gracchusdixit

It should by now be obvious to anyone who isn’t wearing a blindfold or plugging his ears with wax that our system of government, and more particularly our foundational Constitutional arrangements, are broken.  Certainly, that’s what the American people appear to believe.  In a recent Gallup poll, they declared government to be the country’s number one problem, well ahead of the economy, jobs, or even the dreaded specter of Islamic terrorism.  It has taken Americans quite a while to catch on to this dismal and long-standing reality, but as the saying goes: better late than never.

It is impossible to say exactly when things began to fall apart, but if I had to pick a date, it would be July 16, 1964.  That is when the Republican Party, by an overwhelming margin, nominated Barry Goldwater to be its candidate for President.  Goldwater was humiliatingly trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the subsequent election, but his nomination was the first shot fired in a conservative revolution that eventually exterminated the old Republican Party, has now seized control of two branches of our national government, and, unless Hillary Clinton gets her act together, may soon control all three.

The next shot was the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was in no sense a Goldwater Republican, but he was cunning and ruthlessly ambitious.  These qualities led him to devise the “southern strategy,” which transformed the Republican Party forever from being a bastion of old-fashioned and understated conservatism, with its roots in the Northeast and Midwest, to becoming the loud and truculent voice of a New Confederacy.

Then, of course, the so-called “Reagan Revolution” came along, which was merely an extension of Goldwater’s original agenda.  It was, however, far more effective in demonizing the federal government, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and unleashing the malignant magic of the “market”.

Reagan was followed by the Reagan-idolizing Newt Gingrich, who shut down the national government for the first time in our history and launched an abortive attempt to impeach and convict a Democratic President who was (and still is) one of the popular public figures we have ever had.

All this was bad enough.  But things got infinitely worse when the Supreme Court of the United States made the unprecedented decision to intervene in a Presidential election and, by the narrowest and most partisan of margins, awarded the election to George W. Bush—despite that fact that his opponent had won the popular vote decisively.  With this act, the conservative Justices on the court abandoned all pretense of political neutrality, opting instead to advance their own ideological agenda openly and without shame.

The breakdown got worse again with the election of Barack Obama.  From the start, Republicans simply refused to recognize the legitimacy of his two election victories, doing everything in their power to ensure the failure of his Presidency.

In the last month, this ongoing breakdown reached a boiling point.

First, Republicans invited the now reelected Prime Minister of Israel to address a joint session of Congress—though “address” scarcely describes his melodramatic and deceptive performance.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance was not only a stunning breach of long-established protocol, it was profoundly disrespectful to the office of the President and to Barack Obama himself.  During the last Presidential election, Netanyahu all but endorsed Mitt Romney—an act of interference in our internal political affairs that was, and remains, inexcusable.  Despite all this, Ted Cruz hyperbolically compared Netanyahu with Winston Churchill; a comparison with Joachim von Ribbentrop would have been more apt.

A few days later, 47 Republican Senators decided to meddle in ongoing and exceedingly delicate negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, with the clear intent of undermining those negotiations altogether.  By-passing the executive branch, they sent a letter to Iran’s leaders, lecturing them on our Constitutional arrangements.  This was not only patronizing but gratuitous, since Iran’s foreign minister, having been educated in the United States, where he received both an MA and a PhD, probably understands our Constitution better than the fatuous and smug Republicans who sent the letter.

For years, we have danced around the reasons for this scandalous behavior, pretending to be befuddled by the seemingly inexplicable opposition of the Republican right-wing to the general will of the American people and the specific actions of Barack Obama.  Let us drop the pretense once and for all, because the reasons are crystal clear.

The first is that, for all their talk of patriotism and love of country, the only country Republicans are prepared to love is one that mirrors their own theology: white, conservative, and rigidly Christian.  America as it actually is—sprawlingly diverse, increasingly “brown,” and progressively more tolerant on sexual and social questions—is a country they both loathe and fear.

The second reason is that Republicans abominate any form of government that does not serve their own, selfish interests.  They are quite prepared for the federal government to spend billions subsidizing corporations, waging war, and building prisons for the querulous poor.  But the moment government acts in the common good, its actions are denounced as socialism, a first step on the road to communism.

The final reason is blatant racism.  It is racism that lies behind the tea party’s hatred of Barack Obama.  It is racism that lurks behind Republican rhetoric of “makers and takers”.  It is racism that caused the Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act and strike down Affirmative Action.  To pretend otherwise, to suggest that legitimate and reasonable political disagreements are the cause, is a sham.

More than a century ago, the poet Walt Whitman, trying to comprehend the unspeakable carnage caused by the Civil War, described a Union that had been “insolently attack’d by the secession-slave-power” of the South.  Now, more than a century later, that same power is once again doing everything it can to break the nation apart.  That power is called the Republican Party, and its insolence will never end until it is broken at the polls for good.

For nearly 500 years, the words, “Justice is blind,” have symbolized everything we wish our legal system to be: objective, impartial, and blind to distinctions of wealth, power, privilege, or race.  Equal treatment before the law is the bedrock of a decent and democratic society.  It is the only thing separating us from societies that are run by thugs and criminals.

No human institution is ever perfect, and our legal system is no exception.   To say that “justice is blind” is to raise a high ideal, one that we must work hard to live up to.

It has become abundantly clear, however, that we are no longer even trying.  Our legal system is not merely imperfect, in the way of all human institutions, it has become fundamentally flawed and corrupt.

The first glimpse of this sad reality came after the financial collapse of 2008.  Our leading financial institutions committed crimes—not errors of judgment or imprudent mistakes, but blatant and deliberate fraud.  The result was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which cost millions of Americans their jobs or their homes or both.  Eight years later, not a single senior executive in any of the companies that caused the crisis has been indicted, let alone tried or convicted.  We have been told, time and again, that financial crimes are too “complicated” to prosecute successfully.  That’s nonsense.  Hundreds of executives went to jail after the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80s.  Dozens were convicted after the failure of Enron, and the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was forced to close its doors.  But not today.  Now, not only are the companies that caused the 2008 financial catastrophe too big to fail, the criminals who run them are too big to jail.

The second signal of the corruption in our system of justice came when George Zimmerman, the self-appointed “neighborhood watch coordinator” of a gated community in Florida, killed an innocent and unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.  Zimmerman was acquitted of his crime after local police rigged the investigation and Florida prosecutors bungled the trial because of negligence or intent.  Since then, we have seen countless examples of the same pernicious pattern:  Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and others.  In all these cases, local police unions have rallied around the officers who perpetrated these crimes, demonizing the victims and defending the officers themselves as heroes who “put their lives on the line”.  Since the average cop has no more chance of dying in the line of duty than the typical motorist has of dying behind the wheel of a car, that claim is a shameless distraction, designed to ensure that criminals will never be punished.

And just days ago, we witnessed perhaps the most appalling demonstration of all, when the Senate Intelligence Committee published the findings of its years-long inquiry into acts of torture committed by the CIA at the behest of the highest officials in the land. Those who authorized these acts, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush , insist that the “ends justify the means,” that any action which saves American lives is honorable, moral, and legal.  Those who perpetrated these acts deny that “enhanced interrogation” is torture at all but is, instead, a “useful tool” for defending the nation. Those who should know better, including the current President of the United States, urge us to “learn from the past” and “move forward,” as if such insipid clichés were an adequate substitute for justice.

The acts of torture authorized by Cheney and Bush, and committed by the CIA,  are unambiguous crimes under international law and our own laws.  They are crimes that we have condemned publicly, legally and officially for three decades.  They are crimes that demand, not explanation or expiation, but trial, conviction, and punishment.

Until we punish the most powerful criminals in our society—bankers who steal, police who commit murder, politicians who break our laws and betray our ideals—we will be a nation where justice is no longer blind.  We will have become a nation that is blind to justice.

The separation of church and state guaranteed by our Constitution has never stopped Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, from acting as if their faith were the “established church” of the nation.  The National Prayer Breakfast is merely one example of their presumption.  Though not officially “Christian,” it might as well be, and every year since Dwight David Eisenhower began the practice, the Presidents of our supposedly secular democracy have dutifully shown up to express their allegiance to the predominant religion of the land.  Presidential appearances at this annual ritual have generally been innocuous, with our chief executives confining their remarks to platitudes and predictable pieties,  walking a delicate line between declarations of “personal faith” and the official non-religiosity of the land.

The current President of the United States, however, kicked over a hornet’s nest when he addressed this year’s National Prayer Breakfast.  Barack Obama decided to turn his attention to the horrific acts of radical Islamists in Iraq and Syria.  He observed that extremism is not unique to Islam, that many religions, including Christianity, have at various times incited or justified similar atrocities.  For uttering these incontestable truths, the President was immediately assailed from both right and left.

Critics on the right pilloried him for daring to draw any comparison between Islam and Christianity, because they would have us believe that Christianity is morally superior to every other creed on the planet.

Critics on the left were more fastidious, carping that Christianity’s lapses—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials of the 17th and 18th centuries—happened long ago, before Christianity was “reformed” by Enlightenment values, the discoveries of science, and the steady march of modern progress.

Let us put aside for a moment the reality that both these points of view are at best questionable and focus on the more consequential fact that most of the President’s critics chose to ignore his central point.  His central point was that radical extremists like ISIL do not represent the “true Islam,” just as the zealots of the Inquisition did not reflect the  “true Christianity”.

Barack Obama is not the first to have expressed this anodyne thought.  George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, among many others, preceded him, and it has been parroted around the globe by political elites who do not wish to be seen criticizing religion.

In any event, the notion that radical extremism is a distortion of the “true” Islam is undoubtedly well-intended.  But it is also naive and—worse than naive—flatly wrong.

Radical extremism is not a distortion of Islam—it is an intrinsic part of any religion that claims a monopoly on the truth, whether that creed is Islam or Christianity or the Judaism on which both are based.  Absolutist religions breed intolerance and—inevitably—persecution.  The Christianity that gave us Saint Francis and Pope Francis also spawned Torquemada and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  The Bible that gave us the Sermon on the Mount also glorified the murder of Isaac and the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt.  A faith that glorifies the “martyrdom” of its own believers is by definition prepared to condone the murder of non-believers.  Martyrdom and murder are interdependent and inseparable.

Thus, there is no way of separating good religion from bad religion, of pretending that one religious vision is “truer” than another.  Nor is there any way of imagining that any absolute religion can be reformed by Enlightenment values, tamed by the modern world, or sanitized by science.  Like some infinitely adaptable virus, such religions are immune to these curative forces.  They may lie low for a while, pretending to be quiet, until they inoculate themselves against the cure and come pluming back with explosive force.

In the United States, deeply unenlightened evangelicals have all but highjacked the political agenda of the Republican Party.  In the name of “life,” they want to return the lives of women to the Middle Ages, and they have incited the murder of physicians and health care workers who provide women with abortion services.

In Israel, orthodox extremists have undermined that country’s noblest secular and civic traditions, making any prospect of conciliation with Palestinians and Israel’s Arab population all but impossible.

In Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holy places, Wahabi fundamentalists stole the country from its infinitely more tolerant Hashemite rulers a century ago and have imposed a stern and violent vision of Islam on its population.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, a country founded on the principles of secularism and cultural diversity, a new prime minister was recently elected by promising jobs and growth.  The man who made these convenient promises is first and foremost a Hindu demagogue, who not long ago incited the murder of thousands of Muslims.

The President of the United States was incontestably right to remind us that radical extremism is not unique to Islam, but he was sadly wrong to suggest that radical extremism is a perversion of  the “true” Islam or any other religion.  There is no doubt that radical Islam is a problem.  The infinitely greater problem is the radicalism of religion itself.   Pretending otherwise will not help us solve the problem.