The National Fabric Frays in the Absence of Political Vision – The American Spectator

Lee Smith concluded a white-hot article in Tablet last week on the Espionage Act prosecution of Donald Trump, laying bare our country’s need for a sound political vision.

Look at the last half century alone, from Lebanon and Somalia to the former Yugoslavia and Syria—many countries never find a way to get along after blowing each other’s brains out. America is an exception. Indeed it is an astonishing fact that after our own fratricidal conflict, America became the most powerful nation in world history. And yet the fabric of our domestic peace is fragile and now we are tempting fate: Brother calling brother traitor may be the prelude to a renewed nightmare.

There is much to say on this prosecution, the last in a seven-year series of attempts to deny Trump access to the electoral ballot and, when that failed, tenure in elective office. Smith’s article itself is a fine place to start.

But in this space at The American Spectator, I wish to pick up where Smith left off, which is even more important.

As I am writing this article, I am in a solemn and reflective mood. It is the anniversary of the passing of a great teacher and leader, a man who had a tremendous influence on my life and the life of many others, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.

I had no thought at first of a religious profession. I have loved the thrust and parry of politics since childhood. Yet politics is about power and the possibilities of it being nothing more than a power struggle abound. If that is all that it is, then it is essentially a soulless enterprise, bound to contaminate anyone who touches it.

So, as I young man, I turned from politics towards the artistic ferment of the writers and artists who found in the chaos of the Sixties new opportunities to create. The musicians in particular were my heroes, and the authors and poets who found their voices then, especially the authors of the Stanford writing seminars, such as Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, and Larry McMurtry.

But the world of Woodstock turned soon to the world of Altamont and psychedelic pioneers sold out to the unearned high of cocaine. Ken Kesey suggested (to an audience that may have thought it just another prank) that one ought to set time aside every day to read the Bible; he also suggested that one could turn one’s life around by reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

Politics Not an End in Itself

I took Kesey quite seriously, and followed his suggestions. It made sense. If you want to play the blues, you have to be immersed in blues’ roots. Same for country music. And same for going the spiritual route, a central vision of the Sixties: you have to get back to the roots.

And when I started to make the journey, I found Rabbi Schneerson was there with a welcome that was both respectful and challenging, and always loving. 

Challenging because at its core, God asks of us everything we have to give; nothing less than the whole of who we are is the only real contribution we can make. Respectful, because he taught by example; each person is different by design, and not to respect what individuates each person is to disrespect the Creator. And loving, because only with love can differences be more than mere opposition — love is the only thing that binds up difference into a whole larger and better than anyone could achieve in isolation.

And after years studying these ideas in depth, whether in law, in philosophy and theology, or in practical action, it became possible to reengage in politics — the politics in which power is always joined to responsibility and is never an end in itself.

The Visionaries: Churchill and Lincoln

My political heroes since grade school have been people like Churchill and Lincoln. Those two in particular stand out:  both were savvy political fighters, masters of wit, inspirational national leaders in time of existential crisis, unsurpassed at framing the great moral and spiritual stakes at issue, and both were successful at winning the wars they fought.

Neither of them were mere party men. Churchill switched parties twice, and even within his party, he jousted with its leader on the supreme issue of recognizing the danger of Hitler. He willingly suffered a pariah status for that opposition. But political power at the expense of harm to his country was unthinkable.

Lincoln had a different path. The Whig Party refused to address the great corrosive issue of slavery coherently and so was itself dissolved. Lincoln joined the new Republican Party that was formed to be the party of opposition to slavery’s spread. Lincoln saw this cause not only through to victory in  a horrific war, but to the passage by Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would make slavery unconstitutional.

As both led the way to victory in their deadly struggles, both sought for ways to reconcile. With Lincoln in particular, it was a reconciliation after fratricide, exactly as Smith writes about. He chose magnanimity toward the rebels, even though many could have been convicted under the Constitution’s strict definition of treason. Churchill, too, resisted the temptation to seek vengeance. Though he supported entirely the trial of those blood-drenched perpetrators of genocide, he was horrified at Stalin’s appetite for massive enslavement and the shooting of tens of thousands, and censured anyone who would countenance such actions. He taught: “In victory, magnanimity.”

What made their politics forever a model for the world is that they had a clear, uniting vision of human liberty, based on a deeply moral sense of the infinite dignity placed upon human life. We must politic hard for the vision God gives us to see, but we must never lose sight of the fact that others may equally be expressing their vision. Freedom is thus a necessity for peace.

The reality of opposition cannot compel us to give in, for then we show we have no real principles higher than our need to be liked or our desire for power. But neither should opposition stop us from trying to frame a larger vision in response to its challenge, a shared vision in whose shared light force would no longer be necessary.

Politics is About Teaching

Rabbi Schneerson’s vision of politics sought this greater vision always. Anything less, while perhaps sometimes necessary, could be tolerated only as an intermediate step due to special conditions. But in his teaching, politics must in the end be about teaching, through the living example of what self-government really means — people governing themselves, guided by the faith they are constitutionally able to choose on their own, and living cooperatively and harmoniously together.

The great aim of this vision, he would have admitted himself, is nothing new, but its power to inspire is as needed today as when Isaiah first voiced it: all will seek instruction from the Source of truth and nation will no longer lift up sword against nation.

It all seems to hang in the balance right now. Instead of beating our swords into plowshares, some seem to be whetting them for use against their own fellows. In stealth, plots are carried out using the arm of the law to conduct political battles, while waiting once more to subvert American principles by accommodating the terrorist state in Teheran that has made public time and again its desire to destroy an entire nation and its people.

We Americans are better than that. And we can fight more intelligently for our way by offering a more powerful vision, a vision of a powerful love for freedom and for free people, like that of Lincoln and Churchill, who saw their duty as guided by the divine right of the Great King who puts his image deep into the soul of each and every human.