Taking the Politics out of Politics

I heard it again this morning: Representative Terri Sewell (D-AL) was on Meet the Press, and she said, “It’s about right and wrong.”

I don’t mean to pick on Congresswoman Sewell specifically. In the past two years, I have heard many people saying forms of “It’s not about left and right; it’s about right and wrong.” Mark Williams wrote a book with that title in 2014 — actually, the title begins It’s Not Right Versus Left, but you get the point. Don Lemon said it on CNN last August. No advocates of any one viewpoint have a monopoly on this expression. But what does it really imply?

A Quick and Dirty History of Early Modern Politics

Medieval Europe was Christian Europe, and political ideals were informed by religion. In practice, there was a temporal ruling class, and politics was always going to enter through this doorway. Yet, at least formally, the legitimacy of a temporal ruler depended upon his upholding the laws of God.

In Europe east through Poland and Hungary, kings were answerable to popes. Attempts by secular rulers to set their own courses did not usually work out to their advantage. Between 1076 and 1122, both Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and King Henry I of England would attempt to control whom a pope could choose as a bishop or other high church official in their respective lands. Both secular rulers lost these tests of strength. Henry IV was even forced to cross the Alps in the winter of 1077 and kneel, barefoot and wearing a hair shirt, outside the castle at Canossa where Pope Gregory VII was staying. Gregory made Henry wait in the snow for three days before granting the Emperor an audience and revoking his excommunication.

The Renaissance

Renaissance Humanism began to challenge the idea of governance as implementing divinely ordered temporal rule. One of the first principal works of Western secular political though was The Prince, written by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). Machiavelli had been a partisan and official for the Republic of Florence, in opposition to the rule of the Medici family. Tortured and exiled in 1513 after Cardinal Giovanni de Medici (who would become Pope Leo X) regained power in Florence, Machiavelli offered the book as a gift to regain favor of the Medici family. It didn’t work.

The Prince is commonly considered to be a work advocating a consequentialist view of politics, if not an outright cynical approach. Yet it is worth considering Machiavelli’s ideas in the light of Renaissance Humanism. When he wrote of the importance of the Prince appearing to be moral, as distinct from actually being moral, this was informed by an understanding that the audience for the Prince’s actions was those the Prince rules. Under theocratic politics, a ruler should be moral and force that morality down the throats of the people, whether they liked it or not; the ideas of the governed do not matter, so the Prince need not consider his popularity with any of them. Machiavelli considered this a foolhardy course of action, recognizing that power is, to some extent, a two-way street.

The Reformation

Theocratic political principles took a severe hit in the Reformation and the wars of religion that followed. It is a lot less convincing for a ruler to claim that his rule is ordained by God when the priests are having public arguments over what God really wants.

The wars of religion that consumed Europe for over a hundred years did more to spread poverty and misery than to decide whose concept of God would predominate. At the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, Europe settled on the principle that the ruler of any realm would determine the religion of those he ruled in that realm (cuius regio, eius religio). More broadly, Westphalian sovereignty laid the foundation of the nation-state by establishing the exclusive sovereignty of a state over its own territory. The Holy Roman Empire continued on as an anachronism until Napoleon finally finished it off.

The Enlightenment

The Westphalian nation-state was now free to figure out for itself how it ought to govern. Enlightenment thinkers including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke began to conceive of legitimate government as a contract between the ruler and the ruled. Nation-states had to find their way into the modern world, and the Bible was not a sufficient guide.

It is useful to compare this to contemporary developments in societies that had not experienced the developments of Humanism or the Enlightenment. Islam, at least in the Sunni part, was still guided by divine law as interpreted by the Ottoman Sultan, in his capacity as the caliph, and scholars acting with his authority.

That is to say that, in the Muslim conception, God is the true sovereign of the community, the ultimate source of authority, the sole source of legislation. In the first extant Muslim account of the British House of Commons, written by a visitor who went to England at the end of the eighteenth century, the writer expresses his astonishment at the fate of a people who, unlike the Muslims, did not have a divinely revealed law, and were therefore reduced to the pitiable expedient of enacting their own laws.
— Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?, pp. 113-114.

The Religion of the People

The French Revolution introduced a radical change. Historians generally discuss the opposition of the Jacobins to religion as it is commonly understood: Christian religion. However, I am asserting a broader concept of what a religion is. The essential characteristics of a religion are faith and doctrinal guidance as to right and wrong for the believer. A supernatural deity is an optional extra, as William James made abundantly clear in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The Jacobins were calling for a faith in The People as standard of Good and source of doctrine. Functionally, this is a religion in all essential respects; it even requires a priestly class to interpret doctrine for the Great Unwashed. The Jacobins were the first to attempt to implement the Kingdom of the People on Earth. They would not be the last. The Religion of the People is a church militant, seeking the triumph of its definition of good over evil no less than Christianity or Islam.

Beyond Politics

When people say that they want to get beyond politics, what is it that they want to reach? Generally, they have some concept of an absolute right and wrong that informs them. This is sufficiently clear in their minds that the question is “not about left and right, but about right and wrong.”

A religious issue is a matter of good versus evil. Thus, asking true believers to compromise is a fool’s errand. You don’t compromise with evil; you vanquish it.

The people who are saying these things may not realize the full implications of what they are saying. Nevertheless, ideas have consequences: the attempt to go beyond politics necessarily leads to religion. These religions may worship Jehovah, Allah or The People, but these are religions nonetheless. Each of their gods is a jealous god, demanding that “Thou shalt put no gods before Me.” They are founded on faith, demand obedience and promise salvation to the faithful.

Two opposing groups of people trying to organize America on their conflicting principles of good and evil, armed with their shields of faith and swords of righteousness, will bring about a holy war as destructive as that between Catholics and Protestants in the early 1600s. They are not open to persuasion. It’s about right and wrong.

Enlightenment Europe chose politics as a means of deciding how nations would make collective decisions. They did not do this because they were stupid or lazy, but because they recoiled from wars of religion. That same revulsion informed the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …

Do not disparage politics before you have fully considered the alternatives.