WHAT IS THE CRUCIAL ISSUE IN THE 2020 ELECTION? — PART 1

“All you have is childish ridicule. Should have left that in high school.”

You mean like your childish name caller-in-chief, Donald Trump does, the pious leader in your holy crusade of victimhood? 😆

Tom,

Did you ever notice that every atrocity by the dominant political group usually begins with a sense of victimhood on their part?

The whole life and message of Jesus, especially in The Sermon on the Mount, makes clear that Christians have reached a kind of sweet spot of sorts when we are ACTUALLY persecuted because we practice virtue in our love with, in and through Christ. Retaliation, political domination, hatred and revenge are counterintuitive to the whole concept of such loving sacrifice in Christ, even when the persecution justifies it, which it ridiculously does not here. For the dominant political religious group to lavishly hate and whine from their ivory towers in the name of such faux Christian grievance is hypocrisy to the point where even satirical ridicule can’t do it justice. Unfortunately, the ironic twist often only makes it shamelessly double down in it’s shamefulness. But it’s still worth a try because, as MLK made clear, return hatred cannot overcome such a faux grievance based hatred – only love overcomes such hatred. 🙂

“There is no virtue in being a victim.”

Good point. And yet why do you ridiculously seek to proclaim yourself one. The Sermon on the Mount does not beatify faux victimhood and grievance as just a lame excuse to pursue political domination. It ultimately glorifies the virtuous in Christ who are actually suffering.

“You are voting for a political party that has turned victimhood into an ideology.“

Do you mean the faux victimhood of White Identify Grievance Politics? That is a Trumpublican ideology. I may vote for a for a few traditional Republicans and some Democrats, but I’m definitely not voting for any Trumpublicans. I think we are all just about worn out with all that WASP male whining. The country needs a long break from all the petulant drama and corruption of Trumpism.

Tom,

That’s a fine list of grievances, but the underlying grievance to all your pretense is just that you want to retain a WASP patriarchal dominance, and so you’ve fallen for a sad promoter of populist nationalism. Trump would be dangerous if he weren’t so pathetic.

In a way, we are all lucky that we just got a flamboyantly corrupt and incompetent Berlusconi instead of a more deadly Putin to raise us this tattered old fascist flag. Trump’s failure in handling the COVID crisis made his weakness transparent to the most of the nation, but if it weren’t this one then so many other crises were already surrounding us and intruding on the illusion of Trump’s revanchist mirage, the nostalgic dream (or nightmare for most) of a return to a lily white male dominated 1950’s Ozzie and Harriet America that never really was for so many Americans.

There are way too many real problems in the nation and the world today, and the world is shrinking as these problem grow. Nationalist Isolationism wasn’t ever a viable possibility, even if it were lead by someone more brutally capable than the preening, self inflated orange one.

The ascending alternatives are the Chinese style Orwellian state with a mind control of advanced robotic precision that Orwell never imagined or a Putinesque social Darwinism of what is essentially increasingly brutal feudal mob rule. If the liberal world order that emerged after WWII is to survive human induced natural cataclysms, then it will need to provide a serious answer to these problems, an answer that compromises human rights and individual dignity with the ability to selflessly and virtuously sacrifice for each other toward a common future. There are no frontiers left for us to desecrate and murder the inhabitants. We need to scrap our rapacious individualism for something more virtuously sustainable, harmonious and loving because a dystopian future won’t wait for us to wake up from nostalgic dreams.

Trump was never a serious person in an increasingly serious time. But the times they are getting serious whether we get a decent serious leader or not. Soon, perhaps before you and I leave this mortal coil, our grandchildren will look at us with hunger and real want in their eyes, and wonder what we were thinking when we were playing with Trumpism while watching the world flood and burn around us.

Tom,

What is it that you dispute? That Trump’s appeal to his cult like followers is one of good ole fashioned nationalist populism, an emotional revanchist nostalgia for a WASP Patriarchal monocultural dominance? You think what Trump is selling is some rational policy plan rather than pure grievance based emotion? Trump doesn’t even dog whistle it anymore. There’s no plan. It’s just pure white identity tribalism. Trump’s answer to every problem is some impractical form of xenophobic and ethnocentric isolationism:

Build a stupid wall to unsuccessfully keep the brown people out. Then stupidly tax the American consumer to keep the cheap Chinese products out of Walmart’s fully integrated Globalized market capitalism. Now it’s a ridiculous blue “Law and Order“ wall to keep the scary black men away from white suburban womanhood, but it’s too late and nobody is buying that kind of Republican race baiting anymore.

Trump was felled and laid low by a a single wealthy Chinese person buying exotic bushmeat from a wet market in Wuhan. The world is just that small and it can’t be walled out anymore and white supremacy can’t be walled in anymore.

Trumpism never was going to be practical, but it might have been more dangerous. Luckily, Trump is just as incompetent at political leadership as he is at business acumen.

“Wanting schools that don’t teach white kids to hate their race?“

I can’t even count all the ways that statement amazingly proves everything I just said about the fantastic world of Trumpism’s white identity grievance based politics. Thanks. It seems that your “concerns” “address” themselves, if you just think about it good brother, because inside that white grievance mindset is the only place they actually exist.

Consider it this way Tom – only someone who fancies himself superior can be insulted by being told that he is actually just inferior, like everyone else. A skin pigment didn’t enslave and persecute another skin pigment for hundreds of years. Self affiliated groups of actual people did that to other groups of actual people. Race was just the cultural construct of tribal group affiliation or identity that engenders their implicit biases toward their in group and against the outgroup.

And yet that is how you define one of your grievances, or “concerns” as you put it. You pretend not to participate in “identity politics” unless you feel that it is the self superiority of YOUR “racial” (and religious and sexual) identity that you somehow feel is bring threatened with something even a little less than exclusive superiority, even just will historical truth.

You don’t see it yet do you? We all have very good reason to hate what our nation’s white identity groups did to other humans of other pigments and features based on the notion of white supremacy. This happened and our nation’s founders, framers and ratified and actively participated in that evil. To just point out in schools that that enslavement, persecution and genocide historically happened in our nation with the complicity of our government only can make someone “hate their own race“ if they accept race as a their identifying group construct. To feel such faux group grievance without any of the group guilt is the ultimate self delusion of all mob tyranny.

“I am supposed to want schools that teach white kids to hate their race?“

When do you stop beating your wife?

“I don’t believe race has any practical reality”

So you’re color blind.

“Racial differences don’t amount to a hill of beans, but they are observable,”

So no one is actually color blind.

“and they have been used as an excuse for slavery.”

“They”? By exactly what “groups” have “they” been used? A nation group? A government group? A church group? Do any of us still belong to or hold citizenship in any of these groups?

“Evil does not require a ‘real’ excuse.”

Ok, you are just saying lots of opposite things here: It is/was an excuse and then it is/was not an excuse, and then it is/was not the real excuse because no excuse is/was needed, but quite obviously it is/was needed and used because it actually was used for 400 years and counting of human atrocities, and counting.

“Yet, when you should know better, here you are babbling away, so ridden with guilt you cannot think straight.”

You are making about five absolutely contradictory statements at the same time, but I’m the one not thinking straight?

“You, because you are so superior, have the right to inflict your guilt upon other people’s children.”

Now you’re just projecting.

“Nobody but you has the right to define what a proper grievance might be.“

Again, what is your “proper” white “grievance”? The mere teaching of historical and current truth, if it makes a racist person, nation, church or culture feel guilty of their own racism, then it’s a proper grievance?

Liz,

Why the fallacious overreaction and hyperbolic false equivalencies to mere truth, to mere facts? Most of our own founders and framers were indeed white supremacists. If you asked every one at the time, what is your moral justification for slavery, they would have openly (and did say), it was the superiority of their whiteness and the inferiority of their slaves’ blackness that justified their right to use humans as property (and to commit genocide upon native Americans because of practical difficulties and that supposedly savage group’s resistance to bondage).

You say that those mere facts must be equivocated or excused with a moral relativity of time and place? First of all, to do this, one has to accept that the most enduring tenants of morality, and particularly the form of Christian ethics that our founders proclaimed, is not eternally truth, but simply relative. Second of all, who is actually advocating not judging the White Supremacist racism that our founders and framers openly advocated and practiced by both the moral standard of the times along with the eternal standards we Christians profess to believe in?

As to the former question of eternal standards, the founders writings are replete with statements that slavery was morally wrong (Jefferson’s, Washington’s and Adams’, in particular, are just not that hard to find). Recognizing the inherent moral contradiction between slavery and the natural rights polemically stated in the Declaration’s manifesto of rights, at the time of the founding, Jefferson wanted to put a sunset law on slavery, but was overruled by the economic benefits of the practice to his fellow founders.

Evidence that Washington knew slavery was inherently wrong is given by the moral penance he attempted to pay to rehabilitate his legacy by freeing only HIS slaves in his will, but only after he obviously had no use for them and not until his wife, by her death, had no use for them either.

As far as the relative morality of the times goes, the argument is often made that slavery was a common human institution that preceded and went back to and was even morally accepted by Jesus and Paul in their writings, so the founders could also be excused for innocently believing it was moral even though we superior modern folk have supposedly wised up now. Notwithstanding the fact that this argument simply mischaracterizes Christian teachings about love, it also excuses the particularly brutal and dehumanizing characteristics of white supremacy as our a justification for slavery.

Within a generation or less, human tribalIstic differences that justify enslaving “the other” with particularly cruel prejudice tend to disappear. People who have studied the history of slavery say that in most cases slaves taken in battle simply become part of the family within a generation or so, and even where slavery has become part of the economic institutions of the society, same race slavery was not near as cruel and dehumanizing as could be justified by the enslavement that included stark racial differences. As such, historical experts on slavery tell us that there is simply very little precedent for the moral depravity of the institution of black African bondage in this country from the beginning through Jim Crow, and even its lasting vestiges present only a generalization later. Indeed, one of the factors that made bringing black African slaves to this country was that their brutal separation from their native culture and race, once they got here, gave them no place to hide and no where to run, permanently and totally subjugating them to the hopelessness of their fate. This may not have been a reasoned conspiracy by slavers but instead just an economic reality that manifested itself and was expanded upon, to some extent even to this day. That’s how resilient the economic legacy of white supremacy is. 400 years and still crawling out of our heads like the determined beast our tribalism makes us.

The founders and framers can still stand out in our history as an important and very flawed beginning step in the progress of human moral development. However, idolizing these WHITE ELITE MEN ahistorically as gods does a revisionist disservice to those first small steps, minimizes the actual heroism and monumental accomplishments of those that fought for the major changes that have thus far realized the dream that was actually a lie at the founding, and worse, concretizes the lie in our history, thus making it more likely to be repeated over and over.

Ok, Liz now throw some more fallacious over-the-top hyperbolic examples at me, and we’ll continue the actual history lesson if you like, or I can just recommend some book for you.😉

Ugg! Put the comment in the wrong place. Liz please hold your fire and see up top. Tag, rah!

Liz,

Sorry about the pox. That must suck big time. Get better, and we’ll solve the world’s problems later.❤️

“The USA did not invent slavery. The blacks the slavers imported from Africa had already been enslaved.”

Tom,

You obviously did not read what I wrote. This is a bit of an overblown myth Americans like to use to ameliorate the national guilt of what is likely the most brutal, lasting and inhumanly evil institution of human bondage in human history. And the reason why it was the worst is because if the concept of white supremacy.

Why was our institutions of bondage, first with slavery and then with Jim Crow, dramatically worse in the breadth and depth of its inhumanity? As I wrote, earlier historians who study slavery tell us:

1. Because masters began to relate to their slaves, captive slaves taken in battle rarely remained in bondage beyond a generation. With the concept of white supremacy, racial differences perpetuated a myth of inferiority that enabled permanent economic institutions that relegated black Africans to a lower caste system that persists to this day. Thus branded by the meaningless, but genetically impermeable characteristics of race features, blacks found it impossible to generationally slip the prison of bondage by blending in to the dominating culture.

2. Even in history where bondage was more institutionalized into the agrarian economic system, such as as you mention, white supremacy allowed a more permanent level of callous brutality than existed historically anywhere in the history of same race slavery in Africa, Rome, Greece, or anywhere else. Institutionalized white supremacy in America was a quantum level, in its inhuman barbarity and it’s legally self perpetuating depravity, above anything in human history.

3. Unlike captive slaves that were simply uprooted and transplanted into bondage by another tribe or culture, when Africans were uprooted and transported thousands of miles in slave ships that doubled as pacification torture and death devices, white supremacy placed black Africans into a dehumanizing cultural and physical prison that they found almost insurmountably difficult to escape. Native Americans, at least initially, could fall back or escape into endless wilderness where they could return to their tribe or eventually earn their way into another tribe that valued their contribution to the common survival. Although some slaves did escape to the Indian tribes, because of white supremacy, the compete uprooting of black Africans racially and culturally, made this avenue simply unavailable for the large number of slaves being brought to the New World. This became an economic advantage for Black African slaves over other forms of bondage (such as indentured servitude) that was not lost on plantation owners and it was rather rapidly capitalized upon.

4. The creation of a caste system through the institution of White Supremacy also had economic advantages to plantation owners and Northern capitalists in that it created a race to the bottom competitive stratification between blacks and poor whites. MLK realized that this economic caste system was the real enemy to racial equality and until poor whites realized that they were captives to white supremacy and being played in the game of class competition, then everyone would continue to unwittingly support and defend the racist institutions that promulgated their own bondage.
MLK realized that this would require, not only racial equality, but also a new rise in the equality in the value of our basic humanity, our basic human decency, or in other words, a new appreciation of the God in Whose image we all gain our common value. This value by its vary nature is not a material value, but a spiritual one which must exist outside and even override the capitalistic system that has its own particularly mercenary valuing system in which basic human dignity has very little purchase. But that is another discussion, and another dream.

“1. The only thing special about slavery in America is that Americans fought a bloody Civil War to end it.”

That’s true to some extent, but then again, despite the blood and struggle, it didn’t really end it, did it? One hundred years of bondage in the form of Jim Crow followed.

They say that the victors write the history. For those supposedly emancipated by the 13th Amendment, the South won ultimately won that war.

“2. DEMOCRATS supported slavery, and they still won’t give up promoting racial bigotry, which is exactly what you are doing.“

And you believe the Civil Rights Era, lead by Democrats, never happened? This is an old, tired Republican trope Tom. There is a reason why most people are of black African decent have predominantly voted Democrat for the last 50 years or so despite voting the Party of Lincoln before that. After years of race baiting, gerrymandering, and outright voter suppression, Republicans’ latest denial of racism is an inane historical revisionism, and when that doesn’t work they assuage each other with the patronizing trope that people of color are just too stupid to understand that they are the real racists. That may work for Republicans, but I think that you’ll find for the folks who lived the last have century and for those continuing to experience racist now, this ain’t working.

“3. Most Americans are descended from people who had nothing to do with slavery. Yet you want to promote Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, which is racist, stupid, and anti-Christian.“

Broad bigoted statements don’t really settle the argument, do they? They just deny the need to even face the truth It seems that most of the time that people say something is “anti-Christian” it is for a very unChristian political intolerance of the mere truth about our own sins. You claim to be in the truth business Tom, but ideas about implicit bias that go back to the story of Cain and Abel seem to scare you. The real truth is that jChrist just isn’t tribal for any side and that truth is distorted when we attempt to weaponized Christ into propaganda simply to exclude others and rally hatred just to achieve momentary political dominance. The Body of Christ is like Salomon’s baby, He probably least belongs the one who is most willing to cut Him in half just to claim Him.

Tom,

I find the whole “virtue signaling” accusation perhaps the most hilariously pretentious of Right Wing projections. It’s part of human nature to signal our virtues to each other. To pretend that you don’t do it is to pretend that you are not a human. However, among Conservatives lately, fomenting the charge of virtue signaling is the latest method of signaling your “real” virtue to your fellow tribesmen conservatives. And proclaiming one’s sinful nature (when you really mean “their” sinful nature) while doing so is perhaps the ultimate in virtue signaling hypocrisy. Don’t you think that if Christ were alive today and rendered The Sermon on the Mount that our modern Republican Pharisees would just accuse Him of extreme Leftist virtue signaling? Sure they would.😄