My Soul is Troubled. My Mood is Stoic.
Wisdom from a clay tablet that predates the birth of Jesus by 2800 years
The holidays are upon us, and by all appearances, both spiritual and political, there's no salvation in sight for our beleaguered constitutional republic.
This week Trump’s forthcoming government efficiency czar, Elon Musk, declared that he’ll finance primaries against any Republican senator who votes against Trump’s Cabinet appointments. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Musk can throw as much money at a primary as he wants.
We also learn that a cowering ABC News will pay Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that the president-elect brought against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos in March. The retreat, reminiscent of Jeff Bezos’ withdrawal of The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, is meant to shield the outlet from the wrath of an all-powerful monarch.
Yesterday afternoon I returned to Nashville from a one-week trip to Washington, D.C. While there, I dined with thought leaders from the Democratic Party and experts in digital news media, including one knowledgeable about blockchain systems for authenticating information. The general consensus is that no one seems to know what to do about the threat of people like Trump and Musk in our current Age of Demagoguery.
I went to D.C. to give a talk at the George Washington Presidential Library and afterwards to research the question “What form of government did the founders create in 1787—and why?” at the American Revolution Institute.
My most delightful find in the institute’s archives was a speech by Congressman Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, a leader of the Federalist Party noted for his oratorical skills, delivered in the House of Representatives on Thursday, April 28, 1796.
Ames said that a republic becomes an empty vessel when it loses virtue in its laws and leadership, and, to sustain a republic, citizens must be willing to die in defense of those values. In Congressman Ames’ words:
WHAT is patriotism? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent preference, because they are greener?
No, sir, this is not the character of the virtue. It is an extended self-love, mingling with all the enjoyments of life, and twisting itself with the minutest filaments of the heart.
It is thus we obey the laws of society, because they are the laws of virtue.
Every good citizen makes [national] honour his own, und cherishes it not only as precious, but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense.
Much as modern ears might prickle at the sound of “civic virtue,” obtaining it in leadership must be a republic’s highest aim and commitment—its raison d'être.
One of Ames’ partisan opponents in the 1790s was James Madison. Yet the two were of one mind when it came to the structure of a republic: It must be designed, and reformed, always to feed ethical leadership upward.
As Madison put it in Federalist No. 57, “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
Yesterday I wrote to a friend, who is a poet:
Let's begin to attend more to healing solutions for our fellow citizens—and for ourselves—ones that help us cope with the political changes happening versus how to fix the problems themselves. I think of family, friends, community, faith, religion, psychotherapy, and philosophy, especially stoicism. What would you add? Literature, I know. What else?
As poets often do, my friend demurred. Instead he sent me words from a clay tablet that predate the birth of Jesus by 2800 years:
Our Earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
Human beings, he commented, tend to think they are living in the end-times. Perhaps we are—perhaps we are not.
I take some solace in this insight. As we enter the holiday season and approach January 20, 2025, I plan to draw near to friends, family, community, and books of philosophy, especially stoicism.
“There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us,” Seneca once wrote to a friend, "we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
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The question is why do so many people think the rules are unfair, to the point of wanting to abandon all rules, as Trump instructs, when the rules have largely favored Americans, creating a rather safe and productive society (for whites, anyway). And the answer is that the GOP has been cultivating a climate of complaint among whites for 50 years, where every good is ignored and trivialized and every failure - governmental and social - is exaggerated and toxified, to the point now where the mostly white MAGA world intends to tear it all down. The new Trump administration will be a No-Rules administration, a celebration of power unchecked by ethical, or even practical consideration. Every ethical collapse, every grift and every injustice imposed by the new regime will be celebrated as confirmation to those love him, that Trump was right, rules are for suckers (and lib-tards). What could possibly go wrong?
oops, wrong button….. in our more quotidian behaviors, like abiding the rule of law and defending democracy. Who doesn’t bend around these rules now and again, speed on the highway, include some fake expenses in our tax return? What Trump stands for to his core, and what makes him popular among the reluctant rule-followers among us (pretty much everyone) is his example of no-rules living. He not only refuses to follow rules, he intentionally and publicly broaches them and then manages to evade paying the price for his rule-breaking, not only the social price of disdain and judgement, but even for crimes of which he is obviously guilty. He is a paragon of anti-virtue. Everything he says and does is a pantomime of this message: rules are for suckers, and people who think the rules are unfair gather round him as moths to flame. The infamous “elites” of the coasts, whose supposed intellectual snobbery is a humanitarian crime against the common folk, are really just people standing up for the ethical frameworks (rules) that, until now, governed our lives. The disdain that normal, rational, patriotic Americans express for the people who have abandoned democracy and the ethics upon which it was formed is absolutely justified. Disdain used to be a sufficient social force to keep people in compliance, but Trump and his followers ignore, even celebrate the disdain, they eat it for lunch before tromping off to their next session of vandalism against American values.