Stormy Weather

As late Fall's winds start tearing at the leaves where I live, I hope you will indulge me in some meteorological meandering. It helps that the Hebrew & Christian scriptures are chock-full of weather imagery. I intend to take full advantage.

We can start with the dire warning from the prophet Hosea: "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." Tellingly, this appears in a passage about idolatry: about the madness of worshipping objects made with hands. This biblical image has long permeated common culture; it shows up again and again in literature and in political discourse. It was used, for example, by Frederick Douglass, who reminded audiences that the violence of chattel slavery wouldn't work out well for the enslavers. It's more or less the same concept as the Eastern idea of karma, the notion that the sum of your actions will come back to bite you, whether you are an individual or a nation.

It interests me that today's MAGA overlords do not hesitate to describe themselves as a whirlwind sown by decades of liberal "wokeness." Here, for example, is Stephen Miller, speaking at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk on September 25th:

We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion...You [woke types] have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing...You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.

Miller is right to say that something awakened the dragons and demons of the MAGA movement, but he is wrong to suggest that it was wokeism. Wokeism is just a convenient foil for trolls like Miller. I expect he knows full well that the people who sowed the most wind over the past 50 years weren't clueless lefty academic types spouting jargon. The real sowers were the neoliberals, including many Democrats, who pushed false idea that deregulating financial markets and allowing corporations to offshore manufacturing jobs would ultimately benefit everyone: that we would transition easily into a service-based economy in which laid-off steelworkers would be retrained to write computer code and live happily ever after.

These same neoliberals also pushed the false idea that people rising to the top in this deregulated paradise would rise on the basis of merit. In 2020 political philosopher Michael Sandel shattered any illusions we might have had about American "meritocracy," but the sobriety of Sandel and others like him came too late to save us from the MAGA shitstorm. Sensing opportunity, fake billionaire Donald Trump had already come along to say, "I love the poorly educated," and guess what? They loved him back. Mix downward economic mobility with an always-potent white racism, and massive turbulence is the inevitable result.

We should not expect the current storm to subside anytime soon. Not when the top 10% in this economy now consume fully half of all goods and services and continue to gain ground over the vast majority of people who are barely able to live a hand-to-mouth existence. This is why I keep saying that it's not nearly good enough to call for a return to what was "normal" before Trump.

We need a fundamental restructuring.

And yes, the winds of fundamental transformation are already blowing among the disinherited young, who can see much more clearly than their elders that the neoliberal dream was bound to turn into a nightmare sooner rather than later.

It's never over until it's over, in other words. And thus I end this week's Letter with a different bit of biblical meteorology. This is from John's gospel, and it reminds us that history is never closed: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Here Jesus is telling Nicodemus that how people receive new life is God's business. Hopeless cases can change. May it be so for us all, as we weather this storm and prepare to build something new from the wreckage.

~ Peter