“Rebuilding America (after Trump)” February 21, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
The first thing that all of us who live in a democracy must accept is that the messiah is not on the ballot. The media, especially in America, covers our elections with increasing intensity for two years leading up to each presidential election as if that singular vote was going to change the fate of the world. And, in the case of November 2020, it was much more important than usual because, if a president could mess up everything from the environment to international relations to the management of a pandemic, no one could be more destructive than Donald Trump. Still, Joe Biden, while he is already a much better president that Trump, is no messiah.
Like all of you, I am very relieved that Joe Biden has finally replaced Trump as America’s president but, without wanting to be too mean about this, our 77-year-old president attended one of the lower ranked law schools in America where he graduated near the bottom of the class. And, if he had attended one of the grad schools that I attended, he would have been kicked out in his first year when he was caught plagiarizing a paper, taking five full pages from a published law review and turning it in as his own work. How many of you would choose to have your heart surgery done by a physician who attended a low-ranking school and who barely graduated? I wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, and yet, the most powerful person in the world was chosen from among the bottom of the class.
Our political system is not very good at giving us a choice between two highly qualified candidates. Your political campaigns in the UK are never more than a few weeks long, since the date of your elections are unknown until announced. But you also put in place legislation to limit the amount of money spent on a campaign 150 years ago, something we have yet to accomplish.
Our candidates receive large donations from the very industries that the government is supposed to regulate. It would be like giving the monopoly of installing security systems to the mafia. The failure of American politics can be traced directly to political donations made by corporations and special interests and yet we have never mustered the political will to put a stop to this insane system.
A person of real intellectual prowess does sometimes make it into elected office, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama come quickly to mind, but, folks, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and his father, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Regan, could not have earned degrees from Ivy League schools without having been wealthy or influential. That is just a sad fact. More often than not, we elect presidents who would not be hired to manage a large retail store. Serious campaign finance reform would transform the quality of our candidates overnight, but you can imagine our industrial leaders prefer having mediocre minds in the seats of power because they are much more easily manipulated.
We have a very sad alliance between the corporate powers who want to manipulate government and a huge portion of our electorate that prefers politicians who reflect their own prejudices and their gullibility in the presence of easily disproven conspiracy theories. Your own media has reported a great deal on the whole QAnon phenomena in America which, even after the failed insurgency on January 6th, still claims about one-fourth of Republican voters and not a few among the voting public in the UK and Germany, largely inspired by resistance to pandemic quarantine measures.
I realize that reuniting our great nations within our own populations and among the world’s democracies is a noble and necessary goal but, we have to admit, we have a larger portion of our populations who are gullible than we ever cared to admit.
In a recent NPR pole, American voters were asked the question, "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly. Though no one has tried to see if the fourth of Americans who don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun and the fourth that believe in QAnon conspiracy theories are the same 25% of our population but I am willing to put my next paycheck on there being more than 80% overlap in those two groups.
Before you get too worried about American voters though, I should remind you that more than a third of the people in the UK believe that ghosts are real and even now, a few of you are likely saying to yourselves, “That American pastor was making a lot of sense until he said that.” But where we are more similar, about half of UK residents who voted for Brexit believe that your government is lying about how many immigrants are living in the UK and about half of Trump voters similarly believe that the US government is lying about the number of immigrants we have here.
No matter what else they tell you, most of the people who voted for Brexit have an anti-immigrant prejudice and an entirely exaggerated view of how many of them there are, and at least half of Trump voters are absolutely xenophobic, insisting on building a wall along our border with Mexico when the majority of movement along our border is people in the USA going to Central America. Many of my own family members and “former” acquaintances who were Trump supporters would tell you that they didn’t especially care for Trump but they liked his policies, which is complete bologna.
The Republican party in 2020 didn’t even come up with a platform! Trump had no policies, no core beliefs, no goals, and no ambition. People voted for him because they loved his slogans, his hatred of Democrats, blacks, gays, Mexicans, and people who read books.
John Churcher posed the question to me for this lecture, “How does America rebuild after Trump?” I do believe that in his first month in office that Joe Biden has done a lot to restore international credibility and to reverse many of Trump’s worst, most prejudiced and destructive policies. But undoing Trump’s influence on America will require more than getting Trump out of office or even putting he and his henchmen on trial and giving them permanent homes in our Federal Prison System. It will require a change of heart among Americans. Trump was a disastrous president who had an inexplicably close relationship with Putin and other tyrants, and a profound dislike for the majority of Americans. But he also revealed something that doesn’t feel at all good for me to have to say, an awful lot of Americans are not good people. Many are not terribly bright and not very good at critical thinking, but even if you don’t understand planetary movement at a 3rd grade level, not wanting sick people to receive health care, or opposing poor people receiving a living wage, that isn’t really about being smart or educated, is it? That’s about being a decent person. We have difficulty choosing to be decent people and that does not feel good to say.
40 years ago, when President Regan struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, there emerged an entire industry of radio talk shows and right-wing TV news services that turned hatred and prejudice into a form of entertainment. The late Rush Limbaugh, a product of the state where I live, was awarded the Medal of Freedom last year by Trump, shortly before he left office, literally giving one of America’s highest honors to a race-baiting, divisive, climate denying, college drop out.
Confucius once said that “one does not plaster and dung wall.” But, for the past two generations in America, we have been trying to gold plate ignorance and prejudice and that will have to stop if we ever want to get back on track as one of the world’s great nations. But with Limbaugh’s recent passing, we see what I believe will be the real change agent among Republican voters. Death. Most younger Republicans do not share their elders’ prejudice against homosexuals, blacks, Latinx, and the transgender community.
It seems grim to claim mortality as your reason for hope in the future, but the majority of the worst aspects of prejudice in America are found more often in the generation that is on its way to memorial gardens than is seen among younger conservatives. With every passing year for the past 25 years, Republican voters have been, on average, older, whiter, less education, and skewing more towards lower income families.
Through Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and with no small amount of foreign interference, the Trump Republican party may see a few gains in the midterm elections, but on their current path, unless they dramatically change their message, their priorities, and their appeal to non-white voters, the Republican Party is headed for extinction. As a liberal, you may think that would be something that I would celebrate but honestly, it is not. We need at least two viable parties, I wish that we had four, but we need at least two, in which case, I don’t want the Republican Party to fade out of existence, I just want it to be a better party; a more honest, intelligent, and moral party.
So let me try to sum up my best answer to John Churcher’s question: What does America need to do to rebuild after Trump?
Number one, as I have said, is going to be one of the hardest. That is sweeping campaign finance reform. Americans have to get corporations and special interests out of funding elections. We call them “campaign donations” but they are very obviously bribes, right? If McDonalds gives $10 million to health inspectors, you know what they are doing, right? It is no different when military manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and the banking industry raises billions of dollars for political candidates, they are bribing them, buying their support. And that must stop.
Secondly, we must restore the Fairness Doctrine that Ronald Reagan struck down 40 years ago. Americans love free speech but what Reagan did by striking down the requirement that news shows give a fair representation of both sides of an issue, allowed for public lying. It created an industry of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and tabloid journalism that has led to a grossly misinformed, deceived, and manipulated voting public. Germany saw what propaganda did to their nation in the 1940’s and passed laws to make sure that politicians would be punished for lying and their media had to strive for journalistic integrity. America must do the same.
Thirdly, we must renew our commitment to public education, to include access to higher education. When we have honesty in journalism, we also need serious content in our schools. QAnon and other conspiracies do not appeal to people who are capable of doing critical thinking. These insane tales of cannibalistic pedophiles running the government and space aliens and lizard people composing our deep state, are fictions used to thrill the simple minded, not the basis for either voting or storming the Capitol Building to overthrow our government.
It is easy to make light of uneducated people who fall for conspiracy theories, even though there are, at times, substantial danger represented by their delusional thinking. But even among some of our more educated professionals, misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and social media spread lies can have an effect. A half a million Americans have died from the coronavirus at this point and yet, here in Missouri, a half of our patient facing healthcare workers have refused to take the vaccines offered to them. Half! This is a mind-numbing level of scientific incompetence and vulnerability to the dumbest of internet rumors.
My fourth point is that our nation must be reunited around important and achievable goals. It is not always a war that unites a country. In many ways, our drive to put an astronaut on the moon captured America’s imagination and respect for science and engineering. We have been killing our planet by burning fossil fuels as if we had another planet to move to once we had destroyed this one.
Just as we reached new levels of cooperation globally to develop vaccines in the face of Covid-19, our scientists and yours, as well as those on every continent, need to develop sustainable energy, non-polluting transportation, and efficient and effective delivery of health care. Ironically, we already know how to do most of these things and even while we have been distracted by childish political partisan fighting, major automobile manufacturers have turned from gas burning cars to electric cars. The technology of wind and solar power production is already more affordable than burning coal and gas. We can save the planet while we make human life more just, more fair, and, frankly, more enjoyable. Why should the French get all of the paid vacations?
It would likely be kind of me to end right there but I don’t want to be Pollyannish about this. These four simple steps are not simple, they are massively difficult and maybe even impossible for us at this time.
I am not universally a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was theologically a bit too conservative for my tastes and yet there is no denying that he was both very brave and very smart. In one of his letters from prison, written as he awaited execution at the hands of the Nazis, Bonhoeffer spoke very frankly, as only a German can, about stupid people.
He wrote: ‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
It is difficult to just write off 20 or 30% of your own country as being so irredeemably ignorant that there is no building of a bridge towards reconciliation. Damn us if we don’t try, but we cannot risk our democracies on being successful in getting people who have repudiated science, history, and reason in favor of conspiracy theories and prejudices to suddenly come to their senses. My greatest fear for the Biden administration is his inherent desire to reunite the left and the right.
Talk about being non-partisan always sounds right. Obama fell for it in 2008 and, like Charlie Brown, kept falling for it until Republicans regained a majority in the Senate and the Congress and nearly kept him from accomplishing anything.
My fear is that Biden wants harmony so much that he will fall for the same ploy that derailed the Obama administration. There are people who simply will not come to the table. That is true in your churches as you try to figure out how to adjust to be relevant in the 21st Century, and it is true in your Parliament, and it is especially true in American government.
Once a church member, a politician or an in-law has demonstrated that they are impervious to facts, it may be time to just move on towards accomplishing your goals rather than becoming paralyzed by sophistry. That is, of course, just my opinion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
