A Double Barreled Counter-Reformation

I’d like to dedicate this post to the late, beloved, Katherine Smith. Kay and her husband Dutton were like family to me, as her extended family are still. Kay was a constant reader of this blog and quite often emailed me about my writing, offering comments and encouragement. When you die, if you find yourself in an afterlife and Kay isn’t there, you are not in heaven.

 First, I’d like you to imagine yourself as an average peasant in Western Europe in 1516, the year before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The Protestant Reformation is not yet even an idea. There is no “Catholic Church.” There is just “The Church.” It permeates personal, family, economic, and political life. For someone living in Koln, or Naples or Lyon in 1516 there is nothing else. Sure, there are a few Jews about, and you’ve heard, perhaps, of Muslims and Hindus, but these are oddities. Tuck this idea away for later; there was a time when, for the people of Western Europe, there was only one spiritual option, and no concept of any other.

Then, after 1517, there were other versions of Christianity. Lutheranism, of course, and Calvinism. John Knox took Luther’s ideas to Scotland and founded the Presbyterian Church. Suddenly, there were options. The Catholic Church did not tolerate this loss of power and preeminence.

The century between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s is the era of what is now known as the Counter Reformation. It was fought on an array of battle fronts:  political, legal, military, theological, and organizational. The Vatican engaged in diplomacy, cracked down on dissent, and fomented wars. It also formed new organizations, such as the Jesuits, set scholars to work clarifying its theology, and actually engaged in some internal reforms. I won’t dig too deeply into this, since the Counter Reformation has filled a stack of books. It is enough to say that it got brutally violent, with torture and executions, and was finally ended by a vicious war, now known as the Thirty Years War. The terrorism and starvation partially depopulated northern Germany by its end in 1648. Catholicism didn’t yield power quietly, and the aftershocks of that fight persist to this day.

Now imagine yourself as a heterosexual Christian white man in 1947. Perhaps you are working in a unionized factory job or farming. Perhaps you are going to college on the GI Bill, preparing yourself for the white collar world. Whatever your path, your place is analogous to the peasant of 1516, in terms of your demographic identity. Desegregation is in the future. The heyday of the civil rights movement hasn’t arrived. Women’s rights aren’t a thing. Likewise LGBT rights, or even their existence. Secularism is a fringe idea, and psychotherapy is for rich kooks. Like a fish not understanding water, your preeminence in American society isn’t something you even consider. It’s just the way things are.

Nothing big ever happens for just one reason, but I’ll blame our present situation on the beginning and the end of democracy. To be more nuanced, I’ll say the beginning of the beginning of democracy and the beginning of the end. The dates I’m thinking of are not 1776 or 1787 to start and 2016 or a future date to end. I’m thinking of 1965 and 1976. I’ll start with the beginning of the beginning.

From 1787 to 1920 half the population, that is, women, could not vote. A country where half of its citizens are disenfranchised can’t really call itself a democracy. Until 1965, members of racial minorities were not guaranteed the right to vote. Even after 1965 it was only a right on paper in many places. Voting is not the entirety of democratic rights, but it is foundational, and it was missing before then. Functionally I’d combine the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the laws that finally allowed all Americans political participation. (At least on paper)

This was, as we know, not universally popular. Put it in the context of a cascade of social revolutions in the United States. None of these revolutions is complete, but they have each become mainstream in their goals and in public understanding. The civil rights revolution gained traction in the 1950s and 1960s. Its successes were a catalyst. Women’s rights became prominent in the 1970s. LGBTQ rights (originally primarily focused on gay men) gained prominence in the 80s and 90s, with a milestone of marriage equality in 2015. In the first years of the 21^st century secular rights, or more generally the rights of non-Christians started getting serious attention. As noted, none of these revolutions is complete, but they all have much more strength and prominence than they did decades ago. Again, this is not universally popular. Layered on top of all of these was what I call the psychological revolution. Americans became more and more comfortable with the idea that people could seek help to analyze their emotional problems and change their behaviors and beliefs, rather than just copying the mistakes of their parents. This has been a huge threat to traditional authority.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that a set of novels from the 1990s popular among Christian conservatives was called the “Left Behind” series. The books chronicle the trials of a group of Christians left behind on earth during the biblical Armageddon. For a straight, white, Christian conservative in the United States it must feel that way these days. All their assumptions of innate righteousness and superiority are being denied. The fact that they are supposed to even think about these subjects in an analytical way seems an insult.

For a large number of white Americans, the Civil Rights Act was a chastisement. It said, “What you learned from your parents and your society was morally wrong. The way you have acted your entire life has been wrong. Many things you believe now, institutions you value, and your instinctive habits of social interaction are morally wrong.” This was true. Still, nobody likes to be told even a fraction of that. Only fictional characters such as Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, or Shakespeare’s Richard the Third actually decide to be evil. Real people, even racists and authoritarians, think that what they do is right and that they are moral actors.

Add up the cascade of revolutions, right and necessary though they were, and you get two things in this demographic; intense resentment and existential anxiety. It is because of this that the Democratic Party hasn’t won a majority of the white vote since 1964.

We are living during a period of counter-reformation. It’s a double barreled counter-reformation. I’m focusing on the social aspect of it, but there is also an economic side. Wealthy people and corporations have been pushing back on limits to their power since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The robber barons of the 1890s hated the reforms of their era as much as the next generation hated the reforms of the New Deal and the rise of unionization. Their children despised the high income tax rates of the 1950s and the clean air and water laws of the 1970s. The reason this matters is that the wealthy have used the discontent of conservative Christian racists to their own ends from the Civil Rights era onward. The resentment against government action to protect marginalized groups was ginned up into a generalized resentment against government regulation, holding back or rolling back restraints on wealth and corporate power.

And then we elected a black president. He was charismatic, intelligent, educated, charming, and a talented orator. Heads exploded all over the country. The birther movement came out of the utter incompatibility of the white supremacist worldview with such a man at the top of the world’s social and political pyramid. I personally can’t comprehend the nuclear level of cognitive dissonance that this event must have created.

Two ordinary politicians failed to defeat him. He was followed by his Secretary of State, a woman who had committed the crime of being unapologetically intelligent, experienced, opinionated, ambitious, and not conservative.

Enter the demagogue.

Eric Hoffer, a social philosopher, wrote The True Believer, published in 1951. It was his explanation of how mass movements arise and how demagogues incite their followers to mass violence. He was writing in response to the rise of Hitler, but devised a general theory.

The short version (historians forgive me) goes like this: A group of people feel that they are losing power, status, and economic success. Often these are the “New Poor,” once thriving but recently down on their luck. They feel as if the center of power has shifted away from them. A demagogue tells them that this is not just the way of the world and the path of history. No, they *deserve* to have power, status, and prosperity. That power has been stolen from them by deceptive and criminal means. A well-defined other group is responsible. This other group can be defined by race, politics, religion, nationality, or some combination thereof. The demagogue tells the aggrieved group that it is their destiny to achieve the greatness of their past by defeating the scapegoated group.

The techniques of this movement start with insults and propaganda and work their way up through boycotts and demonstrations to discriminatory laws.  Then comes stochastic violence followed by planned violence. An important point is that it doesn’t start with atrocities. It begins with scapegoating, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing the targeted group(s); political speech. The true believers incrementally escalate their behavior. By the time they reach planned violence, there is no going back. To go back is to admit that they are bad people who have done reprehensible things. To go back is to risk ostracism and violence.

I see the U.S. as being in the beginning of the stochastic violence stage. I’m not saying there hasn’t been state sponsored violence all along. I’m limiting myself to the path of the general public over last few decades.

Earlier, I mentioned the beginning of the beginning of democracy and the beginning of the end, in 1976. I place the beginning of the end in 1976, because that was the year of the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. The case was about campaign finance laws, and the Supreme Court struck down certain restrictions on campaign spending, notably limits on total expenditures by candidates and outside groups, and narrowed the scope of donor disclosures. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the beginning of ever larger inputs of money into American politics. Incrementally more money went into politics, exploding after 2010, when Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down restrictions on corporations spending money to advocate for or against candidates. That was followed in 2014 by McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down aggregate limits on individual political contributions. From 1976 on, cash has been king.

I’ve written about it before, but a summary of the USPIRG study, “The Wealth Primary,” is in order. USPIRG investigated the relationship between campaign fundraising and victory. They found that:

The candidate who spends the most money wins, 92% of the time.

High spending candidates outspend 2^nd place candidates by an average of 3:1.

80% of the high spender’s money is donated by multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Being the high spender doesn’t absolutely guarantee a win, but not raising enough money guarantees a loss. Equally important, having opinions that offend rich people dramatically reduces a candidate’s chances. This has played out in legislation. Some researchers polled wealthy people and ordinary people on their policy opinions. Then they compared that to the fate of bills in Congress. They found that the positive opinion of wealthy people almost guaranteed passage and the negative opinion of the rich killed bills. The opinions of ordinary people had no effect.

What does campaign finance have to do with racial counter-reformation? The tsunami of cash hobbled the Democratic Party. Democratic candidates who might have appealed to the economic self-interest of racially disgruntled white people were incrementally replaced by apologists for wealth and corporate dominance. We saw the rise of the corporate Democrat, the Wall Street Democrat, the Third Way triangulating Democrat. The Republican Party had been corporate and wealthy for most of the 20^th century, but they hid that behind the shields of anti-communism, religiosity, and racism.

The Democratic Party could have offered more than lip service to working class and middle class Americans, but most of the politicians who would have done that couldn’t make it through the money filter. Sure, we get an AOC or Bernie in hyper-blue districts, but the majority have been carefully selected for their dilute corporate liberalism. Economically indifferent, corporate friendly social policies like marriage equality get through. A decent minimum wage and fair labor laws have no chance. Given the choice between that and policies catering to racism and bigotry, voters either go Republican or go home. We saw this in 2016. The split was 25% Trump, 25.3% Clinton, and almost 50% either staying home or voting for no-hope third party candidates. A candidate getting a slim majority of the disillusioned would have beaten both mainstream candidates.

I don’t have a glib solution to these problems. The money filter has a ratcheting effect on incumbents. None would want to reduce the role of campaign cash because that’s how they succeeded, and to do so would be to admit their true masters. The racial/religious Counter Reformation is a generational battle. We just have to see it with clear eyes and fight it out politically.

Part of seeing it with clear eyes is to see it through the eyes of the reactionaries. To them it is a fight for survival. Normal rules don’t apply. They will lie, cheat, even kill for their cause. Part of seeing it through clear eyes is realizing that facts mean little and emotion means everything. I recommend George Lakoff’s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” for lessons on the successful emotional framing of political subjects. That framing is for the disengaged middle third of American politics. The reactionaries won’t be convinced. We can’t change them; we can only outlast them.

Here’s the most important tool, expressed as a fantasy. Imagine if I could pick up a bottle on the beach and release the Law Genie. The Law Genie would grant me one law, passed in the House and the Senate, signed by the president and approved by the Supreme Court. It would be this: Limit political contributions to a day’s wages at the federal minimum wage. Right now that’s $58. It would apply to candidates, parties, PACs, 501C this and 401C that. Anything to do with electing lawmakers or making laws. Political entities could raise as much money as they want, but would have to do it $58 at a time. Bill Gates and the guy who mows Bill’s lawn would have the same political clout. Exxon Mobil and a gas station attendant would be equal. Likewise multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos and an Amazon warehouse worker.

Until this or something very close to this happens, wealth will govern America. Take your favorite political cause – fighting climate change, ending police violence, livable wage, healthcare reform, education reform, whatever – write it on a piece of paper, crumple it until it is soft, and wipe your ass with it. Forget about it. You aren’t going to get it in a plutocracy. The people who make laws were carefully selected for their wealth-friendly beliefs. Focus on the single point of attachment that allows the wealthy and big business to steer our country – campaign cash. The wealthy will decide who wins primaries until we level the playing field. It will be the fight of the century.