a move that was justified at the time as a means of stabilizing the continent and preventing quasi-fascist governments, as had arisen in Slovakia, Germany and Austria, from taking root. Particularly loyal US allies like the United Kingdom, Poland and Italy were permitted to govern themselves, while the French presidents, through uncharacteristically intelligent policy, were able to maintain a precarious independence.

By the end of World War IV (2072–2077), it was no longer possible to pretend that Europe was anything but an extension of the United States. The US intelligence establishment had become convinced by this point that the Europeans were utterly unable to share a continent peacefully without American domination. President Donald Trump III crushed the last remnants of European resistance, and from that point on, Washington governed the region directly. Before long, most European countries had been admitted into the union as states.

The United States’ center of gravity shifted eastward

The political union of North America and Europe brought about unexpected economic consequences. While California was an unchallenged tech and AI powerhouse, New York’s financial services industry now found itself in direct competition with London. Europe also experienced an economic boost from the vast influx of Latin American laborers, especially after the US annexation of Chihuahua and Coahuila in 2120.

Far more lasting, however, were the effects of the brain drain that the North American portions of the union experienced in the late 21st and 22nd centuries. American students flocked to European universities, which were mostly public institutions and a welcome alternative to their exorbitantly expensive private American schools. Documents recently unearthed in northwestern Manhattan reveal that Columbia University, a mid-tier institution, was already charging students as much as several million dollars per semester in the 2050s.

The 22nd century saw a cultural and economic renaissance in Europe. Paris, London and Warsaw became fashionable hubs of intellectual activity — the French “post-atheist” literary movement becoming particularly notable. Science and engineering saw just as much of a boost as the liberal arts. Before long, cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Rotterdam began to outmatch their transatlantic counterparts in industrial activity. As more and more money poured into the region, a snowball effect ensued. This — along with the widespread adoption of cloning from the 2160s onwards, which freed wealthy women from the need to take time off from work in order to have children — led to a population boom. By the year 2200, it is estimated that over 25% of the population of the United States spoke German or Dutch. Before long, that number was 50%. Eventually, German would become the first language of nearly the whole population, save for those in some parts of Britain.

Meanwhile, the North American portion of the empire was facing tough times. Several measles outbreaks decimated the population, and political infighting grew to a fever pitch. After the 2232 assassination of President Donald Trump V, outright civil war broke out. The European portions of the union were fortunate to support the victor, Jaden Bloomberg, Jr., who took the title of Donald Trump VI.

As the 23rd century wore on, European Americans gradually came to realize that the transatlantic portions of the union were becoming a military and financial drain on the federal government as usurper after usurper looted the treasury to pay for war materiel. President Franklin Roosevelt III made the difficult decision to relocate the de facto capital of the union from Washington to Brussels, where the central institutions of the union could be more easily defended. This move, originally intended as a temporary measure, quickly became permanent.

The period extending roughly from 2300 to about 2450 saw a nearly endless succession of warlords arise from power centers like Texas, Florida and Alaska to momentarily claim the title of “President” before being shot or poisoned after mere months or even weeks of rule. While the federal administration in Brussels occasionally recognized some of these in an attempt to project some kind of political stability, it was of little use. Epigraphic evidence indicates that there may have been as many as 20 self-described presidents by the eve of the Mexican invasion in 2445.

As every schoolboy knows, Mexican President Aníbal Sánchez Córdova made quick work of the disunited and corrupt North American US forces. Intellectuals across the European portions of the union lamented the downfall of the western half of the union — particularly due to the melodramatic scenes of arson and looting that accompanied the fall of Washington — but administrators in Brussels were quietly grateful for the elimination of the fiscal burden that the west had become.

In 2449, an entity calling itself the Supreme Court of the United States, and recognized as such by Brussels, established itself in Alexandria, Virginia. It was little more than a paper tiger, and records of its chief justices — appointed more or less on the whims of the Mexican president — peter out in the 26th century. Europe was, for all intents and purposes, on its own.

The decline of Europe until today

US President George Washington II (ironically named because, among other things, his ancestors had spoken German for at least three generations) could waste little time grieving the downfall of the transatlantic territories, for trouble was brewing much closer to home. Russia remained a constant menace on the US’s eastern flank, and Turkey, too, was becoming more assertive — a harbinger of things to come. Washington fortified the eastern frontiers with state-of-the-art laser weapons and quantum-powered surveillance systems, but he was quickly called away to affairs in another corner of the republic. In Britain, a nostalgic monarchist party of “freemen on the land” had declared independence. While the movement was quickly crushed, Washington himself lost his life to a knife attack on the streets of London in 2461.

The Russo–Chinese War (2497–2551) did grant the US some respite. This was only the third war in world history to go fully nuclear, and by far the most deadly. By the end, Russia and China had lost a combined 50% of their population and over 90% of their productive capacity. Beset by domestic troubles, Europe took little advantage of the situation except to reduce defense spending and enjoy a minor economic resurgence. This left younger and more agile powers, like Vietnam, Rwanda and, above all, Turkey, to fill in the power vacuum.

By the year 2600, Turkey had consolidated its hold on the Caucasus and Ukraine regions, along with pacifying its Arab neighbors to the south. As a more confident Turkey finally pushed westward, a series of tragic and sometimes nearly comic military disasters characterized European attempts to prevent the onslaught. The republic lost half of its territory and one-third of its population by the end of the century, although the border eventually stabilized around the Elbe-Carpathian frontier. Europe had been severely weakened, but it kept going for another two centuries.

The 28th- and 29th-century culture of the United States of Europe produced a noteworthy flowering of German-language literature, the likes of which had not been seen since the 22nd-century renaissance. Yet, despite appearances, it was fundamentally different. No longer creative, the literature of late modern Europe was inward-looking and mostly historical in character, reflective at best but usually nostalgic and even self-indulgent at worst. These intellectuals saw themselves as the heirs of the twin cultural and philosophical legacy of federal America and ancient Europe. In reality, they were neither. Their civilization had become a museum and, like all museums, it closed abruptly.

Some people alive today may still be old enough to remember the Second Euro–Turkish war that severed the economically productive Rhine, Po and Seine valleys from Europe forever. In 2930, President Donald Trump X and the rest of his administration holed themselves up in a 20-mile circle around Brussels with the last functioning nuclear weapons, antiques already two centuries old, as the last line of defense. The Turks were happy to ignore this little enclave as they spread their control over the rest of the continent, and Britain, of course, declared formal independence from Europe.

That was the situation until about two weeks ago. While the late Turkish monarch Cevdet Muhammad Özdemir was a relatively tolerant ruler, his son Özdemir, who succeeded him two years ago in June 2983, has been a vigorous supporter of the most extremist portion of his parliament in Vienna. These pious believers have long rankled over European possession of the Great Mosque of Brussels, and the younger Özdemir has decided to give the people what they want and make a name for himself in the process. Gambling correctly that either the European nuclear weapons are no longer functional or the Europeans no longer willing to use them, Özdemir gave the order to his marines to breach the border six days ago. European resistance has been sporadic, but fighting reached the downtown neighborhoods of the city yesterday afternoon. With the death of Trump XI, I believe we can safely say that the US constitutional experience — stretching 12 centuries back to the North American colonies’ 1776 declaration of independence — has finally come to an end.

While the United States of Europe no longer exists as an independent state, its ethnic identity still remains in the Turkish-dominated areas of Europe. I recall one of the most striking illustrations of this phenomenon, a quasi-apocryphal story from the Turkish occupation of Ragusa in September 2927. A Turkish sergeant addressed the town’s residents in elementary German: “We are Turks, Europeans like you. We have come to liberate you.” To which, without skipping a beat, one Sicilian lad responded, “Wir sind keine Europäer, sondern Amerikaner.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Trump, we were told, was just what Plato had predicted 23 centuries ago in his famous dialogue, the : that democracy will inevitably cave in upon itself and birth a tyrant. Trump, supposedly, is that tyrant.

’s Sean Illing told us that “the character of Trump and the reasons for his rise are explained in remarkably prescient terms by Plato over two thousand years ago.” He was echoing a similar notion Andrew Sullivan propounded the year before in . UPenn professors Eric W. Orts, Peter T. Struck and Jeffrey Green, writing in , promised us that we could understand Trump’s character and motivations by fitting him “into a template of tyranny” derived from the Republic. ’s David Lay Williams joined the chorus too with a piece entitled, “Here’s what Plato had to say about someone like Donald Trump.”

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The meme spread, giving a patina of intellectualism to our collective anxieties about the erratic president. Those anxieties are justified — but the reading of Plato is not. Now, it might seem petty to quibble about the classics when great matters of state are at hand, but at times of crisis, we need the classics to fall back on to give us perspective and wisdom. If we do not listen to Plato carefully, we may miss what he really does have to tell us. If we instead shoehorn our own anxieties into his words, we will only really be listening to ourselves.

The fact of the matter is that America’s current civil crisis, while terribly real, is not the crisis of democracy as Plato understood it. Nor is Trump the tyrant from Plato’s dialogue. The reason for this is that America is not really a democracy at all.

What did Plato mean by democracy and tyranny?

Plato recognized that what is most important about human behavior, and thus about political behavior, is the good that humans seek. What do we value? What are we looking to gain when we act, personally or politically? This is the most basic thing; the forms and processes of politics are secondary, because we can use a variety of systems to achieve the same goals as long as we agree on what we want. For this reason, it is a to Plato whether the ideal state is a monarchy or an aristocracy. What matters is that the people in charge, whether they be one or many, are lovers of wisdom and rule with an eye to virtue.

For this reason, two states with quite dissimilar systems can behave in a very similar manner if they value the same things. The United States is a republic with a tripartite national government as well as a federal union of sovereign states. The United Kingdom is a unitary monarchy with a sovereign parliament and a largely unwritten constitution. Yet, the two states behave as the best of friends, coordinating their operations internationally and influencing each other domestically. They do this because their political cultures are the same; they (largely) have the same vision of what a state should look like and value.

Human beings are complex, but not infinitely complex. They have patterns that we can discern. Plato divided the five basic kinds of political character into based on their chief values. He called them aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny.

The “aristocratic” character is philosophical. This character values transcendent and eternal things: the gods, the objects of mathematics and the unchangeable essences of things. The second character, called “timocratic,” loves honor, is concerned with the esteem of peers and seeks traditional respectability and military glory. The “oligarchical” or plutocratic character loves wealth. An oligarch amasses wealth in great quantities and excludes others. The “democratic” character is concerned with the satisfaction of the here and now, the personal pleasures of feasting and revelry. The most important thing is the vote — the expression of each individual’s will. Finally, the tyrannical character loves a pleasure that is lawless and goes beyond the bounds of human nature.

Plato did not draw up these characters at random. They were all too plain to see in Plato’s Greece, which knew the honor-loving and militaristic Spartans and the tumultuous and democratic Athenians. Greece saw its fair share of merchant oligarchies that made themselves fabulously wealthy. Unfortunately, it also produced depraved and lawless tyrants at times. And Plato himself had the blessing of meeting high-minded and philosophical rulers as well. Archytas, the Pythagorean leader of Taranto, may have Plato’s portrayal of the philosopher-king in the Republic.

Politics are an expression of choices, and choices are an expression of values. So, the five types correspond to the five possible kinds of value. Values can either be spiritual or physical, and if physical, either external or internal, that is, bodily. The philosopher loves the spiritual good; the timocrat loves an external good, reputation. Further, bodily goods can either be natural or unnatural, and natural goods can either be moderate or immoderate. (There is no moderate amount of unnatural “goods.”) The oligarch loves bodily goods in moderation; a wastrel cannot amass wealth. The democrat loves bodily good without moderation; satisfaction of individual desire is paramount. Finally, the tyrant loves something that not only exceeds the limits of nature but is repugnant to them.

The philosopher and the tyrant are both characters. Philosophers transcend nature to contemplate the universal laws that are beyond it. The tyrant, too, goes beyond nature, not by transcending it but by violating it. Because they are exceptional, they both are . Most human beings are in the middle. The mass of mankind is neither very good nor .

Spiritual behavior drives political behavior. For this reason, a state will become what it loves. A money-loving state will become an oligarchy — i.e., it will have few rulers — because only a few can amass great wealth. They hoard everything they can and reduce their fellow citizens to . Likewise, a state where the citizens are most concerned with satisfying their immediate, selfish desires will seek to give the most liberty to the greatest number of individuals. This is necessary for each to follow one’s own passions.

A state may appear to have a very democratic constitution on paper but function as an oligarchy in practice. (Examples of this situation are probably too common to be worth listing.) Or a state may appear to be an oligarchy on paper but function as a tyranny in practice. (This was the case for the Roman Empire in its darkest moments.) What matters more than any charter is the constitution written in the hearts of citizens. In the words of another philosopher, , “one’s ethic is one’s fate.”

Generally, like begets like. Wise leaders will do their best to raise wise young people to carry on the constitution of the best state. Honor-loving, money-loving and freedom-loving people will pass their own values down in their own cultures. Even tyrants, in a perverse way, breed more tyrants.

Yet nothing in human affairs lasts forever. So, Plato tells us, a wise state will eventually produce a generation that conforms not to philosophy but to tradition — no longer understanding the reasons that motivated its founders to frame just laws. An honor-loving state will eventually become corrupted by money, which can have the false appearance of glory. The Greeks saw this happen in their time when Persian gold infamously corrupted Spartan agents.

According to the Republic, this downward trend continues because oligarchs ultimately dispossess most of the population and create a resentful underclass that deposes them. But the resulting democratic state is highly unstable, and so it gives over in short order to a tyranny. The tyrant is the caricature of a democrat: Loving base pleasure above all things, tyrants enslave every other citizen to give themselves maximum freedom. So, in this way, each kind of constitution arises as a corruption of the last.

Interpreting Donald Trump through the lens of Plato

Well, it’s settled then, isn’t it? America is a democracy, so, when it collapses, it will become a tyranny, and obviously, Trump is that tyrant.

Not so fast. The trappings of democracy do not a democracy make. Prosaically, what Plato had in mind was a direct democracy and not a representative democracy — although even a direct democracy has representatives (think of Pericles). More important, however, than any procedure about how votes are translated into laws is the spiritual orientation of the state. What does it value? Whom does it favor?

These days, it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy. Even former President has said it. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page this empirically. Popular opinion has almost no correlation with US policy; business interests do.

This doesn’t have to mean that US elections are not free and fair. What it does mean is that, even if our democratic elections are not a sham, and even if voters can decide which of the two candidates of the ruling party wins in a particular year, the people do not exercise control over their politics. The state doesn’t work for them, and it’s not supposed to. As political scientist Josep Colomer pointed out in a March interview with 51łÔąĎ, the US was designed not to be a democracy. By all appearances, I would add, its constitution is still working as intended.

There is no need to belabor this point much further. If you are a US citizen and not a member of the wealthy elite, ask yourself: Do you feel in charge?

Our next conclusion follows in due course. Is Trump the tyrant to America’s democracy? No; he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy. After all, tyrants are very rare. But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.

The man Republicans picked to “drain the swamp” is himself a swamp creature. As a political donor, Trump rubbed elbows with his 2016 opponent and even his current opponent . Not too long ago, either. So why has the Washington system tried to spit out Trump the way an organism tries to expel a foreign body? He is an outsider, sure. An outsider to the party, an outsider to Washington. But not an outsider to the culture. He is, as terrifying as it is, one of us.

Not every conflict is a conflict between basic political constitutions. Far more common is a conflict between factions within the same constitution. Russia recently saw one militarist thug try to another one. Was Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion a battle for the soul of Russia, or just for who would be in charge in Moscow? Our own oligarchs may not be driving tanks at each other, but Silicon Valley billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have been to throw a few bombs. More recently, the Washington oligarchs have taken to rather than outright violence as their weapon of choice.

A conflict between good and evil? More like sand tiger sharks eating each other in the womb. The fact that they’re killing each other doesn’t mean that they come from different species.

But isn’t Trump a fascist?

There is one other argument that buttresses the thesis that Trump is a tyrant. In brief: Trump is a fascist, and fascists are tyrants. This is deceptively simple, since “fascist” and “tyrant” are nearly synonyms. But even here, the spiritual orientations that drive politics belie our easy comparisons.

The utter vagueness of the word “fascist” makes its use as the major term of any syllogism problematic. By now, nearly every political movement has been described as “fascist” by its opponents. I have my doubts that the term can usefully be expanded beyond the militarist-nationalist authoritarian regimes of interwar Europe; even then, naming Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement after Benito Mussolini’s Fascism can be more confusing than clarifying.

Policy-wise, Trump is a Republican. Sure, he represents a more isolationist, populist strand of conservative ideology rather than the neoconservative version which was previously hegemonic within his party. That doesn’t make him Hitler, even though his Democratic opponent to tie him to the German dictator. (Democrats have been calling Republican candidates Hitler since at least .)

Still, the term “fascist” does retain some utility. If Trump is a fascist, his fascism would seem to consist primarily in his embrace of political violence and his willingness to accept the support of thugs, from the Proud Boys he told to “” in 2020 to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill rioters that tried to stop the electoral count and chanted “.” I doubt that Trump really wanted rioters to lynch his own vice president, but he certainly seemed to be with the idea that his supporters would go outside the law for him, whether or not he incited them to do so in a legal sense. And a New York jury has that Trump was willing to break the law himself in order to boost his own chances in the 2016 election.

If a fascist is a politician who is willing to break the law and use violence to win, then Trump is a fascist. For that matter, if on or encouraging political violence makes one a fascist, then a good proportion of the US political and media establishment is fascist. But not only tyrants are violent. Timocrats, oligarchs and democrats throughout history have employed violence to intimidate, expel or eliminate their political opponents. If you want a fun read, historian Paolo Grillo can walk you through a of violent clashes and partisan expulsions in the medieval Italian republics that will make your head spin.

If nothing else, Grillo’s book is a fascinating (and sobering) reminder that Western democracy is a lot older than 1776. But perhaps you prefer your democracy post-Enlightenment. Don’t forget that, already by 1793, French democrats were lopping people’s heads off with industrial efficiency. And even the American Revolution was marred with plentiful scenes of that we rarely like to talk about.

Finally, as Plato never lets us forget, it was a democratic vote that sentenced Socrates to drink poison for the crime of doing philosophy.

I say none of this to make a “whataboutist” argument that Trump is no better or worse than anyone else. But we should be aware that an oligarch is perfectly capable of violence. Trump might be a particularly nasty oligarch, but he is one. So, there is no need to jump to conclusions: Trump’s existence does not mean that our democracy is now dead. Much more likely, it means that our exploitative, ugly oligarchy is continuing to grind on much as it always has, right on top of you and me.

The spiritual significance of Donald Trump

Of course, we can’t take it easy just because Trump isn’t a tyrant. Tyranny is the worst possible scenario, but there are many other evils in between the good and the worst.

The concept of tyranny terrifies us because it is the total bankrupture of the state, and whenever we see someone like Trump undoing previously sacred norms, we rightly get nervous. Tyranny arises from chaos, and chaos arises from order gone wrong. Oligarchy is that order gone wrong, and we are in the thick of it.

Remember that every constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those seeds sprout and grow as the old order begins to die away. The seeds of democracy — mob rule, the breakdown of legal order — are already present in the United States. Trump and his populists may well represent this tendency.

Trump is an oligarch with a tinge of the democratic. A perfect oligarch has only one spouse; that’s the best way to balance a checkbook. Even our best oligarchs have been having keeping their households together lately. Trump is a and a philanderer besides. A lot of good Christian voters have forgotten Trump’s about “grab[bing women] by the pussy.” That is a mistake. When sleaze enters the highest levels of politics, things are going to the dogs. People who can’t keep their own lives together can’t well be expected to keep the state together.

Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither was it destroyed. Trump may not be our Caligula, but he could be our Sulla, if first-century BC Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla is willing to bear the comparison. Sulla did not destroy the Republic, but he weakened it fatally. By employing political violence, he brought a crassness and lack of collegial respect into the senatorial class that precipitated the disastrous civil wars of Pompey and Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian. This destabilization led to the establishment of the Empire.

I, for one, am not calling the time of death of the American republic just yet. It may limp on, perhaps for centuries, just as Rome did. But I fear that Trump may already have dealt it a wound from which it will never completely recover. Whichever way the results of today’s voting turn out, it may take decades before historians can tell us whether Trump, and today’s coarser, more fractious politics more generally, were a sickness unto death or just a bad cold.

Lord preserve us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post No, Trump Is Not the End of US Democracy. It Never Existed. appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Then, Atul asked me another question. “I never understood why there needed to be so much suffering,” he said. “Why did God want Jesus undergo all that torture?”

I was dumbstruck. All of a sudden, I had nothing to say. It was not because I had never thought of the question before; indeed, I have been pondering the meaning of Jesus’s death all of my life. But how does one even begin to express the answer to that question in a sentence or two, without it falling flat like some stolid answer from a theology textbook?

It’s a little bit like when a woman asks a man why he loves her. The obvious answers just don’t seem to do the question justice.

Yet Atul’s is a question that deserves to be answered. Is the central drama of the world’s most widespread religion simply absurd? How can the religion that preaches a message of love really teach that God demanded his own son to suffer and die on a cross to satisfy the demands of his justice?

God is not a sadist

When I finally did manage to stammer out an answer, it was something along the lines of, “Well, that would be what the Calvinists would say.” An unsatisfying answer, sure, but one that was true enough. The Calvinist tradition has proposed a theory of the Crucifixion which, I think, is the cause of a lot of the concern that underlay Atul’s question. In many ways, it is the concept that the rest of the world has perhaps now come to see as the Christian idea of redemption. The name of this theory would be .

According to the theory of penal substitution, what Jesus did on the Cross was take all of the punishment that was really ours, the wrath of God that we had merited by our sins. God imputes the sins of humanity to Christ, and he punishes him with all of the fury that his divine holiness has for the wickedness that we commit. In a paradoxical way, God treats his own son like a sinner and unleashes his wrath on him.

There is something about this picture that does not sit right with our ideas of what Christianity should be. God is so angry that he needs to take it out on somebody, and that somebody turns out to be Jesus? Is God really pleased by the suffering of an innocent man? Sure, you can say the innocent man voluntarily accepts his suffering. But one still finds it hard to accept. In this picture, God seems to be acting more out of wrath than out of love, or even justice.

That is not the God of scripture, the God who “.” The Old Testament book of Wisdom us that “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” And God loves none of the living, human beings or , as much as he loves his own Son. Jesus is the offspring of the very bosom of Father’s divinity, the son whom he loves more than the entire created universe. No, God is not pleased by the torturing of his son.

This theory is a distortion of the biblical truth: Jesus did the will of his Father by bravely accepting death in an act of pure love, obedience and self-sacrifice that is worth more to the Father than the sins of the whole world. Jesus paid the debt for evil men, not by taking the punishment they deserved — which would be Hell — but by showing the Father a love that was greater than all of the worship that sinners had denied him throughout the ages. This is why Jesus is our and our justification and our savior — not our whipping-boy.

A sacrifice of love

It is love that God desires, than anything; Jesus earned our salvation by his love, because love deserves a , and love a multitude of sins. But then, one might justifiably ask: Why did Jesus have to die? Was not his love enough?

In a way, this is true. One single act of Jesus’s perfect love is worth more to God than the sins of the whole world. He could have merited our salvation with a single prayer, a single day of fasting or a single act of mercy for the poor. And indeed, Jesus spent his entire life sanctifying the world with acts of unspeakable love. Yet God desired our salvation to be accomplished by the greatest act of love — and there is than this, which is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

We will never fully unpack the mystery of the supreme act of saving love that Jesus poured out on the Cross. Perhaps God desired to show his infinite love for us by saving us in a gratuitous way, something more than was strictly necessary. Perhaps God wanted to show us how Jesus was betrayed by Christians, accused by Jews and tortured by Gentiles, to teach us that we all have a part in rejecting God’s goodness. Perhaps it was fitting that God had turned death itself, which had been the weapon the Devil used to oppress humankind, into his own instrument for frustrating the evil one’s plans. Thomas Aquinas five reasons. He could have listed five hundred more.

I will try, in my own little way, to offer three reasons that I hope will answer Atul’s question.

Why did Jesus have to die for the salvation of mankind? Because doing so was the greatest act of sacrifice, of sincerity and of solidarity.

Sacrifice is an ancient concept. Nearly all human cultures have had sacrifice as a way of displaying devotion to the gods. Today, with the spread of Christianity and Islam worldwide, animal sacrifice has become much rarer than it was in ages past. Yet the basic idea is universal: Human beings, who owe everything to the divine, must out of gratitude give back in some way. We do this by sacrificing, because, as an ancient Sumerian expressed, “What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away.”

The Jewish religion was full of animal sacrifices, especially bloody sacrifices of cattle, sheep and goats. The essential act was not merely the killing of the animal, which could be done by laymen, but the offering of its blood upon the altar by an ordained priest. In this way, the animal was dedicated to God. Christians believe that Jesus is our priest, and that, while he was slain by the hands of other men, it was by his own blood on the altar of the Cross that he gave God an act of pure, saving worship.

What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away. Jesus gave up everything to God on the cross, accepting the abandonment of his friends, the stripping of his possessions, the defamation of his good name and the loss of his very life. In doing so, he showed us that he held nothing back in order to save us. At the same time, he taught us to hold nothing back from God, but to offer ourselves wholly. And, in time, God was to restore to Jesus everything that he had offered a hundredfold, precisely because he had given it up so freely.

Why do I bring up sacrifice? It seems an archaic concept, and perhaps an excessively technical one. But it’s important to remember because sacrifice is the biblical concept that was distorted and made unrecognizable by the theory of penal substitution. Jesus is not so much the scapegoat of Yom Kippur as he is the lamb of Passover. And that is why this day, Easter, is called the Pasch — pascha, פֶּסַח, the Passover, when the blood of the Lamb rescued God’s people from destruction.

An act of honesty

Even beyond this perhaps esoteric conception of sacrifice, I believe that something far simpler is too at the heart of the Crucifixion. That is the plain fact that to die is hard.

This world is full of false prophets, would-be messiahs and cult leaders. It is easy and profitable to make yourself look holy and sound profound. With it come fame, wealth and even, a lot of the time, sex. (One sure way to tell that you have a cult leader is to see that he has a lot of girlfriends.)

We are much more willing when we believe preachers who are capable of denying themselves. The Buddha and St. Francis made themselves credible by casting away their wealth, not by amassing it like televangelists do. Yet perhaps even for selfish reasons one might cast away one’s wealth. After all, a good reputation is worth more than gold. Someone might prefer to be revered rather than be rich. What someone will not do, unless they are insane, even for the sake of fame is die.

Jesus is a preacher who tells me that he from heaven, that he comes bearing for human beings, that I must call upon him to be saved, love him more than my own kin and deny myself and be willing to for him. This is not just a purveyor of good advice, to whom I might listen and gather some pearls of wisdom and go on my merry way, even if the rest of his sayings are not trustworthy. I can glean pearls of wisdom from a Christian televangelist or a Hindu self-named guru. But I cannot trust them. With the demands that Jesus makes of me, unless I can trust that this man means what he is saying, I cannot listen to him.

I daresay that if Jesus had not died on the Cross, he would not have had many followers. But this is a man who is willing to go the whole nine yards. This is someone who is willing to give it all up — everything — suffer the betrayal of his followers, the condemnation of his own people and the most humiliating and cruel form of torture-execution designed by the Romans, who were masters of cruelty. And he tells me that he is doing it all for .

Because Jesus died on the Cross, because he withstood horrible tortures and refused to recant or make excuses, I know that he meant everything that he said. His suffering proves his sincerity. And his wisdom proves his sanity. This was no lunatic with a death wish, but a wise, compassionate, strong and capable man who gave it all up for the truth.

Only such a man will I trust with my immortal soul.

A savior who was not ashamed to be like me

The sacrifice of the crucifixion tells us something about God. The sincerity of it tells us something about Jesus. But what does it tell us about ourselves, and about our own suffering?

On the Cross, God the Son embraced suffering. He took it into himself. He bore what all human beings bear — pain, humiliation, death. Jesus did not consider these things to be beneath himself.

Jesus lived an entire human life, complete with all of the things that a human life includes, except for sin. We can miss the profoundness of this truth for how obvious it is: Everyone suffers.

God created this entire world, with suffering in it. He did not create evil, but he did not disdain from making even those creatures which he knew would experience evil. He creates human lives, fully knowing all of their joys and their sorrows, their successes, failures, deprivations, long lonely nights, heartbreaks. God looks at the entirety of a human life and, in his all-knowing decree, he says yes.

Jesus did not select some parts of our humanity, the pretty ones and the pleasant ones, to take to himself. He did not disdain any part of it, consider it unworthy of his dignity. He took it all. Thus, he testifies to the truth that human life is worth living, human life is fundamentally good, despite and even within suffering.

Even more: Jesus chose suffering. Even suffering itself then is not without value, without meaning. When I suffer, I am not experiencing the absurd uncaringness of a cold universe. Nor am I experiencing simply something unfortunate, a mere flaw in the universe that God simply did not feel like fixing, something not meant to be.

No, even suffering has meaning, because Jesus embraced suffering. So I will embrace suffering, too. I will take on all that my human life has to offer me, not shrink from pain out of fear, not fly from humiliation because I have an inflated sense of how dignified I should be. I want to live it all. I want the world that God created. Wrinkles and all.

And Jesus shows me that suffering is part of the story, but not the end. He gave everything to God in an act of utter self-emptying. And yet God gave still more back to him, because of his love. God raised Jesus, today, not reversing his sacrifice but completing it: A man, fully alive, fully devoted, full of truth and of love, having given up his life for others, now becomes the fountain of life for all of them.

Evil does not have the last word. Suffering is more than evil: It is what the soul does when it confronts evil, wrestles with it in order to defeat it. And in the end, life wins. After all the suffering of Good Friday, the morning of Easter comes.

Why did Jesus need to undergo so much suffering? Because he is the way of self-sacrificing love. He is the truth of honest teaching. And he is the life that embraces suffering, and even overcomes it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Why Would God Want Jesus to Suffer a Painful Death? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

“It is in changing that things find repose,” says the philosopher Heraclitus. The world that we live in is a world of flux, and things that resist this flux die. Mountain ranges wear down because they attempt to stand still against the wind and the rain. Biological life, which at first glance seems much more fleeting than geological features, has survived on this earth for billions of years while the mountains wear away. Land plants and the Appalachian Mountains both formed in the same geological period, but now the Appalachians are eroded hills while plant life grows thick on top of them, eroding them further.

Without belaboring the point too much, we can say that life is not just change, but organized change, change according to a definite plan. An organism must react to its environment and modify itself and its behavior in order to survive, but it does so while preserving the nature that it has from birth. Even evolutionary history, which enacts no preconceived plan, does not simply change without direction. Mutation is without direction, but evolution is mutation guided by selection. This is why crustaceans, and mammals do not. What we will become is guided by the nature and the needs of what we are. What life enacts is not random change, but change that preserves its existence and, so to speak, mission. Deer developed antlers so that they could keep being deer.

To survive is to change

A state is like an animal, but it is most like that rational animal, man. It is capable of understanding its core principles and values and of planning and enacting deliberate change in order to live up to those values. We are not called to evolve blindly, but by deliberation and understanding to move forward into history with our eyes wide open. Using reason—our ability to conceptualize, to dialogue, and to plan—we humans do what all life does, but intentionally. And when we cease to do this, we die.

States die. Civilizations die. History is all too full of tales of the calamities, wars, and devastations that occurred when statesmen and citizens became either too complacent, too divided, or otherwise too unequipped to take account of reality and affect adequate change. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, infamously crippled by the broad right of individual nobles to veto legislation, precipitating a humiliating and disastrous partition between its land-hungry neighbors and over a century of suffering for the Polish people. The same pattern has played out time and time again in human history from the dynasties of China to the republics of Latin America as corruption, factionalism, and poorly functioning political processes paralyze states, rendering them unable to reform.

I stand here with the strange privilege of living in one of the most successful and powerful states that have existed in the history of this planet, the United States of America. This country has astounded the world more than once with its capacity for innovation and dynamism, finding solutions hardly imagined by generations past. But there is a sickness in this country, an ideologization of what are taken to be our values that is slowly killing that dynamism, which is meant to come to the defense of our core values and is indeed one of them. What I am talking about is the notion, so much in vogue in the current popular discourse but so alien to the founders of this nation, that every jot and tittle of the Constitution—not only its principles and values, but the mechanisms that were originally crafted to enact those principles—is so imbued with the wisdom of that founding generation that it cannot be changed.

Everyone understands, perhaps, that on a basic level no commonwealth can exist very long without some change. “Even the barley-drink,” says our friend Heraclitus, “will separate if it is not stirred.” Yet was it not that same philosopher that admonished a republic to “fight for its laws as it does for its walls”? For what could protect it from upheavals of a social, economic, military nature or otherwise if, without its laws, it were no community of citizens but just an unorganized mob of men and women? Only a fool would argue for a nation with no respect for the laws that have created it and guided it, but all the same it would be folly, too, to forget that it was reason that crafted those laws, and it is still reason—the reason of the living, communicating, rational animals that we are—that must judge those laws and modify them, in an orderly way and for the common good.

The United States has a legislation problem

American law is in many ways uniquely hard to change. Even ordinary legislation must pass through an intricate path of checks and balances in which, at every step of the way, there are barriers that can stop proposed legislation in its tracks. It may die in committee, fail to pass on the floor of the chambers of Congress which often operate on razor-thin partisan majorities, fail to achieve the agreement of the House and of the Senate, experience filibuster in the Senate, suffer veto by the president, and so on…it is a wonder that any laws ever get passed at all. Of course, this kind of legal process is going to be an essential part of lawmaking in any democracy, but the American process has so many choke points that it is far easier to kill a bill than it is to pass one.

This creates a bias in favor of old legislation rather than new legislation which is, on the face of it, irrational, since the time at which a law was crafted has no essential bearing on whether or not it is wisely framed. The new is not automatically better than the old, but neither is the old automatically better than the new. If old laws are to continue, it should be because human minds, in a legally structured process, have considered them and judged them prudent to continue, not because of an institutional structure so full of snags that the previous way of doing things is mindlessly approved simply because it is too difficult to do anything else.

“Ah,” I can hear the reply coming back, “but this is by design. A government that governs less governs best, after all, and the founders intended to make it very difficult to pass new laws.”

If this is the founders’ intent, it is ill-served by this mechanism. New laws do not always mean more government; indeed, there are good reasons to think that the growth of government can be fostered by the rigidity of laws, rather than hampered by them. More of this anon. But the more basic notion is this: if small government, or any other ideal that we prize, is to be the aim when we are deciding how to craft our laws, then we must do so consciously, keeping that ideal in mind when we make laws and adjusting every measure to best suit it. We can only do this consciously, not by trusting unconscious processes like legislative inflexibility to do the work for us. We must choose to be what we will be: A republic cannot better itself by hindering its own ability to make choices. Only a nation self-conscious of its own activity can keep itself free. Legislative snarls will not keep you free.

The most fundamental reason underlying the fact that unconscious processes will not keep one free, or serve very many other useful purposes, is that what is done unintentionally will inevitably have unintentional consequences. Of course, all human endeavors on this side of heaven will have unintentional consequences, but the surest way to multiply them is to hinder reason’s ability to monitor, to anticipate, and to forestall negative events by assessing and readjusting its methods.

Legislation problem expands executive and judicial power

If Congress does not issue its own guidance in the form of laws, the president will find his own way. This leads to the expansion of executive power, about which enough ink has been spilled that I need not continue the subject here. The bureaucracy will find its own way, and what ought to have been laws, deliberated by civil society and enacted by the people constitutionally empowered to make laws for the republic, instead become regulations, of dubious democratic merit and perhaps of opaque origin. The courts will find their own way, concocting in legal decisions directives which often have very little to do with the text, history, or intent of the laws that they claim to find their source in. But the executive and the courts are not simply being irrational or selfish. They are making do in a system where the direction that ought to be given by law is found lacking. And this is because the legislature cannot act.

I don’t think either liberals or conservatives are thrilled with an imperial presidency or with judge-made law.  Such channels can provide temporary wins, but each side can count just as many smarting losses. In the end the real loser is an America which is seeing her ability to deliberate clearly and openly and to make laws that best suit everyone weaken with every year.

Nowhere is this country’s inability to legislate more acute than in that most vital legislation of all, our Constitution. Here, Article Five mandates that in order to make any change at all to the Constitution, in addition to proposal by a supermajority in both houses of Congress (aside from an alternative convention process which in 234 years has never been used), a proposed amendment must be ratified by a whopping three quarters of states or state conventions.

This extraordinarily high bar hearkens back to the confederal origins of the union, in which the nation’s first constitution behaved more like a treaty, requiring unanimity, than like the constitution of a republic. But the United States is a republic, in spite of the many and time-honored aspects of federalism that it possesses. It is conceived both by its own citizens and by the global community as a nation among nations, not a supranational organization, and as a nation it ought to have the constitution of one. It should be able to decide its own destiny, by common as well as by fundamental law, and it should not be subjected to the levels of paralysis, often more reminiscent of the EU or even the UN, that do indeed more befit a treaty organization than a constitutional republic.

US constitutional law is in disarray. Judges and legal commentators, all the way up to the high court, seem torn between a rigid originalism which would tie the world’s hegemonic power to the legislative framework framed for a league of thirteen recently liberated and mostly agrarian colonies, and a “living constitution” model which seems to be employing a biological metaphor not in support of an ordered and self-conscious development of a political community operating through rational laws, but to support the departure from those laws into a zone of individualistic, moralizing, often ad-hoc judicial oligarchy. Neither of these will do and indeed neither should we expect that any judicial philosophy should. The problem is not with those who interpret the laws, but with those who make the laws.

We need a different system. We need to stop hiding behind institutions and processes which no longer work for any of us as an excuse not to step up and take control of our future. We need to stop using processes as a way to bludgeon each other and exploit thin majorities which will inevitably reverse and learn to reason with each other and develop genuine consensus. Only genuine consensus can save us, and only genuine consensus is worthy of the kind of social and rational beings that we are.

I am proposing that we make amendments easier. What I am not proposing, however, is that some new clever set of norms and processes will make all of the difference. Ultimately, the change will not come from some new system but from a new mindset which will make new systems necessary. We need to start to talk to each other. And we need to listen.

Going down a dangerous path

In ancient times, the most powerful republic in the world was the one that belonged to the Romans, a people more famous for devotion to their laws and their constitutional customs than we. Through it all, the wisdom of the senate, the energy of the people, and the ingenuity of the magistrates guided Rome from a tiny vassal city to the Etruscans to a superpower that dominated the entire classical world. Its laws were singularly well-developed, intricate, and socially entrenched, but at the same time the republic—ultimately, unlike ours, a direct democracy—could modify its most basic laws with a single act of legislation, something it did time and time again to resolve the numerous social and military crises the city was beset with in its long history.

When the Roman democracy finally did come to an end, it was not because of its mechanisms of flexibility, but rather because of the degradation of them. The republic did not end because a demagogue whipped the people up into a fury and convinced them to vote away their democracy—although this sort of thing certainly can happen—but through a much longer, slower process of loss of political consensus-building, the increasing abuse of its institutions through partisan corruption and obstructionism, which eventually necessitated the use of illegal force as a brute substitute for consensus in order to stabilize the state.

After a century of strongmen—Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antony—tried and failed to use military authority to shore up a republic that no longer knew how to govern itself, the empire was founded when Octavian, using his personal prestige, took control ultimately not as a legally appointed dictator but as a private citizen granted extraordinary powers to do what the magistrates and the senate could not do. Even Tiberius, his successor, was surprised to find the senate so unwilling to govern that he was caused to continue this unorthodox arrangement. Eventually, the imperial role would evolve into an unfettered despotism.

This is how a republic dies. When it forgets how to deliberate, it degenerates into political gamesmanship. When political gamesmanship degenerates, as it inevitably does, the door is opened to violence. And violence can only breed more violence.

We cannot allow this to happen. If we are to avoid this fate, we must learn how to legislate. And to do that, we must rediscover how to debate, and how to think.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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