Wolin, Superpower, and Christianity

Sheldon Wolin says that contemporary capitalism, representative government, and the drive to empire coalesce to translate America into “Superpower” and its practice of democracy into a fugitive enterprise. Democracy today can only be episodic and particular. It must be inspired by the grievances of ordinary people and insulated from the light-headed, loose-lipped experimentalism of post-Nietzscheans. As a long term devotee and plagiarist of volume I of Politics and Vision, I can say that I am convinced by 77% of the things Wolin says in Part II of that volume. That figure includes a more modest 21% concurrence with its account of Nietzsche, bringing, as close calculation will show, acceptance of the non-Nietzschean sections of Part II to 84%. Which means, I suspect, that I concur with Wolin more than he does with me. His view of Nietzsche, presented in a long chapter, is crisply summarized in the Preface: “Nazi totalitarianism represented the precise inversion of the modern conception of revolution. Like Nietzsche it identified with the strong and aimed at the weak — Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, social democrats, communists, trade unionists, the sick, deformed and mentally ill.”¹ I note that Christianity is not on the list and that Nietzsche’s stated compassion for everything in any or all of us that fends off the politics of ressentiment is not either. While I too expose and oppose numerous moments of hardness and cruelty in Nietzsche, my Nietzsche, nonetheless, also helps to diagnose some of the tendencies, cruelties and dangers of Superpower. He does so by pointing to the connection between one side of contemporary Christianity and the driving edge of state capitalism in Superpower. For it is American state joined to cowboy capitalism and the theocratic ambition of the most virulent section of American Christianity that pose the greatest threats to positive democracy today. Indeed, the electronic news media now serve as an echo chamber of the capitalist-state-evangelical juggernaut, doubling and tripling the obstacles democratic movements face in promoting economic security, reducing inequality, fostering multidimensional pluralism, and fending off reckless wars.

I agree with Wolin that fugitive democracy is both an indispensable source of energy for pluralism and equality during hard times and that it is also ripe for hijacking by ugly, repressive forces. I merely add that in such a world positive democratic movements on behalf of egalitarianism, ecology and diversity must be active at several sites, including local involvement, country-wide social movements, direct pressure on corporate structures and church organizations, participation in national party politics, and cross-state citizen networks to press Superpower from inside and outside at the same time. It is if and when actions at these multiple sites resonate together that the prospects for positive democratic achievement improve.²

What, though, is the relationship between the state-corporate components of Superpower and the evangelical machine? My thesis is that the evangelical and military-corporate dimensions resonate together across several differences of interest, belief and creed, engendering a larger assemblage irreducible to the parts from which it has been organized.

One way to challenge Superpower, so defined, is to focus publicity and protest on the effects of corporate-government practices on ordinary people. Wolin does that. And it is indispensable to do so. A complementary way is to show how an ugly drive to existential revenge infuses the larger assemblage, giving it a presence larger than the number of constituents it inspires and more powerful than the economic-governmental gears it turns. These intensities even flow sometimes into the periodic eruptions of fugitive democracy itself, propelling the most ugly expressions of it down inegalitarian, culturally exclusionary, and internationally bellicose paths. Let’s see if these claims can be defended.

The hardest edge of the evangelical Right is organized around a vision of the Second Coming, as presented in the best selling series of novels, “Left Behind.” The series has sold over 60 million copies to date. In the first novel, millions of born again Christians are immediately lifted to heaven during the Rapture, leaving an entire world torn apart by traffic accidents, aborted medical operations, airplane crashes, and professorial class absences...