Not necessarily a bad thing
Like many of you, I’m still catching up with people and places not visited since the pandemic hit in early 2020. Daily rituals have filled the gap, pecking along here on a schedule being one of them. Daily walks being another. The expression “even keel” comes to mind.
Memorial Day rituals are back on in full, finally, and perusing all the local events this weekend, I may when finished here scratch out a list of events to stop by. “Keep Asheville Weird,” the bumper sticker says, but even normal weird feels good.
Brian Klaas argues that rituals contribute to social, not just personal, stability. They are “a potent force, sometimes enlisted for good, other times not,” but for that not to be ignored: How about some pro-democracy rituals?
Here’s the problem: the political right and authoritarian movements have perfected the art of the ritual. They have tapped into this ancient wisdom, harnessed it, used it to mobilize their members and fasten them together. And it works.
The political left and pro-democracy movements, by contrast, have often unilaterally disarmed, jettisoning rituals, even looking down upon them, then scratching their chins with perplexed bafflement as to why they keep losing battles that they should be winning. “We’re the party of reason,” some will say. Congratulations! But reason isn’t fun.
Sure, rituals like Nazi salutes are associated with some of mankind’s worse moments and lock-her-ups smack of brainwashing, conformism, and jettisoning of critical thought. On the other hand, Klaas argues, “If we don’t satisfy our intrinsic craving for them, demagogues may swoop in and fill that void,” as you may have noticed.
“Donald Trump is a ritualistic ringmaster,” Klaas writes, his instinct for it “an impulse emanating from the lizard-like parts of our brains, unthinking, an impulse that he follows even if he couldn’t explain why he does it or how it works.”
Trump rallies are rife with ritual. The song list, the hats, the chants, the ritual vilification of the press and, of course, THEM. They are a natural binding agent for believers, “authoritarian super glue.” They build cohesion, a sense of community. They define a movement.
This, Klaas argues, the left has lost to its detriment.
I humbly submit to the skeptics that your energy is best spent not on opposing rituals that people enjoy, appointing yourself the anti-ritualistic Fun Police, but rather making sure that rituals are used to celebrate the right things: inclusive, democratic nationalism, heroic public service, and true patriotism, not the fake kind. Too often, the political left attacks problematic rituals—for good reasons—but fails to come up with alternatives that could fill that human need we all have to be part of something larger.
Throughout human history, we’ve turned to ritual to reflect our values and reinforce ideas. In the past, religion was the bastion of ritual. It still is today, for some. But for others who have no church, or who care about our civic church, we need to provide replacement rituals. In America, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was a great idea (though I wish rituals around it were more widely celebrated).
The New Age movement of the 1990s seemed driven in part by a need on the left to replace the ritual and symbolism once provided by older religions. Stripped of our myths by science, believers scrambled frantically to reconstruct their interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons. Modern otherwise, we are perhaps navigating the 21st century with a pre-Enlightenment collective unconscious. The keel that keeps us stable lies partly in our genetic memory, in our discounted lizard brains.
Klaas concludes:
Democracy, too often, is treated as a static feature of the status quo. That’s completely wrong. We speak of constitutions and institutions as though they have magical properties, hallowed features that will automatically endure. But ideas, institutions, and values are only as strong as the people who actively uphold them. When a democracy is under threat, as many are today, pro-democracy movements require more than the business-as-usual “I’ll do my bit and vote every few years” approach.
We need to recognize our mistake: criticizing problematic rituals should not lead to eliminating them altogether. To fight for democracy, and to reclaim patriotism and nationalism from those who make a mockery of what those concepts are supposed to mean, we need to produce new hubs of collective effervescence. And this is where studying flawed rituals rather than just condemning them is worthwhile.
The Trump Rally is not a template, but it does offer a lesson.
Netroots Nation (in Chicago this year in July) has its own rituals that cement the progressive tribe. There are appearances by political celebrities, of course: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and Tennessee State Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, plus Rep. Maxwell Frost, Rep. Chuy Garcia, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Summer Lee, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, among others. My friend Anderson Clayton, the new Gen Z chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, will be there along with three other women leading state parties.
But even the foolish nonsense builds community. The annual Pub Quiz with its silly team names, costumes, and won almost every time by the California team. Leaving with a sense that in all the awfulness there are thousands like yourself working every day to preserve our freedoms.
The 2022 elections, Anat Shenker-Osorio emphasized in a Thursday Zoom briefing, was a referendum on FREEDOMS. The left needs to reclaim the word from those threatening them in the name of freedom. We abandon patriotic ritual to the right at our peril.