A failed assassination exposes the abysmal depths of our poisonous politics

But it also compels us to read the new book by the very author who coined the phrase "culture wars"

It wasn’t expected to last, and of course it didn’t.

The failed attempt at assassination of former President Trump – the first of its kind since John Hinkley tried to take out Ronald Reagan in March 1981 - set off a seismic wave followed by a very brief and unusual glimmer of national political unity accompanied by ritual decrials of violence.   

But now as expected America’s hyperpartisan witch’s cauldron is once again frothing and boiling over.   

Unanswered questions about the shooter’s motivations and the lack of any personal background clues or discernible ideological profile that might explain his actions abound.

Stoking the mystery even further are blatant and gaping breaches in the security planning and implementation at the Butler County (PA) fairgrounds where the Trump rally was held.  The Secret Service initially faulted local police, tasked with securing the outer perimeter, with these lapses, but later took responsibility.

The enormous and unprecedented nature of this security failure has only inflamed suspicions among Trump supporters that the deep state in collaboration with the Democrats is working over time to eliminate him. 

Meanwhile, the left is also going crazy with its own conspiracy theories that the hit on Trump was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by the right to ensure his election victory.

The incident of Saturday, July 13, 2024 will probably not move the needle significantly in terms of who ultimately wins the election in November.  But it will in the long term most likely serve to both harden and widen political divisions in this country beyond the point of no return.

What kind of real as opposed to ideologically fantasized future will wriggle from all the chaos and crystallize before our gaze?

As I have written recently and not so recently, what is happening right now in the United States is simply a regional manifestation of a global populist trend that many respects represents an epochal backlash to the growing economic inequality and precarity facing the workers of the world because of the digitization of commerce, finance, and communications controlled by the new knowledge-based elites.

But it also can be seen as the baleful outgrowth of the shattering of the basic cultural consensus that has held America together since its founding.

Ever since the turmoil of the 1960s a variety of scholars from Christopher Lasch to Allan Bloom to Richard John Neuhaus have written best-selling tomes attempting to diagnose the causes of the disintegration of the consensus, or what President Jimmy Carter as far back as the late 1970s labeled a deepening American cultural “malaise”. 

At the time Carter himself was punished at the ballot box for speaking plainly about our growing national dysfunction.

But now comes a new and impressive work by American sociologist of religion James Davison Hunter, the figure who coined the expression “culture wars” in a book published in 1991.

Entitled Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, Hunter argues essentially that what until at least the last half century has prevented our republic from unraveling at the seams has been a unique and amicable arrangement between secularists and religionists, what he terms a “hybrid enlightenment.”

Hunter characterizes such a “hybrid enlightenment” as a “specific configuration of cultural sources that underwrote American democracy….[and] sought to provide an ethical vision for the reconstitution of public life.”

In addition, “it not only made certain ideas and ideals intelligible but, in the process, provided sources for solidarity or cohesion that, by virtue of their opacity, could contain democracy’s many internal disagreements”.

In short, such a “configuration” melded a commitment to rational debate with a profound respect for the exercise of spiritual convictions as part of the democratic process.

Or, as New York Times columnist David Brooks summarizes Hunter’s argument in a recent opinion piece:

American culture…was formed within the tension between Enlightenment values and religious faith. America was founded at the high point of the Enlightenment and according to Enlightenment ideas: a belief in individual reason, that social differences should be settled through deliberation and democracy, that a free society depends on neutral institutions like the electoral system and the courts, which will be fair to all involved.

Such a system was designed, therefore, not just to allow but encourage the routine expression of religious beliefs in all spheres of public life while ensuring that their specific expressions were not allowed to become public policy. 

The quotidian claim bandied around today that America was founded as a “secular republic” is as historically false as the competing stance that from day one it had been constituted as a “Christian nation” with all the attendant theocratic overtones.  In fact, the argument itself betrays the breakdown of the very “hybrid” understanding of the role of faith Hunter masterfully summarizes with copious historical examples and in laborious detail.

In other words the “hybrid enlightenment”, according to Hunter, reflected a deep moral consensus that was both religious and juridical.  One did not have to worry about something presently demonized as “Christian nationalism” because the national “mythos”, as Hunter labels it, was inherently “Christian” with the broadest interpretation possible for such a term.

With a few exceptions the notion of a “hybrid enlightenment” reflects the gist of the European Enlightenment overall.

One of the signature contributions of the Enlightenment itself was acceptance of the idea, promoted by the eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that moral behavior did not necessarily require religious revelation to authorize it.  With proper education and the fine-tuning of our social and political institutions, Kant insisted, morality could be interpolated as a product of “pure practical reason”. 

Yet at the same time the moral life could not be separated from a religious outlook, Kant contended.  Even though it was crucial to practice a “religion within the limits of reason alone,” morality could not be sustained without a profound “reverence” (Ehrfurcht) for divine reality. 

The German word Ehrfurcht literally means a “respect” grounded in “fear”.

The real problem, Hunter laments as his book grinds on, is the collapse of Enlightenment principles in the formation of both moral and political discourse.  One of the chief causes of this collapse is the burgeoning complexity as well as ambiguity in the twenty-first century of moral and political decision-making.

The overwhelming nature of this complexity forces us into a kind of reactive and instinctual style of politics that relies on emotionally charged memes and tropes that are reinforced by the power of social media.

Instead of pulling together to realize some vision of the common good, we are thrown back on what the great seventeenth political philosopher Thomas Hobbes portrayed as the “state of nature” which is literally a “war of all against all”.

Consequently, both religion and reason become ineffective, if not irrelevant.  In their place “rage against injury and its perpetrators emerges as a source of moral authority.”

Furthermore, anger and resentment grease the wheels of a new and dangerous machinery of social exchange that trades in pure signs and negative affects rather than useful goods and services.  Hunter laments:

The fact is that in the symbolic economies of the late modern world, moral rage becomes a form of capital. It is the means by which political parties and special-interest groups mobilize their supporters. It also becomes the primary means by which special-interest groups raise money in support of their cause. And precisely because it entertains and enrages, it also becomes the substantive means by which social media and the mainstream media generate revenue.

One of the most baffling aspects of the narrative that has been pieced together so far about Matthew B. Crooks, the 20-year-old would-be assassin of Donald Trump, is how unremarkable he truly is.  He was a good student, but not in any way a standout.  He was a loner but didn’t have any transparent grievances.

In many respects he reminds us of the character Rodion Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, who murdered an old lady pawnbroker merely to prove himself “exceptional” in the face of his own self-evident mediocrity.

Raskolnikov is typical of so many aimless male youth today absorbed in their smartphones and obsessed with self-image while nurturing their own secret rage against everyone and everything in general while taking pleasure in nothing in particular.

According to some scholars Dostoyevsky’s character inspired Nietzsche’s famous account of modern “nihilism,” which he dubbed “the strangest of guests” and which Hunter himself diagnoses as the fatal condition of contemporary culture.

Hunter defines such nihilism as “the profound confusion that derives from the sense of multiple realities and multiple ways of knowing, the relativization of value through pluralism and choice, the absence of authority and with it the sense of meaninglessness in life and history, the diminution of the moral worth of all human beings (though some more than others) through their instrumentalization, and the absence of clear, coherent, and common purposes to which individual and collective life might be directed.”

The ”nihilism” of Crooks’ actions over the weekend has created an energy and determination among the MAGA millions in this country which has come to be branded by their critics as its own species of nihilism.  But one could say much the same about the “nihilistic” resort of so many Democrats and never-Trumpers to derail his campaign at any cost, especially their constant on cheap manipulation of the criminal judicial system through the modality known as “lawfare”.

And so the spiral into “nothingness” continues unabated.

What Hunter proposes as a brake on this spiral is a sustained effort to “depoliticize” the public sphere and restore the rich “humanistic” threads of culture and civic piety that once furnished feelings of “solidarity” to underwrite democracy.  He opines:

Underwriting a new ethical vision for the re-formation of public life would be the cultural resources of a reconstituted humanism. It is critical that we rediscover human beings underneath the abstractions of our inflammatory symbolic politics.

We have sought with megalomaniacal zeal to make politics “salvific”, Hunter complains. But, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger once quipped, “only a god can save us”.

And in the end we may all have to get down on our knees before God in order to be saved from that fate toward which we are with breakneck velocity invariably headed.