It's hard to sort out what a Christian attitude should look like with regard to politics. Our bishops don’t appear to be a credible guide given entanglements in the gay and government mafias, the latter being money from contracts handling refugees and an understanadable desire to kneel before Ceaser to avoid shrinking an ever-shrinking church and avoid offending political leaders who, to some extent, hold religious liberty in their hands.
The conflict for me is a wish for unity (ala David French) versus the reality (two countries in a pre-civil war era). It might be just one of timing: French is where I was pre-Trump, and everyone comes to the line of discovery at different times based on different criteria. Part of the difficulty is simply ascertaining God’s will for the patriotic. When do we recognize domestic enemies as enemies rather than citizens with differing views? I guess it’s just line-drawing.
Jesus said to love our enemies but that implies we'd have enemies. In that sense, one can see someone like the California Antifa teacher Gipe as an enemy who needs to be stripped of his job immediately at the very least. He might lose his job but he’ll be taken care of by the Left army, which is what the right needs to do as well. In war you take care of your soldiers. I don't blame the Left if they financially supported Gipe anymore than I'd blame the Confederacy for supporting their leaders.
David French posted a laughable piece today insinuating that if the GOP wasn’t so Trumpy we could draw in more Democrat pro-lifers, which is sort of like saying, “if the GOP in 1860 was nicer and better, we could’ve avoided the Civil War.”
Is tribalism inherently bad? When you have a two-party system and one of the parties becomes tribal then it feels like an asymmetrical warfare situation with a big advantage for the tribal side, since they will stick by their own side more cohesively. This used to be the function of patriotism but that's dead since at best only half the country identifies as American these days.
With canines, two dogs will get along if one is dominant and one is submissive. This was the dynamic in the country as long as the GOP was submissive and guilt-ridden but post-Trump that seems no longer to be the case and so the country is fracturing.
The media held the GOP in check for decades by the threat of ending careers but after Trump's victory in '16 it seemed to show that the media's power had ebbed in part due to its own shredding of its credibility. (In '20, of course, the media showed it still had some effective tools in its toolbox, like the astonishing suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.)
Perhaps there’s a faint echo of all of this in the Catholic Church where the famous dubia was sent to Francis, as well as in Vigano’s dramatic (and non-submissive) letter. I wonder if traditionalists and the pope could’ve coexisted more peaceably without the interventions?
It seems in the politics of the church and state that a desire for clarity is the beginning of rupture. The desire, for example, for transparency in the election process has been a disaster given that the Dems/media have pushed back so remarkably hard that a bipartisan issue is now knee-jerkedly partisan. Similarly the dubia, which would ideally be seen as a bipartisan request for clarity (on the surface don't both sides want to know if Communion can be given to divorced and remarried Catholics?) ends up pushing Pope Francis to stonewall and feel a loathing for the "instigators".
In order to hold wildly disparate forces in check, does there have to be ambiguity in order for both sides to feel like they can spin things their way? The problem with ambiguity is it gives little direction or comfort and seems to just kick the can down the road. Perhaps that’s the goal. Procrastinate in the hope things will improve with time.
The conservative impulse is one of gratitude for the way things are. But what happens when things change so fast that that thing you were grateful for just yesterday (i. e. patriotism, rule of law) is gone today?
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