Common Life Politics

"Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?"

What looks like a simple tax question was actually a perfectly crafted political trap. Imagine religious leaders so desperate to discredit Jesus that they'd bring together groups that normally hate each other – just to set up an impossible question."

The Pharisees and Herodians were religious and political opponents who rarely agreed on anything. Yet, they united against Jesus to create a no-win scenario. If Jesus said, 'Pay taxes,' he'd alienate the Jewish resistance. If he said, 'Don't pay,' he'd be accused of sedition against Rome.

This wasn't just a question. It was a binary choice designed to force Jesus into an impossible corner – exactly how our current political discourse operates.

Jesus refuses to play by their binary rules. When asked about paying taxes, he doesn't choose sides. Instead, he reframes the entire conversation.

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.”

This isn't tax policy. This is a profound statement about true allegiance.

Dominative Christianism often reduces the passage to a simplistic endorsement of patriotic duty. 'Pay your taxes, be a good citizen' becomes a way to sacralize a particular national identity.

When nationalism meets faith, we risk missing the subversive heart of Jesus's response—how he challenges the entire premise of earthly authority.

On the other hand, Providential Identitarianism wants to read the passage as a sophisticated act of political resistance. Jesus becomes a clever strategist, outmaneuvering imperial power.

But this misses the deeper theological truth. Jesus isn't primarily a political strategist – he's revealing something profound about human identity.

Notice how Jesus first asks to see the coin. His questioners have it – he doesn't. He's already exposing their complicity with the very system they're critiquing.

The coin bears Caesar's image. But humans? We bear God's image. This isn't about taxes. This is about ultimate allegiance.

Both Dominative Christianism and Providential Identitarianism trap us in binary thinking that betrays Jesus's teaching.

Truth isn't about:

* Picking the right political side

* Maintaining the current power structure

* Overthrowing the current power structure.

Truth is about recognizing whose image we truly bear.

A coin. An image. A profound question. When religious leaders tried to trap Jesus, he didn't choose sides. He revealed a deeper reality.

The coin belongs to Caesar. But you? You belong to God. Our ultimate allegiance isn't to political tribes or ideological camps. It's to the one who created us in divine image.

Whose image are you bearing today?

During my morning reflection today, one verse from Psalm 119:1-8 particularly resonated with me: "I will give thanks to you with a heart that does right as I learn your righteous rules" (v. 7). The poet highlights the challenge and necessity of integrating our emotions with reason. It's a learning process. We don't simply decide to "walk in the Lord's Instruction" and immediately know how to do it or possess the willpower to stay on that path. Instead, we build that strength over time, much like an athlete who trains her muscles through repetitive sets of lifting increasing weights.

In this process, God teaches our emotions to respond to life's stimuli as individuals who love what God loves. We desire God's desires and learn to act according to that unified intent. It’s a will to love rather than a will to power—one that inspires us to create rather than dominate. The guiding principle that directs our path is an attitude of gratitude. When we turn our hearts toward God with genuine thanks, the mists of confusion clear, our minds realign, and we adjust our course to "walk in the Lord's Instruction" (v. 1).

Through years of addressing God and being addressed by God in this way, we learn how to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, ultimately becoming more fully human.

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Welcome to the final part of my series on the Communism/Socialism/Marxism Dog Whistle. My claim is that the sounding of the Dog Whistle is immoral because we historically used it to sustain wealthy male domination over women and the poor.

In a previous video, I explained how dog whistles work by covertly saying that we must hide from the light of day because it cannot be said aloud and subverts our values.

I’ve explained how civic republicanism presumes we invest as a society in the infrastructure, insurance, and insulation necessary to ensure we are all expressively equal politically so that all citizens can look at each eye-to-eye without fear that the other takes away our basic liberties.

And I’ve explained how to know when we legitimately describe something as communist/socialist/Marxist.

In this final video, I will finally turn to my thesis. I want to persuade you that those who use the communist/socialist/Marxist label as a political dog whistle act immorally and subvert our republic when they do so.

Let’s begin by remembering how we have used that dog whistle in our history.

Before and after the Civil War, Lincoln’s Republican reformers advocated for expanded citizenship rights for non-Anglo males and Anglo females.

They focused on rights such as voting, property ownership, marriage, and work across cultural boundaries.

They also pushed for public investments in infrastructure like roads, schools, and hospitals accessible to non-Anglos. This battle involved the rights of white women and formerly enslaved males. It also involved Tejanos in Texas and Californios and Asians in California.

From sea to sea, wealthy Anglo males fiercely opposed these reforms, fearing a dilution of their cultural dominance if States extended voting rights to non-Anglos and females. They predicted that expanding suffrage would increase taxes to build infrastructure in areas inhabited by people experiencing poverty.

They objected because:

(1) it would be unfair, as they owned most of the nation’s property and would pay a disproportionate share of the needed taxes.

(2) They also saw it as wealth redistribution, with the poor and middle class benefiting more from the improved infrastructure than the wealthy. Of course, the rich already cared for the wealthy’s infrastructure, insurance, and insulation needs.

To maintain their power, they fiercely opposed the passing and enforcement of the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to previously enslaved men.

They also enacted laws to prevent or hinder non-Anglo voting, impacting groups such as formerly enslaved individuals, el Norte, and Native Americans who preceded Anglos in settling in California and the Southwest, Latino immigrants in Florida, and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast.

Anglo-male voters established unequal treatment under the law for 70 to 100 years. White women got the vote in 1920. Asians were allowed to become citizens in 1945.

We finally empowered all women and the non-Anglos oppressed by Jim Crow to vote when we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, a hundred years after the war that ended legal enslavement practices.

The key point to note is the propaganda used to justify excluding and suppressing non-Anglo and female citizens. The winning strategy arose in the 1870s as part of efforts to resist our First Reconstruction.

Wealthy former Confederates opposed the idea of granting voting rights to women and Black males by comparing them to the communards, who were supporters of the Paris Commune of 1871. The communes were French socialists who briefly took over Paris in response to the suffering caused by the Franco-Prussian War.

Wealthy male landowners aimed to create fear among Anglo citizens that non-Anglo and female enfranchisement would lead to a violent socialist takeover of the United States. They generated that fear by labeling Black and female suffrage supporters as communards.

This deployment of the Communist/Socialist dog whistle justified Jim Crow laws.

The Communist/socialist refrain was so successful that it spawned the rise of the KKK, its first terror campaign, and the suppression of voters through the implementation of Jim Crow laws. Affluent Anglo males defended our actions as necessary to safeguard the American Way, arguing that taxes for public improvements constituted unjust wealth redistribution.

During the Jim Crow era, wealthy Anglo males continued to use exclusion and violence against voters who supported the rollback of Jim Crow laws or taxes that mainly helped America’s poor. We justified it with the constant use of this Communism/Socialism/Marxism dog whistle.

One lasting impact of this era is that it ingrained in Anglo culture the belief that maintaining minority rule through the suppression of non-Anglo voting and wealth creation is in line with good citizenship and the protection of the American Way

Labeling Black and women suffragists as communists became a highly effective political strategy.

It led to a coded language that always conveys the same message.

We are to see anyone labeled as a communist, socialist, or Marxist as a threat to the American Way, which good citizens should resist. If not, a socialist takeover will occur, leading to the permanent loss of the American Way. We have to stop them to maintain our minority rule. That’s the message the dog whistle encodes.

Defining one’s opponent a communist, Marxist, or socialist – whether true or untrue – became a tried and true way to redefine them as America’s public enemy number one.

In our history, this is the standard way Anglo politicians and their wealthy patrons – a minority of our population – have resisted reforms aimed at improving the lot of the poor and disenfranchised. They fiercely resist policies that (1) dilute Anglo power by fully enfranchising non-Anglos and women or (2) provide infrastructure, insurance, and insulation to protect people experiencing poverty from domination.

Empowering all citizens to vote neither abolishes private property nor establishes government control of the means of production. Nor do policies aimed at ensuring all citizens are free from domination due to insufficient “infrastructure, insurance, and insulation.” On the contrary, they strengthen civic republicanism by widening the range of citizens participating in its responsibilities and fruits.

The communism/socialism/Marxism dog whistle was and is nonsense. But it’s highly effective nonsense.

It’s how the Anglo majority rolled back our First Reconstruction and imposed Jim Crow and its cousins to oppress non-Anglos for more than 70 years after the Civil War.

It’s how the wealthy resisted the demands of the labor movement before and after both World Wars, how the Anglo majority resisted the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, and how it resists efforts to address the massive wealth inequality that threatens our democracy today.

Suppose you are a politician whose patrons enjoy asymmetric power in our society. How do you resist efforts to give women the vote? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to give the former enslaved the vote? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to give wage-earners the right to unionize so the wealthy elites do not dominate them? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to build equal-quality schools, roads, and hospitals for low-income people? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to eliminate discrimination in the workplace based on race and gender? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to regulate toxic pollution practices that disproportionately impact the only land affordable to people with low incomes? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.

How do you resist efforts to eliminate structures of domination so that all citizens share equal freedom and look into each other’s eyes as equals in the 21st century? You know the answer. You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle. It’s the same old playbook.

For all citizens to be free, we must be expressively egalitarian in ensuring sufficient infrastructure, insurance, and insulation to flourish. That’s not Marx. That’s Aristotle and James Madison—paraphrased—describing what’s necessary for a civic republic to thrive.

So, suppose we’re serious about preserving our civic republic for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. In that case, we need to stop responding to and repeating dog whistles—especially this evil one—and start responding to our responsibility to make all citizens free in the most robust sense.

Let’s do it together!

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Bruyneel, Kevin. Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States. The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Illustrated edition. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hughes, Coleman. The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. Thesis, 2024.

Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Richardson, Heather Cox. “July 12, 2024.” Letters From an American (blog), n.d.

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Pettit, Philip. Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

———. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

———. The State. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Przeworski, Adam. Crises of Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

———. Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

———. States and Markets: A Primer in Political Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

———. Why Bother With Elections? 1st edition. Polity, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. On Freedom. Crown, 2024.

———. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. 1st edition. Crown, 2017.

———. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Crown, 2018.

Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2009.

———. “Virtue among the Ruins: An Essay on MacIntyre.” Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 26, no. 2–3 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1515/nzst.1984.26.2-3.256.

Woodard, Colin. American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good. Penguin Books, 2016.

Wright, Gavin. Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Belknap Press, 2013.

Let’s talk about dog whistles. Why? If we respond to them, we’ve forgotten who we are. We are less than ourselves. I will explain what I mean by that below. Let’s get started.

My dog’s name is Sadie. After my wife, she’s my best friend. You likely get that because you may also have deep bonds with your pets.

Let’s start with the obvious. Sadie is a canine, and I’m a sapiens. Scholars say canines and sapiens have evolved together for over 15,000 years. We have a synergistic relationship. But we can’t get confused about our roles for the relationship to be coherent. She must remain a canine, and I must stay a sapiens.

Sadie can outrun, outsleep, outsmell, and out-hear me. She can also think critically and collaborate to solve problems.

Sadie is the most intelligent and loving canine in canine history.

I have only two advantages over Sadie. I can sweat, and she can’t, which means I can run a marathon without stopping to cool down, but she can’t.

Like her, I am a critical thinker. But my brain enables me to imagine and manage relationships at a scale far more significant than my pack or family.

Indeed, I can collaborate with people I’ve never met to create solutions all sapiens face.

That capacity to think critically and work collaboratively at a large scale makes me a sapiens. Mature sapiens are in a reconciled relationship with all creatures, always striving to love their neighbor as themselves and imagining how to flourish at scale.

If I forget that and instead act like a dog, both Sadie and I get confused. I debase myself by acting less than human. Flourishing depends on our acting according to our kind.

Sadie’s so bright she can make associations and then react to things she sees later. For example, if I give her a piece of meat every time I ring a bell, I can ring that bell in the future, and she’ll begin to salivate.

Or, if she sees me getting on a particular shirt that she knows I run in, she’ll immediately run and block the door because she knows that means I’m about to go running. She’ll insist that I take her with me. That’s called a Pavlovian response.

Which brings me to dog whistles.

A dog whistle works the same way. I can sound a dog whistle, and Sadie can hear that frequency and respond to it as if it were my voice. I can whistle in specific ways and cause her to react according to how I’ve trained her. Again, that’s a Pavlovian response.

The interesting thing about dog whistles is that other sapiens don’t hear them. The sound is too high a frequency, so it’s not audible to sapiens. But canines listen to them. Sadie hears the dog whistle and has the inside knowledge that enables her to decode the sounds and respond as I want her to.

Because Sadie and I are in a pack leader/pack member relationship – I’m her master – I could control Sadie completely with dog whistles. That’s a normal relationship between Sadie and me.

But if I tried to command you with a dog whistle, I’d debase both of us. Ours is not naturally a master/slave relationship. Commanding you with a dog whistle is not appropriate to our kind. We are equal in our human dignity. Flourishing depends on both of us acting according to our kind.

Which brings me to the use of dog whistles in our politics.

The concept of political dog whistles

In politics, a dog whistle is a phrase or statement that appears benign or ordinary to most people but carries a concealed, often contentious or harmful, meaning intended for a specific audience, potentially causing harm if not critically examined.

It is a way to communicate secretly with a particular group without drawing attention from others. A speaker uses this technique to appeal to views or beliefs that would be considered unacceptable or offensive if openly expressed.

Dog whistles are commonly used in politics and are not necessarily destructive.

They become destructive when their covert messages cloak the subversion of American values from their intended audience, triggering reflexive responses without awareness of being manipulated.

So, what’s a dog whistle? A dog whistle is a covert appeal to an unhealthy set of political attitudes that have to be disguised because they undermine accepted American values.

Dog whistles are a form of covert politics

Those politics typically involve three tactics:

* A subtly disguised message, appealing to views that cannot withstand the light of day.

* If called out: a denial of violating core values

* If called out, it attacks those who call out the dog whistle, often accusing them of playing the victim.

Examples of political dog whistles

Politicians on the Left sometimes use dog whistles to command performances of disdain and condescension toward groups.

Left-Wing Dog Whistles

For example, Hillary Clinton famously used the dog whistle, “Flyover country,” to signal that the opinions of those in America’s heartland should be dismissed because they reflect less enlightenment than those of citizens who live along the East or West Coast.

“Rural” is often used in the same way. More subtly, declaring that a candidate “voted for the ‘90s crime bill” that resulted in massive incarceration rates for Blacks is a way of signaling that someone is racist without actually saying so.

Right-Wing Dog Whistles

Politicians on the Right have since the 1870s used the communist/socialist/Marxist trifecta to name someone as America’s enemy, to create a false association of proposed social welfare policies with communism or socialism, and to command that patriotic Americans rally in opposition to defend the American Way. I will unpack that more in a future post.

Similarly, mentions of George Soros, the Rothschilds, or “globalist” or “globalism” are right-wing dog whistles that invoke centuries-old anti-semitic tropes about rich, usually Jewish, men conspiring to control the world’s finances.

Dog whistles ask us to stop being sapiens and start acting like canines. They debase our politics and cause us to be less than we are called to be. What’s the solution?

Let’s consider how dog whistles operate.

The role of dog whistles in political manipulation

Understanding the mechanics of dog whistles is crucial.

They demand that we shut down our critical thinking and embrace Machiavellian claims.

They demand we abandon our collaborative imagining and regard others as enemies to hate rather than neighbors to love.

They demand that we regard the one holding the whistle as our master rather than our equal.

They demand we overlook the evidence that a charlatan sees us as his dog.

We act like dogs rather than humans when we respond to dog whistles. We are not dogs. We ought not to respond to whistles.

Let’s flourish together by acting according to our kind.

Beaver, David, and Jason Stanley. The Politics of Language. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 3rd edition. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Lopez, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Illustrated edition. Oxford University Press, 2013.

McWhorter, John. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Portfolio, 2021.

Mounk, Yascha. “How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary.” New York Times, September 22, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/opinion/identity-politics.html.

We’ve talked a lot about healthy and disordered nationalisms, but today, let’s talk about the American civil religion. Why? It’s the nationalism American children are taught, the means through which we embed our American identity in our citizens. We need to discuss it because there’s solid evidence that the American civil religion is at the heart of our divisions today.

E Pluribus Unum, Our Civic Canon, & Civic Virtue

Since 1873, just after our Civil War, we have had a law that requires us to print our national motto, E pluribus unum, on all our coinage. It’s also on the dollar bill. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. E pluribus unum names our aspiration to become a people united in constructing a common life based on specific shared values and commitments. Ideas and leaders who divide us work against this grand aspiration. Out of many, one.

If you comprehend that American aspiration, you can understand the American civil religion. It’s the peoplehood story we share as we strive to construct an American identity that aims to achieve a neighborly unity nourished by our diversity.

That peoplehood story – or nationalism – is our way of conveying the transcendent values that matter most to that aspiration. I call it a story, but it’s something we convey not just with words but with practices like saying the Pledge of Allegiance, singing our national anthem, including prayers for our country in worship, preserving monuments and memorials in our midst, celebrating birthdays of American heroes, and through rituals like our 4th of July and Thanksgiving celebrations.

The American civil religion remembers heroes like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It draws upon a civic canon—an American Bible if you will—that includes identity-shaping documents such as the Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and MLK’s “I Got a Dream” speech.

Collectively, our civil religion fuels a shared American dream of becoming a free people who govern ourselves for the common good. That common good ethic includes our shared commitment to protect those whose political and economic insecurity is denoted by the biblical metaphor of the widow, orphan, and resident alien from arbitrary power.

It calls us to embody the belief that all are equal in our essential human dignity.

It teaches that all Americans are called to sacrifice so that our neighbors might flourish.

Our American civil religion also teaches us the importance of humility, recognizing human frailty and sinfulness. It teaches us to respect democratic institutions as essential but insufficient protections of our liberty and freedom and, therefore, regards civic virtue as the ultimate means of ensuring the common good.

So, above all, our American civil religion is about cultivating that civic virtue that must be cherished if we are ever to embody E pluribus unum -out of many, one.

The American civil religion is supposed to unite us but too often divides us.

That ought not to be surprising at one level because all healthy and disordered nationalisms are curated at home and in our communities, and they compete in the public square for influence. I call them peoplehood stories to highlight that they evolve as they compete, come into contact with competing perspectives, and adapt to events and changes in our lives.

So, no static and monolithic American peoplehood story encapsulates our values and commitments. There have always been many.

Some people older than me nostalgically recall when we all seemed to be on the same page regarding our American identity. However, that homogeneity is a romantic myth, an illusion created by segregation’s walls. America has always been a work in progress.

While there may have been a relatively common American civil religion in the post-WW2 era, today, we can identify two strands, distinct from Christian nationalism and radical secularism. They teach competing accounts of America, generate different worldviews, and emphasize different values and commitments.

Political scientists call these the priestly and prophetic strands of the American civil religion. Sometimes, they promote two mutually exclusive narratives. The “priestly” strand defends America’s status quo, deeds, and structures, most often justifying the status quo by celebrating American exceptionalism themes. In contrast, the “prophetic” discourse contrasts America’s deeds and structures with its ideals and calls for reform.

To understand how these differences play out, consider that the two strands of civil religion generate different responses to the following questions: (1) Should school kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school each day? (2) Is “in God We Trust” out of place on the dollar bill? (3) True or False: Burning the American flag is wrong because it is sacred.” (4)” Freedom must be for everyone to be the ‘land of the free.’(5) “We must make amends for our country’s original sins.”

Two important takeaways from this survey of American civil religion:

(1) We agree more than we disagree.

Though the two strands diverge in how they answer those questions, they agree more than they disagree on the American values and commitments they proclaim.

They agree that what ultimately binds us together is our commitment to live under the rule of law rather than our passions. All citizens should be bound by the same law, regardless of gender, skin hue, creed, or national origin.

They agree that our goal is to create a society where we govern ourselves for the common good, not just for one segment of our people. This distinguishes both forms of American civil religion from Christian nationalism, which, as the oxymoron it is, imagines a society governed by and for the benefit of an Anglo-Protestant segment of our people.

It’s important to remember that both strands of the American civil religion vastly outnumber those who advocate Christian nationalism.

(2) The two strands can divide more than unite us

Our two major political parties have tried to co-opt the strands, raising the existential stakes for us. The priestly strand permeates Republican politics, while the prophetic strand is entrenched among Democratic partisans. Why is that important to know?

Historically, faith communities have been a significant source of our identity and belongingness. But as participation in faith communities has waned, identification as a Republican or Democrat has displaced religious identities, and belongingness to our political party has replaced the belongingness that once came through participation in a faith community.

Faithfulness to our party is now how many meet our existential need for belongingness. That changes radically what’s at stake when a political leader insists we embrace blatant falsehoods or attitudes that contradict the transcendent values of American civil religion.

It’s now a matter of being cast out of the community that fulfills our hunger for belongingness. That’s a recipe for an identity crisis. You perform your identity as an American through participation in that political community, but that community now requires claims and behaviors contradicting your values and commitments.

What do you do? To preserve their sense of belongingness, many will perform extraordinary feats of mental gymnastics to rationalize outrageous lies or behaviors. They choose to be willfully blind to the contradiction.

But returning to the higher ground is hard once you debase yourself like that. It takes extraordinary courage to risk your sense of belongingness to stand up for truth and America’s highest values. But, as our American civil religion reminds us, that’s what American heroes do.

If that describes you, I pray you’ll choose to be an ordinary hero and return to the higher ground where you belong.

Now that we know that the vast majority of Americans share some strand of the American civil religion, we will turn in our next video to understanding a clear and present danger to both the Church and State: Christian Nationalism. Godspeed.

This is the third video in a four-part series in which I present a framework for understanding several accounts of how America can flourish that compete for influence in our public square. This framework will prepare you for a subsequent series in which I will deep-dive into multiple disordered nationalisms we encounter on the left and right.

In the first and second videos, I introduced the concept of nationalism from a Christian ethics perspective and developed our understanding of disordered nationalisms. In this video, we will shift our focus to rightly ordered nationalisms.I will explain why they're the antidote to the disordered kind and how to imagine them. I aim to empower you to make informed decisions about whether accepting some of the stories we hear in the public square is healthy.

This is the second video in a four-part series in which I present a framework for understanding several accounts of how America can flourish that compete for influence in our public square. This framework will prepare subscribers for a subsequent series in which I will deep-dive into multiple disordered nationalisms we encounter on the left and right.

In the first video, I introduced the concept of nationalism from a Christian ethics perspective. In this video, we will develop our understanding of disordered nationalisms.

This video is the first in a four-part series examining how American civil religion, once a unifying force, now contributes to our division.

Let's talk about nationalisms. What are they? Why do they matter?

I think the best way to understand nationalisms is to consider families.

Think about a family with many children and the different stories that children, even as they grow into adults, may tell about what it means to be a member of that family. What were mom and dad like? What values were taught? And whether or not they had gotten a fair deal at the table.

Depending on how they tell that story, they may have different practices and ethics and behave differently, even though they come from the same family.

The stories we tell about who we have been as members of a family matter in terms of our ethics.

And so, too, and in a very similar way, do the stories we tell about our peoplehood - our national identity - and what it means for us to be American.

If we tell a rightly ordered story, then our ethics as Americans and how we treat and love each other will be rightly ordered.

And if we tell untruthful stories that omit both our sins of omission and commission and our great achievements, well, our ethics, too, can be disordered.

They are very similar things: we tell stories around the table about our family lives and our lives as a community.

If the stories we tell about our lives put us in the role of victim, if they put us in the role like Cain did in the story of Cain and Abel, as the one who was victimized because all the glory, all the love went to one and not to the other, then we might often tell stories about impossibility: how it's impossible for us ever to flourish unless we resort to power, unless we resort to dynamics that would lead to the destruction of others. Or the subjugation of others, or ultimately, the subjugation of ourselves.

Of course, Cain told stories of victimhood, how he had not benefited as much as his brother, and he used those to justify his actions.

He slew his brother. And, of course, the rest is history. It determined who he would become.

Cain and Abel is one of the great stories from Scripture that reminds me of disordered nationalism. Cain’s version is a story we tell that puts us in the victim position.

But another one that comes to mind is pertinent here in the United States. That's the story of the two prodigal sons.

Most of us will think of the prodigal son as the younger brother. But there were two brothers. The story of the Prodigal Sons is a story of a younger brother who received and demanded, actually, his inheritance and went and wasted all the gifts that his father had given him in pursuing a life that was not worthy of himself.

He ultimately reached a point of no return - of the abyss - went home and was welcomed home by his father.

For me, the critical point here is not the younger brother's behavior but that of the older brother.

When the older brother saw that his younger brother, who had been so wasteful, was welcomed with extraordinary grace—that his father slayed the fatted calf and gave him a feast—he couldn't handle it.

And he, too, put himself in the place of a victim. Life was not fair.

The younger brother was given the privilege that was due him. And it was not fair. It was unjust. And so he was filled with resentment.

We can tell stories that put ourselves in the place of victims. Inevitably, this leads us to stories about ourselves that will shape our ethics in a disordered way. We will not become the people we were called to be.

That happens with us as individuals, and it happens to us as nations.

So we can tell many kinds of stories as a people, and the ones we accept matter immensely to us—to whether we will become the people we're called to be and, as James Baldwin put it, achieve our country.

Let’s talk about the enablers of autocracy: those who accommodate the slide from democracy into autocratic, quasi-totalitarian states. 

Who are the Accommodators of autocracy and why do they make this grave mistake?

The Accommodators of autocracy tend to be highly successful, highly intelligent leaders in whatever they do. They tend to be upper middle class or lower upper class - wealthy enough to imagine they’re insulated from most calamities. In our current crisis, the enablers are mostly white males close to my age. For many, the only threat they fear is higher taxes.

Why are enablers blind to the real threat the autocratic attempt presents? I’d cite two factors.

We were born at a time after WWII when no other nation could match America’s industrial might. Middle class males like me grew up in a time when the formula for flourishing was crystal clear: go to college, start a business career or profession, invest 10% of your earnings for multiple decades, and you’ll be a millionaire by the time you reach retirement age. 

It was like a law of nature: you could express it simply as the Rule of 72 and graph it as the exponential accumulation of capital over time. 

Capitalism was for us like a religion, and we had more faith in it than that stuff the preacher says at Church. We were taught and believed the markets function according to known laws almost by magic and lift all boats. As long as capitalism’s invisible hand is free to do its work and we work our butts off, not just our personal prosperity but the flourishing of our republic is assured.  And being American means that’s true for every American who’s willing to hustle. So as long as no one interferes, the future is assured. The future’s just a more restful and affluent version of the present. 

But here’s where the blindness comes in: when we see the future as just a better version of the present, history’s lessons don’t seem to apply to us. Why study how others lost their democracies when we can achieve a bright future simply by being savvy investors in the present?

So, my generation didn’t pay attention to history’s lessons. We thought we didn’t need to. We remember events, but not lessons learned because we believed our distinctive form of capitalism means those lessons don’t apply to us. 

But there was a second pragmatic reason. We didn’t have time to reflect on such things. Building a business and mastering the skills of a profession sufficiently to excel takes near total focus. Our educations are highly specialized. What little time we had leftover, we spent coaching your Little League teams, attending your recitals, hunting, fishing, and golfing with friends, and going to Church. Our lives were so fast paced that we had little time left over for luxuries like studying why other peoples failed to preserve their democracies when faced with autocratic attempts. 

Those lessons didn’t seem to apply to us, and we were too busy excelling to focus on them.

Yet, today, the USA and other Western nations are under attack: we face today an effort to displace our republic with a Putinist franchise. And, as you know, an autocratic attempt only succeeds if enabled by those who would stop it in its tracks if they weren’t blind to it.

So, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z voters: it’s up to you to defend our republic against this autocratic attempt. 

Too many males my age have political astigmatisms that blind us to the threat. 

Too many males my age think we’re different from the nations who’ve lost their republics to kleptocrats. 

Too many males my age make the grave mistake of thinking short-term policies matter more than character. 

Too many males my age don’t know or don’t see as relevant the history of Strong Men so weak they pillage the republics they’re called to serve.

To you younger generations: 

 This is your time to stand firm for good.

This is your time to define yourself as one of the great generations that carried on the grand American experiment our forebears bequeathed to us. 

This is your time to lead the resistance. 

Dare to stand up now for character, 

And the blessings God bestows on America through you will be celebrated by your children, your grandchildren, and their grandchildren. Thanks be to God.

Let’s talk about the accommodators of autocracy. Why? Because history teaches us that, though enablers see themselves as protecting the American Way, future Americans will remember them as having failed our generation’s greatest test. 

The history I allude to is that of populist movements that slid from some form of illiberal democracy into autocracy. In my lifetime, we’ve witnessed that more than 40 times. 

In my earlier video on the battle for America’s soul, I described how some of us become Ambassadors for a Putinist franchise, embracing and advancing the conspiracy of lies that fuels the Strong Man’s rise. But there’s another group that are not Ambassadors but nonetheless enable the Strong Man’s destruction of democracy. I call them Accommodators.

Whether that slide began from Left- or Right-Wing populisms, there have always been influential people who thought they could control a charismatic populist leader with a kleptocratic agenda, who thought they could safeguard their prosperity - and that of their grandchildren - by aligning with and empowering a Strong Man against those who recognized him. 

In every autocratic attempt, Accommodators tend to recognize the character defects of the charismatic leader but mistakenly think they can contain him. Almost always, their country experiences some real or manufactured catastrophe, and they conclude Strong Man tactics might right the ship of state and benefit them. 

So, Accommodators generally are well-meaning but make a grave mistake. They think what’s needed in the crisis is a set of policies. They don’t recognize that the essential non-negotiable ingredient in a crisis of state is the leader’s character. 

We remember George Washington not because of his policies but because of his character. We remember Abe Lincoln not because of his politics but because of his character. We remember Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt because of their character - how they called us to be our best, most courageous selves - more than for their policies.

In the history of lost democracies, the grave error of Accommodators was that they failed to recognize that the essential test for a president is character, not policy. Because once they elected a Strong Man with defective character, they soon discovered it would be the last meaningful election of their lifetimes.

We see this in 1930s Germany and late 20th century Russia just before both became totalitarian states. But scholars name many examples of those who enabled autocrats since WWII: China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, and more than 30 others. 

In every case, the Accommodators thought policy mattered more than character, but they ultimately discovered the charismatic leader moved swiftly to replace the people’s sovereignty with kleptocracy, to eliminate transparency and accountability, as well as anyone who got in their way.  And, soon after, the personal wealth the Accommodators thought they were protecting was stolen by the autocrat’s political machine. 

But it was too late: they’d lost their power to resist.

So, what does history teach us about autocratic attempts? First, that character matters more than policy promises. The people can correct bad policy but not bad character once we’ve enabled a wannabe Strong Man. Second, that the Accommodators of autocracy are usually elites themselves- especially business leaders and wealthy professionals- who think they can contain the damage done by the Strong Men they enable. History shows they usually can’t, and that, ultimately, they themselves end up plundered by the Strong Man. The Strong Man must be contained before and not after being entrusted with power. 

In a future video we will talk about why autocracy’s Accommodators are blind to what’s at stake and usually aren’t able to see until it’s too late. 

Godspeed!

Applebaum, Anne. 2024. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Doubleday.

Gessen, Masha. 2020. Surviving Autocracy. Riverhead Books.

Snyder, Timothy. 2018. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Crown.