“The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world,” wrote American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History. Stop, pause and think deeply about those words. That thought is both simple and profound, I think.
Niebuhr was an influential voice of conscience as the shadow of the Cold War darkened the world and McCarthyism was eating at America’s soul. He wrote through the lens of a mid-century white male American gaze, eliding some of America’s worst excesses as a nation, or, at times, obliquely referencing them. But who doesn’t write though the lens of the present and one’s lived experiences.
His salient points, nonetheless, were about virtue, and in his book’s case: not rejecting the “Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue” while America pursues it Cold War battles with the Soviet Union through proxy wars. He wanted America to avoid the trap that our way, the American way, was the one true way.
You can imagine, were he alive today, Niebuhr would be a tenacious critic of Trump and the Christian right’s cult of virility; embodied by Stephen Miller’s pronouncement that the only virtues in the world are power, strength, and violence. Niebuhr’s and Trump’s concepts of virtue and Christianity are diametrically opposite.
As for an infant being secure in his world, I think Niebuhr was critiquing the naiveté of the growing popularity of the myth of American exceptionalism and government policies that flowed from that belief. The hubris that Americans of European heritage were a chosen people, in a land created by God for them, blinded them to history’s lessons. We see that myth once again resonant in America. Our government is run by these man-infants, these enfants terribles who naively and mistakenly believe that they are God’s chosen, that they speak for God, that only they have the virtue to lead America.
Well before Niebuhr, many, many centuries ago, Abu al-Ala al Ma’arri — a freethinking poet, philosopher, and writer, some would say heretic — was born in Syria in the late 10th century. He was skeptical and suspicious of any religion’s claim to absolute truth.
Blinded by smallpox while young, he was nonetheless a prolific author, dictating his many works. I came across a quote of his while reading about the crusades. At the time, I was posted to Beirut and had borrowed a three-volume work on the crusades to help pass the nights away. While al Ma’arri lived before the first crusaders set foot in Jerusalem in 1099, he did live in an Arab world where Shia and Sunni battled over the soul of Islam, territory, and power.
Al Ma’arri’s truism stuck with me. I even printed and framed the quote, hung it in my office for years: “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.” It was reminder to me of the sectarianism, fanaticism, and zealotry that drove (and drives) much of our world’s history. In Beirut, the grim reminders of sectarian civil war were everywhere.
It’s about extremism. Whether it be religious bigotry and zealotry predicated on deliberate interpretations, misreadings, or misconceptions of religious texts to murder the other; or scientific Darwinism used to justify the sterilization or murder of the mentally and physically disabled.
We never seem to learn the lessons of sectarian violence. If anyone is the personification of this ideation of no brains but religious certitude and bigotry it is Secretary of Defense Hegseth. For Trump in general, and Hegseth in particular, the Iran war wasn’t really a war to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, although it was part of the equation. The war is really about going to war with Islam on a global scale, punishing a transgressive Iran for not becoming supplicants like the Saudis or Emirates.
Netanyahu, for his part, exploited Trump’s and Hegseth’s biases and infant-like world view for his own purposes. For all his faults, and there are many, Netanyahu is not naïve like an infant, he sees the world for its complexities.
As for domestic politics, most every single consequential executive order issued by this President revolves around a form of white male Christian sectarianism and zealotry: American history (who counts and who’s erased), DEI (reinstating white male privilege), Immigration/birthright citizenship (racist replacement theory), access to reproductive rights (male control of the female body), and vaccinations (God decides who lives or dies).
Our government, it seems every day, is falling deeper into the latter half of al-Ma’rri’s dictum and continues to self-radicalize as Trump’s misjudgments tanks the economy and he is humiliated on the world’s stage by Iran. It is bad enough that the Executive Branch has been captured by these enfants terribles, but when Congress and the Supreme Court are also controlled by this gang of enfants terribles, things become dangerous.
Trump’s strongman grip strangling America’s democratic institutions is starting to slip as he becomes weaker politically, but his weakness is also simultaneously a time of greater danger. All strongmen flail violently when the end nears. Miller’s virtues — power, strength, violence — are a warning.
Democratic institutions like the courts should be rallying around the Constitution, and they are at the lower levels. But, given the Superme Court’s recent stay of a lower court’s order blocking implementation of parts of Trump’s executive order regarding mail in ballots, I doubt the Court will block Trump’s meddling and interfering with the mid-term elections.
America has had periods of rupture before and come back stronger. Will our country recover from the coming rupture this November? We have seen what Trump’s acolytes can and will do to overturn an election. Unlike January 6, 2021, the guard rails are gone. They are acting for God, they believe. Will Trump’s paramilitaries (DHS) rain pain on Americans after the mid-terms? Will the military occupy blue cities and seize ballot boxes? Will the Justice Department conduct mass arrests and detentions of Trump’s political opponents, blue state governors? Will Speaker Johnson refuse to seat newly elected democrats in the House? I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I thought they were far-fetched. Ten years ago, I would say these are crazy questions. Now, you feel in your gut that they aren’t far from the mark.
Our 250-year-old experiment in in serious jeopardy, both at home and abroad. We are a nation without friends. A bully pushing agendas driven by sectarian ideologies. Even our geographic neighbors – Canada and Mexico — hate us, it seems with a passion. Why? Because we the people choose this nut job now residing in the White House. We put him there. We choose this path with eyes wide open. Most Americans who voted choose to reelect a Machiavellian, narcist, psychopath with a god-complex whose first disastrous term ended in an attempted coup. What could go wrong?
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