Bad Calvinism in Modern American Politics

John Calvin (etching by Konrad Myer)

Back during my teaching days, one classroom discussion circled the myriad influences that molded colonial and early post-Revolutionary America. One student threw out a name I personally wouldn’t have considered: John Calvin. But the student made a persuasive case that, through the New England Puritans, Calvinism has become a dominant force in American politics. Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” statement comes from Jesus Christ, certainly, but it also comes from Puritan John Winthrop.

Last time, I concluded my invective against falsely “pro-life” politics by noting that hard-right American politicians love every human life while it remains an unrealized potential. Ask many conservatives, and the Evangelical pastors who support them, why they oppose abortion, and they’ll praise the undeveloped fetus as potentially the next Einstein, Beethoven, or Jane Addams. While human life remains abstract, it remains a receptacle of our society’s hopes and aspirations, simply waiting to be filled.

However, once that life actually becomes human, with visceral needs and wants, those same politicians begin scheming ways to destroy it. The minute an abstract fetus needs food, or prenatal medical care, or—heaven forfend—defense against civilians hoarding military-grade firearms, hard-right political support dries up. I compared this to “original sin.” However, thinking back, I suspect my student foresaw this situation. The barrier problem isn’t original sin; it’s Calvin’s theology of Total Human Depravity.

Before I get carried away, this isn’t a literal Calvinist problem. Calvinist churches, like Baptists and Presbyterians, have landed on both sides of pressing issues. Nor is the problem conventionally partisan, as these problems persist, and even get worse, regardless of which party controls our government. Rather, sloppy thinking and half-informed opinions muddy everything they touch, if they can find a halfway-serviceable moral justification. Bad-faith actors have sullied science or art as badly as religion.

For a useful analogy, let’s start with homelessness. Consider briefly how people react if you give a panhandler a buck. “They’ll just spend it on booze or drugs.” In American political mythology, homelessness doesn’t arise from our economic system, or an individual’s momentary circumstances. We deem homelessness a reflection of the homeless person’s moral core. The indigent are “bad people,” suffering the consequences of their choices, and anything to alleviate their suffering reinforces their sin.

The same analogy of “consequences” arises whenever we consider providing even the slightest assistance to pregnant persons. If they need prenatal medicine, or nutritional assistance, or affordable childcare, our political and business leaders recite shopworn moral language about rights and responsibility. Pregnant persons and their families have a moral responsibility to look after themselves, and if they can’t, they’re bad people, and any provided assistance simply reinforces their bad choices, confirming them in material sin.

But if that same pregnant person admits their inability to support a child, and opts to terminate the pregnancy, that’s also interpreted moralistically. If you choose to have sex, official legislative reasoning goes, you’ve perforce chosen to give birth. Even if you cannot support the child, or you’re fleeing a violent relationship, or the fetus has terminal abnormalities and cannot survive, birth is nevertheless a moral imperative which you cannot shirk without compounding your sins.

Either way, the Calvinist precept of Total Human Depravity (stripped of its Christian ethic) defines you. The secular Calvinist interprets every adverse circumstance as an outcome of individual sin, never a product of economic systems, or damaged families, or just bad luck. Secular Calvinists believe the universe is wholly just and morally complete, and therefore every bad circumstance is a moral judgment upon the individual. Helping the poor only makes them likely to sin again.

I’m using pregnancy and abortion as my touchstones, because of the current political fad of harshly restrictive abortion bans. But the problem exceeds one hot-button issue. America remains the only developed nation which hasn’t ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, because America refuses to consider food a natural human right. Food! Since the Reagan administration, America has refused to protect children from starvation because doing so would reinforce parents’ sinful ways.

America refuses to protect healthy pregnancies, or end unhealthy ones, because either choice protects “sinners” from “consequences.” Likewise, we won’t feed the starving or house the homeless because they haven’t “earned it,” and therefore are sinners. America has Earth’s largest prison population because we believe, despite all evidence, that extreme punishments will stop people from sinning. And so on. Our lingering bipartisan consensus only makes sense if our politicians uniformly believe in Total Human Depravity.

Uvalde, Abortion, and You

Robb Elementary School has been shuttered and is scheduled for demolition.

One year ago today, on May 24th, 2022, a gunman armed with a high-yield assault rifle and seven spare ammunition clips entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nobody stopped the gunman (who shall remain nameless here) for 74 minutes, despite the eventual presence of nearly 400 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers on-scene. The shooter killed twenty-one people and injured eighteen, the third-deadliest school shooting, and ninth-deadliest civilian mass shooting, in American history.

This past Monday, May 22nd, 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed LB574, a controversial bill that both establishes a 12-week abortion ban statewide, and bans all gender-affirming medical care for minors. By mashing together two popular conservative bugbears—Nebraska’s legislature is nominally nonpartisan, but dominated by Republicans—this new law gives the state sweeping omnibus authority in how Nebraskans express their sex and sexuality. The “small government party” is literally regulating private citizens’ genital activity.

The correspondence between these two events couldn’t be more jarring. In the year since the Uvalde shooting, state legislatures and Congress have done nothing about America’s overwhelming concentration of private firearms, which now outnumber U.S. citizens and legal residents. These changes, we’re told, take time. Yet at this writing, nineteen states have banned or severely restricted abortion in the eleven months since the Dobbs decision, proving that lawmakers can, indeed, work quickly when they try.

We’re already hearing horror stories emerging about abortion bans’ unanticipated consequences. One high-profile story out of Florida featured a woman forced to carry her fetus to term, knowing it had no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs, and other deadly fetal abnormalities. The baby lived for 94 minutes. A South Carolina Republican legislator publicly regretted the abortion ban he co-sponsored when it almost immediately nearly killed a 19-year-old woman. These are just the stories getting national media traction.

Personally, I formerly opposed abortion, until about 25 years ago. A woman I knew suffered an incomplete miscarriage that created complications which very nearly killed her. Because the treatment for her condition was technically an abortion (although her fetus was already dead), several hospitals bounced her case before one accepted her. That’s when I realized the nuance and complexity of abortion. Last week, I decried LB574 on social media, saying: “this will get people killed.”

A friend responded: “People die by abortion every day.” I don’t know whether my friend means adult women suffer complications daily, or if she counts aborted fetuses as dead humans. Either way, she’s wrong. Pew Research disagrees that complications are common. And even if we believe unborn fetuses are fully human, which I don’t, the underdeveloped fetus cannot have more value than the mother, and her ability to survive and care for her existing children.

Furthermore, our inability to protect elementary school children from Uvalde-style massacres proves that we don’t care about the living. Our legislatures can’t pass even rudimentary precautions like red-flag laws, background checks, and safe storage standards. With no way to prevent weapons hoarding, mass shootings are now literally a daily event. Mass shooters routinely target locations where children congregate, including schools, malls, churches, and concerts. We’ve known this for years, and we’ve done nothing about it.

Claims that we pass anti-abortion legislation to protect children are abject and demonstrable bullshit. The states most likely to pass onerous abortion restrictions are also least likely to have affordable prenatal care. Texas has restrictive abortion laws, and a permitless carry law similar to one recently signed by Nebraska governor Jim Pillen. It also has a high and growing mass shooting rate. Conditions are worse in Texas now than they were before the Uvalde shooting.

Stopping mass shootings don’t require mass roundups of civilian firearms, which no serious lawmaker is proposing anyway. Evidence suggests most mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence; the Uvalde shooter shot his grandmother in the face before moving onto the school. (She survived.) Taking guns away from convicted domestic abusers would protect not only the abusers’ families, but anyone else who may suffer knock-on effects. That suggestion seems both low-friction and supremely modest.

Yet we continue doing nothing. We love every human life while it remains an abstract platonic ideal swimming in the amniotic goo. But the minute it needs a doctor, or a square meal, or protection from an AR-15, our sympathy evaporates. Indeed, we don’t protect fetuses because they’re human; we protect them because they aren’t human, untainted by original sin or human avarice. The minute it becomes human, we’re ready to kill the damn thing.

The History of Women and their Sexual Choices

Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

This may shock and astound some people, but in the 19th Century, people actually had sex. This has been redacted from most pop histories, which present the era as either a bastion of restraint, or a desert of sexual repression. But just know that, if you think that, you believe a fable that later people sold you. Before the Gilded Age, people frequently had sex, and then as now, they didn’t want to get pregnant.

It’s hard to avoid the phrase “then as now” when reviewing this biography of Madame Restell, old New York’s most famous abortionist. This partly reflects pop historian Jennifer Wright’s intentions, as she deliberately compares the Tammany Hall era with our own. But it also bespeaks how much of history’s seedier side later historians bowdlerized. Wright doesn’t just restore Madame Restell to American history, she shows readers how much of history we’ve had withheld from us.

First, her name wasn’t Madame Restell. Ann Lohman, née Sommers, née Trow, reinvented herself as a sophisticated French physician, when she was actually a working-class immigrant from northern England. Like millions, she entered America through Ellis Island, looking for work, only to find an America overcrowded with similar immigrants. Despite being a skilled laborer, she couldn’t readily find work. She did find, however, that Manhattanites often had sex recklessly, and wanted to purge the evidence.

Some women in 1830s New York went into sex work because it paid well. Others took factory or domestic service jobs, but found bosses who saw their employees as essentially their personal harem. And some already simply had as many children as they could afford to raise. Again, the phrase “then as now” seems germane. Ann Sommers apparently apprenticed herself to a Manhattan compounding pharmacist, and soon started selling contraceptives. That word “apparently” looms large.

Jennifer Wright has written multiple pop histories about important people (mostly women) or events in American history. This is apparently her first book to spotlight just one individual. She works heavily from primary sources, which mostly means newspapers, from the heyday of American newspaper publishing. And that, in turn, means wringing the most salient facts from lurid 19th-Century scandal rags. During Madame Restell’s time, journalists weren’t overly burdened with professional ethics or commitment to accuracy.

Jennifer Wright

Wright therefore must frequently extract the details of Madame Restell’s life from what her detractors didn’t say. (Restell herself apparently didn’t keep a diary, and therefore isn’t her own primary source.) Many of Restell’s accusers claim her wanton abortion practices were potentially deadly to women, for instance, yet they consistently failed to find one dead woman from Restell’s roster. This apparently means that, unlike many of her peers, Restell had no blood on her hands.

We know, from reliable testimony, that Madame Restell performed surgical abortions. No record exists, however, of where she learned the skills, much less how she learned them with such accuracy that she left few dead or maimed patients, something her peers couldn’t say likewise. We also don’t know where Restell learned her other skills. In addition to selling pharmaceutical contraceptives and performing abortions, she apparently also served as a midwife, adoption agent, and marriage counselor.

Restell gained notoriety, both for her effectiveness, and her personal boldness. Wright finds evidence of Restell’s notoriety in newspapers as far afield as Texas and Wisconsin. Apparently her reputation stretched nationwide during an era when news was limited to the speed of print. Restell was so effective, reliable, and safe—during a time when credentialled doctors were frequently quacks—that she became certifiably rich, plowing her money back into ventures like banking and land development.

This isn’t just one notorious woman’s biography. Madame Restell arose from a specific historical era, and Wright recreates that era for us. Restell’s business arose against a background of conflicting forces: urban industrialization caused gender roles to change rapidly. The women’s movement commenced, but because first-wave feminists were largely Quakers, they had little interest in sexual liberation. The slave economy, followed by the Civil War, created ripples that weren’t always obvious until many years later.

Wright’s biography recreates Restell’s life and times, including times that, in schoolbook American history, has often been shamelessly sanitized. Wright restores the era’s nuance, when social upheaval made abortion something women both despised and needed. But like the best literature, Wright’s history is equally about us, and how today’s social upheaval resembles the Tammany Hall era. She encourages us to learn from Madame Restell, and warns us what might happen if we fail to learn.

The Business of Finding Enemies

Accused subway vigilante Daniel Penny
being escorted by police after his
arraignment last week in New York

Nearly three weeks after Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny fatally choked homeless man Jordan Neely, nobody doubts who did the killing, or when. Bystanders captured the killing on cellphone video, and Penny admitted delivering the fatal chokehold to police. The only meaningful question is how to interpret what happened. Penny’s arraignment, and expected trial, turn on questions of when it’s acceptable for civilians to use terminal force.

Nobody disagrees that Jordan Neely behaved in a belligerent, intrusive way on that Manhattan subway platform on May 1st. After all, we have bystander video. Analysts disagree heartily, however, whether Daniel Penny responded proportionately. These same questions emerged last month after the wounding of Ralph Yarl, shot for ringing the wrong doorbell: does one civilian’s subjective feeling of threat justify fatal, or near-fatal, responses? Is fear a sufficient justification?

These questions matter. Following routine disasters, first responders face questions of exactly how to interpret ordinary civilians. As Rebecca Solnit writes, following Hurricane Katrina, police and National Guard reinforcement had to hastily interpret people’s intentions. Did fleeing New Orleanians constitute peaceful refugees, or an incipiently violent mob? Were individuals recovering survival supplies, or looting? Answers to these questions often determined who got shot.

Much American political rhetoric today involves how we interpret enemies, real or potential. Are transgender citizens simply ordinary people striving to live their truth, as their advocates claim, or incipient sexual predators, as opponents like Ron DeSantis claim? What about undocumented immigrants seeking asylum status: are they criminals needing punishment, 6or refugees needing help? Chances are, your answers to these questions coincides with your political party affiliation.

My personal response flashes back to elementary school. I remember hearing from authority figures early that my mere perception that somebody else intended to hit me, wasn’t sufficient justification for me to hit them first. Even after experiences with repeat bullies, I couldn’t claim self-defense until something violent actually happened. No, the principal admonished, not even if this bully hit me previously. Past outcomes weren’t predictors of future behavior.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

Admittedly, this resulted in awkward encounters, where literal bullies with demonstrated track records received essentially free rein to shout, threaten, and harass me. I remember the feeling of powerlessness this rendered. On multiple occasions, bullies loomed over me, threatened and shouted at me, even encircled and shoved me— and every time, adults repeated, I was responsible to de-escalate the situation, even at the cost of my own dignity.

So yes, I can imagine how powerless subway riders might’ve felt when Jordan Neely acted belligerently.

The obverse of this situation, though, is paradoxical: the few times I ignored adult advice and resisted my bullies, I didn’t feel more empowered. Answering force with force didn’t break the cycle. Instead, it reinforced a violent, helpless worldview, where vigilance often shaded into paranoia. Once I began identifying and preparing against enemies, I inevitably started seeing enemies everywhere. Like after Hurricane Katrina, my enemies were often racially coded.

Cyclical paranoia and preemptive violence might make sense to children, whose limited experience means they usually can’t see the longer view. Unfortunately, in today’s America, this shallow depth of field has become mandatory among many adults. Ron DeSantis has identified enemies among schoolteachers, drag performers, Black teens in hoodies, and the kitchen sink. Florida may be a cartoonish exaggeration, but it’s a microcosm of America today.

Conventional American politics has devolved into an exercise in identifying enemies. Republicans display this pronounced tendency more visibly, certainly. Enemy-baiting has become their brand. But Democrats occasionally bump into that paranoid tendency; remember the outcry about hip-hop in the 1990s, or sex in video games in the 2000s. Like me in elementary school, Democrats try to appease the opposition by acting tough, but descend into paranoia.

Because I, too, descended into vigilant paranoia, I have great sympathy with politicians like DeSantis, who identify enemies around every corner. It isn’t mere political posturing; once you start preparing for enemies, it becomes an all-encompassing worldview. Fortunately, adults and other authority figures around me saw it happening, and broke the cycle. Because that paranoia was really starting to take a psychological toll.

Tragically, today’s political sphere has no authority figures prepared to break the cycle; today’s authority figures are the cycle. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Donald Trump desperately need a grown-up to intervene, but voters have granted them grown-up authority. Thus the paranoid feedback loop continues until citizens stop it. Voters need to step up and stop this paranoia, because if they don’t, the next stage is revolution.

The Shallow State

Rufus Sewell (left) and Keri Russell as Hal and Kate Wyler, in The Diplomat

Previews for Netflix’s The Diplomat are edited in a rapid hip-hop style, implying a series anchored on explosions and sex, like a Tom Clancy thriller. Both of these are in relatively short supply. Instead, we get a series anchored on the machinations of the unelected bureaucrats whose presence always lingers beneath normal politics. These are the members of the “deep state” we’ve been coached to fear in recent years.

Kate Wyler, a longtime member of America’s professional diplomatic corps, has packed her bags for Afghanistan. She’s spent her career identifying and exploiting weaknesses in other nations’ political organizations; this skill has rewarded her richly, while also serving American interests. So she’s baffled when, on the eve of the departure, President Rayburn calls her into his office. The President has an alternate offer: the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom.

Start with how showrunner Debora Cahn casts Keri “Felicity” Russell as Kate Wyler. Early in her career, Russell was so thoroughly pigeonholed by her beauty that an over-hasty haircut nearly derailed her first starring role. But she’s now forty-seven, an age when Hollywood puts most women out to pasture. Cahn casts Rufus Sewell, an equally famously attractive showcase, as Kate’s husband Hal, but he’s a man. His greys are “distinguished.”

The show’s characters comment that the U.K. ambassadorship isn’t usually considered a serious diplomatic posting. Embassies in America’s NATO allies are usually plum appointments for prestigious political donors—a fact considered shocking when George H.W. Bush dispensed ambassadorships that way in 1989, but banal now. Skilled diplomats historically run things in America’s friendly embassies, but wealthy, semi-retired palm greasers get the prestigious chair.

Except things have changed. Business executives face steeply reduced pressures to retire at a certain age; Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Sussman continue running their corporations well into their seventies and eighties. A two- or three-year hitch in some plush London mansion, shaking hands with King Charles, hardly seems like an appropriate career capstone anymore. Especially when, as now, international tensions remain permanently peaked.

This series contains numerous pointed references to current events. Kate Wyler is appointed ambassador by a rough-hewn but semi-progressive American President who’s terrified of being perceived as old. President Rayburn wants Kate to stage-manage America's relationship with Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, whose folksy, off-the-cuff manner makes him popular with British voters. However, events hint that both Rayburn and Trowbridge are craftier than they appear.

David Gyasi as U.K Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison, with Keri Russell, in The Diplomat

Everything described occurs under the constant shadow of war. President Rayburn picks Kate for the British ambassadorship because somebody’s just hit a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing forty-one sailors. The British public is braying for blood, and PM Trowbridge’s off-the-cuff comments only make that more likely. Except that professional diplomats like Kate know the evidence doesn’t add up. The obvious suspects are, in this case, hardly obvious.

It’s impossible to overlook the direct real-world parallels. Streaming TV, with its relatively short lead times, can comment in ways that legacy scripted media can’t. While the next presidential election promises to feature two very old and broadly unpopular White men, the British public has watched three consecutive Tory PMs disintegrate rapidly, and possibly a fourth. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war drags interminably, and Putin has been indicted for war crimes.

PM Trowbridge is played by Rory Kinnear, who last appeared on Netflix in the Black Mirror premier episode. If you missed that, he played a Prime Minister who, to appease a terrorist, is compelled to fuck a pig on live national television. Though Trowbridge is a darker, angrier figure than PM Callow, surely showrunner Cahn recognized this parallel. Because Trowbridge specifically, and elected officials generally, come across as crazed pig-fuckers.

Again, online trailers spotlight explosions and sex. But after the opening scenes of episode one, the explosions are largely limited to verbal sparring and personal conflicts. This is a series about the backroom log-rolling sessions that voters never see, but which make politics happen. The characters quarrel, swap favors, and submarine one another regularly. Elected officials like Trowbridge and Rayburn are there to be managed, not to call the shots.

But if this is the feared “deep state,” it really isn’t that deep. Far from a finely tuned engine of political know-how, this show features a complex nexus of wounded egos and resentment. Other than a brief on-screen appearance by an Iranian ambassador, this entire show features American and British characters, nominally allies, who constantly play one-upmanship games and personal horse trades. The deep state is, apparently, really quite shallow.

The Debt to Our Democracy

Richard Haass, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens

One need only browse the headlines or crack the occasional book to know that American democracy is suffering within our lifetime. Lawmakers have jettisoned standards of legislative debate, while judges base case law on their avowed politics, not legal precedent. Meanwhile, actual voters increasingly distrust the electoral process, especially when their elected representatives tell them to. Storming the Capitol has become a political maneuver, not an act of war.

Dr. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is hardly the first public policy specialist to suggest Americans need a deeper investment in civics. It’s not enough to demand that the government defend our individual or collective rights, if we don’t share a commitment to the body politic. He believes Americans need social obligations concomitant with their constitutional rights. Which sounds great—if you don’t probe too deeply.

Haass divides this slim volume, barely long enough to be considered a pamphlet, into two parts. The shorter first part breaks down how America’s longstanding democratic traditions have fallen into disrepair, and we citizens bear collective responsibility. His “ripped from the headlines” exposition doesn’t really add anything that dedicated politics junkies (who are probably his core audience) don’t already know, but it lays the groundwork for his proposed solutions.

His second part involves ten “obligations,” which he defines as standards that good citizens ought to follow, without being compelled by law. Again, Haass isn’t the first to suggest that citizenship carries certain responsibilities, beyond showing up on Election Day. His proposed list of baseline standards sounds pretty good, in the abstract. Precepts like “Be Informed” and “Get Involved” match the bipartisan exhortations which emerge like clockwork every election cycle.

But the longer Haass talks, the more aware I become that his seemingly nonpartisan suggestions have a dark shadow. His fourth “obligation,” for instance, is “Remain Civil.” That sounds great, hypothetically. We’ve watched America’s political discourse descend into name-calling and bad-faith rhetoric with remarkable haste. I’d like to see politicians, and the voters who support them, resume treating the other side as ideological cohorts, not enemies to crush.

Dr. Richard Haass

Sadly, exhortations to “civility” have historically been mustered against minority groups demanding even rudimentary reforms. Defenders of the status quo have always accused Civil Rights activists, feminists, and Pride marchers of being “uncivil,” a moving target used to silence any form of dissent. Demands for “civility” usually mean forcing powerless minorities to beg, hat in hand. Protesters like Dr. King quickly learned it’s impossible to be civil enough.

Similar problems taint others of Dr. Haass’ suggestions. Suggestions to “Stay Open to Compromise” are great when talking about, say, taxes and infrastructure. But you can’t, indeed mustn’t, compromise with certain groups. I write in the immediate wake of an avowed White Supremacist shooting up an Allen, Texas, strip mall. You can’t compromise with those who believe other people need to simply die.

The laundry list continues, sadly. Haass urges us to “Value Norms,” without asking who wrote those norms or how they’ve been historically deployed. He tells us to “Support the Teaching of Civics,” even as Florida and other “red” states actively rewrite the entire discipline. Concepts like “norms” and “civics” appear morally neutral, until we make even the most rudimentary efforts to unpack their definitions in specific terms.

On civics specifically, Haass admits we need a meaningful public debate about the best civics curriculum, and I agree. But he advocates “teaching the controversy,” a technique historically used to keep moribund debates alive. Just as Intelligent Design doesn’t belong in science classrooms, because it can’t be tested, White Supremacy and Confederate “Lost Cause” apologia don’t belong in civics classrooms, because they’re inherently violent and uncivil.

These proposals sound great, provided their treatment remains superficial. I, too, would prefer a world where political actors “Reject Violence” and “Put Country First.” But we don’t, as Haass himself acknowledges. Violence, partisanship, and bigotry are all on the table. Many January 6th insurrectionists, a group Haass excoriates by name, justified invading the Capitol by claiming that, if they didn’t do it first, the other side would.

Don’t misunderstand me: I share Haass’ precept that Americans must recommit to the small-d democratic experiment. But this isn’t about atomized individuals being good people. Honestly, anybody reading Haass’ book already probably shares his commitment to America’s common good. We’re witnessing a fundamental institutional breakdown comparable to Belfast during the Troubles, and like Belfast, America needs a recommitment to law.

If most citizens being good people was sufficient, they would’ve won by now.

The Search for a Modern British Messiah

Tom Moran, The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi and Jessica Raine in The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, receives second billing in The Devil’s Hour, behind Jessica “Call the Midwife” Raine. Yet he’s remarkably absent from the first half of the series, commenting on things he’s seen, but unseen by others. We don’t even learn his character’s name for several episodes. When we do, it confuses more than it resolves: who, exactly, is Gideon Shepherd? Needless to say, the following involves spoilers.

For practical purposes, we know Gideon (he’s generally addressed by his first name, once it’s uncovered) combines aspects of Capaldi’s two most influential roles, the Doctor and Malcolm Tucker. When the show’s other male lead, DI Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel), asks whether Gideon is perhaps a time traveler or a soothsayer, given his foreknowledge of events, he hedges. Because the show knows its audience already recognizes Capaldi’s face and voice.

Perhaps the solution comes in Gideon’s name. In the book of Judges, Gideon arises from the disorganized tribes of Israel when the nation has lost its collective respect for God. When the neighboring Midianites invade, Gideon alone recognizes this as God’s judgment upon the people. He musters an army and, after winning the unworthy from its ranks, challenges and defeats an overwhelming Midianite force in a Thermopylae-like underdog performance.

The specifically Biblical implications of Gideon’s name, contrasts with his superficially violent approach. As both a Judge of Israel and a shepherd, a title used by Jesus Christ, he’s implicitly declared a Judeo-Christian messiah. But like Malcolm Tucker, Gideon is violent and vulgar, turning an almost operatic language of vindictiveness on anyone who crosses him. If he’s a messiah, he certainly isn’t anybody’s Prince of Peace.

Not that he lets that stop him, protected by the certainty of deterministic destiny. The universe seems to provide him favor; cornered by DI Dhillon in Gideon’s first substantial appearance, a literal lightning bolt from above provides the protection he requires. Once he finally becomes an active participant in the story, we see him appearing to target children for psychological conditioning and torture, which he justifies with self-righteous rationales.

Peter Capaldi as Gideon Shepherd
in The Devil’s Hour

Gideon displays his Christian implications through the interstitial narration that unifies the series. As the story unfolds out of sequence, we see two tracks throughout the story. Lucy Chambers (Raine) and DI Dhillon watch their story unfold, as Dhillon tracks Gideon’s trail of destruction, and Lucy struggles with her son’s flat affect and her own seemingly psychic premonitions. In the moment, little makes sense, for them or us.

In the second track, Gideon explains the truth about everything the characters previously experienced. What seemed meaningless as it happened, turns out to possess explicit purpose. But that purpose isn’t frivolous, and it happens in the person of Gideon himself. For the religiously inclined, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to the Gospel of Luke, wherein the resurrected Jesus, at Emmaus, explains how the whole Tanakh points ultimately to himself.

If Gideon is a messiah, though, he’s an unquestionably brutal one. What gospel does Gideon preach? He certainly follows the apocalyptic facet of Christ, who on the final day, looks into every person’s heart and judges accordingly. Unlike DI Dhillon and the police, who can only respond to crimes that have already occurred, Gideon judges people according to their hearts, and metes out responses accordingly. These responses are frequently violent.

Unlike the Doctor, Gideon has only one approach, to crush humanity’s worst inclinations. The Twelfth Doctor’s anti-war speech in the episode “The Zygon Inversion” urges Kate Stewart, as representative of humanity’s power structure, to uphold humanity’s best tendencies, to avoid war, and to resolve conflicts through our better nature. Gideon, by contrast, can only hope to stop people by hurting others, usually by hurting them first.

Only in the sixth and final episode do we discover Gideon’s motivation. His worldview is bleak and deterministic because he, uniquely among humanity, understands time’s nature as a flat circle. Gideon’s messianism directly counters his father’s Presbyterian religiosity, but it isn’t nearly as counter as he believes. Both are judgmental and believe in corrective violence. Gideon just doesn’t justify his brutality through appeals to an invisible God.

Like the Biblical Judge, Gideon Shepherd’s mission begins when the people have lost their communal faith: Gideon’s mission of retributive justice begins in approximately the middle 1960s, when British religious observance plunged dramatically. Both Gideons want to restore justice to the land. But this Gideon brings a truth that Britain’s power structures don’t want to hear, and work to quell. We know his crucifixion must be imminent.

First Ask Yourself: Where Does Money Come From?

Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy

Modern Monetary Theory begins with a deceptively straightforward statement: the national economy doesn’t essentially resemble your household budget. MMT then extrapolates outward to “prove” that conventional neoliberal economics doesn’t describe the world accurately, and therefore standard budgeting precepts don’t apply. A longtime Distributist myself, I anticipated cheering this insight. Then I saw the appalling brass tacks.

Professor Stephanie Kelton didn’t originate MMT. It actually originated from a retired Wall Street investor who claimed to realize an underlying truth that generations of economists had missed. Kelton has, however, contributed to the discipline, and helped it establish a theoretical veneer that passes muster in academia. Like me, she abandoned neoliberalism in her youth when its theoretical underpinnings failed to result in testable real-world outcomes.

That said, Professor Kelton and I have reached different subsequent conclusions. Her discipline, Modern Monetary Theory, relies upon “fiat currency,” money which derives its value from the government body issuing it. Monetary value, MMT contends, derives from law. Her analysis scarcely mentions the floating value of goods, services, and human labor. To understand MMT, we must examine Kelton’s premise that governments requisition money into existence ex nihilo.

Kelton is right that money doesn’t come into existence when ordinary citizens pay their taxes. But she’s also wrong: the government doesn’t spend money into existence either. Money comes into existence when banks make loans against their reserve capital; that’s why the American economy contracted violently in 2008 when banks began going under. With nobody to create new money, the existing pool began drying up.

Banks’ role in creating money often gets overlooked. Currency—paper money—is issued by the Federal Reserve, which looks deceptively like a government office. After all, its leadership is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. But the Federal Reserve is a public-private hybrid, and actually owned by American banks. Indeed, to receive legal status as a “bank,” institutions must own voting stock in the Federal Reserve.

Dr. Stephanie Kelton

Before banks collaboratively formed the Federal Reserve in 1913, American banks issued their own currency. Unfortunately, without centralized control, some banks issued excessive currency to falsely pay down their own debts. As historian Paul Kahan writes, bank recklessness created recurrent financial panics. American banks organized the Federal Reserve, and transferred partial authority to the federal government, to restrain their own worst impulses. For nearly 100 years, that worked.

An economy isn’t a mathematical construct, friends. It’s the system of exchanges, gifts, and debts that control our daily, dirty world. The thought experiments Kelton devises to fortify her argument are specious, because they have prior limits. The larger economy doesn’t essentially resemble a game of Monopoly, because in Monopoly, there’s only one bank, and only one city to spend money. Land and housing prices are predetermined and cannot float. I cannot negotiate based on supply and demand, or take my Monopoly money to another Monopoly town for improved competitive value.

I cannot muster a point-for-point refutation of Kelton’s thesis; that exceeds the scope of a 750-word review. But neither can I seemingly read two pages of Kelton’s book without setting it down in frustration because she says something transparently incorrect. Her economic analogies rely on closed-loop systems without floating exchange rates: sports scores, improv comedy, household allowances. One recalls right-wing YouTubers basing their economic analyses on in-game transactions in Fortnite.

Like other economic analyses, including the Laffer Curve or Marxist surplus value, MMT only has value to the extent that its theoretical calculations accurately predict real-world outcomes. And the theory’s fundamental precept, that the state should print more dough, should raise alarm bells for anybody who’s read the history of Weimar Germany. Coincidentally, German economic history doesn’t even merit an entry in Kelton’s index.

Please don’t misunderstand me. The status quo is deeply insufficient and, like Kelton, I’m eager for another approach, one that doesn’t rely on permanent shortages and wage theft. Neoliberal capitalism has been a massive global catastrophe, which is why innovators worldwide look for alternative models in everything from Marx to Mondragon. The damage is too real and painful to excuse continued indolence. We need to fix the underlying system now.

Kelton says plenty I support, like that inflation is more indicative of economic health than deficits, or that public debt doesn’t essentially resemble private debt. But her preliminary assumption, about where money originates in today’s economy, is a thought experiment, not evidence. Without that, her subsequent hypotheses simply slap patches on capitalism’s leaking hull, when our modern economy actually needs an entirely new vessel.