The Sources of Political Gridlock and Anger

It has been a very unconventional political primary season. In the last three weeks two public debates sank to what seem to me to be new lows in presidential politics. In the first of these debates three of the candidates called other candidates for the same office “liars” on fifty-two occasions in that single debate. In the next debate incredible insults were hurled at the other candidates by each other, reaching the level of attacking the shape of the candidates’ ears, mouths and hands. The suggestion was made that that one candidate had suffered a “meltdown,” and that another had “wet his pants.” Political anger was so high that I thought I might have been listening to fourth-graders competing for the presidency of their class.

As if the debate needed another emotional issue to heighten the negativity, the death of Justice Antonin Scalia brought into this campaign new dimensions of fear and anger. The majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, announced that he would not even allow hearings on a nominee submitted by the President until after the election in November. While that attitude is not unfamiliar in American politics, it has never before been articulated in such a bald way in the history of our constitutional democracy. Still other evidence of anger and gridlock occurred about six weeks ago when the President of the United States submitted a budget to Congress as the Constitution requires him to do. The leaders of the opposition party, in control of both houses of Congress, announced that they would not even receive that budget.

Senators have the constitutional authority to reject any nominee to the Supreme Court, but do they have the right to refuse to consider that nominee? Members of the House of Representatives in which, under our Constitution, all appropriations bills must originate, have the right to reject any item found in the president’s proposed budget or even the entire budget, but do they have the right to refuse even to receive the budget that the President is required to submit?

Political gridlock and anger in Washington have been growing stronger over the last decade. It has now reached levels never seen before in American history. The presidential campaign reveals this anger in spades. Thirty years ago, Antonin Scalia, a brilliant legal mind with a deeply conservative point of view, was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan and confirmed by a Democratically-controlled United States Senate by a vote of 98-0. How is it possible that in the brief span of thirty years we have gone from unanimity to the inability even to consider a nominee to the highest court of this land?

Behind the political anger of our day there appears to be enormous fear, which suggests that power has been or is being lost and with it the ability to keep control of the political process. The articulated fear is that America is changing and that never again will the future be better than the past. What is it that creates and feeds this fear, fueling what sounds like apocalyptic, end of the world, political rhetoric? Today, I search our nation’s history for clues.

Contrary to what most people seem to think, the United States was not born as a democracy in which the voices of the people were allowed to be heard and the will of the people was allowed to rule. We were born rather as a “Republic,” in which power was limited to a very few. At our nation’s beginning, the only people who were allowed to vote were white, land-owning males. There was nothing strange about this requirement. Indeed, it had long been the norm in most of the developed world. Beginning in 1215, however, with the adoption of the Magna Carta, the forces of democracy have slowly but surely eaten away at the prerogatives of the white landed gentry were challenged. It is, nonetheless, a fact of history that this nation has from its beginning been substantially controlled by white males. Over the years, however, the power of that group has been eroded on a regular basis. Those steps can easily be documented.

Step one came when the power of the ballot was extended to all white males, not just those who owned property. That step expanded the electorate, but it did not greatly weaken the power of the ruling landed gentry. Economic pressure was used to keep the electoral process relatively unchanged. Following the Civil War, the franchise was extended to black males. Once again this step expanded the electorate, but it did not disrupt white male power. This was especially true since black male voters were a distinct minority and they could be and were controlled through intimidation, both physical and economic. The result of this step was that the rule of the white male aristocracy continued, a bit less secure, but with little change.

In 1920 after a decades-long struggle, the constitution was amended to allow women to vote. The number of people with the power of the ballot was theoretically doubled. The great fear of the male voters at that time was that uninformed women might choose an ill-equipped man to run the nation. Their fears proved inaccurate for many years. Black women, facing threats and oppression voted in very small numbers. White women, however, tended to vote in almost identical patterns with their husbands. From 1924, which was the first presidential election in which women could vote until 1996 this pattern persisted. Finally in 1996 the voting patterns of males and females diverged sufficiently for women to be credited for the first time with actually determining the presidential outcome. Without the female vote in that year, Republican Robert Dole would have defeated President Bill Clinton in his quest for a second term. That result sent shockwaves of fear through the white male establishment.

Next a new immigration pattern developed during the sixties when the “quota system,” which favored immigrants from Great Britain and Europe, most of whom were white, was changed to give the people of all nations equality of opportunity in immigration. Immigrants from Asia, Africa and South America, all of whom were people of color, began to seek their futures in this nation. The rainbow coalition of the world’s population began to describe America’s profile.

One of the results of the Vietnam struggle in the 1960’s was to solidify the power of young adults who led the protests against that war. That power found expression in the adoption in June of 1971 of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age in this country from 21 to 18. The winning argument was that if eighteen year olds could be drafted to fight this nation’s wars they should be given a voice in setting this nations policies. When the voting age was lowered to 18 colleges and universities became hotbeds of political activity. It was a scary development for the white male establishment.

When we add to these systemic, structural changes of history things like the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement, the empowerment of heretofore marginalized people began to be real. These groups began to organize and to claim their voices in the political arena. Intimidation no longer worked. The political power of this nation was clearly shifting from the control of the white males of yesterday toward a new kind of democracy marked by the power of the people, who once had been so deeply marginalized. The white male-ruling oligarchy thus became deeply threatened.

The remaining avenues of power open to the entrenched white male ruling class were laws that controlled the electorate by making voting difficult for minorities, combined with the use of unlimited money to manipulate the political process so as to guarantee predictable political outcomes. The Supreme Court of this nation alone could and did open these doors. The voting power of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960’s that guaranteed the vote to minorities was rescinded by the Court and turned back to the states. The result was that states from Texas to Pennsylvania immediately moved to make voting more difficult for the young, the elderly and the economically challenged minorities. Next the Court defined corporations as people and voted to allow unlimited and anonymous money in the billions of dollars to flow into the electoral process. One man, one vote died and money was allowed to magnify the vote of the wealthy hundreds of times. Today this practice is so common that we know the names of the billionaires, who fund the super PACs and we watch our politicians grovel before them.

Then in 2008, the growing tide of the much-feared, non-white voters in the country accomplished that which up to that moment had been unthinkable. An African-American was elected president by a 53% majority! He had won the nomination of his party over the challenge of a white woman. White male power was no longer in control. It would “just be for four years” became their hope, expressed literally by Senator Mitch McConnell, who at that time was the minority leader of the Senate. The African American President, however, won re-election four years later by five million votes over a very well-known white business man of enormous wealth. Shudders ran through the political power structures. The Supreme Court had become the final defender of their power. Then the leader of the 5-4 conservative majority on the Court died and the African-American President was in the position of nominating his successor and the 5-4 conservative majority might be lost forever. Anger abounded. The presidential nominating process reflected that anger. Establishment figures in both parties were challenged and began to be shunted aside.

Popularity seemed to be correlated with anger. It was said that the 2016 election would be “the most important one in our history.” The election of 2016 will either hold back the tide of change for four more years or it will open forever the floodgates. How we negotiate these issues will determine whether democracy will survive in this nation. How we got here is clear. How we will get through this transition is yet to be determined.

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

Chiwoza Bandawe from Blantyre, Malawi, writes:

I was sorry not to see you at the Parliament of World Religions held a while back in Salt Lake City, which was a joyous celebration of love, unity and togetherness as children of God. I wanted to ask your view and interpretation of the celebration of Holy Communion. What is its history? How would you interpret it since you do not subscribe to the blood sacrifice theory? Does it still have its usefulness or would you exclude it from a new progressive Christianity?

Dear Chiwoza,

I’m sure the meeting the Parliament of World religions in Salt Lake City, was worthwhile. The concept of gathering adherents of the world’s various religions for mutual conversations always breaks stereotypes and challenges exclusive claims. My only problem with it is that it tends to work from the top down and therefore means that it is only a very small number of people who are involved. There is so much work to be done from the bottom up. It is very difficult for people to embrace the concept of world religions when they cannot even embrace the division between Orthodox and Reformed, Shia and Sunni, Catholic and Protestant, fundamentalist and modernist. This does not mean that I oppose such things as the Parliament of World Religions. I think we should walk every path available to us in the quest of human oneness. I simply do not want anyone to be unrealistic about the limitations in every path we human beings walk.

The Christian Eucharist was born in the Passover meal of the Jews where bread was taken, blessed, broken and given in a meal that celebrated the Jewish people’s birth as a nation in Egypt when they passed from a life marked by oppression and slavery into a life of independence and the joy of freedom. Early in Christian history Jesus had been identified with the Passover Lamb. It was Paul writing to the Corinthians around the year 54 CE, who first made that identification. “Christ, our new paschal lamb, has been sacrificed for us,” he wrote.

The history of the Passover according to the book of Exodus was that it began as the final plague that God would visit on the Egyptians to force them to allow the Hebrew slave people to go free. This plague was that God would send the “Angel of Death” to pass through the land of Egypt and to kill, shall I say murder, the first born male in every household. The story reflects a rather vengeful tribal deity. Moses inquires of God as to how the Angel of Death would be able to tell the difference between a Jewish house and an Egyptian one, so that no first-born Jewish males would be put to death. God’s answer was that they were to slaughter a lamb and place the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of Jewish homes. The Angel of Death, seeing these bloody doorposts, would “pass over” the Jewish homes and only slay Egyptians. That is the origin of the name Passover. It was to be while the Egyptians were in shock and grief, mourning the loss of their loved ones, that the Children of Israel would make their “exodus” from the land of Egypt.

The Christian Eucharist was at first a highly symbolic act designed to identify Jesus with the paschal lamb. I suspect that this identification actually grew out of a sermon preached by a follower of Jesus at a Passover celebration seeking to draw the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the slaying of the Passover lamb.

The cross in this sermon was seem as the doorposts of the world, suspended as it was between heaven and earth. On one side it pointed to heaven, while on the other it was rooted in the earth. The blood of the new paschal lamb on that cross served in some magical way, they believed, to break the power of death so that people coming to God through the blood of the paschal lamb could participate in the life of God, which was eternal. It was much later that content from the liturgical day called Yom Kippur entered the Eucharist. That was the time when the blood of the sacrifice entered the Eucharist and atonement theology was born.

Originally, the Eucharist was, I believe, the liturgical context in which the resurrection was understood. It was a gathering of the people of God around the table of the Lord in order to share in his life. That was the meaning that gave the Eucharist its primary power.

The idea that Jesus died for my sins is a much later bit of bad theology, which was subsequently placed on top of the Eucharist. So if we separate the Eucharistic experience from the explanations that gathered around it through the ages, then we might recover its original meaning. In this question and answer format I can only scratch the surface, but I hope the direction is clear.

Stay in touch.

John Shelby Spong