The New York Times ran a fascinating interview with Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma yesterday. In the course of the discussion, Lankford made clear in a thousand ways that—despite being a Republican—he is not Donald Trump. He held Trump responsible for tanking the bipartisan border deal that Lankford negotiated earlier this year. He acknowledged that the only reason Trump opposed the legislation is that he was worried it might actually solve a problem, in the eyes of the public, and would thereby hand Democrats a victory in an election year. In other words, the bill died for reasons of rank politics, rather than sound policy. (Meanwhile, I too oppose the bill—but not for reasons that matter to either political party at this point. I am still quaint enough to believe in asylum; that was my problem with it.)
Lankford also acknowledged that Trump does and says things we would never do himself. Lankford said that he supports in principle the idea of asylum—i.e., that the United States should be a place of refuge for the oppressed. "There are people that are asylees that are fleeing from injustice around the world," he said, adding: "We don’t want to ever lose [that] in America[.]" When asked about Trump's stated ambition to carry out "mass deportations" of all undocumented people in the country, Lankford made no attempt to defend this policy goal. Instead, he observed that Trump would almost certainly never be able to pull it off in practice. He would start by deporting people with pending orders of removal; but if he tried to circumvent due process for everyone else, "[a] court would stop that immediately."
In short, Lankford is a very different kind of Republican than Trump; and yet, he insists that he is still in the former president's corner. He has never openly broken with Trump; and he did not disavow the label "MAGA" (though he gently tried to redefine it, before applying it to himself). The interviewers tried to press him on how exactly he squared what he knew to be true of Trump with his continued support for the man. They brought up the example of Mike Pence. There, the interviewers observed, was a man who—like Lankford—was an evangelical conservative. He, too, had tried to tolerate Trump's reign over the party for as long as possible. But—eventually—his conscience got the better of him. Trump asked him to cross one ethical line too many. Specifically, he was not willing to betray the Constitution.
The interviewers were effectively asking Lankford if he might ever encounter a similar limit within himself. Was there something that Trump might ask him to do that would force him to break openly with his party's standard-bearer? Lankford's response to this was intriguingly indirect. He told a story from the Bible, the applicability of which to his circumstances was so subtle that it at first seemed almost a non sequitur. Lankford says:
Nehemiah 1 does a great story about Hananiah, who’s the brother of Nehemiah coming back from Jerusalem when they’re both living as slaves in isolation and exile. And Nehemiah catches his brother Hananiah and says, “What’s it like in Jerusalem now?” And Hananiah says: “Oh, it’s awful. The people live in disgrace. The walls are down. The economy’s collapsed. It’s terrible.” And Hananiah walks off. And Nehemiah, who wasn’t even there or didn’t even see it, prays: “God, this is terrible. What do I do about it?" There’s two different perspectives that come out of that. There’s a Hananiah that sees the problem and says, “Stinks to be them,” and walks away. And there’s a Nehemiah that says: “That’s terrible, God. What can I do to make that better? What can I do to help solve that?” I have to make a decision every single day. Am I going to be Hananiah, or am I going to be a Nehemiah? I’m choosing to be a Nehemiah.
Reading between the lines, Pence is apparently supposed to be Hananiah, in this story—the person who threw up his hands and walked away. Ultimately, he chose not to stay in the cult. He "blew," as they say in Scientology speak. He had had enough. He had been willing to mortgage his soul for quite some time. He had served his turn in the trenches as a "Nehemiah." Reporting from inside the Trump administration often described how Pence and his wife would say as a mantra—whenever Trump's grotesque behavior was becoming intolerable—"just stay the course." Pence, like Lankford, believed for a long time that he could do more good by remaining inside the administration than as a critic outside the center of power. But eventually, Trump pushed his moral boundaries past the limit.
Lankford is apparently now where Pence still was just a few years ago. He can plainly see everything that is wrong with Trump. He knows it is wrong to stigmatize innocent people who are just coming to this country looking for work and safety. He knows "mass deportation" is not good policy. He knows people have a right in principle to seek refuge from persecution. He knows—as Pence ultimately did too—that it is wrong to try to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election. (Lankford, for instance, makes no attempt to defend Trump's recent comment that Christians "will never have to vote again" after the coming election. "[W]e’re certainly going to have elections. Nothing’s going to break the Constitution," he said.) But Lankford still thinks he can "stay the course." He thinks he can do more good inside than out.
This is a form of moral casuistry that politicians have been practicing for decades—if not centuries. In his classic of political science, Political Parties, Robert Michels devotes a long section to exploring the motives of "children of the bourgeoisie" who sacrifice their financial and social futures by choosing to join the socialist cause. Michels plainly admired such individuals, for the material comforts they were willing to forbear for the sake of the party. But he also observes that some of them were willing to make an even greater sacrifice. They were willing to make a moral sacrifice, in other words. Like the "suffering servant" of Isaiah, they were willing to take the transgression on themselves. As Michels puts it, a politician of this type "offers up his honor to the party, the greatest sacrifice that a man of honor can make." (Paul trans.)
Lankford seems to see himself in a similar light. He is willing to make the sacrifice, even of his honor, in order to stay in the arena. This is evidently what it means to be a Nehemiah, in his eyes. It means being willing to accept the compromise of one's own moral purity. It is being willing to part even with one's own honor and integrity—because it is better to stay in the fight and be willing to dirty one's hands, than to walk off and thereby keep oneself pure—but at the expense of being unable to help anyone who remains behind.
I'm sure this is what Pence was telling himself too, for a long time. This is what "staying the course" meant, no doubt, in his mind. I translate it as: "I know this is terrible. I know this is all a moral scandal. But we have to stay in the arena. Even if it means parting with our own honor and accepting moral compromise, we have to still be Nehemiahs." But eventually, Trump pushed him too far. He will undoubtedly push Lankford too far as well, soon enough. It is Trump's nature to push every moral boundary, as a kind of loyalty test, to see how far people will bend. Will they be willing to divest themselves of every last shred of credibility and integrity they had? "Yes, sir," Marco Rubio said (not that it did him any good in the Veepstakes). But I can't see Lankford being willing to go that far. He will eventually hit his own limit. He will have to become a Hananiah in spite of himself—just as Romney, Flake, Pence, and so many others have before him.
But does this mean that people with integrity—who are eventually forced to break with the Republican leadership, because Trump demands too large a piece of their soul—cannot do any good? When Pence left Trump's fold and declined to endorse him for the next election, does that really mean that Pence is walking away, Hananiah-like, and effectively saying (as Lankford paraphrases it): "Stinks to be them"? Surely not. Pence is actually—in my view—doing more good on the outside than he ever could within.
There's a passage in Sir Thomas More's Utopia in which the narrator argues over this point with his interlocutor, the radical Raphael Hythloday. The narrator—who is perhaps More himself, or someone a great deal like him, attempts a version of the same casuistry that Lankford deploys. Sure, he has accepted the moral compromises of practical politics, he says—but it is only because he has chosen to stay in the fight. He is sticking it out in the arena, because he knows he can do more good there. He is choosing to be a "Nehemiah," in Lankford's terminology. But Hythloday offers a pretty sound rejoinder to this. He argues—citing Plato—that a philosopher can do more good by preserving his integrity, than by mortgaging it in the pursuit of power. After all—he observes—if a man were to see a group of people all getting rained on, would he serve them best by running about arguing with them, and getting wet himself? Or could he do the most good for his fellows by finding a dry spot and standing outside the rain, so that others might see what he is doing and follow him?
This, in my view, is the good that Pence is doing. This is the good the Hananiahs can serve in society. They can lead by example. They can stand where it is dry, and show other people that it is possible to do so, in the hopes that others might follow. They can say: "See? It's dry over here! You don't have to mortgage your integrity. You don't have to sell your soul to Trump. You don't have to give up your honor to the party. It is actually possible for you to follow your conscience—and the U.S. Constitution." Others are bound to follow their lead.
And so, at least in this case, I am with the Pences of the world. I am with the Hythlodays. I am, I guess you could say, on the side of the Hananiahs.
No comments:
Post a Comment