The inauguration of Joe Biden can be understood as the Solemn High Mass of democracy’s civil religion after Trump had tried to destroy it.
This week, Joe Biden finally took over. Everything went well. There were no attacks or riots, and many felt that with Trump leaving the White House, one of the blackest pages in the history of the United States has been left behind. The Trump era will not fade away, and certainly not in the minds of analysts who will try to explain how it was possible that a charlatan was on the point of putting an end to the Constitution, truth and decency in the most powerful country in the world.
There are many hypotheses about the Trump era. This is mine.
Auguste Comte, a 19th-century French thinker, predicted that countries would become increasingly secular and that eventually people would stop believing in gods and religions. But when that moment comes, he said, it will be necessary to create a “civil religion” that instils the essential values that society needs to stay together.
Comte was wrong about the death of religions, at least for now. But he was right in thinking that faith has become a more intimate and personal matter, and the idea of a civil religion that instils the essential values of public life (tolerance, dissent, respect, legality, participation, etc.) is still valid. That is why current thinkers like Martha Nussbaum encourage it.
What does this have to do with my hypothesis? Well, Donald Trump, with his party, became an apostate from that civil religion. Instead of defending the Constitution, its values and its morality, he governed for his followers (the racist whites, the rich, the evangelicals, and the politically disenchanted naive) and, above all, to feed his ego as a fleeting hero of the television screen.
The four years that ended last Wednesday in the United States did not witness a political confrontation between two polarised parties, but an illegal attempt by a group of extremists led by a lunatic, and supported by a shameless party, to seize control of the country’s institutions, their meaning and the values of its civil religion.
According to Paul Krugman, a radical party was in government during those years, and it acted contrary to the law, against democracy and against the truth. This is not the first time this has happened in the US. Our history, Biden said in his speech, has been a constant struggle between the ideal that we are all equal and the terrible reality of racism.
The inauguration, with its typically American kitsch pastors and singers, is best understood as the celebration of the Solemn High Mass of that civil religion after Trump was on the point of destroying it.
Important lessons remain from all this, and one of them is that democracies also die, that justice does not always triumph, that political legitimacy goes beyond electoral results, that the public good must be defended, that the education and culture of citizens are important and that, in democracies, we always have to be careful to expose the apostates of our civil religion.
This article appeared in El Espectador on 23 January, 2021, and was translated by Kieran Tapsell.
Mauricio García Villegas is a Professor of Law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Colombia and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a regular columnist for El Espectador, Colombia.
Comments
11 responses to “Democracy’s Apostates”
Jerry,
I no doubt represent the silent majority who found Trump’s lies, arrogance and incitement to rebellion impossible to stomach. From the very start, the previous election was marred by threats if he didn’t win and refusal to accept any result other than his election. There was and is no conspiracy other than that in the heads of his supporters. If you want to live in the world of fantasy and fake news then that is your right .To call the commentary ‘garbage’ is an arrogance of the highest order .The State Authorities in the U.S. handled the electoral process as well as can be expected in a COVID-19 Pandemic world. All attempts legal and otherwise by Trump and his supporters to reverse the verdict of the people of the United States to express their will , however imperfectly have failed .The fact is Trump lost, end story!
It is hard to tell from this distance but I think you are wrong on the voting, Gavin. The point here is that the South American is saying democracy is OK as long as clever fellows such as himself can control it. This is the “swamp” against which Trump led the charge. Certainly a lot of people in Australia I know find Trump an unpleasant person but I expect his major policies are still popular in America — tightening up the porous southern border (the wall), stopping wars of “regime change,” bringing jobs back to America, letting the Europeans pay for more for their own defence. As I have written here and elsewhere, I would have voted for Howie Hawkins and for Jill Stein in 2016 and 2012 and I am still hopeful that a third party drawn from the Bernie Sanders movement will be active in time for the 2022 mid-term elections. If you are interested in the personality side of politics the individual to watch is Tulsi Gabbard who appears to have the grounded good sense to bring together the Sanders and Trump voters against the corporate world of the Democrats and Republicans.
This is the nastiest piece of garbage that I have seen in the five years or so I have been reading Pearls and Irritations but the editor is to be congratulated for observing the rules of free speech.
Fortunately this nasty piece of garbage has now left the presidency.
You have missed the whole point of Garcia’s article. He was not arguing against Trump’s policies as you have outlined them. The “civil religion” that he talks about is respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions. The rule of law means that citizens (including presidents) follow the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress, and they have to accept the results of properly conducted elections. If there is any doubt about what the law says or about the results of the elections, those doubts are settled by the Courts. Citizens are obliged to accept the courts’ interpretations, whatever their private views might be. Trump took the election to the courts and lost 49 times. In some cases, when his lawyers were asked by the judges if they were alleging fraud, they said no, and there was a good reason for that. Lawyers have ethical obligations to the Courts and one of them is that if a client wants to allege fraud, there must be some evidentiary basis for it. Even William Barr, Trump’s own Attorney General, admitted that there was no basis for fraud. Whatever the merits of Trump’s policies that you outlined, he tried to undermine the very basis of the democratic system. That is what Garcia is talking about. If these principles are part of the swamp that needs to be drained, there are plenty of other regimes without the protection of this swamp: Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba….
If you want to go into constitutional specifics, Kieran, I think you will find that Mike Pence was asked to seek a six day postponement so that voting results could be investigated in six States. I understand this to be within the constitution. I thought the South American’s piece was poisonous, coloured and the Comte parallel was nonsense. I support the right of the marchers on the Capitol and I would have joined them had I been in my native America. It is their House, not Nancy Pelosi’s. I dislike the attack on Trump and I dare say the 72,222,958 Americans who voted for him don’t like it either. The biggest worry is that Trump is made a scapegoat for the deep social and economic problems facing the USA that go back to the Vietnam War.
And do you say that Mike Pence’s refusal to seek a postponement was unconstitutional? He seems to have been advised that he was entitled to refuse. And when you say the Capitol was “their” house, you are referring to the mob. What about the majority that elected Biden? Had it ceased to be “their” house too? If you had joined the mob storming the Capitol, what would you have done when you got there – gone along with killing Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, as some of the mobsters intended to do? And if you say no to that, what was the point of invading? The peaceful means of resolving disputes over elections are set out in the Constitutions and laws of the United States. That is the whole point of Garcia’s article, and if that means living in a swamp, them I’m very relieved that Australia has one too.
Hi Kieran. I have had a fair bit to say on this episode, mostly in response to Nicholas Gruen and Dennis Glover on the Club Troppo Blog. I am urging people to seek out eye-witness accounts of what happened at the Capitol. So far I have found three — photo-journalist Jeremy Lee Quinn’s fascinating interview with Bret Weinstein on the Dark Horse Podcast, Cat McGuire, a Greens voter and veteran of numerous political rallies and Pastor Randy Short, a long-time resident of Washington DC familiar with the Capitol. I am reminded of the night I reported on the crowd at Perth airport and later in the city outside their hotel when the Springboks arrived to start their Australian tour and local rugby supporters outsmarted the anti-apartheid protesters. Don’t rush to judgement, Kieran.
The Republican and Democratic parties are like the Catholics and the Protestants accusing each other of apostasy.
The arrogance of elite commentators such as the South American is the reason he was elected in the first place.
This bloke would be on the staff of the Grand Inquisitor of Castille.