Sullivan and Naipaul on the link between Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism, and modern civilization

Last week Andrew Sullivan responded to the burning of Notre Dame by describing [secularized] Christianity as one of the “metaphysical foundations” of liberalism:

“It remains an open question whether liberalism, broadly understood, can survive the loss of its metaphysical foundations [its defense of the individual soul as inviolate]. And as we see liberal democracy struggle to articulate its truth against the ocean of nihilism, the lure of tribalism, the cult of the strongman, and the left’s contempt for the Enlightenment and religion — the burning of this symbol of Christian devotion [Notre Dame] cut me to the quick.”

The heart of “our universal civilization”(1) is the Christian value Sullivan cites: The individual soul is inviolate. From this value stems that Eighteenth Century rallying cry, The Rights of Man, which even a criminal “president” cannot abrogate.
 
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(1) V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Enemy Within

“You will rule or ruin in all events.”

This “enemy” first prevented the Founders from including an anti-slavery plank in the Constitution. Lincoln:
“I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more …” — Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1860 Lincoln faced plantation owners’ demand that slavery be extended to the territories which were being added to the original thirteen states. At Cooper Union, according to Wikipedia, he reasoned, “the federal government can regulate slavery in the federal territories (but not states), especially resting on the character of the founders, and how they thought of slavery.”

The Southern Democrats refused to take no for an answer. Lincoln charged:
“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” (Emphasis added)

Beginning April 12, 1861, the plantation states of the Confederacy committed an act of war. Near Charleston, South Carolina, they fired on Fort Sumter, a military installation of their own country.

The Confederate states, defeated in their war against the United States and compelled to release their slaves, never, in their hearts, rejoined the country they had attacked, or accepted its principles of equality and liberal democracy. [As a personal note, in 1964, having graduated from a college in the Pacific Northwest, people in Texas and Arkansas told me I was from “Yankeeland.”]

There was a postwar period of Reconstruction. Wikipedia: “Blacks remained involved in Southern politics, particularly in Virginia, which was run by the biracial Readjuster Party.[206]

Numerous blacks were elected to local office through the 1880s, and in the 1890s in some states, biracial coalitions of Populists and Republicans briefly held control of state legislatures. In the last decade of the 19th century, southern states elected five black U.S. Congressmen before disfranchising constitutions were passed throughout the former Confederacy.

Like an abscessed tooth in the body politic, the Jim Crow South thwarted Lincoln’s aspiration that his beloved country, “shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

A century after their ancestors attacked us and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of us, the ruthlessness of the sullen, resentful enemy within was evident in their response to a crusade for reform: “The brutality displayed towards the [Civil Rights] Campaign's demonstrators and King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", written while he was incarcerated, brought national and international attention to the civil rights movement.”

On the eve of the slaveholding plantation owners’ traitorous attack on America (wrongly, the “civil” war), the Confederacy, relative to the industrialized United States, was like a third-world country: Lower per-capita income; lower average educational level; feeble industrial output; fewer scientists; fewer professionals; more superstitious; in all, far more backward.

Since modern war is won by materiel (cannon, shells, gunpowder, combat engineering), those who made treasonous war on the United States would, predictably, lose, provided they did not overrun our America before we could ramp up our inherently superior war-making capacity.

“This good free country of ours,” as Lincoln called it, endured early setbacks and eventually ran those whose betrayed their nation in the sordid cause of “property in man” into the ground.

Today the descendants of the treasonous slaveholders impose their mindless backwardness on our entire nation. Relative to all other industrialized democracies, the United States is “like a third-world country: Lower per-capita income; lower average educational level; … more superstitious; in all, far more backward.” The sullen, resentful neo-Confederates impose on Americans worse, more expensive health care; shorter life expectancy; hostility to reproductive rights; higher infant mortality; higher maternal mortality; and a gap between rich and poor that shocks the conscience.

No other modern liberal democratic nation endures a ruthless politicization of the courts; practices wholesale voter suppression; or teaches its innocent children that evolution is a wicked fallacy.

In no other modern liberal democratic nation are racial minorities routinely shot by fascistic public safety officers; or schoolchildren massacred every few days by machine guns in the hands of psychotics in the defense of an RKBA ideology ferociously defended south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In no other modern liberal democratic nation are the citizens of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” resigned to such an appalling state of affairs because the Undead Confederacy controls the Congress, the Courts, and the Presidency through a generation’s cynical abuse of the machineries of democracy.

What we have lost:

One person, one vote (gerrymandering, voter suppression)

Impartial justice (McConnell’s theft of the Garland Supreme Court seat; a minority president* who has already made two lifetime Court appointments)

The ability to pass laws restoring democratic principles without a corrupt Court striking them down using crazy constitutional interpretations.

The power to expel a president* who is tanking democracy.

Capacity to remedy policy risks like climate change and health care, currently blocked by spiritual wickedness in high places.

In the Amicus podcast of 3/29/19 (about 33 minutes in), Aaron Belkin suggests that extreme conditions require strong measures. “It’s time to bring a gun to a gunfight. … The progressive agenda is DOA unless we protect it from the courts.” Belkin argues that the Framers left it up to the Congress keep the courts from getting out of hand, by leaving the composition of the courts to the legislature.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was blocked until he proposed to alter the composition of the Court, whereupon the Nine realized that the better part of valor was to cease being obstructionist.

Notes I’ve transcribed approximately from what Belkin(1) said:

Court packing is the moderate, workable way to stop our radical court from continuing to sabotage democracy. …
Court making bizarre convoluted decisions against people of color, women, and workers. …
Packing threat saved FDR’s New Deal.
Packing is honest and people understand it. …
A generation of ruthless judicial politics which put W. in the presidency for no reason. …
No reasonable concept of democracy supports throwing millions of votes away because of gerrymandering. …
Campaign on bold, clear ideas.
Ruthless Republican judicial politics.
Revitalize democracy by reforming the courts.
Theft of open seat (Merrick Garland).
Illegitimate judicial appointments by pres. elected by minority.
Trump should not be making lifetime appointments.
Time to bring a gun to a gunfight.
They prioritize party over the national interest.
Tell the truth.
‘Balls and strikes’ grossly disingenuous.
The Supreme Court has spent the last generation attacking workers and women and brown people.
What the voters saw in the Kavanaugh hearings.
The connection between Kavanaugh and the theft of the Garland seat and the destruction of democracy.
Five presidential candidates have admitted that something needs to be done about the courts.
The voters understand that Trump is tanking democracy.
How to fix broken democratic institutions.
We are in deep trouble.
Change our beliefs when new facts dictate.

In closing:
The liberal democratic nation Lincoln thought he had preserved by defeating the slave-holding rebels has had its government hijacked by brutal, ruthless, sullen, angry Rule or Ruin neo-Confederates nursing centuries-old grudges. Belkin: “They prioritize party over the national interest.”

To them, we are not in their nation. We are in “Yankeeland” and they are implacably opposed to the American idea we represent.

Nevertheless, it is our country, not theirs; we are in the majority; the future is not theirs to determine, but ours.

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(1) Slate's later transcription of Aaron Belkin's remarks:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/court-packing-has-become-a-litmus-test-left.html

A sample:
“But what’s surprising some of the candidates, we hear, is that the voters also are asking them how they’re going to fix broken democratic institutions, and what they’re going to do about our broken democracy.

And so I think that—not just with respect to the courts, but more broadly about democracy and the robustness of the political system—the voters really get that we are in deep trouble, and they’re seeing the connection between Kavanaugh and the theft of the Garland seat, and the court, and the destruction of democracy, and also policy risks like climate change and health care access. And so today is a day when we can make that case in a way that was not possible in the past.”