What can one say about a week in which a Republican Supreme Court affirmed the Heritage Foundation's Marxism of healthcare and the right of your gay neighbor to marry for love; a week in which the Confederate flag swiftly transmogrified from a symbol of "pride" to a movable scar of disgrace; and a week in which the most offensive man in America, Donald Trump, became the statistical presidential frontrunner in the party of Lincoln?
It doth fog and delight the mind, this flurry of decency, though it be entangled with the enduring darkness of the nation's dimmest.
There is, especially, something about the puritanical abomination of true love that excites the lower orders to summits of outrage. All around them God, if you like, has dropped inescapable hints as to the splendor of human and natural diversity, and yet the vocally pious scream Wrong, it's all wrong, it's as wrong as the fossil record. The champions of these earthly salts — the latter of whom I pity far more than disdain — are quite happy, of course, to rally ignorance and prejudice, and arm for the Apocalypse.
I won't trouble you long with the roster of such demagoguery. Trump's was — unsurprisingly — ineffably incoherent. Scott Walker's was bland and predictable, although we repeat ourselves: "The only alternative left for the American people is to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reaffirm the ability of the states to continue to define marriage." Mike Huckabee's was fiercely entertaining: "We must resist and reject judicial tyranny." Ted Cruz's was, I must admit, inventive: What this country needs is a "constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants," by which he means "judicial retention elections" that would "[render] the justices directly accountable to the people" — a kind of tea-party judicial branch which would have horrified the Madisonian ethic. Bobby Jindal's was hilarious: "The Supreme Court is completely out of control…. If we want to save some money, let’s just get rid of the court." And Jeb Bush's, in a knowing conflict of conscience, read like a P.O.W. note from the Hanoi Hilton: "The Supreme Court should have allowed the states to make this decision." In his next public appearance I expect that with his eyelids he'll tap out in Morse code, "H-e-l-p m-e."
The award for most intriguing reaction came, however, from the incomparable Louie Gohmert: "If Moses, Jesus, and contributors to the Bible were correct, God’s hand of protection will be withdrawn as future actions from external and internal forces will soon make clear. I will do all I can to prevent such harm, but I am gravely fearful that the stage has now been set." We do so appreciate Louie's vigilance and his apparent eagerness to fight the Divine Will, which is blasphemous enough. But what really fascinates is that Louie seems riddled with theological doubt and apostate wonderment: If Moses, Jesus, and contributors to the Bible were correct? Good God, I bet that lit up the Huckabee Hotline.
But back to some sanity. I suspect Anthony Kennedy had a bet going with Antonin Scalia that with Jim Obergefell he could bring Andrew Sullivan out of retirement. Kennedy won. Sullivan has returned, however briefly, to rejoice but also "to rebut the entire line of being 'on the right side of history.' History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward…. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance."
From what a historian would call a synchronic view of history, Sullivan is correct. (See how it's done, Louie?) He's as correct as George Will is correct in limiting his survey of global warming to a decade or two. But from the more expansive diachronic view of history, I'd argue that Sullivan has it wrong. Human history, it seems to me in a quasi-Marxist sort of way, is an unstoppable force of progress. Its trajectory is depressingly jagged in the short term — meaning decades — but over the centuries it's essentially upward. In time, the convictions of the uncourageous are overwhelmed by courageous convictions, such as Sullivan's, such as yours, and such as mine (however Montaignean they may be). We as a species stagger and grope quite a bit and we've a helluva long way to go, but human decency — whether God-inspired or not — is much more vivid in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Ramses, Nero, Charlemagne or John C. Calhoun.
What we witnessed this week — a particularly high point of human decency — is sure to be followed by new lows. Of those, the uncourageous never run out. But in the greater scope of things, what we also witnessed this week was the inexorable meeting of both true progressivism and authentic conservatism, at the intersection of Sullivan and Sanders.