The Un-Conventional Wisdom

 

Next Week the Republican party meets in its National Convention in Tampa Florida to nominate its candidate for the US presidency. The following week the world’s oldest political party – the Democrats – will convene in Charlotte North Carolina for the same purpose.

There is nothing unexpected going to happen at either convention. Governor Mitt Romney’s early nomination of Representative Paul Ryan has robbed the GOP convention of any aspect of surprise. The Democrats have President Obama and Vice President Biden long in place and so the long winding road to the fall campaign draws to its predictable end.

Except the end in question isn’t quite the end the strategists and the commentariat imagined. And wisely in that latter group of fools I will include myself.

None saw Ryan as Romney’s likely choice last spring. Ryan was on the lists of possible Vice Presidents but was thought too far to the right to be plausible. Ryan’s choice tells us much about the state of the GOP and the state of Governor Romney’s campaign and the effect of Rick Santorum’s run from the sidelines. This is the first time the Republicans have not fielded a Protestant on either part of the ticket.

On the Democrat side President Obama is formally Christian but as an intellectual his faith has long been tinged by secularism and agnosticism – especially in the disbelieving eyes of America’s far right – many of whom refuse as yet to believe the President was actually born in America.

However, for the first time both major parties have a Roman Catholic as the candidate for the Vice Presidency. But the respective candidates versions of Roman Catholicism itself tells the story of Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this campaign Joe Biden has outspokenly and repeatedly taken the line of  Christian social liberalism associated with the poor and minorities’ rights. Increasingly these causes have come to focus in the US on women’s rights – particularly a woman’s right to chose whether or not to have a termination – civil rights, gay rights – particularly the right to gay marriage –  all these causes still tinged still with the liberal interventionist notions of  Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. This version of Catholicism looks to Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council that inspired its gospel – liberation theology –  and reformed liturgical simplicity. The ethic of Christian socialism; institutional reform and ecumenism – all have heady echoes of those other great upheavals in the Christian history –  the twelfth & thirteenth reformation ignited by mendicant revolutionary St Francis of Assisi and the later reformations in the sixteenth century triggered by Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Intellectually the pontificate of Pope Paul VI was practical apotheosis of this movement.

Strikingly it was not Pope Paul VI’s liturgical revolution in the new missal – which took the Roman Mass into a practice of which Luther and Cranmer (before 1547) might have approved – which fired the doctrinal counter-reformation of the next two pontificates but rather Pope Paul’s refusal to give the Church’s official blessing to contraception. His encyclical Humane Vitae (1968) exposed the limits of the accommodation between the Roman Church and the modern world. In doing so it set off a counter-reformation which took an increasingly hard line on issues of social theology.

Yet it is not a little ironic that the church has been governed since the death of Paul VI (Montini) in 1978 – the year of three popes – by three men all elevated by him to the college of cardinals –  Popes John Paul I (Luciani) , John Paul II (Wojtyła) and Benedict XVI (Ratzinger). Given the length of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate – almost thirty years – and the age of the average cardinal – that is extraordinary in itself. However, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have proved as conservative as their patron was liberal.

Rep Paul Ryan – Mitt Romney’s choice for Vice President –  embodies that muscular conservative mould championed by the papacy since 1978. Ryan is a hunter; a man who catches catfish with his bare hands; and a man who catches tides and swims ferociously with them. In the arid desert of modern politics Ryan passes as an intellectual. By comparison with Governor Sarah Palin he may be – at least he is articulate.

Ryan opposes abortion – even for victims of rape and incest. Ryan opposes gay marriage and is in favour of an amendment to the US constitution to that effect. He also trails his antipathy to social welfare in particular not only opposing the President’s healthcare reforms but wishing also to roll back  by the current provisions of Medicare and Medicaid on which many seniors in the US are dependant. Indeed it is difficult to imagine a candidate further to his right – even in the current Republican Party. Romney has found the man to out-Santorum Rick Santorum.

And what is more since 2008 Ryan has also become something of a fiscal conservative – along the new-model-army lines of the Tea Party. Though Ryan voted like many of his Republican colleagues from 2001 to 2008 for every cent of every unfunded tax cut and every cent of war expenditure unfunded by a tax  – he now blames the Obama’s administration for scale of the government debt.

…By the way, this wasn’t the first time Republicans in office have run up huge fiscal deficits – Nixon  between 1968 and 1972 did so; Regan did it on an even greater scale between 1980 and 1988 – leaving President Bush senior to pick up the tab that eventually cost him his presidency in 1992. But there’s no question who wins the palm – George W Bush did it on the grandest scale….

Nevertheless Ryan has had a damascene conversion to the politics of deficit reduction and on the House Budget Committee this year Ryan produced a  counter-budget proposal with which even Wall Street and the fiscal hawks took issue. So godly men with hymn books in hand and puritan restraint upon their lips are the order of the day in the GOP. It’s an odd uniform for millionaires to don but odd times make for strange fashions.

Since Paul Ryan’s selection the Republican base has been fired-up but so has the Democrat base. President Obama’s campaign has been struggling to some extent with the sluggish economic recovery that spluttered towards stall from last April onwards. For a time in early June, in the afterglow of winning the GOP Nomination Romney pulled ahead in both national and state polls. But he slipped back badly in July and early August.  Ryan is in every sense a wild card and rather like the choice of Palin by McCain or Qualye by G.H. Bush or even Spiro Agnew by Nixon – it is an attempt to stir up the dynamics of an election which was looking like it was slipping from the Republicans.

And it certainly has stirred up the dull certainties of this sterile campaign with its choice between who would run things better – an intelligent intellectual – the President – or an experienced CEO – Governor Romney.

Suddenly all the talk is about social issues and a wider philosophy of government.

This is territory upon which as we saw in the spring Governor Romney treads rather gingerly and on which he is not comfortable. It is however, home turf both to Biden and the President who have a clear alterative vision to the conservatives – even if in Vice President Biden’s case it isn’t always clearly articulated.

Thus Romney was hoping perhaps to squeeze victory from getting the conservative base out in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, in Missouri, in Iowa and most of all in Florida and Ohio. This at best is a high risk strategy since it’s bound also to bring out those voters lukewarm to the President but deeply hostile to the social policies of the neo-conservatives.

Then last week a man, unknown largely outside his home state,  spoke to a friendly conservative talk-show host on a local TV channel. His name: Todd Akin; his chosen specialist subject: rape; and on that subject he spoke at some length and to utterly disastrous effect.

Not only did Todd Akin introduce the world to the concept of legitimate rape he also gave us  a first class example of the bogus mumbo-jumbo of the quasi-scientific rhetorical factoid beloved of Fox News presenters and their ‘evangelical’ cadre on the American right. Indeed it has given birth to that ugliest of non-intellectual; non-scientific; non-senses espoused as fact by creationists – ‘Intelligent Design’.

The fact that educated men and women cannot distinguish the method used by Anselm’s ontological proof that God exists – and Aquinas’s later philosophical refinements of it to the five proofs that God exists – and scientific method, speaks ill of the effects of public education upon thought.

The fact creationists also routinely misuse Occam’s Razor to supposedly prove there must have been Intelligent Design is particularly crass. It upturns the distinction between a simple belief – in this case in an omnipotent creating Deity – as being is a simpler explanation for the state our known world than that postulated by Darwin’s ‘complicated’ theory of evolution by natural selection. Thus, it mistakes the apparent simplicity of an complicated idea –  the existence of an omnipotent creator – over actual simplicity of the random process of trial and error that’s Natural Selection.

The fact they cannot see Occam’s Razor actually cuts the other way demonstrates the woolliest of thinking that previously has led mankind to believe the earth was flat; or the earth was the unmoving centre about which the universe turned. Still I suppose as these people generally do believe that God made the world in Seven Days – well six since he rested upon the seventh – facts play little part in their discernment of reality.

Scientific method may challenge but it doesn’t disprove the existence of God but neither is it capable of being used as a means to prove God’s existence. Mixing the empirical of science with a teleological philosophy makes both into a soup of incoherence. And that insults a putative Omnipotent Deity as much as it confuses a philosophical debate with scientific method.

Still whatever the methods which account for Todd Akin’s strange conclusions about the rape and the other realities of our world –  there ‘s enough madness in it for it to go politically viral. Even the anti-intellectual Republican right has disowned thee would be senator from Missouri. Governor Romney  – with Rep Paul Ryan sitting beside him –  disowned Todd Akin’s concept of legitimate rape and virtually ordered him to stand aside. Todd Akin isn’t easily moved by common-sense considerations. He refuses to withdraw more than the words he used –  but not their meaning – which is held in his heart – and which God alone understands as Todd seems unable to explain them.

Ryan tellingly sat beside Governor Romney saying nothing. But his silence speaks to other truths.

Most of the attention around Ryan centred on his plans for Medicare it turns out that he is no ‘Johnny-One-Note’.

Paul Ryan  co-sponsored a bill in the House with the same Todd Akin. It was called “The “Sanctity of Life Act.” It declared that a zygote or embryo is a legal person with full constitutional rights.

This simple statement is redolent with complicated legal possibilities. For example, if enacted would a woman who had a termination be guilty of first degree murder? Would a doctor carrying out such a procedure be also be guilty both of second degree murder and guilty of being accessory to murder? The list of possibilities you can see is endless and note also that the Ryan/Atkin act would have given this legal protection to any embryo – no matter how conceived – through rape or incest.

And so we are returned to the Akin campaign apology which has in fact fuelled the debate rather than dampening the conflagration. Akin himself steadfastly refuses to explain, to withdraw and now as he has passed a legal filing deadline – he may only now so do with the permission of the state courts of Missouri. But the GOP may regard that as a small price to pay. Meanwhile his Democrat opponent craftily puts out advertisements designed to keep akin firmly on the ticket as the legal winner of the GOP Primary.

This has up-turned all the predictions. It was long held that this election would be lost and won on the economy – stupid.  Instead it is turning into another epic struggle between the two different Americas harnessed into a single political entity by the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

First slavery; then states rights; then silver and gold standards then prohibition – these have all be vehicles for that struggle between conservatives and liberals. The cultural divide in America will widen over this coming Fall and whether either winner will be able to reach over to his defeated opponents seem increasingly unlikely. The next Congress will be as divided and partisan as the last. The winds whip about the creaky political constructs that holds the USA together.

As in Europe culture and economics divide. National governments are stymied by international forces of finance and trade. These great powers of the new century are deeply antipathetic to Internationalism and legal and political constructs that might be used to call them to account. The irresolution now inherent in the electoral process in the USA is only one more sign that this crisis will not be easily resolved without even greater disruptions than those which we have already seen.

Historians are wont to see the apocalypse around every corner. But  – as in 1914 – one feels that the polities and certainties of the past are no longer able to supply a resolution to our current problems. And as in 1618; and as in 1789; and as in 1914 History teaches us that when political structures are no longer working to effect they are apt to be destroyed.