The Centre Holding, Barely

 I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
-Robert Frost, Ten Mills, I. Precaution

It is time to think about the future.  Not just the next four or even eight years, but the future of our Republic.  A very dangerous moment has just passed, and we have inaugurated a new President.  He is not the man that radicals wanted, he is not going to shake up the order of things and create a new paradigm in our government.  Joe Biden is a centrist, that most uninspiring creature, but the sort that you really need to be in charge in a time like this.  Our norms have been chewed up and spit out, our institutions have been tested, who knows how far they were from breaking. Depends on who you talk to.  Thankfully we didn't find out.  Thankfully the sound and fury played their hour upon the stage and the idiot has shuffled off to Florida.

Personally, I am living my life backward, I was much more conservative when I was 19 than I am now.  The difference for me has mostly been the development of empathy.  I didn't have much when I was young, I have more now, and it seems to be growing.  If I'm not careful I may end up one of those extremely sentimental old folks who seem to really just love everyone.  As for right now though, I find myself very much in the center what you might call the political spectrum.  I am pulled a bit to the left because of my convictions about justice, particularly for the poor and the oppressed.  Honestly, I can't imagine myself 20 years ago embracing liberation theology quite like I do now, but I do, and I don't regret it.  Capitalism, while I still consider it superior to the alternatives, needs a heart transplant if it's going to help us advance as a species.

The thing is though, the takeover of the "conservative" movement by a populist demagogue with deep personal flaws actually made me appreciate the conservatism I used to call my home. 15 years ago I considered George W. Bush a fool at best and a war criminal at worst, Trump's administration has made me nostalgic for W, and it also makes me think, what in the actual heck is going on here?  Well, as it turns out, if you plot our recent presidents going back to WWII, most of them end up falling pretty much within spitting distance of the center.  At worst this means there isn't a drastic difference between how say Bill Clinton handled things and how W did it.  I suspect that we still would have gotten ourselves sunk into the quagmire in Afghanistan even if Gore had been President.  Iraq part deux, maybe not, but who knows.  But at best, it means there isn't a drastic difference in how the two sides would have handled things.  For instance if a conventional Republican had been President last year when COVID hit, he or she probably would have handled things very much the way the Biden administration is going to do it: tell people to wear masks, shut down what had to be shut down without making it a political football, work like hell on a vaccine and try to get it rolled out quick and smooth.  

What Trump did is try to spin this virus, that did not care about political party, from something that was making him look bad to something he could use to his advantage.  The goal should have been: keep over 400,000 Americans from dying, but instead it was: get Donald J. Trump re-elected.  I think even Tricky Dick Nixon probably rolled over in his grave.  Republicans owe it to us as a nation to not let another character like him get their nomination.  We need conservatives to operate like conservatives, not like terrorists, but that is what the far right fringe is right now.  The Proud Boys and the others like them on the right are exactly the sort of bogeymen that Fox news tries to make of Antifa.  They are willing to be violent, they believe conspiracies of all sorts, and they think that they can win.  The left has had some who think that way in their house for decades, but they have never quite let them get so close to running the show, and a Democratic president has never sent them marching to the capitol with his love and admiration.

Let me tell anyone who is afraid of the sinister elements on the Left, and I say this sympathetically, they are far too disorganized and perhaps even schizoid to be any real danger.  Antifa is not a shadowy organization seeking the overthrow of the government, they're not even hard core anarchists (which if there was a threat from the left, would probably be it).  Antifa is a shortened form of Anti fascist, which means they are against fascism, the statist manifestation of authoritarianism.  Donald, only I can fix it, Trump was the closest thing we've ever had to a fascist in the oval office.  But he wasn't completely there yet, he was sort of a half baked fascist.  I am very much against fascism, which I suppose makes me Antifa, at least as much as anything can.  I'm not out rioting in the streets, I don't even go to peaceful protests, I don't like crowds.  I write and I preach about Jesus.  Jesus was put to death by fascism, the much ballyhooed Pax Romana was a textbook example of fascism, which was probably why Mussolini had such a great time bringing it back to Italy during WWII. That being said, the Democrats shouldn't let that crowd run the party either.  Even and perhaps especially if they're trying to use the name of Jesus to do it.  There was actually a scene in the Gospel where he is offered the authority to rule all the kingdoms of the world, and it was an offer from the Devil.

So listen up America, you know when J-Lo sang This Land is Your Land, yesterday?  Did you get a little misty?  I did too, but I know that Woody Guthrie wrote that song, and he wrote it because he absolutely HATED Irving Berlin's God Bless America. And he wrote it because he was a pretty hard core socialist with the workers rights movement.  Woody lived close to the working people and he thought the Robber Barons and the Politicians were his natural enemy.  Property ownership was a bit of a sticky subject in some of the non-J-Lo friendly verses of that song, and so was the plight of people who worked their whole lives and couldn't feed their family.  That song demonstrates that you can be a leftist and be a patriot, for real, you can love this country and what it stands for, you can love the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  The patriotism of the right fringe is all about hatred and exclusion, they're not writing great songs about this land, they're chanting about killing people and storming the capitol.

You need to stand in the center to see the difference.  Hopefully, if we do what Joe asked us, if we hear him out, no matter where we stand on taxes, on healthcare and suchlike, we might gain from that center perspective and see what the real dangers to our Republic actually are. And we won't be so ready to buy that white supremacy is the only thing keeping us from communism or that smashing out the windows of a Best Buy is stopping fascism, and we won't equate being asked to speak politely and civilly with being cancelled and maybe we won't be so hot and ready to cancel people in the first place. From the center you can see that ideas might compete, but you don't always have to only pick red or blue, this isn't the Matrix (as far as I can tell). Only if we see them for what they are do we stand a chance of putting them to rest.