"Greatness" after the Bulldozer

Some watch with horror and others with glee as Donald J. Trump runs a bulldozer through American politics. Those who understand the profound corruption of reigning institutions are inclined to cheer. But before we cheer too hard, we should consider what will be built from the wreckage.

That will depend on the values and allegiances of the builders. If they do not embody humanistic values and acknowledge basic moral truths, then their constructions will be every bit as ugly as what they have demolished, or even uglier.

The most important of these truths and values, and the most easily forgotten in times of conflict, is so basic that it often devolves into platitude. Each human being, of any origin, race, creed, nation, ethnicity, or circumstance, is equally a miracle of creation, capable of suffering, joy, and grief… a full human being no less and no more beloved of God than any other. This idea is the foundation of the political enlightenment that started in the 17^th century, with its doctrines of human rights and individual liberties, rule of law, due process, and democratic governance. As well, it inspired the abolition movement, women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights. “All men are created equal.”

I have framed the idea in monotheistic terms, but other spiritual traditions can express it just as well. It is a universal truth, the truth of compassion. Our separation is an illusion. None of us is made of better stuff than any other. We may be unequal in our gifts, afflictions, and fortunes, but our fundamental worth is the same.

I hope that doesn’t sound too preachy or patronizing — kindergarten level spirituality — but Trumpian rhetoric and policy begs for a reminder. Most obvious is the immigration issue: the dehumanization of illegal immigrants, the ignorance of the circumstances that brought them here, and the disregard for the suffering that indiscriminate deportation causes. Nothing good will come from this. Nothing good will come from denying the truth of compassion. Not only will it harm migrants, it will harm citizens of the United States too. What kind of country do we become, when we hold some people as less worthy of dignity and freedom than others? What kind of country do we become when we brutalize the helpless?

The more we stoke the fires of hate, the more fuel it will demand, and the more of us will burn.

Consider also the reversal of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) policies in government and other organizations. Conservatives have raised valid questions about the use of racial discrimination to remedy the results of past racial discrimination, and the pitfalls of demoting merit in education and employment. The absurdity and excess of some of the ideas implemented under the DEI banner provoked intense public resentment. However, let us not forget the moral engine that drove such policies in the first place. It was care for the lamentable condition of various minorities in America, particularly those of African descent. Slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the rest left a lasting legacy, a legacy of poverty, a legacy of addiction, violence, incarceration, and mental illness. If we do not recognize this, we are not operating in reality. If we ignore the condition of our darker brown siblings, we disconnect from our grounding in moral truth. We need not adopt the discourse of “critical race theory” to recognize an urgency to respond.

This is not only a matter of altruism. Society cannot be healthy when whole segments of it are unwell. The sickness will spread. It already has. Today many of the rural white towns across the Midwest have sunk to a level of degradation once reserved for the inner city ghettos and Indian reservations, a landscape of dollar stores, pawn shops, meth labs, depression, suicide, cancer, addition, and despair. Nor can the gates — literal and figurative — of privilege keep out some form of these afflictions from even the richest enclaves. Addiction, illness, abuse, and depression find their way there too.

The principle that connects the well-being of some to the well-being of the rest applies also to relations among nations. No country can be “great” when that greatness comes at the expense of others. A leader is not the one who most successfully dominates the rest. A leader is someone who shows the way, who provides a model, who brings benefit to all. In the case of geopolitics, America cannot be great by grabbing and bullying, through a trade war or indeed any kind of war. Such tactics may bring apparent economic benefits in the short term, but because they are oblivious to the truth of interconnection, they will ultimately create poverty and accelerate the country’s decline.

No country can thrive when it cuts itself off from global cooperation or seeks to win a headlong competition of each against all. Those days are over. The maturation of global civilization is precisely to unify in something higher than the relative self-interest of nations or individuals. Competition has a vital role, but winning cannot be the highest goal. It is as in sports. The game has rules that all parties agree to for the good of all of them, and for the good of the game itself. All agree there is something more important than getting the ball across the goal. If that were the most important thing, the game would no longer be a game, it would be a killing field, and the skills of killing would supersede the skills of football.

Critics left and right have, with excellent reason, disparaged the “rules-based international order,” since it has been the U.S. that has made the rules for its advantage and broken them with impunity. Yet there is something right about the concept. For competition not to destroy us all, we must agree to its rules. The motive for this agreement can’t just be to limit destructiveness, because then the incentive to cheat is too strong. Instead, it has to serve a common aspiration, something that brings all humanity proudly together in common cause. Donald Trump’s emphasis on “winning” does not meet the times. Again, those days are over. That does not mean that a nation’s president should abandon any idea of national self-interest. No outside ruler can know as well as a people’s own choice what that people want and need. But that ruler, that government, must also understand that its nation’s thriving depends on other nations thriving too.

Any nation that forgets this and denies the truth of interconnection will reap the opposite of what it intends. Seeking wealth, it will reap poverty; seeking security it will generate constant threat. The violence it wreaks abroad will seep into its own cities, its homes, its people, taking all the forms of civil violence, domestic violence, and inner violence. The situation in Palestine well illustrates this principle. As a pretext for its oppression, dispossession, and slaughter of the Palestinians, Israel invokes its own security, but it has not achieved even that. That is because security cannot be achieved this way. It cannot be achieved from an us-versus-them worldview. It cannot be achieved by ignoring the basic truth of interconnection. Endless war against the other, endless vigilance, is not security. It is the opposite.

The same is true of the United States. The us-versus-them worldview of national chauvinism collapses the complexities of other societies into simple binary categories. When we treat other nations, or indeed other people, as implacable foes, they tend to occupy the role prepared for them. The hardliners gain power, confirmed in their belief that we ourselves are the implacable foe. What Russia is, what Iran is, what China is… these are not fixed objective quantities. As in interpersonal relations, the other changes according to how we see them and what relationship we invite them into. This is another truth of interconnection.

The Trump administration seems to understand that the unipolar era is over; that the United States must give up its fantasies of world domination and accept a multipolar world order. But multipolarity doesn’t have to mean a free-for-all in which the U.S. becomes the bully king of its own section of the playground, extracting as much as possible from the weaker kids in its shrunken domain. Whether it is in the bipolar world of the Cold War era, the unipolar era of American hegemony that followed it, or the multipolar world of today, no good will come by restricting one’s idea of “winning” to the separate nation-state. History establishes this truth beyond doubt: the “great” dominating empires suffered within themselves the mirror-image of their imperialistic tyranny; all rotted out from the inside. All the more true is it today, as technological progress has woven together the fate of nations, and the fate of humanity, more tightly than ever before. Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, and good old nuclear weapons confirm the need for an overarching global cooperative agreement to contain competition among nations.

Conservative readers may have objected to my inclusion of “ecological collapse,” equating it to the issue of anthropogenic global warming. But even those who reject that scientific theory need not discard along with it their love for nature and their spiritual intuition that, as with nations and people, what we do to the living world we do to ourselves. The expansion of drilling, fracking, mining, cutting, and the deregulation of manufacturing that Trump has promised doesn’t only generate greenhouse gases. It devastates habitats, lays waste to whole ecosystems, pumps poisons into the living body of the earth. We will all suffer accordingly. Our lives will suffer. Our children will suffer. Our spirits will suffer.

In allying with RFK Jr., Donald Trump took up the cause to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). I believe he is sincere in this. However, health too is unattainable in isolation. We can do all the things that Kennedy has advocated. We can reduce ultraprocessed foods in the diet. We can subject the vaccine schedule to unbiased science. We can shut the revolving door and removing conflicts of interests from health agencies. We can scrutinize the effects of pesticide residues, PFAs, microplastics, endocrine disrupting chemicals in the water supply, EMF radiation, and psychiatric drugs, and take steps to protect people. But health will remain elusive if the nation continues to sponsor genocide and ecocide around the world. Only a sick nation does things like that—and doing things like that makes a nation sick.

The us-versus-them mentality I have described has infiltrated political culture all the way to the grass roots. Having read this far, the politically engaged reader may be trying to understand this article through the lens of “Which side is Eisenstein on?” As in foreign affairs or any other domain, that lens collapses complexity and nuance. Both Trump-as-hero and Trump-as-villain leave a lot out. Same for “Eisenstein supports Trump” or “Eisenstein is anti-Trump.” Stop it. We can refuse to accept the framing of current events as two sides lining up against each other. We don’t need to join that narrative and throw our lot in with one side or another. Outside of it, outside its false simplicity and the wishful/despondent thinking it encourages, we can observe obvious truths. We can withdraw our political support for policies not grounded in them. We can advocate policies that are.

Let us not be deluded. Yes, the institutions that Trump is dismantling are irredeemably corrupt. They have maintained a regime of lies and secrecy that goes back at least two generations. Under the cover of those lies, they have perpetrated crimes so heinous and pervasive that their shock value alone makes them hard to accept as real. But remember: if compassion and transparency, honesty and humility, do not guide those who uproot the corrupt institutions, their replacement will be no better. A new deep state will replace the old. A war on corruption will morph into a war on political enemies. Censorship will not be dispelled, but only transferred. The AI tools Musk & co. are using to eviscerate corrupt institutions can be turned into terrifying instruments of control. Those who are convinced of their own righteousness, those obsessed with winning, those who see the world in terms of us versus them, those who forget the dignity and worth of each human soul, are sure to misuse the power they have seized. What will they do when their policies, based on delusion, inevitably fail? Will they relinquish power willingly? Will they surrender to the other side the potent tools they have developed?

The political revolution of 2024 will be no revolution at all, if it only exchanges one deep state for another, one delusion for another, one enemy for another (Iran instead of Russia), one target of dehumanization for another (trans people or immigrants instead of white straight males). The real revolution is a revolution of love. It is a revolution of peace. It is a revolution of healing. It is a revolution of forgiveness. Everyone knows this on some level, because it is obvious. You hear a real story of a migrant or a black mother or a rural white or a Monsanto executive or anyone whom ideology held in contempt, and the truth shines forth: you are my brother, you are my sister, if not for the grace of God, it would be me standing in your shoes. The revolution is to integrate this understanding into our systems and to run a planet on the basis of this truth. Let’s not pretend otherwise.