What they say about assuming
Change may indeed make fools of us all, as Ezra Klein writes in reference to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Was SVB a “bank run by idiots” or a “bank-run by idiots,” posed financial journalist Matt Klein. Perhaps both, the former Klein poses back.
History, too, makes fools of us all by keeping a record. Conservatives who once believed they “defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience” now twist democracy into a pretzel to justify minority rule as long as they’re the minority — “Hehehe” — to borrow from an amateur painter in Texas.
The Federalist Society faces the uncomfortable realization that “most conservatives couldn’t care less about their high-minded principles, and, even worse, that many of their allies view their attachment to those principles as a quaint — and slightly embarrassing — relic of the bygone era when conservatives still had to be coy about what they actually believed.”
That era is not entirely gone. Still, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve written that conservatives’ (and include evangelicals’) attachment to their vaunted principles is a mile wide and an inch deep. They prove again and again that many are at heart royalists committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry.
A mistake all of us make is to assume that underneath our changing experience is unchanging ground. Those who allege this country was founded of, by, and for Christians may reference the Mayflower Compact’s multiple references to God. They must ignore social/cultural changes in the intervening 150 years between settlers landing in New England and the framers writing the U.S. Constitution. Those early colonists were not seeking the religious freedom enshrined in 1787, but the chance to be the ones to dictate what faith residents must practice. They were not here seeking political freedom but counted themselves “Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James.” History makes fools of us all.
Those who assume that the world they grew up in must and will be the one they die in are destined for disappointment in this era.
Those who allege ours was founded as a Christian nation must specify how, exactly. Was the slavery the Constitution tacitly endorsed a principle Christians endorse in 2023? Wait. Don’t answer that.
Is the atomized nuclear family the way Americans should and always have lived? Or is that an artifact of recent history? Ask people still living with their parents into their 30s.
Are women incapable of, or unworthy of equality, with men? Or is that too an artifact of a slowly eroding patriarchal culture?
Are there but two genders, male and female? Or is that belief an artifact of a repressive culture unmasked by social media and liberation movements as a popular fiction? Judaism’s “most sacred texts reflect a multiplicity of gender,” argues Rabbi Elliot Kukla in the New York Times, adding, “people who are more than binary have always been recognized by my religion. We are not a fad.”
Change and history make fools of us all eventually.