WHAT HAPPENS AFTER 20 JANUARY 2025?

     A question to be asked on Presidents’ Day.  When an issue was resolved or a problem solved in episodes of The West Wing, President Jed Bartlett would ask, “what’s next?”  Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, leaders of neighboring states, some European countries, and the United States have been planning for what happens after hostilities end.  With four trials and an election approaching, all involving former-president Donald Trump, no one is asking what happens after the inauguration.

    Trump could be acquitted or convicted of some or all of the 91 federal and state charges against him.  He could be sent to jail or not.  He could be re-elected or not.  A cheeseburger and a Diet Coke could kill him before the election or, if elected, before his inauguration.  No combination of outcomes changes the answer to the question “then what?”  Whatever happens will augment for decades the degree and the kind of damage which he has done to the country.  To consider that future, we must consider the past. 

Both history and philosophy are written and read by those whom today we call the elite.  The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states what our Founding Fathers believed to be “self-evident” truths.  But the first such truth, “all men are created equal,” was not “self-evident “to most colonialists, who believed themselves intellectually and morally superior to blacks, whether they owned slaves or not.  When the colonies declared their independence from England, many more than the third of the population who remained loyal to the crown disliked or disregarded this truly revolutionary proposition.  The conservative position was the inequality of man; America was racist.

 

But the tides of intellectual thought and social policy were slowly beginning to erode, if not racism, at least slavery.  The North slowly abandoned it as commerce and industry showed that free workers were more productive than slaves.  The South increasingly relied on slavery because a cotton-based economy required cheap labor.  The South justified one person’s ownership of another person as a piece of property on the assumption that whites were superior to blacks.  The notion of the inequality of man was as much a part of the “Southern way of life” as corn pone, pecan pie, or mint juleps.

 

The Civil War ended Southern succession and, in theory, the structures of racism endemic in the South.  But Reconstruction under Northern military rule, terminated after twenty years, failed to effect a radical reorientation of Southern life.  Indeed, under it, former rebel officers and soldiers formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 to keep former slaves in their subservient place in society and the economy.  When Reconstruction ended, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws, which, though outlawed a hundred years later, continued to operate in many places many years later.  (In Odessa, TX, memorialized in Friday Night Lights, schools remained officially segregated until 1982.)

 

Before and after the Civil War, emigres from Southern states populated the area between the hundredth meridian and the eastern side of the Pacific Coast ranges.  They took their racism and their resistance to the federal government with them.  The embodiment of these propensities was the invariably white cowboy, the hero of movies and TV serials with enormous audiences in the 1950s and 1960s.  (In The Olympics’s 1958 hit “Western Movies,” the singer complains that he cannot get a date with his girl because she watches so many western shows.)

 

The modern Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln and emancipation, became a racist party with the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.  Exploiting the racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” changed the South from a racist, anti-Republican, Democratic stronghold into today’s racist, anti-Democratic, Republican stronghold.  The dog-whistles of Republican politicians prove that racism abides in the character profile of millions of Americans.  Racism is as American as apple pie.

 

Until the advent of Donald Trump, those millions remained mostly silent and sullen.  His racism and his appeal to this disgruntled and resentful “base” have enabled their emergence into public, their noise, their anger, and their violence.  Nothing new here, just more of the same, only more apparent and widespread than before.  Their attacks on public officials, election workers, protesters, teachers, and the FBI—not state and local police, many of whom sympathize with the base (and might endanger the rest of us one day)—are like the attacks on people since Reconstruction who have fought for legal and political equality for themselves or for others, with “liberty and justice for all.”  The difference is that Trump has increased the degree and deployment of bigoted animosity.

 

But he has also effected a change in kind.  Trump has focused the base’s grievances with the ascent of blacks (and others of color and women) on government efforts to reduce disparities and enable their rise in employment and education.  He has led Republicans to redouble familiar efforts to bias elections by gerrymandering, limiting the franchise, and making voting more difficult for some groups.  But his change in kind has been to lead the base in new directions, to challenge the legitimacy of elections which they lose (or expect to lose) as “fixed,” and by attacking the courts and the rule of law itself.  The difference in kind is his attack on institutions, norms, laws, and systems.

 

The aftermath of Trump’s attack on democratic practices, principles, and values—among the latter, decency, respect, honesty, truth, reason—will remain corrosive.  Like the “lost cause” of Southern rebels, the “lost cause” of his base, perhaps with Trump as a convicted and incarcerated martyr, will survive as a continuing threat to American democracy, with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other such groups as a latter-day Ku Klux Klan.  No doubt, Trump’s disgruntled and resentful base, like their predecessors, will abide and scheme, rather than admit a mistaken loyalty to a man hostile and a cause alien to the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of equality.

 

What happens after Inauguration Day depends on those who support democracy.  They must resolve to live by advice dubiously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  Which means that, every day, in every way, all little-d democrats must work for equality and justice at every opportunity, not just at elections.  My corollary: Do not think that a battle won—say, Trump’s defeat on 5 November 2025—means victory in the war.  Of course, a Trump victory will make resistance to autocracy and recovery from its ravages even longer and harder.

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS NEITHER CHRISTIAN NOR RIGHT

I wrote this blog after reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.  To those who see merit in religion and value in American democracy, the book is a horror story told in twenty-one chapters and an epilogue by a man well-versed both in Christianity and in the current religio-politico scene.  What Alberta does not say is that many evangelicals are extremists in supporting the Republican Party and former president Donald Trump.

 

Everyone knows that Christianity in America has been in trouble, increasingly so in the past decade.  Common opinions about Christian churches are that non-mainline denominations are rabid, mainline denominations are insipid, and neither provides much in the way of non-political moral or ethical guidance.  Church affiliation and attendance are down.  The average age of church members is rising because younger people are opting out or not joining.  With a few notable exceptions, many churches are struggling, splintering, or closing.

 

Of the many reasons for Christian fissiparousness, my two may be unconventional.  The first traces back to the apostles and their missions to different lands, peoples, and cultures.  The apostles themselves were a varied lot who had different understandings of Jesus and his message.  In preaching to different audiences, they not only preached according to their understanding, but also tailored their message to their audiences’ interests.  By preaching different messages to different audiences, they established different Christian beliefs, some of which survived underground despite homogenizing efforts by the Catholic Church and which, if they re-emerged, it declared heresies.  One such heresy was Protestantism, with a tendency to fissiparousness built in.  For allowing individual interpretation of scriptures inevitably means different opinions.  To forestall theological dissension and social chaos, Protestant leaders organized local and regional churches, from then to now, splintering into smaller churches, merging into larger ones.

 

The second reason for Christian fissiparousness is a codified theology without a codified ethics.  Establishing this ethics-free Christianity are the two early, essential creeds: the Nicene and the Apostles’.  Both mention the miraculous birth and miserable death of Jesus; both ignore his life, his message, and their meaning.  The Catholic Church deals with this void by claiming that faith without works is faith without effect but does not stipulate what counts as good works.  Protestant churches declare that faith alone justifies and say nothing about works.  Love, which can mean anything, everything, or nothing, does not specify ethical conduct.  So Christians have no credal basis to argue about “culture war” issues.  For example, abortion rages as an issue creating contention among Christians of many denominations.  Although both sides cite Christian verses to support their positions, abortion is not mentioned in either the Old or New Testaments, not that opportunities to do so did not exist, given its occurrence.  The void, which a Christian ethics sketched out in the creeds might have precluded, is filled with this and other political and social issues promoted by some Christians and protested by others.

 

Abortion is only one, though perhaps the most bitterly contested, political or social issue among American Christians.  Jesus had no position on abortion, but he would have had a position on the acrimonious exchanges between the two contentious sides.  Given their aggressive conduct, he would think that one or both could not call themselves Christian on the basis of his pacifistic inclination evident in two of his most prominent messages: turn the other cheek and resist not evil.  So, in the context of our contentious times, it makes sense to ask, not what would Jesus do, but what would he say about conduct underlying claims on both sides to be Christian.  The answer depends on his life and message to provide criteria defining what is Christian and what it not.

 

Doing so, in the simplest terms, means starting with the basic facts of Jesus’ life.  He was a Jew throughout his life; he was born a Jew, circumcised as a Jew, educated as a Jew, lived and taught as a Jew, and died a Jew.  With few exceptions, everything which he professed is compatible with Judaism.  One exception—resist not evil conflicts with the Jewish commitment to justice—is a forgivable one under a repressive Roman occupation, for non-resistance meant survival.  Yet nothing about what he professed or practiced is incompatible with the creeds and could not be included in them.

 

A notable fact about Jesus was his recurrent conflicts with Jewish authorities, the basis of which was the difference between observance of ritual and obligation to others.  One way to visualize the difference is to consider that Jewish law has two axes.  One is a vertical axis for rite, or the laws governing the relationship between God and man.  The other is a horizontal axis for right, or the laws governing relationships between man and man.  The Ten Commandments sort themselves on one or the other axis, the first four of rite, the last six of right.  For Jesus, the priorities of his teachings were laws of conduct; as he said, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  Pharisees criticized him for violating rite when he had done right.

 

The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds fit the primary Christians observances, the rites of Christmas and Easter.  Nothing about Jesus, his life, or his message would rule out bridging the gap between his birth and death with generalized statements sacralizing his ethics: his concern for service to others, as is clear from his Sermon on the Mount, or his concern with right, as defined by the Ten Commandments.  As a devoted Jew, Jesus would understand the need to enlarge upon them or, as Jewish scholars say, put a fence around the Torah.  For instance, he put a fence around the Seventh, the proscription of adultery, by proscribing lust.

 

Jesus’ messages are for all times and thus for our time, especially for our politics.  The Sermon on the Mount can serve as a Christian rationale for social programs to help the disadvantaged, whatever their disadvantages.  The Ten Commandments, with fencing extended outward to protect them in today’s world, can serve as ethical criteria for what is Christian and what is not.  I offer expanded versions of four commandments as I think Jesus would have expanded them.

 

Fifth: Honor your father and thy mother.  Jesus would extend this commandment beyond the family to society in respecting, not necessarily blindly following, tradition.

Sixth: You shall not kill.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit violence, including threats of violence or other acts of intimidation or harassment, against another person.

Eighth: You shall not steal.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit fraud, extortion, and other violations of trust in transactions involving anything of value.

Nineth: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit lying about, smearing, libeling, or slandering another.  He would insist on truth-telling because, as he said, the truth will set you free.

 

With these fences around the Ten Commandments, anyone who wants to distinguish true from false Christians can do so.  For example, in today’s political environment, those who self-identify as Christians yet support Trump are fakes.  Their departures from these standards in speech and conduct reveal their moral bankruptcy, as I have argued before.  The same may be said of Christian nationalists as well; it is not possible to be a Christian and a nationalist.  For they render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but also what is God’s.  Ultimately, evangelicals, Republican politicians, and others supporting Trump are ungodly, neither Christian nor right.

THE INTRUSION OF POLITICS INTO COLLEGE ENGLISH COURSES

Almost 70 years ago, Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers taught me a lesson never forgotten and almost always observed: listen to and learn from one’s “enemies.”  For about 60 years, I have heard conservative, usually Republican, politicians decry the liberalism of America’s institutions of higher education.  Usually, they have meant the best public (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UNC, UVA) and private (MIT, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Duke, Johns Hopkins) colleges and universities.  Tops on their list and sneered at as “elitist” are those constituting the Ivy League.

 

For 45 years, I have reacted to trends in my field, English.  It was my second major as a Cornell undergraduate and my field of graduate study at Michigan, where I earned a Ph.D.  Unlike conservatives, I have supported the trend expanding the canon.  By and large, English literature consisted of works almost exclusively by white males until about 1800, added works by white women thereafter, and expanded to include works by writers of diverse races, genders, and nationalities after about 1950.  Like conservatives but for different reasons, I have opposed the pernicious trend politicizing the humanities, the social sciences, and administrations.

 

Current controversies about campus politics prompted my curiosity about changes in Cornell’s English Department since my day 65 years ago.  Its website revealed its new name, Literatures in English Department, and only one course description, that of the first semester of its introductory survey, recognizable to me.  Then, the course title of English 251 was, as I recall, “English Literature from Beowulf to 1800”; now, English 2010 is “Literatures in English: From Old English to the New World.”  The implications of the different titles are significant.  I do not recall the older description then, but I know it was nothing like the new one now:

 

English 2010 is an introduction to key works of English and American literature for majors and non-majors.  Here's a chance to study some of the greatest hits of the literary tradition in a single semester: Beowulf; Arthurian legends; works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Sageyowatha, Phillis Wheatley.  Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society.  How did literature factor in England's transformation from a cultural backwater into a global empire?  What role does literature play in disciplining, civilizing, and colonizing subjects?  When and how is it used to delight, resist, and rebel?  From our reading, we will create a toolkit of literary terms and techniques.  And through a series of exercises, students will get hands-on experience with literary experimentation.  The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

 

I was put off by the Department’s use of the phrase “greatest hits,” as if the professor were a D.J. playing them in a lecture hall, in a tawdry attempt at folksy “with-it-ness” to appeal to those who might think the study of English stuffy and old hat.  The “key works” or “greatest hits” of the authors cited do not represent “the [or even a] literary tradition” by definition: a “literary method or style established by [a] … writer … and subsequently followed by others.”  The diversity of the authors and their works makes the only unifier the English language, if one assumes the similarity of the Old English of Beowulf and the modern English of Phillis Wheatley.  The inclusion of Sageyowatha, or “Red Jacket,” points the problem.  An eloquent speaker in English, he contributed no “greatest hit” to “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine).

 

The Department’s misuse of the word “tradition” reflects the political desirability of giving a certain gravitas to some minor authors not white or not male in an introductory course.  Unhappily, its concern for diversity and inclusion overrides cogency.  The word “Literatures” in the title and the claim that “Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society” undermine the idea of a unified “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine).  Notwithstanding, politics expands the “tradition” of American writers on the basis of their race or gender: a white woman (Anne Bradstreet), a white man (Ben Franklin), a male Native American (Sageyowatha), and a black woman, a slave from Africa (Phillis Wheatley).  Whatever their achievement, they made little contribution to “the literary tradition.”  (My second-guessing adds Jonathan Edwards or, white man for white man, replaces Franklin with him.)  The Department might have less politically, less pretentiously, and more honestly said that the selections were a sampling of important literary works (excepting Sageyowatha) throughout the period.

 

More importantly, the Department’s political considerations underlie the three “big questions.”  Students do not ask them, cannot answer them by reading the “greatest hits,” and lack the information to address a relationship between literature and society.  An answer to question one requires knowledge about the relationship between cultural attainment and political power, and the role played by literature in influencing the growth of that power.  An answer to question two requires knowledge about the political, educational, and cultural circumstances in each colony of subjects, and about how literature can discipline, civilize, and colonize suppressed people.  (Note that the question assumes the “white man’s” definition of “civilized” and posits that literature can “colonize” people.)  An answer to question three requires knowing who so uses literature and under what conditions; and why the purposes are limited: “to delight” but not to instruct, and to “resist” and “rebel,” but not to accept and comply.

 

Since the “greatest hits” cannot provide answers to questions which go beyond their literary boundaries, whence cometh the information or opinion to answer these “big questions”?  Necessarily, from politically oriented lecture hall or classroom instruction, or assigned reading.  As the questions are biased by political considerations, instruction and assigned reading are likely to involve political preaching, not humanistic teaching.  For many of today’s English professors believe that the proper purpose of the study of literature is to use literature as a pretext to address political issues.  Whence cometh this political orientation?  Historically, from a change in literary theory and criticism, from my day’s New Criticism, seeing a work of literature as an aesthetic object, to today’s New Historicism, viewing it as a force in society operating in matters of race, gender, class, and colonialism—a change much for the worse.  Raised in a different time and place, I regard this approach as having little, if anything, to do with the purpose of the study of literature, to appreciate the variety of experience represented in literature.

 

Two nits.  Meant to be alluring, the chances to “create a toolkit of literary terms and technique” and “get hands-on experience with literary experimentation” are instead peculiar and puzzling.  No need exists to “create” (whatever that process entails) a “toolbox” (whatever that object is).  Glossaries of “literary terms and technique,” like Cornell’s late distinguished English Professor M. H. Abrams’s, A Glossary of Literary Terms, are available.  The idea of “literary experimentation” by “hands-on experience” suggests the fanciful manipulation of texts (improving a Shakespearean sonnet?).

 

Despite a little incidental mockery along the way, I am serious about the pernicious effects of literary criticism which politicizes the study of literature.  I am not surprised by lower enrollments in English courses and declining numbers of English majors on many campuses, results which punish professors who have dismayed themselves and discredited the field by preferring politics to literature.  My daughter took a politically oriented English course at Cornell in the 1990s and swore off taking another; obviously, she is not alone.  My “big questions” are why are English professors blind or indifferent to a self-defeating, politicized approach to literary criticism, and why do they no longer maintain the study of literature as a part of a humanistic education.  Self-righteousness?

 

I began by affirming that we can learn from our “enemies.”  I assume that other course descriptions reflect a similar politicized approach to the study of literature.  I assume that conservative teachers politicize English courses as well, but on a smaller scale or on smaller and less prestigious campuses.  Although conservatives have been right about the liberal bias in many colleges and universities, their criticism stops at eliminating only liberal biases, not also conservative ones.  In my field, they offer no alternative based on an appreciation of literature per se or the humanistic tradition in research and teaching—where I plant my flag.