Two Versions of the Right

 You'd think just reading a mainstream newspaper would be enough on its own to make one acquainted with the depths of depravity in the Trump administration. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of the alternative media ecosystem in which the American MAGA right lives, and one sees that the abyss is even deeper than one could have imagined. 

Today, for instance, I was trying to look up news reports about the TPS designation for Somalia, when I stumbled upon a press release from some evangelical group. They were applauding a MAGA representative for drawing up articles of impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for daring to pause Trump's termination of Somali refugees' legal status under the TPS program. 

At the bottom of the press release, this nonprofit calls upon its members to pray "For members of the House of Representatives as they consider the impeachment articles for judges who ignore Supreme Court precedents."

This group not only supports Trump's maniacally cruel policy of deporting people to war-torn Somalia, then (a country our own government has meanwhile been continuously bombing for years—including under this administration!). They are also trying to impeach a federal judge for daring to so much as slow the wheels of this deportation machine while she adjudicates the underlying legal issues. 

There's something particularly perverse about this kind of statement coming from a purportedly evangelical group—and not just because Trump's policy so obviously flies in the face of the Gospel message; but also because it is so strangely different from the stance many of these same evangelical communities would have taken just a few short years ago. 

My recollection is hazy at this point of the 2004 movie I Heart Huckabees. But I do seem to remember a scene in which the annoying, SUV-driving, Bush-supporting evangelical family who are the primary antagonists of the film boast about taking "a goddamn Somali refugee into our homes!" (Or maybe it was Sudan—different country, I know; as I say, my recollection of the movie is a bit vague). 

At any rate, my point is that the stereotype of even the worst, most obnoxious sort of evangelical conservative in the Bush years was that they would be morally sanctimonious. They might be polluting the planet and supporting forever wars of aggression in violation of the UN charter. But they would at least do it all under the mantle of "saving" the benighted peoples of the world. 

And, almost as an incidental byproduct of their messianic savior complex, they would happen periodically to actually do a few good things—like welcome refugees from war-torn countries in Africa. 

Today's evangelical right—like today's right in general—is obviously something else entirely. Their position now is the same as Trump's: Somali refugees, in their Gospel-informed opinion, can go die for all they care. Somali refugees are inhuman "garbage," as Trump has put it. (Trump again yesterday sweepingly denigrated Somalis as a class, saying they were "not smart" and have "nothing going.")

It is a valid question whether it would really be better to restore the hypocritical right of the Bush years, instead of the nakedly evil right that we have today. 

Some critics of imperialism have argued before that the worst of all sins is to rob and kill people while claiming it is for their own good; they would say that the hypocritical version of the right is worse. 

As the sympathetic protagonist of Orwell's Burmese Days says of the British imperial project in Asia: "We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we'd only admit that we're thieves and go on thieving without any humbug."

As Ernest Crosby once framed a similar sentiment in his poem "Rebels" (from his great anti-war collection of protest verse, Swords and Plowshares): 

Oh, for the good old Roman days
Of robbers bold and true,
Who scorned to oil with pious phrase
The deeds they dared to do—

The days before degenerate thieves
Devised the coward lie
Of blessings that the enslaved receives
Whose rights their arms deny! 

I hate the oppressor's iron rod,
I hate his murderous ships,
But most of all I hate, O God,
The lie upon his lips!

These authors, then, seem to be suggesting that the Bush-era hypocritical right was even worse than the openly chauvinistic and violent Trump imperium we have now. 

In the Bush years, after all, left-wing critics often had to make the argument that, beneath the administration's soaring rhetoric about democracy and uplift, they really just had their eye on Iraq's oil fields. 

Trump, by contrast, boasts openly open about how he is going to take Venezuela's oil, and says that he intends to "run" the country as a neo-colonial puppet state. 

Trump, then, is a "robber bold and true" in Crosby's sense of the term. He doesn't pretend he's waging these wars for the victim's own benefit (though he did at first make a lot of empty claims about saving the Iranian civilians, before completely betraying and abandoning them again). By and large, he can be said to be "thieving without any humbug." 

But this too, I say, is in a sense even worse than the hypocrisy Crosby and Orwell denounced. Of hypocrisy it can be said, at least, that it is "the tribute vice pays to virtue." Open thievery, by contrast, does not even pay such a tribute. It simply has nothing to do with virtue at all. 

As Julien Benda writes in The Treason of the Intellectuals (Aldington trans.), people in the past at least had the decency to "honour good" even while they often "acted ill"—whereas today's nationalist right seems to both "honour ill: and "act ill."

Benda quotes a line from a Tolstoy story to illustrate his point: "Others were at least ashamed of being brigands; but what is to be done with this man, who is proud of it?"

Indeed, that is my point here. The Bush-era religious right was at least ashamed of being brigands and thieves and murderers. They feel the need to hide their imperial crimes beneath a mantle of humanitarian rhetoric. Whereas Trump and his evangelical followers today just seem to want to brazen it out. They say: "we conquer, rob, murder, and destroy—and we're proud of it!"

Which is worse? "O which one—is it each one?" (Hopkins). Let's just say they are both terrible, and leave it at that. Better than either would be to not rob and pillage and invade other countries at all, nor deport refugees and asylum-seekers to inhuman conditions where their lives will be in peril. 

Imagine that!