What Have We Learned?

There is a good article by Sister Joan Chittister on the NCR site today.  In it she remembers how her mother used to say that there was something to be learned in everything, whether from a good or bad experience. "I'd pour out my losses or celebrate my gains and my mother — somewhere along the way — managed to make her ever-living point: "And what did you learn from that, Joan?"

From the article:   "That's where I am now. I've learned a lot from President Donald Trump in none of the ways I wanted to."

"First, I want to thank Trump for exposing to us how dangerously fragile a democracy really is. What I had been taught was that our democracy — American democracy — unlike all those pseudo-systems like Argentina or Turkey or Germany in 1939, was impregnable....People like Trump, narcissists and power-patriarchs, can simply shape our political world, not around our values, but around themselves and their personal goals, their ill-gotten gains, their blatant disregard for any values we thought had been unalterably baked into the system long before they came."

"...Second, Trump has shown us how baseless democracy is if it is not understood and protected by all of those who take an oath to preserve it. A presidential election is not meant to give any single person power alone. "

"...Third, Trump has shown us that the makings of a coup run through every form of government, including democracy.

"...Fourth, in the end, I learned that even "party" meant little to Trump. That seemed to be a refreshing thought until I realized, too, that though party did not move him, cronyism did, "loyalty" did, personal power did — in fact, personal power was his fatal addiction. But unfortunately, he taught me too that the likelihood of members of Congress to yield to intimidation for the sake of saving their own seats and putting petty power above the welfare of the country is itself a political virus. I admit I was shocked."

"...Fifth, I am grateful to past-President Trump for demonstrating how easy it is for a president to simply pull the boat away from the shore by himself. Thanks to Trump, we learned the hard way that government by executive orders — presidential determinations neither vetted nor voted on by Congress — is not a democracy. It is at best a monarchy in disguise, a monarchy in waiting.  The executive order is a legislative tool that has been growing in popularity. In the modern era, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the face of a recalcitrant Congress, launched his New Deal. Worse, he also incarcerated Japanese Americans with it. Before that era, western states had been created by it. Yet, for all intents and purposes, that approach to national legislation sank back into the shadows to be used for little more than minor issues in a world of more important debates or national emergencies. In our time, however, those doors have been blown open again by the plague of polarization. Presidents have little power in the face of political rejection to get anything done except by taking things into their own hands. But the process deserves watching. It's Trump's executive orders on border protection, immigration and immigrants, ecological reversals, federal land usage, infrastructure and the Affordable Care Act that are clear indicators of how easy it has gotten to legislate outside of legislation."

The whole article is worth reading, but I was especially struck by Chittister's fifth point. And her last paragraph:

"May God help us all, citizens and political figures at every level, to figure out that the lesson that will make or break our future lies in realizing that politics is a seriously righteous act — a socially ethical responsibility, a deeply spiritual one. The great political question in this country now is a moral one: Are we devoted to such public morality? Are we up to it? "

"From where I stand, through it all I learned that the complacency of "it can't happen here" has died here these past four years. Just as it did in Munich in 1939. "