Body (Politic) Ablaze

No.123: September 2, 2022

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Dear Friends,

We live in deeply cynical times, and deeply cynical times are dangerous times. People keep dialing up the temperature on our cultural and political rhetoric and they are playing with fire. That’s not my metaphor. That’s from the Apostle James:

Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

I think this is also true of bodies politic.

This is on my mind because of President Joe Biden’s deeply troubling primetime address to the nation last night. It was a scathing partisan screed that did not just argue that former President Donald Trump is a threat to our Republic (a defensible argument given his insistence that the election results should be vacated and that he should be reinstated to the office), but also that everyone who voted for the man (roughly half of the country) is a threat to our Republic. Oh, he had a one-liner about how not every Republican is what he called “MAGA,” but that pathetic little seawall was no match for the roaring rip-tide of the rest of his rhetoric. The “extremist” movement that “threatens the very foundations of our republic” includes pro-lifers and those who oppose the LGBTQ+ agenda.

This is the guy who was going to unify the country and usher in a return to normalcy.

I would say that this is cynical beyond belief, but it isn’t beyond belief. It is now standard operating procedure. Trump himself perfected the art of stoking precisely this kind of division from the opposite side of the aisle, and he did it for the very same reason as President Biden: to energize and fire up his electoral base. People do not run campaigns to win over new voters anymore; they run campaigns strictly to the voters they think they already have, and they do it by demonizing the other half. This began, by the way, with Barack Obama in 2012. And it was the same strategy by which President Trump blew his own reelection (he wasn’t, alas, quite as personally popular as Mr. Obama).

It is all so patently obvious and cynical. Biden does not believe that Republican office-seekers who pander to MAGA world are a dire threat to the Republic. We know this because his party has been busy spending millions of dollars to get those very people on the ballot. You know the old maxim about how the government creates a problem so that they can then offer to be the solution? That’s the Democrat strategy in 2022: put all the election deniers on the ballot so they can then posture themselves as the great defenders of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That’s Biden’s speech last night in a nutshell.

In addition to being cynical, it is a lie. Pro-lifers and citizens who want to preserve a biblical sexual ethic are not enemies of our democracy. And you all know how I feel about the events of January 6th, 2020; it was a complete and utter disgrace. At the same time, I know that the vast majority of people on Capitol Hill that day were not a “threat to democracy” or our Republic. You know why? Because they fervently—religiously—believed that they were saving our democracy and Republic from evildoers. Why did they believe that? Because the previous lying demagogue and his sycophants had been telling them so for months.

Quite a little spin cycle we’ve gotten ourselves into, isn’t it? Russian collusion! Hunter’s laptop! Stolen election! All the way to last night’s “Enemies of the People” speech.

Not only is most of this cynical, and not only is it a web of lies and half-truths, it is dangerous.

Frankly, we’ve had a lot of moments of impassioned division in our country. But I can’t help but feel that the heat continues to rise and it appears that we don’t have much of a cultural coolant system left. We’re getting closer to meltdown.

Flash back to November and December of 2020. If I said it once to my friends, I said it a dozen times. This “stolen election” rhetoric is going to get somebody killed. It did. It was thankfully not at a large scale, but things could easily have been very different.

Maybe this kind of fiery rhetoric doesn’t move the needle a whole lot in the grand scheme of things (we are a stubbornly divided people, and we’re going to be equally divided for a long while yet), but it certainly matters on the margins. Set aside January 6th for a moment. Remember when a Bernie Sanders socialist decided to take his AR-15 and attempt to murder dozens of Republican Congressmen on a baseball field? Remember when that guy brought his pistol and Chik-Fil-A sandwiches to the Family Research Council so that he could murder everybody there and stuff sandwiches into their mouths? Remember the 94 documented cases (so far) of arson and vandalism at Crisis Pregnancy Centers and churches? Remember when a guy showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house prepped to assassinate him?

In every one of these cases, from January 6th to the firebombing of places that nefariously provide [checks notes] ultrasounds for pregnant women, first there was a tongue. Whether it be claims about a “stolen election” or demagoguery about the “wealthy 1%” or accusations of “homophobia” or “controlling women’s bodies,” it began with words.

The tongue is a fire that sets the whole body ablaze.

If we do not cool it, these little blazes—which are bad enough on their own—quickly threaten to get out of control. And I have some bad news: There are very few cooler heads with tamed and disciplined and truthful tongues left in our public life. Even worse, the toxic vortex of our current spin cycle disincentivizes such people from even trying to seek public office. And perhaps worst of all, many of the loudest and most brazen and irresponsible culture warriors are doing this cynically, whether for fame, notoriety, clicks, or piles of cash. They set fires thinking it is all under control, and I think the Apostle James would call them fools.

Nothing in what I’ve said denies that there are real divisions and real conflicts. You’re not going to hear me singing Kumbaya or see me attending a Pride parade. But if we Christians particularly do not tame our tongues and stop adopting worldly modes of discourse we will be active participants in burning down civilization, not building it up. Sure, Joe Biden needs to knock it off; but it is all-too-easy to just talk about the other side so as to distract from out own.

There is a video clip going around of a few of the Daily Wire honchos having a little confab over drinks and cigars. It looks rather pleasant, actually—I’d attend if I were invited. Anyway, it starts with the part of the clip that got a lot of rejoicing and praise from conservative Twitter: Ben Shapiro railing against “being nice” because if we’re nice, then the conflict is “asymmetric.” “Screw that,” he says. We’re left to guess that that means we have to be as nasty as the other side, just to keep things fair.

The Christian sitting next to him, Andrew Klavan, looks to me mildly uncomfortable with what he just heard. And so he says the most responsible and sensible thing in the whole clip:

But we don’t even have to fight at their level. All we have to do is speak out without fear because the things that we say make sense to most people. And I think that that’s—

He’s interrupted immediately by Shapiro:

Cowards need to be punished.

And Klavan doesn’t say another word.

And if you wonder why I’m cynical about some of this culture warring, the clip ends with Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing. He takes up this fraught topic of massive cultural upheaval and … hawks his razor company. You wanna fight a culture war? If you don’t buy my razors, you’re part of the problem.

Yeah, I think somebody’s in this for the cash. What’s a little fire here and there?

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