Hindsight and foresight in 2020

The passing from one calendar year to the next – is it indeed already 2020? – is and ought to be a cause for reflection and introspection. It’s been my study to avoid ranting about politics recently, especially here, and focussing instead on positive things like the history of the undivided Church in the West. For the most part that’s been a positive change. But personally I feel there are a few things that I need to address, to make a clean slate of things and also to set a clear vision for the next year.

To begin with, an acknowledgement of my own foibles: my leaving the American Solidarity Party being as much indicative of this as having joined it in the first place. I can’t say I don’t have regrets on that former score. Speaking honestly: I could have handled my exit far better than I did. I could certainly have treated certain people more kindly who were acting in the ways they felt to be right. Even so, I did feel that I had to stand firm against a twin attack from higher up in the party, which was fronted by two Roman Catholic members of the party whom I promptly unfriended and unfollowed on social media. This was an attack on my faith and specifically on my region. This was specifically in the form of an attack on a blessed saint of the Orthodox Church, who acted as he did precisely because he was loyal to his community. Loyalty to locality stands for nothing among certain advocates of ‘subsidiarity’, it seems, if their dogmatic a prioris do not precisely match those of Pius IX.

But really, this was something of a straw that broke the camel’s back. Long before, I had growing doubts about the viability of the Christian democratic project in general: specifically, that it points to a centre which we know cannot hold, and which in so doing will end up either in the heartless degeneracy of neoliberalism or the monstrosity of blood-and-soil revanchism. (The attack on a Hasidic Jewish community in New York three days ago, by advocates of a very different sort of revanchism, serves mostly to punctuate this latter fear of mine.) Added to this has been my growing suspicion of the intégriste tendency in American religious politics, mirrored by a failure to learn from anything the Middle East has experienced in recent years regarding the interface of religion and politics. My former compatriots were no better or worse than those in the political mainstream; indeed, their dysfunctions on this particular score were a microcosm of broader arguments in American public circles.

This, more than anything else, is the definitive ground on which we enter the next decade. If the question of a ‘liberal moral order’ was on unsteady legs at the beginning of 2010, then it’s completely collapsed now in terms of legitimacy, and the question of what will replace it looms large. And I should be remiss if I didn’t point out that this existential crisis of liberalism looms large exactly at the point where greenhouse gas accumulation is at record highs and the global climate is becoming more inhospitable. That isn’t going to stop our politicians from either navel-gazing or solipsism, though, even as the œcological stakes rise.

This is by necessity as much a personal reflection as it is a political one. I’m thirty-three years old. I have two mixed-race children. I have marital ties to a nation which is judged by half or more of my country’s political establishment to be a gæopolitical enemy. I have religious ties to another suspected gæopolitical enemy. I have placed myself in such a way that I can’t help but be personally affected by foreign policy. In addition to this, being working-class, I have certain personal stakes in the fight for single-payer and in the fight for fifteen. Still I do care very deeply for what happens to this country of mine, and grieve that we seem to be heading, as a result of our past policy choices, into several different ideological cul de sacs all at once.

Speaking personally, one of my resolutions for this year – implicit in the past, now explicit – is to live not by lies. That would include lies told by my ‘own side’, or whomever claims to be on it. That also includes lies I tell myself. I’m also resolving not to look for easy answers or answers that are too pat; and not to take more responsibility (or less) than what is due to me. A great deal of my witness rests in how I treat and teach my children, and that needs to be one of the foremost responsibilities I take on myself. And because my family and I occupy such a strange and in some ways politically præcarious place, I feel it is necessary to prepare my children to ask and begin to answer the same tough questions about belonging, place, interests, production and consumption, justice and grace. At the end of this decade, at least one of my children will have and use her public voice; I need to do more than pray that she uses it well.