LA Progressive

Smart Content for Smart People

  • Home
  • About Us
    • About Us / Copyright Info
    • Privacy Policy
  • Topics
    • Animal Rights
    • Climate Change
    • Economic Justice
    • Education Reform
    • Elections and Campaigns
    • Environment
    • Community Calendar
    • Healthcare Reform
    • Immigration Reform
    • Labor
    • Law and Justice
    • LGBTQ
    • Progressive Issues
    • Social Justice / Racism
    • The Media
    • The Middle East
    • War and Peace
  • Authors
    • All Authors
    • Steve Hochstadt
    • Charles D. Hayes
    • David A. Love
    • Diane Lefer
    • Dick Price
    • Jerry Drucker
    • John Peeler
    • Joseph Palermo
    • Tom Hall
    • Sharon Kyle
    • Sikivu Hutchinson
  • Events
    • Left Coast Forum
    • Event Calendar
  • Subscribe
  • Contact Us

The Antichrist Trap: Trump Isn’t the Whole Story

Trump SatanDavid Leonhardt’s widely-discussed column from earlier this month laying out the case against Trump crystallizes a certain way of thinking about a path forward for this troubled republic. Leonhardt is certainly not alone in taking this line; he merely drives it home more forcefully than others. The gist is that Donald J. Trump embodies everything that’s threatening to this essentially good and benign nation. According to this view, expelling the 45th president—driving him from office by any means necessary—opens the way to our national salvation.

This way of thinking is wrong and profoundly dangerous. It’s akin to thinking that if we can only silence the likes of Steve King, we will have disposed of the problem of white supremacy.

Far too many of our self-anointed progressive saviors speak as though Trump’s overthrow will make everything good again.

Those who take this approach have fallen into what I call “The Antichrist Trap.” This obviously needs some explaining.

The kind of ethical monotheism that at least some of us grew up with was all about critical introspection: Let those who claim to be without sin cast the first stone; let us have the decency not to go on about the imperfections of others while ignoring what is badly twisted in ourselves.

This was and is a sober religion. Realistic about our craving for self-justification and our pitiful susceptibility to the Tempter’s wiles (as it were). This realistic vision lives in tension with a very different religious framing, one that actually flows from the urge for self-justification and that’s often born of despair. This other framing places the locus of evil not in ourselves but elsewhere: in the corrupt heart of the evil oppressor.

In the apocalyptic framing, we will be rid of oppression once we rid ourselves of the oppressor.

Apocalyptic literature arises from the trauma of a people convinced of their own goodness (“chosen” is one way of putting this) who chafe under the sway of alien evildoers. The texts they create promise ultimate deliverance, sometimes accompanied by spectacular special effects (stars falling, grapes of wrath being trampled, etc.). According to the apocalyptic frame, a new dispensation will arise with peace and joy and security for all, once the Beast of Babylon has been slain.

Although the dump-Trump-to-make-it-right forces would undoubtedly object to being labeled dispensationalist (or to having any religious category applied to them), it’s hard not to notice how their overall procedure partakes of the same naiveté.

Far too many of our self-anointed progressive saviors speak as though Trump’s overthrow will make everything good again; they speak and act as though the normal functioning of American democracy (and here many reference the Clinton or Obama years) will be capable of producing a sufficient quantum of public justice.

Are they right? A bargain-priced plastic surgeon might want to convince us that removing a large carbuncle will render our face entirely beautiful, but can that kind of pitch really be trusted?

Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose that Trump is driven out in 2020 and that a Democrat in the mold of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama takes over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Will all of the abominations associated with a centuries-deep structural racism disappear along with Trump? Will the evaporation of the middle class and the extreme concentration of wealth and power at the top be reversed with a business-friendly Democrat steering the ship of state? Will big money politics be driven from the temple of democracy with, say, Cory Booker installed as our chief executive?

Sober-minded people don’t believe in magical outcomes. Yet a large part of the progressive community acts as though its work will be done if we can only just turn the page on Trump. These apocalyptic believers are only too happy to “resist” the manifest evils of Trumpism, but they are constitutionally averse to confronting the less obvious evils afflicting a nation that was founded on the violence of white settler colonialism and whose economy continues to express the features of what Rev. James Lawson accurately calls plantation capitalism.

Here it’s crucially important to distinguish between a minority of committed anti-Trump actors who do notlabor under the illusion that all will be well with Trump gone and the far greater number of liberal Democratic “resisters” whose resistance is only skin deep and who are drawn to apocalyptic framing because of the way it absolves them from having to confront the uglier realities of a system that can, after all, be very good to educated elites of all political persuasions.

We can see this distinction play out among possible candidates for the Democratic nomination. Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown are both avowed foes of the neoliberal project: free trade, deregulation, de-unionization, privatization. Both understand that concentrated wealth at the top is never innocent—that it’s extracted from workers and the poor. Both understand the scandalous reality of debt peonage in America. And although both could and should be much more explicit about the crucial role played by white supremacy in propping up this system, they do say that they want to attack the structures that underpin plantation capitalism. There’s no question that both want to break the hammerlock of corporate wealth in national politics.

These positions will clearly handicap Warren and Brown in the all-important money primary that’s already unfolding. I take no satisfaction from predicting that corporate power inside the Democratic tent will prevent either of these people from being nominated, let alone elected. I likewise do not rejoice to predict that the vast majority of white liberals within the Democratic fold will be pleased to accept a candidate who is fully approved and substantially funded by our corporate overlords, especially if the proceedings exhibit the requisite gloss of diversity.

To cite a relevant historical analogy, the Whig Party may have died in the 1850s, but melioristic whiggery did not thereby cease to function as this country’s default operational politics. Whiggery came back with a vengeance when Radical Reconstruction was rejected as far too threatening to the really important business of white people making money within a reunified United States. Jeff Davis was gone; chattel slavery was gone; and that was plenty good enough for the white liberals of that era.

Will this kind of ineffectual business-friendly whiggery be our default politics again, once we put an end to the scourge of Trumpism (a phenomenon that does, in fact, echo many Lost Cause themes)?

I fear that it will.

It goes without saying that Trump represents a clear and present danger. No one is disputing that. No one is disputing the urgency of his removal. But there’s an equal and perhaps greater danger lurking within the surge of liberal self-righteousness.

To the corporate-friendly liberals: Get rid of the Anti-Christ, and the sooner the better. But don’t imagine that doing so will make you the Christ.

Peter Laarman
Religion Dispatches

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

By Peter Laarman posted on January 16, 2019

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Peter Laarman

Rev. Peter Laarman is volunteer project coordinator for Justice Not Jails. He formerly directed Progressive Christians Uniting, the LA-based network of activist individuals and congregations that first launched Justice Not Jails in 2012 as a multifaith initiative. He served as the senior minister of New York’s Judson Memorial Church from 1994 to 2004. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, Peter spent 15 years as a labor movement strategist and communications specialist prior to training for ministry.

Comments

  1. Paul Berry says

    January 18, 2019 at 7:21 pm

    Bravo Peter Laarman, I prefer the AntiChrist, he’d be a lot more fun and you’d know you were around to see the end of the World (what a privileged time to be alive!). Trump will probably live out his term just because Mike Pence is secretly convinced he, himself, is the AntiChrist and every one of us knows that about him, at least subconsciously. The problem is not “End Times” theology, the problem is that small business leadership is so bad in the USA that many many people see their own employers in Donald J. Trump, his bully leadership style is all they recognize. Small time capitalists, parents who tell their kids to grow up to be “entrepreneurs” are the real problem. But don’t worry, North Korea is out there, we just need to be sure they have Orange County targeted, that’s where the evil is: Suburban Indifferent Isolationism in it’s purist form.

    Reply
  2. William Nemcik says

    January 18, 2019 at 12:32 pm

    The Antichrist is not a person, it is a collective level of consciousness.

    Reply
  3. roger lowenstein says

    January 17, 2019 at 11:44 am

    The point is well taken that we progressives should go beyond dumping Trump and focus on electing a replacement who feels the pain of the income disparities that our current system has permitted and promoted. But I do think that labeling Trump the AntiChrist is useful, because it puts the heat on the fake Christians who run the country. I really don’t see the Trump enablers giving up on him except within the organized Christian progressive movement. We need to root for real Christians stepping forward, confronting their pastors and priests, and talking more about what Jesus would say about ripping children from their mothers and permitting the moneylenders to run the Temple……

    Reply
  4. Tom Hall says

    January 17, 2019 at 9:16 am

    “the Whig Party may have died in the 1850s, but melioristic whiggery did not thereby cease to function as this country’s default operational politics.”

    Ah, that terrible “meliorism” – the evil philosophy that the world can be made better by human effort. And “whiggery” – the evil political belief that people have the right to throw off bad, oppressive governments.

    Thank goodness we have conservative religious thinkers to remind us that using big or arcane words is a sufficient substitute for stating any actual alternate proposals for action.

    BUT shorn of the terrible conservatism at the root of Rev. Laarman’s writing, I think that it IS very important to take the focus OFF the Donald and put it where it belongs, on corporate Republican politicians and funders, and help people see that it takes more than changing a figurehead to make the ship of state seaworthy on an ocean of troubles.

    I am delighted to see the increasing press coverage of new congresspeople who are asking leadership to become more progressive. But I also hope that those same new members are as willing to consider that some traditions and traditional procedures have merit, just as they demand that more experienced people consider that their newly empowered ideas have merit.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Thank You For Supporting Independent Media. The LA Progressive cannot publish without your support. Please donate. Thanks....

This Weeks Featured Posts

Nationalize Facebook

Is It Time to Regulate or Nationalize Facebook?

New York Nurses Strike

A Boss is a Boss: Nurses Battle for Their First Union Contract at Albany Medical Center

Iranian American Relations

Iranians in the U.S. and Abroad Are Using Cultural Responses to Overcome Political Tensions 

Trading Chihuahua Desert Hardscrabble for Coast Range Wet

michael bloomberg announces

Veritas Vigil: From Fox’s Media Buzz to Midway





Impeachment TrapIranian American RelationsKerry Endorses BidenHolding Trump AccountableMatt Bevin DepartsDan BrotmanTrump the Anti-ConservativeMoral InjuryUnited World



Sponsored

Best Wedding Photographer Surrey

The Best Wedding Photographer Surrey

Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling: Tips For Women Trying to Market Themselves Online to Potential Employers

More Posts from Sponsored

Book-A-Bus



Article Categories

Africa | Animal Rights | California
Climate Change | Defense | Economic Justice
Education Reform | Elections | Environment
Events | Foreign Policy | Gay Rights
Healthcare Reform | Immigration Reform
Juvenile Justice | Labor | Latin America
Law and Justice | Los Angeles | Prison Reform
Progressive Issues | Science & Religion
Sexism | Social Justice | Terminal Velocity | The Body Politic
| The Media | The Middle East | Veterans
War and Peace | Wellness

Los Angeles

Organizing in South LA

Rethinking 27 Years of Organizing in South LA

Elect Loraine Lundquist

Let’s Elect Loraine Lundquist, a Breath of Fresh Air for City Council 

More Posts from Los Angeles

The Middle East

If Americans Knew

The Most Enduring Media Cover Up

Trump and Netanyahu

Trump and Netanyahu: How the Far Right Subverts Democracy Globally

More Posts from The Middle East

Economic Issues

Race to the Bottom

“Booming” Economy Means More Bad Jobs and Faster Race to the Bottom

billionaires and capitalism

Why Billionaires Don’t Really Like Capitalism

More Posts from Economic Justice

Copyright © 2019 · Dick Price and Sharon Kyle · Log in