The Wellfleet Community Forum met on Feb. 26 to discuss how we might bring more civility and efficiency back to our town. Moderator Dan Silverman reminded us that conflict and disruption were as much a part of our town history as civility and community. At the same time, the fact that we had that forum is an indication that what is happening to the nation at large filters down to our local community and that even here we need to vigilantly defend our basic values.
Ten days before that meeting, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are persons and hence enjoy the protection of the state. At roughly the same time, the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, said in a podcast that “God created government. And the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it’s heartbreaking for those of us who understand.”
Parker is part of a national movement to overturn our understanding of the nature of legitimate government. His view flies in the face of our nation’s founding documents. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states: “…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.” The founders were positing that government did not come from God, as was argued by those who believed in the divine right of European monarchs, but was a human creation.
The U.S. Constitution, which does not include the word “God,” begins with “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, … do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” The writers made it clear that it was the people, not God, who ordained and established the nation.
Judge Parker would have failed a beginning civics class, but his ignorance is his personal shame. What is more disturbing is that his comment reflects a larger historical shift. Even in the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and 1840s or the fanaticisms of the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s, the nation was not at as great a risk of losing its meaning and ideals as it is today. Parker’s comment must be seen in the context of a Supreme Court whose majority favors fundamentalist Christian ideals over long-established secular values.
It should also be seen in the context of the presidential contest. For the first time in our nation’s history, we have a major-party candidate who has been found guilty of sexual assault and has been recorded talking about grabbing women’s genitals, and who openly attempted to thwart the peaceful transition of power. Even the Federalists did not do that, though they feared and detested Jefferson and believed he would destroy the country.
Such a candidacy would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The political landscape is littered with candidates who failed because of far milder accusations. And so we must ask ourselves what has changed in the country, and what does it tell us about the future?
The change is that Donald Trump has managed to forge an alliance with a right-wing Christian movement singularly focused on gaining power in order to transform the nation from its liberal (in the classical sense of that word) and secular ideals into a theocracy. Trump has managed to pull together white discontent, nativist hostility to immigration, male fear of female equality, and a general anxiety about sexuality into a movement centered on his persona. Despite the fact that Trump the person is a corrupt, racist sexual predator, the persona behind Trumpism is the manifestation of a march toward a nation dedicated to white male hegemony and secure in its righteousness.
Trump’s ultimate success will depend not only on his mobilized base but also on the inaction, indifference, exhaustion, or petty differences of those who have not drunk the Kool-Aid. If you do not think this is a serious threat, look closely at today’s Republican Party and at the number of people who a decade ago would have been seen as conservative institutionalists and are now bending their knee to an anti-institutionalist theocrat. And consider that 676 of our neighbors in the four Outer Cape towns voted in last week’s primary for an authoritarian sex offender.
John Cumbler lives in Wellfleet.
