Soft money nostalgia and a book review
Imagine a world where instead of every institution that matters being partisan, partisan institutions actually mattered. Also, our current golden age of devotional writing.
Greetings,
This week, I have some thoughts on why we need stronger partisan institutions, and I use the latest book by Fiona and Terryl Givens to riff on some ideas about redemption, history, and devotional writing.
Putting Partisanship in its Place
It’s a truism of American politics these days that we are in an era of hyper-partisanship, and while it’s always dangerous to generalized about America as a whole based on on its political junkies (especially those of the Very Online variety), I think that there is some truth to this. As I’ve blathered previously, we do seem to be in a moment when our public debates are able to encode almost any major social or cultural event with a partisan valence almost immediately.
For example, I am personally and professionally (but mostly personally) interested in kidney donations. Someone recently reported a debate to me about the decision of some transplant centers to require a COVID vaccination before you can get a transplant. The debate immediately degenerated into fights about government and freedom and Joe Biden, even though the federal government does not regulate the practice of medicine, and, as I understand it, transplant protocols are set by doctors and hospitals not the government. In other words, this isn’t Joe Biden’s issue or even the government’s issue. But the discussion went there with lightening speed. Everything can be about partisan politics at the drop of a hat.
The ironic thing about our hyper-partisan moment is that institutionally our political parties are very weak. The biggest piece of evidence for this is Donald Trump’s takeover of American conservatism. It’s pretty clear that in 2016 the main GOP insiders did not want Trump, but the reality is that they couldn’t keep him out. Fame and a Twitter following carried much more weight than any institutional party structure. Because the Democratic nomination process includes superdelegates (party members holding elected positions who are given an outsized weight in the nominating process), it’s less susceptible to a hostile takeover than the GOP, but not by much. (Thank you superdelegates for helping to defeat Bernie Sanders; I owe you!) Certainly, the Democratic National Committee isn’t particularly important in defining and pushing out progressive messages for the country. As with the GOP this is largely a decentralized process of journalists, interest groups, and activists, with political superstars wielding an outsized influence. What we don’t have is the party as a structure doing much of anything.
Compare this to something like the Social Democratic Party in Germany in late 19th or early 20th century. That was a party that was institutionally strong. Indeed, it was so strong that the party organization itself created what amounted to an entire cultural context for its members. There were Social Democratic youth groups, orchestras, and health clubs, all of which were to a greater or lesser extent institutional extensions of the party apparatus. There are reasons of constitutional design in Germany that mitigated in favor of such parties, and I certainly wouldn’t advocate something as encompassing as the Social Democratic Party. The idea of political party as a totalizing institutional and cultural context was to take horrific turn in Germany in the 1930s. (Hitler was a keen student of the Social Democrats.) Still, within the universe of partisanship in a constitutional democracy, we can think of today’s American parties are representing one pole (extreme institutional weakness) and the German Social Democrats of the early 20th century as representing the other pole (powerful and centralized).
I wonder if part of what makes so much of our culture at this moment pernicious comes because of the weakness of our political parties as institutions. The party as an organization has very little role in public discussions, and as a result the job of defining and pushing out the party’s message gets outsourced to a host of decentralized institutions. Consider modern pressure groups like the Club for Growth, the NRA, NARAL, or the ACLU. We would expect such institutions to be focused on their single issue — taxes, guns, abortion, civil rights — and this is true often enough. However, such groups also see themselves largely as partisan water carriers. This can be seen most clearly, I think, in the evolution of the ACLU away from its traditional role of equal-opportunity offender and gadfly into a reliable cog in the progressive coalition. (Although kudos to the ACLU for still occasionally breaking ranks.) From pressure groups we can see the tendency for partisan alignment metastasize out further, for example to the two worlds that tend to obsess me: universities and churches.
Perhaps this is happening precisely because our political parties are so weak. In a world where the DNC is a powerful force in our public discussions, perhaps the activists that infest universities would swarm around it instead. Likewise, if the RNC was the place where conservatism was articulated and propagated, pastors might be less afflicted with political itches. In other words, perhaps everything gets sorted by partisan ideology because the institutions that are supposed to be partisan and ideological just don’t matter that much. There are constitutional structures — federalism and the separation of powers — that tend to make American parties weaker than those in other countries, but since Watergate federal law has also been consistently weakening them. For my money, the death blow to the institutional power of national parties came in the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, which banned so-called “soft money.” These were the unlimited donations that were previously allowed to political parties, money that made party institutions serious (or at least more serious) political players. After 2002, it is very difficult to see why anyone would care much about political parties as institutions. The money that pre-2002 went to political parties didn’t stop going into politics. It just found other outlets, and civil society organizations realized that there was fund-raising gold to be made by grabbing a share of the cash that used to go to the DNC or the RNC, provided that you were clearly lined up on one side or another of the partisan divide.
I’m not enough of a social scientist to know if this story is ultimately true. There are a lot of things that go into the making of a cultural and political hellscape. I can’t help but think, however, that part of the reason that every institution seems to be about politics is that the social institutions that are supposed to be about politics don’t much matter.
Redemption, Therapy, and Genealogy
I recently finished Fiona and Terryl Givens's latest book, All Things New. It’s basically an extended theological reflection about the nature of sin and redemption, one that argues that many Latter-day Saints have a mistaken notion of sin that focuses on worthiness and perfection rather than brokenness and atonement. I liked it, and largely (but not entirely) agree with it. I do have a couple of thoughts on the book and the broader projects of which it is a part.
First, on the substantive theological point that it is making, I am largely in agreement that there is much to be learned if we think about sin in terms of the inevitable brokenness of the human soul and redemption in terms of healing. I think that they are correct that there is a strain of Pelagianism within Mormonism that often leads Latter-day Saints down some spiritually and emotionally destructive paths. (Elder Wilcox, I think, made similar points in less erudite language in the last General Conference.) However, I think that the Givenses run the risk of reducing atonement to a kind of therapeutic technology in which repentance is primarily a way in which we deal with psychological distress.
There are two problems here, it seems to me. One is that it’s a view of sin that misses the possibility for truly monstrous human actions. Stalin or Idi Amin were not simply psychologically damaged. There was a Satanic element to their sins that isn’t captured by the idea of brokenness. In a less dramatic way, I think that much of the sordid every day conduct of human beings — adultery, casual cruelty, selfishness, and the like — partake of something more than simple brokenness. The other problem with a therapeutic notion of redemption is that it seems open to the objection that even brokenness itself is too harsh of a vision of human nature and even the call to healing through atonement is too judgmental. There is a risk of simply dissolving the idea of redemption into psychology. In fairness, I don’t think that the Givenses fall into either of these traps, and I suspect that they would resist both of them. Still, if we are to adopt the stance that they take toward sin and redemption, these, it seems to me, are the dangers with which we must contend.
My second thought has to do with what me might think of as methodology. Fiona and Terryl nest their reflections in a particular view of theological history, one that begins in antiquity and carries forward through the middle ages to the Reformation and on to the Restoration. To put it in crude terms, they tend to prefer Catholic thinkers to Protestants and think that Latter-day Saints have been unduly influenced by the latter and unduly dismissive of the former. I like that they are trying to get Latter-day Saint religious thought to engage more seriously with the Christian theological tradition. However, there is a certain vagueness in whether or not they are providing intellectual history or an intellectual genealogy. The latter project is a matter of trying to show the interaction and relationship between different ideas as ideas. One references historical thinkers as examples of particular approaches, but one’s primary goal is neither to accurately recreate the thought of those figures in its entirety nor to make strong claims about the historical origins of particular ideas. Intellectual history, in contrast, does try to make such strong claims about intellectual origins and actual historical development. Now as it happens, I think that genealogical projects are much more interesting and important than historical projects. Indeed, I tend to see the value of the latter primarily in providing grist to the former. I think that history left to its own devices often falls into pedantry, tendentious social science, or political polemic. I’d rather have the actual philosophical discussions rather than just let their results hover about as background assumptions in the historians’ narratives. That said, I think that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that one is doing intellectual history when one is doing intellectual genealogy, which, I fear, creates problems for both.
A final thought: All Things New is part of a growing number of recent Latter-day Saint devotional writings that manage to avoid the vacuous wasteland of saccharine and cliche-ridden schlock that has too often defined the genre. Rather, this is a serious reflection on Latter-day Saint faith that tries to bring that faith into dialogue with broader traditions and makes some real intellectual demands on its readers. It joins not simply the Givenses own previous devotional volumes, but a number of other works by authors like Sam Brown, Patrick Mason, Melissa Inouye, or Adam Miller. In many ways, we are living in a golden age of Latter-day Saint devotional writing. Long may it continue.
See you next week,
Nate
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