Doing Away With Political -Ites
Citizenship with Jesus
The last eight years have felt politically, culturally, and societally unsettled. We have seen this unrest in everything from the election of Donald Trump, to the storming of the US capital, to reactions to the murder of George Floyd, to the rise of identitarianism, all the way through the protests on US college campuses that have shaken those spaces and led to the firings of multiple prominent college presidents over the last twelve months.
In the face of such upheavals, I have often wondered: What is happening; What can we do? I know a great many people who sense fear, anxiety, and trepidation in the air. We wonder together: Will the election be fair? Will our democratic institutions be respected? Will the loser of the election concede peacefully? And will we see power transfer without violence? Considering why we feel so deeply unsettled may help us as individual Church members think about what we might do moving forward.
I felt deeply enlightened about the sense of displacement by Ezra Klein’s recent interview of historian Gary Gerstle, one of the foremost historians of his generation, and whose work examines the larger flows of cultural currents within U.S. history.
As he explains in the podcast episode, in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Professor Gerstle notes that in the US, though political parties have consistently staked out more and less conservative or progressive viewpoints and platforms over the last 250 years, both the more conservative and the more progressive parties have also been subject to the currents of history in the form of what he calls periods of “political orders.” In his formulation, these orders, which most often start with an economic catastrophe and usually last about thirty or forty years, define the rules of the road for US politics during the decades over which a given order is in place. So, for example, in response to the Great Depression, the people of the United States elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As every high school student knows, President Roosevelt put in place the New Deal and as a result inaugurated a period of significant government intervention into the political economy.
What is less well known, however, is the degree to which the political and economic order that President Roosevelt put in place dictated both the progressive and the conservative political viewpoints over the next three to four decades. As an example, Professor Gerstle points out that William Howard Taft ran against Dwight Eisenhower to become the Republican nominee for US President soon after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mr. Taft represented a political and economic consensus that much more closely resembled the pre-depression conservative viewpoint. Mr. Eisenhower represented views that were actually much more aligned with those of President Roosevelt and the Democrats, to the point that his political allegiance was sometimes questioned. That he became the nominee reflected the degree to which New Deal principles—and an acceptance of the beneficial nature of greater government intervention into the economy—had come to rule the political day.
This political order more or less held sway in the United States until the period of “stagflation” of the 1970s opened the door for the questioning of these liberal orthodoxies. Jimmy Carter, a man whose post-presidency has been among the most successful since that of George Washington, has largely faded from historical view because he fell victim to forces beyond his control that came with that period of economic difficulty. It was left to Ronald Reagan and those who worked with him to define a new “political order” that was much more conservative than the one that came before—an “order” that Gerstle terms the “Neoliberal Order.” Many people are familiar with Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that the government is not the solution to our problems but, rather, the cause of them. What we may forget, however, is that it was Bill Clinton who famously conceded that “the era of big government is over.” That Bill Clinton would capitulate to those conservative orthodoxies is a testament to the degree to which he, too, had to play by the rules that were dictated by the “order” of the time in which he lived. He was the Neoliberal Order liberal equivalent of what Dwight Eisenhower had been during the order defined by the New Deal.
That Neoliberal orthodoxy held sway until the Great Recession of 2008, a period of economic destabilization that opened the door for a political and economic realignment. Gone was the consensus that the government could govern best by governing least and that markets could lead to widespread prosperity by external actors largely getting out of the way. According to professor Gerstle, much of the reason for the recent feelings of tumult and unrest have to do with the fact that we are in the middle of what he terms an “interregnum” between different political economic orders. And, quite to the point, we do not yet know what the next order will look like.
I find this history illuminating, but there's more to my fascination. I believe it also holds for us an important political and historical lesson as disciples of Jesus Christ, a message that can, I believe, help us to better make peace and to be better equipped to heal a wounded world. This analysis reminds us that political parties are not stable entities. They do not represent a fixed set of principles. And they most certainly do not reflect any monopoly on eternal truth. They are, at best, a muddled attempt by imperfect humans working in concert with other imperfect humans, within the context bequeathed to them by history, and in response to forces over which they have no control, to try to determine what will make the world a little better in a given year, in a given place, in a given set of circumstances.
It should hardly surprise us that, over the last few years, church leaders have insisted that partisan allegiance cannot dictate our political actions. Dallin H. Oaks, in a sermon that might more likely have been devoted to discussing Easter, spoke at length in 2022 about civic responsibility and specifically about the US Constitution. It is striking to me that as part of that message, he taught, “There are many political issues, and no party, platform, or individual candidate can satisfy all personal preferences. Each citizen must therefore decide which issues are most important to him or her at any particular time. Then members should seek inspiration on how to exercise their influence according to their individual priorities. This process will not be easy. It may require changing party support or candidate choices, even from election to election.” Shortly thereafter, the entire First Presidency put out an official statement that said, in part, “Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on tradition without careful study of the candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards.”
Likewise, in the most recent general conference, President Oaks said this: “We need to love and do good to all. We need to avoid contention and be peacemakers in all our communications. This does not mean to compromise our principles and priorities but to cease harshly attacking others for theirs. This is what our perfect role model did in his ministry. That is the example he set for us as he invited us to follow him.” Meanwhile, in his now famous April 2023 general conference address, President Nelson taught, “The Savior's message is clear: his true disciples build, lift, encourage, persuade, and inspire—no matter how difficult the situation. True disciples of Jesus Christ are peacemakers.”
With all of the above in mind, I would like to offer a single concrete recommendation for how we might better establish peace while also bearing in mind the historical lessons referenced above. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, each of us should stop identifying as a member of a political party. Let me fully explain what I mean and do not mean by this statement. The nuances here are important.
First off, I definitely do not mean that we should withdraw from politics. To the contrary, many of the same messages from Church leaders I have outlined above emphasize the need for Church members to, if anything, become more involved in politics. Instead, what I am suggesting is that we not offer allegiance to or derive any significant part of our identity from political parties. Paradoxically, even though I recognize that we will continue indefinitely to operate in a two-party system in the United States, I believe that a collective decision not to identify or affiliate primarily with any political party as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would greatly strengthen our ability to meaningfully affect political outcomes. And would also make us better disciples while strengthening our ability to make peace. I recognize that, right now, this call would mean a lot more people abandoning an identity as Republicans than the reverse, but this merely reflects our current partisan distribution. Even now, that distribution is changing—especially among the young—and it is different now than it was 100 years ago. But the point is not that we need fewer Republicans to identify as Republicans; rather, the point is for all of us, wherever we are on the spectrum, to abandon partisan affiliation as a primary part of our identity.
I offer this recommendation in part because I believe that, in our fraught and hyper partisan environment, political affiliation often poisons the civic waters. It pits family members against family members and causes us all to view the world in terms of “us” and “them.” Anything we can do to lessen the degree to which we divide ourselves into opposing camps is all for the good. Ceasing to have primary political affiliations strikes me as a powerful way of following the example of the disciples in Fourth Nephi who created a society with no “-ites.”
Beyond this, however, I fear that our partisan political affiliations too often excuse us from making difficult decisions. When it comes time to think about a given political, economic, or social issue, there is a strong pull to think like the others in our party. And so, if we understand that our political party feels a certain way about immigration, we may adopt that position partly to maintain party cohesion. By the same token, if the party's position then shifts four years later, even though we may not follow mindlessly like lemmings, there can still be a tendency to mold our views to fit those of the party to which we belong. This is part of the reason the historical analysis offered earlier matters so much: it helps to rid us of the illusion that we can subscribe to a set of fixed principles by subscribing to a particular political party.
How much more powerful and morally compelling would it be if, instead of saying, “Because I am a Democrat, I think X about Y,” we said, “I don't belong to any political party, but as a follower of Jesus Christ I have thought about this issue and here is what I believe”? As I have reflected on President Nelson's call to use the full name of the Church, I have become convinced that one reason for doing so is because invoking the name of the Savior, always with respect, almost inherently changes the tenor of any conversation with which we are involved. Similarly, basing any of our political positions in the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than the strictures of a given political platform changes both the likelihood that we will take a given political position and the way we will engage with those with whom we may disagree. It is difficult, after all, to shout and scream about the superiority of my position if I start out my explanation for my views by reminding my listeners that I am a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I was reminded of the power of this approach when I recently heard Jennifer Thomas, co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, describe the group’s organizing policy. She explained that multiple representatives from similar organizations have approached their leadership to ask how they have had such success in bridging ideological, political, and partisan divides. Her answer was more nuanced and more comprehensive than I can fully convey here. But the essence was quite simple: they have achieved success in bridging those many divides because their founding charter, in effect, is the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I will confess that hearing this, I felt stunned and embarrassed. Stunned because I had never heard anything like that during a political conversation. And embarrassed because I realized that that is not always my own approach.
While I acknowledge that we each have multiple aspects to our identities, in my experience, there is something about the inherently adversarial nature of politics that inflects partisan identities with a vitriol and aggressiveness that do not attend most other elements of identity. In some cases, partisans are open about the fact that, even if they are members of the Church, they have come to view their political identities as more normative and formative than their religious ones. This strikes me as problematic given the shifting, illusory, and go-along-to-get-along nature of most partisan beliefs.
So as a body composed of striving followers of Jesus, as people who want to make the world better, as citizens who want to be deeply politically involved while also making peace, might it not be time to stop identifying as Democrats and Republicans and to start instead to see ourselves only as daughters and sons of heavenly parents and disciples of the Savior Jesus Christ?
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Art from government collections.