Politics and Love

Politics is NOT love. In fact, as it stands today here in the United States, it cannot be. For one thing, politics is generally taken to be motivated by patriotism, which is a form of exclusion and bigotry. This holds for both the left and right. You see it in their preaching of America First and Buy American. You see it in their willingness to use military violence abroad. You see it especially in the right’s organizations that have woven hate and intimidation and violence into their policies and rhetoric: the Republican party, MAGA and its various associated organizations, the Proud Boys, the neo-nazi organizations throughout the US, the many private paramilitary groups that cling to Trump’s politics. (There really are no organizations like this on the left in the United States. Antifa, for instance, is not an organization, but a spontaneously organizing group of individuals. The right has institutionalized political violence and hate.) Politics cannot be a way of love. Not today. Maybe not ever.

Really, politics is on a scale too large to be a way of love. Love is personal, intimate, it looks the person in the face and embraces them as a friend, family, lover. Love is concrete, intimate, personal. Politics, on the other hand, are the actions and policies and institutions of a distant leadership of hundreds and thousands sitting over the hundreds of millions across a continent spanning country. Politics is abstract, distant, anonymous.

There is no way to scale up love to be a political solution. Love is too weak and intimate to work at that level. But we do need a solution to today’s political disease. Democracy and capitalism have failed as answers to our political problems. Democracy feeds on the hateful rhetoric and practices of the right. And this has created a fearful situation in America. Capitalism as it is practiced abuses the need of workers. Only if you are lucky enough to be in the top 10% are you financially secure… and opportunity in this country is largely an illusion as economic mobility is pretty much a fiction: your place is determined by where you came from and what you look like.

The remedy to the disease is unclear. Fallen Pastor Holy Order seeks to restore us to an ethic that is in our bones: intimate love between neighbors, friends and family. Maybe by restoring our hearts to life, we can begin to dream of a solution to our political illness that will truly reflect who we want to be, who we need to be.

Frater HG