The Corruption of Senatorial Virtue

People have usually attributed the fall of the republican order in Rome to the corruption of senatorial virtue and the expansion of empire. Senators came to seek only private interest in their public office. They neglected the unifying worship of the ancient hearths. They convulsed the republic with factionalism and civil strife. The republic collapsed through loss of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good.

This is from William Johnson Everett's gem of a book, God's Federal Republic: Reconstructing Our Governing Symbol. And with his summary above describing the fall of the republican rule in Rome, transitioning to the Casesars, Bill describes so much of what is going on in modern-day America.

The particular sentence describing the neglect of our foundational principles ("unifying worship of the ancient hearths") points to our ignorance, or contempt, of those concepts like the common good, compromise, and the rule of law that our nation's founders set in place over two centuries ago. Even the structural features of our constitutional government, with its separation of powers and checks/balances, are abandoned in the pursuit of "factionalism" and the expansion of political power. "We have to support OUR president, and select OUR judges."

It's just a little thing, but I believe it is telling. With their social media presence, politicians invest significant energy in telling us the virtuous things they do, in order to gain political approval. It is apparently extraordinary, for example, when a politician supports veterans, as current Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) attempts to remind us on Facebook every week. Supporting veterans with all kinds of services, including health care, and education, and housing assistance, is not some extraordinary virtuous act. Rather, that should be taken for granted, expected, a basic responsibility of the civil society through its government. Yet Senator Tillis, in touting this as extraordinary, is simply, in the words of Bill Everett, seeking only his own private interest.

We should also note Bill's definition of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good. An enlistee in the armed forces is therefore virtuous, compared to those who seek through extraordinary means to avoid military service. Those who stood up to King George III more than two centuries ago, pledging their lives, there fortunes, and their sacred honor, sacrificed for the public good. And those who compromised from very principled (and self-serving) positions a decade later to "form a more perfect Union," acted with that same sense of virtue.

I fear that we are losing that virtue, and that our republic is in imminent danger of collapse.

The Stark Contrast

This morning there are two headlines juxtaposed on the New York Times' website.

In one headline, we read Behind Trump’s Dealings With Turkey: Sons-in-Law Married to Power. This describes how President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, officially an Advisor to the President, is working outside normal diplomatic channels with the son-in-law of Turkish President Erdogan and the son-in-law of a wealthy Turkish business tycoon. It is this backdoor diplomacy that resulted in the withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria, allowing the Turkish army to occupy territory once controlled by the Kurds. And at the same time, Trump Towers rises in Istanbul.

In the other, less prominent headline and story, we read Jimmy Carter Hospitalized for Brain Procedure. When former President Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, he was so concerned with the appearance of a conflict of interest that he sold his south Georgia peanut farm.

From the time of Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, through FDR's New Deal, Ike's shepherding of the economy through the post-war boom of the 50's, and with LBJ's Great Society, we generally had an American sense of shared purpose and shared prosperity. That sense wasn't perfect, set against the backdrop of racism and America's original sin of slavery. But we sensed that our leaders understood the social compact and the concept of the common good.

That changed with the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, his breaking the air traffic controllers' union, and the move toward "small government" and deregulation. Gordon Gecko declared that greed is good, and the prosperity gospel carnival barkers joined right in the chorus. So we continued with tax cuts for the wealthy, neutering regulation of financial services, and generally transferring the wealth created by working people (labor) to the ownership class.

And so here we are. Where government policy is nothing more than just another business deal. Where the foundations of our system of government are no longer obstacles to nepotism and self-dealing by government officials. Where legal fictions that exist on paper are imbued with the rights and privileges of natural persons, and the government sides with corporations that have, for example, the right to worship over the rights of individuals.

And that is the threat to our Constitution that we cannot ignore.

Starting a new book

I just received God's Federal Republic by William J. Everett. Bill is a noted professor and scholar of theology and ethics. He and his wife Sylvia, herself a noted liturgical artist, retired here to our small town west of Asheville a few years ago.

According to the summary on Amazon:

Biblical religion is driven by a longing for God's ultimate order of justice and peace. Most of this longing is steeped in the patriarchal symbols of kingship, monarchs, lords, fathers, and princes. This symbolism came to bind European churches to the legitimation of monarchies and empires for over a millennium. The American and now global experiment separated the churches, with their kingdom language, from government dedicated to democratic, republican, and federal constitutional order. Religious efforts to guide and critique government have subsequently suffered from political irrelevance or theocratic nationalism. Everett lifts up the biblical and classical origins of our present republican experiment to construct a theological position and religious symbolism that can imaginatively engage our present public life with a contemporary language permeated with a transcendent vision.

I look forward to Bill's insights into how our language around the Kingdom of God can somehow fit into our 21st-century Constitutional democratic republic, with its First Amendment freedoms.