It's Time For a Harry Truman Moment

President Harry Truman

It’s easy to forget, at this late date, how wildly unpopular President Harry Truman was in 1948. Having inherited the Presidency accidentally, only 89 days into FDR’s fourth term, Truman was considered a bench-warmer, holding the Oval Office until a better candidate became available. The famous “Dewey Wins” photo happened because Truman’s defeat was considered a foregone conclusion, despite FDR’s lingering shadow.

This perception wasn’t entirely unfair. A longtime darling of the Kansas City political machine, Truman got nominated for Senator as a compromise candidate, and was so surprised by his Vice Presidential nod that his first response was reputedly: “Oh shit.” He initially showed no temperament for executive action, and dithered terribly. Historians attribute Truman’s chronic inaction for the Democratic Party’s widespread losses in the 1946 midterms.

But when Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, a Northern semi-progressive, for President, Truman saw his opportunity. Truman had recently converted to antiracism, and desegregated the military by executive order. Dewey pledged an antiracist Republican platform. So Truman called the Republican-dominated Congress back into session to vote on bills essentially supporting Dewey’s racial policies. The Republicans’ inability to vote on their own platform probably got Truman reelected in 1948.

Watching events unfold following this week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, feels like watching a prewritten script stumbling toward an inevitable ending. While conservative voices offer crinkum-crankum “thoughts and prayers” tweets, progressives insist somebody needs to do something, but feign helplessness against intransigent bipartisan indifference. It’s hauntingly familiar, and it’s currently poised to result in the usual outcome: a multiparty agreement to do nothing.

Nineteen children under age ten were slaughtered by one shooter with a military-grade rifle. Many bodies were so badly mutilated that the only hope of reliable identification is through DNA matching. Though the Uvalde Unified School District has its own six-member police department, the shooter received no meaningful interference until he’d racked up a double-digit body count. Clearly the standard responses—waiting periods, increased security, “red flag laws”—didn’t work.

President Joe Biden

This only compounds the threats to young people’s future. Children today will face social and economic dislocation caused by Global Warming; the only question is what, not whether. Our democracy is under assault by groups that repeat conspiracy theories which originated in neo-Nazi circles. Our middle class is disappearing, and soon a majority of Americans won’t be able to afford health care, assuming SCOTUS hasn’t banned it all anyway.

America hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 1991; all of the twenty hottest years on record have happened since then. We haven’t had an budget since Barack Obama’s first term, and have funded basic functions like national defense and road repair by short-term spending bills. Meanwhile Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema keep promising that bipartisanship will happen any day now, despite overwhelming evidence that the parties speak different languages.

Our two major political parties are hemorrhaging right now. Republican policies are deeply unpopular, particularly as they’ve increasingly become mere Trumpist whims, yet unless something happens, they’re likely to sweep this year’s midterms. That’s because the Democrats have descended into bickering and inaction. The big-tent party means Democrats can’t agree on almost anything, and handle policy disagreements by punting every ball further down the field.

Now is the opportunity for a Harry Truman moment. The Biden Administration, suffering from almost exactly the same accusations of dithering inaction that plagued Truman in 1948, can simply force Congress to vote on something, anything. Slamming an omnibus bill on Congress to protect our children’s future will require Congress to take some position, any position, as we move into the general election campaign. Make them do something.

It won’t work, of course. Just like Harry Truman’s civil rights reforms crashed in 1948, anything Biden pushes will collapse now. The point, sadly, isn’t to accomplish anything; it’s to get incumbents on record, in their home states and districts, taking positions on issues that Americans care about, particularly ensuring children have a future. By making working legislators take concrete, specific sides, we can potentially reforge the New Deal coalition.

Politics in 2022, like in 1948, isn’t working by existing rules. The way we’ve done everything previously is failing now. We can’t naively rely on bucolic nostalgia for days when legislators made things happen by back-room log-rolling sessions. Joe Biden needs to learn the lesson that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton all learned, eventually: “politics as usual” is almost always an illusion.

If we want to get anything done, force legislators to take a concrete position in public.

Heaven, Hell, and the SBC

Back before college, the United Methodist congregation I attended had a youth pastor who loved telling stories of how awful his oversexed youth was. Over and over, week after week, so many stories. He was the JRR Tolkein of elaborate anecdotes about lust and promiscuity. Eventually, I realized, he didn't regret his debauched youth.

He missed it.

As news broke this week that America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is structurally rotten with male sexual violence, I returned to that youth pastor. Back in the 1990s, purity culture infiltrated White Protestantism. Though quasi-puritanical attitudes weren’t invented in the Clinton era, they were codified in new and exceedingly intolerant ways. They divided the world into “pure” and “impure” camps, identity clusters which were reinforced through pulpit sermons, layperson testimony, and in-school outreach.

Purity culture has multiple forms. The lurid popularity of purity balls has attracted attention, as has voluble online condemnation of women wearing leggings and low-cut blouses. The adults governing purity culture have gained notoriety for punishing even the most rudimentary forms of female sexuality. Women’s bodies, according to this reasoning, are so inherently suffused with temptation, that men and boys need constantly shielded from their influence.

Notably, purity extends beyond sex. The SBC, like many conservative denominations, divides theological roles according to biological sex: women are excluded from authority though, as Jim Henderson writes, women mostly keep such congregations working. This division, called by the faux-doctrinal name “complementarianism,” pre-slots people into roles according to accidents of form, and just like racial segregation, gender segregation inevitably carries a whiff of uncleanliness.

The news emerging from the SBC should horrify anybody of any religious persuasion. An all-male pastorate preached sexual purity and defense of “family values,” while sexually abusing parishioners, including minors. A male power structure turned sex into a power prerogative, while spreading a message that women and girls were responsible for men’s libidinous reactions. Constant messages of submission and culpability turned out to have—quelle horreur!—an ulterior motive.

I’ve never heard any accusation that my youth pastor, whom I’ll not name, ever actively abused anyone. By all accounts I received, he was a paragon of respectability… I guess. Because his constant messaging had definite effects. I watched church youth descend into doom-spirals of self-recrimination (Christians are no less likely than anybody else to have premarital sex). Youth, drawn to our congregation by his personal charisma, soon drifted away in a fug of self-hatred.

This problem isn’t universal. As Austin Channing Brown observes, chastity is a preponderantly White church obsession. Freed from the impositions of oppression, poverty, and captivity, White Christians could pursue a ministry of service and responsibility. But that’s a difficult sell; much easier to convince believers they’re secretly oppressed. The belief that, if sexual violence happens against you, you’re covertly responsible, is an outgrowth of Calvinist belief in depravity.

Functionally, this sexual fixation doesn’t preserve anybody’s purity. It just transfers sexual autonomy onto powerful, mostly male, adults. It creates an atmosphere of guilt, stifles forgiveness, and convinces those who most need Christ’s guidance that they’ve fallen outside His domain. I’ve watched Christians, mostly youth, leave the church, not because they don’t believe, but because they believe they’ve done something God can’t forgive. That’s heartbreaking to witness.

Let me stress, irreligion isn’t the answer. The secular world of commerce hasn’t liberated anybody; a casual browse through the internet, or a stumble through any shopping mall, demonstrates that irreligious influences frequently conflate a woman’s dollar value with her sex appeal. Who can blame youth, browbeaten by constant sexual messaging from the spiritual and secular realms, for relinquishing control of their sexual choices?

My youth pastor probably meant well. His voracious sexual history innately entailed disrespecting not only the girls he had sex with, but also himself, and he wanted other youth to avoid that pattern. But his single-plank platform turned Christianity into a vehicle to shame sex, and especially female sexuality. He presented a world without hope, only momentary escape from constant temptation. That’s no way to live a life.

Extreme and repressive attitudes about sex are innately abusive, even before powerful people exploit those attitudes for selfish ends. What we’re seeing revealed at the SBC is simply the end result of a cosmology that ties people to their pasts, rather than opening them to a better future. White Christianity's relationship with sex has been distorted and toxic for some time.

And sadly, evidence suggests that it's going to get worse before it gets any better.

The American Century and its Discontents

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 112
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

America has a message for the world: we’ve come into prominence for a reason. We come to bring justice, freedom, and democracy throughout the earth. The problem is, if we’re honest, we know we haven’t always lived up to our own rhetoric; but we’re not always honest, and therein lies the problem. When challenged on the gap between our language and our actions, we frequently respond with violence.

Journalist and foreign policy scholar Stephen Kinzer spent much of the 1980s reporting from Central America, from countries touched by America’s foreign policy backwash. He became conscious of the cognitive dissonance that arises in United States administrations when our small-D democratic values run aground on real-world political exigencies.He chronicles here the times America has, directly or by proxy, overthrown fourteen lawful governments. The butcher’s bill isn’t pretty.

The United States overthrew its first government in Hawai’i, in 1893. White planters, mostly American, owned extensive tracts of Hawai’ian land, growing sugar for export. They perceived Queen Lili’uokalani as an impediment to their economic expansion. With the private backing of William Henry Harrison’s administration, the White planters overthrew an internationally recognized government and declared themselves an American protectorate. To the Queen’s shock, the world seemed okay with that.

Thus begins a pattern which Kinzer identifies clearly throughout America’s “regime change” foreign policy: we verbally express commitment to global democracy and international autonomy, but flinch when autonomous nations, many of them democratically elected, go against American wishes. The gulf between American values and United States government actions is frequently huge. And sadly, it hasn’t gotten much better since 1893.

Sometimes, the United States has overthrown international regimes directly. This has happened openly, as when George W. Bush authorized regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also happened covertly, as when President Kennedy approved the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. In both cases, these governments have opposed American policy, but enforcing that policy ultimately undermined American interests. We’re still paying the price for all these interventions.

Stephen Kinzer

Other times, America has overthrown governments by proxy. Besides the White plantation owners in Hawaii, America permitted United Fruit to overthrow home governments in Nicaragua and Guatemala. This not only led directly to decades of civil war in both nations, it required the United States to intervene to prevent popular Marxist uprisings. Cold War rhetoric required America to interfere with other countries’ autonomy to prevent Communism from gaining ground.

Kinzer has differing relationships with different overthrows. He’s largely forgiving, for instance, of America’s invasion of Grenada. In truth, Grenada’s socialist government had descended into infighting, and was probably about to collapse, leaving a power vacuum in the Caribbean. But Kinzer depicts that government as illegitimate anyway, led by a lite-beer Leninist university dorm room bull session. This interpretation is, let’s politely say, still debated in foreign policy circles.

He’s also more forgiving of America’s overthrow of Hawai’i than most Hawai’ians would be. He depicts American control as largely popular. But he bases that opinion on people living in Hawai’i; because of militarism and resource hoarding, most Native Hawai’ians can’t afford to live in their homeland. Even in America, the overthrow was divisive: President Harrison privately approved the coup, but before it was complete, Grover Cleveland was President, and was horrified.

Conservative readers will probably interpret Kinzer’s critical attitude toward United States interventionism and regime change as anti-American. Not so. Kinzer criticizes America, not to disparage it, but to hold its people, collectively, to their highest ideals. He wants America to follow its own teachings of freedom, democracy, and justice, teachings we’ve long espoused but frequently not followed. Kinzer wants America to be as good as its rhetoric.

Therein lies the message. America has historically believed in Enlightenment-era principles of popular sovereignty and rule by the population. But we’ve also believed the Enlightenment’s myth of universal truth. We believe our interpretation of democracy and justice applies everywhere, and when different cultures read their social, religious, or economic needs differently than ours, America believes these countries have strayed from universal truth. We believe they need correction and “rescue.”

Like me, Kinzer believes America has great potential to do good in our conflicted world. It can correct human rights injustices, bring democracy, and stabilize an unstable globe. But the ways it’s attempted to do so have often created terrible blowback, and resulted in greater instability. Kinzer doesn’t want to blame America; he wants America to live by its own principles. It can start by stopping overthrowing world governments.

Governor Pete Ricketts is a Toxic, Gaslighting Liar—and So Is His Party

Pete Ricketts

Nebraska appears to be on a COVID-19 upswing. Official figures indicate five consecutive weeks of rising numbers, including nearly doubling last week. Given this opportunity to demonstrate energetic engagement in Nebraska’s public health, Governor Pete Ricketts, Republican, chose instead to appear on CNN, announcing his intent to unilaterally ban abortion at the first chance. He’s so focused on what he calls “preborn babies” that he’s forgotten the literal living.

I’m conflicted in my response. Ricketts, who was born rich and never held office before being elected governor, has a history of saying complete bilge on national media to gain cheap attention. This isn’t even the first time Ricketts has used the “Nebraska is a pro-life state” line, because he apparently believes he’s entitled to pronounce for all Nebraskans. Ricketts believes himself, not an elected representative, but Nebraska’s embodied avatar.

Yet for all his “pro-life” flexing, Pete Ricketts has demonstrated dismal performance among the actual living. His economic policies have favored the rich and urban in an overwhelmingly rural, working-class state. He continued flooding agricultural conglomerate ConAgra with cash subsidies and tax breaks, only to watch ConAgra move its headquarters to Chicago. Ricketts later tried the same trick to hold TD Ameritrade, which his father founded, with marginally better results.

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricketts has resisted even the most nominal efforts to curb the spread. As recently as this January, at the second-highest peak of the pandemic, the Ricketts Administration did worse than nothing; it actively opposed local mask mandates, attempting to declare face hankies “illegal.” Hey, remember April 2020, when Grand Island, Nebraska, briefly had North America’s highest COVID rate? I sure do.

Throughout his administration, Ricketts has defined “freedom” as whatever comforts well-off White men, like himself. Massive interest-free cash transfusions to multinational corporations? Don’t mind if I do. Extended unemployment benefits to protect unskilled workers during a pandemic? Piss off, working-class people have a moral obligation to work. Ricketts also opposes even the most fiddling gun control measures, claiming “Nebraska is a pro-Second Amendment state.”

But letting women make reproductive choices unhindered by government bureaucracy? No dice, we’re “pro-life.” Never mind the things we do that cause death, like obstructing any effort to stem a highly transmissible disease. You have a lawful right to breathe your potentially lethal vapors on somebody’s grandma without impediment, that isn’t a life issue. The mere fact that, under current conditions, the wrong person’s exhale is literally deadly, means nothing.

This contradiction baffles me. Even if we accept Ricketts’ premise that a fertilized zygote is already human (which I don’t), then you know what else is already human? An actual walking, talking human being. Calling yourself “pro-life” because you value a glob of meiotic cells, while actively opposing attempts to protect living humans, or ensure they earn enough to buy groceries during a pandemic, makes you worse than contradictory.

It makes you a liar.

Don’t mistake the importance here. I’m targeting Governor Ricketts because, as a Nebraska resident, I’m familiar with his policies, and their lived consequences. But these effects don’t stop at the Nebraska state line. Republicans nationwide are floating bills that would classify abortion as homicide, bills which have already had intrusive consequences for women who miscarry. Many such laws are actively ignorant of biology.

Simultaneously, the same party actively opposes any attempt to make life easier for employed people. A newly floated bill would preemptively forbid any attempt at student loan forgiveness. In the midst of a much-publicized baby formula shortage, House Republicans voted against fixing the conditions which caused the shortage by 192-12. Easier to blame the Brandon Administration than fix the problem, I guess; doesn’t matter who gets hurt.

(Edit: in the House vote, Nebraska's Congressional delegation split. Don Bacon, a Republican representing the 2nd District, which includes Omaha, was one of 12 to break from the party line. Adrian Smith, a Republican representing the large and mainly rural 3rd District, voted against the bill. The 1st District seat, which includes Lincoln, is currently vacant pending a special election.)

Governor Ricketts isn’t important enough to say that today’s Republican Party follows his lead. Indeed, Ricketts probably follows the marching orders of the cable-news androids whose telegenic outrage drives the base right now. But Ricketts is on-brand for today’s Republican mess: claiming “pro-life” prerogative for actions that will create massive burdens for poor people, immigrants, BIPOC, the disabled, and women, while banning even the slightest inconvenience for themselves.

Today’s Republican Party is opposed to anything that would make life better for those currently disadvantaged. Whether it’s systemic policy, like fixing a student debt machine with interest rates worse than a Dickensian usurer, or pure bad luck, like minimizing the consequences of an infectious disease, they’ve demonstrated they don’t care. Fixing it isn’t their responsibility. Anyone who now votes Republican demonstrates they’re okay with this approach.

Fear of Being Wrong

“Is it worse,” my distant acquaintance asked, “to fail at something or never attempt it in the first case?” I felt convicted by the question, because I’m frequently guilty of punting indefinitely on trying new and important actions. I have countless unfinished art projects, so many manuscripts waiting for my hand to complete them, so many tools I’ve purchased but never used, because on some level, failure is a terrible consequence. Something to avoid at all costs.

We avoid attempting things because, in the near term, failure is the worse consequence. But, because failures are often the building blocks of success, in the long term, avoiding the attempt is worse. So I guess it depends on your perspective.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) May 16, 2022

It’s easy to rationalize this outcome. It’s downright cliché to laugh about former “gifted” children who translate into frustrated, timid adults. Even Malcolm Gladwell writes that people deemed “geniuses” by our academic establishment only sometimes live up to their potential; great success in life and career tends to follow those who face obstacles, not those to whom school comes easy. We former “gifted” kids become averse to setbacks.

But I feel something more particular occurring here. Something closer to my spiritual core. As stated in my response to my acquaintance’s question, avoiding trying something means protecting myself from the disgrace of being wrong. It’s much harder to determine where I acquired this paralyzing fear of being wrong, and therefore, it’s much harder to shake the fear and progress into being able to accomplish goals without fear of judgment.

Sometimes I fall into the temptation of blaming outside forces. That temptation is easy because it isn’t entirely wrong. Teachers correct students’ mistakes in crowded classrooms, in front of peers eager to leap on weakened classmate like leopards on a wounded gazelle. As Dana Goldstein writes, American-style classroom learning is cost-effective, but not necessarily pedagogically effective. Therefore teacher-blaming is tempting, if facile.

I also sometimes recall my father’s instructional technique of public callouts. He loved correcting me in front of friends and family for every minor mistake. As a teenager, I became reluctant to do anything with him until after I’d thoroughly mastered all relevant skills, for fear of public callouts. This behavior was also gendered: he regularly called me out in front of women, but never corrected my sister similarly. I suspect he thought this toughened me up.

But these explanations are unsatisfying. Classroom embarrassment and public callouts are techniques as old as formalized education, and many people emerge unscathed. The problem isn’t that these things happened, it’s my reaction to them. Instead of learning to accept these behaviors as events that ordinarily happen, I internalized them, made them part of my identity. My life’s purpose became not accomplishing goals, but avoiding being wrong.

Perhaps it’s because I was able to read at an unusually early age. Because I’d already spent years reading recreationally before beginning grade school, I talked in complete sentences and with adult grammar. This, combined with my being unusually tall, possibly made adult authority figures mistake me for older than I really was, an expectation I then tried to live up to, acting adult and well-informed before giving myself permission to be young and make mistakes.

Except oops, there I go again, blaming others.

Whatever the reason, from an early age, I learned to associate being wrong with losing face. Getting corrected wasn’t an opportunity to improve in the future, it was always read as a callout for being wrong in the past. Therefore I became invested, not in improving my upcoming responses, but in defending my previous errors. And the surest way to avoid wasting time on old errors, was to ensure I never committed them.

This fear isn’t entirely unjustified. We’ve all known somebody who becomes deeply invested in some esoteric pursuit that others don’t understand, and becomes exceptionally good at it: hard science, for instance, or art. The crowds often handle these people by mocking them. Not only for being quirky “nerds” in their learning, but also, even especially, when they become accomplished and bank everything on wrong ideas. Remember cold fusion?

In other words, we treat those who are wrong as having wasted their lives. We subject them to ridicule, tearing down whatever accomplishments they actually achieved to justify shaming their mistakes. The gifted few are immune to such judgments, shrugging off mistakes as learning opportunities for future learning. But that wasn’t me; I cared what others thought. I learned instead to avoid being judged by avoiding being wrong.

I’m still deciding where to go from here. Reaching this point hasn’t given me insights into correcting this trend. But by naming the effect, by explaining why being wrong hurts, maybe I can plan my next steps.