Anglospherics

Based on what has been publicly released, the whole interaction between Good, Ross, and the other ICE officials was a series of unforced errors by the government. The entire encounter, even accounting for Ross’s own footage, illustrates the general lack of professionalism with which ICE has operated over the past few months and its abandonment of its own internal policies.

This article will not wade into the debate over whether deadly force was justified at the exact moment Ross fired into the vehicle (that debate will largely focus on a narrow legal question—did he have a reasonable belief that Good would use her car as a weapon to hit him—in a manner that will frustrate many observers, and should rely on a much larger tranche of evidence than many observers realize). Because even if Ross’s deadly force was justified in the moment he fired his weapon, what much of the nation has now seen was not professionalized or situationally appropriate law enforcement. It was a series of incredibly bad choices leading to an unnecessary death. At every step which led to the fatal trigger press, ICE could have behaved differently. It could have behaved more tactically. It could have behaved more humanely. The nation—to say nothing of Renee Nicole Good’s family—deserves an honest accounting of why it did not. […]

Minnesota defines a peace officer as “an employee of a political subdivision [i.e. a local municipality] or state law enforcement agency,” and only grants their federal counterparts arrest authorities for the purposes of state and local violations when a number of conditions are met. The most important of these prerequisites requires that the federal officer be on duty, acting at the request of a local or state officer, and operating pursuant to the supervision of that local or state officer. At this point, neither ICE management nor any executive branch officials have argued that these conditions were met; indeed, the tenor and tone of statements by the Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota governor would certainly suggest otherwise. The proper remedy, then, for Good’s obstruction of traffic would have simply been for the ICE officers to request that local police join in the response and facilitate the movement of her vehicle.

But let’s put this argument aside, for the moment.

Some political disputes are impossible to resolve because they involve fundamental principles—and, in some cases, fundamentally American principles: The fight over abortion, for example, pits one libertarian argument (for women’s individual bodily autonomy) against another libertarian argument (for the bodily autonomy of the unborn), at the root of which is a disagreement over a question of fact (whether there is a second individual with rights to consider). Some disputes are difficult but not impossible to resolve because they involve good-faith disagreements over preferences and priorities: Americans who are more risk averse tend to prefer a larger and more expensive welfare state and are willing to trade some quality and innovation in medical care in exchange for more certainty about prices and access to care, whereas Americans who are less risk averse are more open to approaches based on market operations, competition, and consumer choice. There is not really a correct or incorrect level of risk aversion, objectively speaking: We have different preferences based on our own situations, our own experiences, and our own temperaments. And that is precisely the kind of situation in which it is possible to come up with solutions based on, or at least adjacent to, that Pareto concept: When something is very important to the other side and not very important to you, that is the place to give in—and when something is very important to you but not very important to the other side, that is an opportunity for getting your own way.

But when political failure—or political treachery—is defined as cooperating with the other side or by giving the other side anything of importance to its partisans, then there is no room for compromise or consensus-building. At this political moment, Republicans are particularly perverse: If a Republican leader manages to win some Democratic support for a Republican proposal, this is taken by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world as an indictment rather than as evidence of basic political skill on the simpleton’s theory that if the Democrats are for it, then it must be bad. Greene may be trying to rehabilitate her reputation lately, but that remains her fundamental orientation.

I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing. If my sense is correct, then this is a ripe moment—if anybody has the wit to make something of it. Doing that starts with looking across the table and starting the conversation: “Okay, then—what do you want?”

Agrowing network of churches, publishers, podcasts, and conferences in the United States and Europe has begun to “just ask questions.” These “questions” are about things like the “traditional narrative” regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust, the benefits of “race realism” and “ethnically homogeneous communities,” and whether interracial marriage or interracial adoption should be censured and considered “relatively sinful.”

Skinheads and Klansmen we have long had with us. What has happened over the last decade is something else, something more disturbing: it is an intellectual and indeed theological retrieval of racial supremacist and separatist ideas within Christian circles. As we exit what British historian Alec Ryrie has called the “Age of Hitler” – that is, the age when simply identifying an idea as fascist or Nazi was enough to discredit someone – we find ourselves needing to do something that has not been necessary since the Second World War: we must vocally refute and resist racial supremacy and narrowly exclusivist and hateful ethnonationalism. In this resistance, we must argue as Christians. And, increasingly, we must argue against other Christians – or at least against people who profess the name of Christ.

There are few better allies in this task than the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. […]

The Jesuit theologian Pedro Descoqs, under whom de Lubac studied, famously defended Maurras. For Descoqs, and many Catholics at the time, an alliance with Maurras’s secular political movement was conceivable because of a reading of Thomas Aquinas that took his distinctions between the truths of supernatural revelation and the truths of natural reason to insinuate that supernatural considerations are not relevant to the political sphere. This drew on the Aristotelian idea that all natural beings are ordered to ends they can attain by their own powers. Maurras thus distinguished “political facts” from moral and religious realities, promoting a strict separation between orders of religion and politics. Descoqs defended Maurras, saying that his system dealt with this-worldly matters that need not be shaped by theological considerations. Religious considerations were increasingly deemed irrelevant to broader society and politics.

In Descoqs’s affirmation of Maurras, de Lubac sensed that Descoqs abandoned both the supernatural claims and the social demands of Christianity, thus becoming an ally of secularism. According to de Lubac, Maurras and his ilk opened the way to a Nietzschean “brutal return to instinct.” They celebrated base affections, fanning them into flame as “natural” aspects of human existence, and resisting the reformation of those “instincts” according to Christian revelation. In this, de Lubac sensed the legacy of Nietzsche, whose genius was his appeal to the desire for greatness. However, this desire for greatness was promoted to stoke hatred between groups, resulting in an interpretation of history as what de Lubac called a “war between the races,” which was antithetical to the universalism of the Christian faith, the call to charity, and the path of renunciation enshrined in the cross. De Lubac saw Nazism as a form of neopaganism that sought “to corrupt Christianity from the inside, paganize it, strip it of its universalism, its charity, and its sense of the cross.” De Lubac argued that the Nietzschean “racist faith” of the Nazis, which he described as a “myth of blood,” needs to be opposed by “our Christian and Catholic faith.”

Lincoln passionately defended the Declaration’s principle of equality during his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that the signers of the Declaration referred only “to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men.”

Lincoln rejected this claim. During a July 10 speech in Chicago, he said: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior…. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” Lincoln called the Declaration’s insistence on the equality of all men “the father of all moral principle.”

The next year, in a letter reflecting on the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, Lincoln wrote:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln showed his commitment to this abstract truth in the Gettysburg Address. America, he said, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War, he said, was a test not just for America but for “any nation so conceived and so dedicated.”

The political philosopher Harry Jaffa notes that Lincoln’s interpretation of “all men are created equal” transformed that proposition from a “pre-political, negative, minimal” norm that “prescribes what civil society ought not to be” into “a transcendental affirmation of what it ought to be.” […]

In his 1926 speech at Independence Hall, Coolidge acknowledged that the right of people to choose their own rulers was an old idea—detailed by the Dutch as early as July 26, 1581, and by the British people in their long struggle with the Stuarts. But he insisted that “we should search those charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality.” It was this equality principle that Coolidge deemed “profoundly revolutionary.”

The Declaration mattered, Coolidge said, not because it established a new nation but because it established “a nation on new principles.” The Declaration’s preamble set out “three very definite propositions” regarding “the nature of mankind and therefore of government”: “the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

Comparing today’s politics to fully fledged totalitarianism can be illuminating. But if it’s all we do, we risk overlooking Arendt’s subtler lessons about warning signs that can help us gauge threats to democracy.

The first is that political catastrophe isn’t always signposted by great causes, but arises when sometimes seemingly trivial developments converge. The greatest example for Arendt was political antisemitism. During the 19th century, only a “crackpot” fringe embraced it. By the 1930s, it was driving world politics.

This resonates with hard-right and far-right ideology today. Ideas widely seen as eccentric 20 years ago have increasingly come to shape democratic politics. Anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia penetrate the political mainstream. Alongside growing Islamophobia, antisemitism is on the rise again too.

The mainstreaming of previously marginal views helps explain a second warning sign that politics is increasingly driven by what Arendt described as “forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest.”

A simplistic politics of ideological fantasy and paranoia takes over instead. It appeals most to the isolated and lonely, people lost in society who have given up hope that anyone will ever address their real interests and concerns. Perpetually frustrated by reality, they seek escape in conspiracy theories instead.