Although I voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I recognized early on that Hillary was plugged firmly into a network of elite Democratic leaders and donors, and that was one of the reasons I supported Bernie. I nonetheless think Hillary's honest intentions as a candidate were to use the power of her intended office, the presidency, to help those who lack power. But I feel there's something adverse to that intention in the very notion of powerful elites.
This attitude of mine is upheld in a book I'm reading, Nick Spencer's The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values. Mr. Spencer's book has it that Christian core values have underpinned all of Western thought and belief following the decline of the Roman Empire. Though I'm a Catholic Christian, it surprises me to learn that such values as ...
- women’s rights
- care for the poor
- opposition to slavery
- legal equality of all individuals,
- an appeal to personal conscience rather than "trial by ordeal"
- and even how liberating it was to women to insist the sexual renunciation of libertine practices rife in the Roman Empire
... all come directly from core Christian principles. (Never mind that the church hierarchy in medieval times typically observed those values in the breach.)
But the core value in interested in here is that of Christian opposition to the very notion of hierarchy:
[Saint] Paul’s message [was that] ‘the Christ reveals a God who is potentially present in every believer.’ Through an act of faith in the Christ, human agency, which is no longer simply a plaything of stars, gods or fate, can become a medium for God’s love. Such an understanding of reality deprived rationality of its aristocratic connotations. Thinking was no longer the privilege of the social elite and became associated not with status but with humility, itself a virtue entirely alien in the ancient world.
I take this to mean that our modern "aristocracy" — the power network that Hillary Clinton was plugged into — violates Christian core principles.
For many of Hillary's supporters who aren't necessarily in the country's power loop, this idea will nonetheless seem problematic. Here we had a choice between Trump, who despite his wealth came across as a populist, and Clinton, whose heart was in the right place despite her associations with Wall Street. Trump's rhetoric was racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and so on. His personal behavior was execrable. If Hillary had won, she would have used her power base to help those with little power. The choice was clear. Right?
Well, yes ... and no.
As I say, I voted for Hillary, but my heart wasn't hugely in it. I'm an anti-elitist to the core.
But I am great friends with Catholics who are stronger that I was for Hillary. My best friend is one of them. He voted for Hillary in the primary partly because (in my opinion, based on our long friendship) he is drawn to elite personages and their power networks. As a political pragmatist, he felt that Hillary could leverage her powerful connections into policies that would advantage the powerless. In fact, it must seem to a lot of people that such a pragmatic approach embodies our requisite Christian support for the poor.
In fact, that seems logical, no? But Christian teaching often turns ordinary logic on its head: the last will be first and the first shall be last.
And admittedly, my anti-elitism is more an aspect of my personal psychology than it is a grudging acquiescence in Christian teaching. My friend's personal psychology is the opposite of mine on this point, but we are both responding to the interior organization of our respective psyches.
As are, I assume, the voting habits of most people in our electorate. It is difficult for any of us, Christian or not, to go against our own deeply held attitudes and beliefs.
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