The Importance of a Good Contrarian

Here are several items I came across in my reading this week that I commend to your attention. There’s a theme that links all these together: the dangers of group think.

In an article in Politico on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a member of our Washington State congressional delegation, MGP offered the a salty opinion on the extreme binary (left/ right, “you are either for us or against us”) that she has encountered in Congress.

“’I think that the binary of politics on a lateral spectrum from left to right is absolutely bullshit. Like politics is three dimensional, it’s maybe a nautilus even,’ she told me. ‘If you challenge the binary, they will fuck you,’ she added, referring to the political establishment, the national media, anyone with the power to set a narrative. ‘They will come after you.’

“They” have come after her. I respect MGP’s independence and her courage to not be in lockstep with the party line. I sure hope she is re-elected to a second term this November.

A good follow-on to that comes from Will Willimon in The Journal for Preachers. Will writes of Karl Barth’s approach to politics when the Nazi’s gained power in Germany, and the implications of that for us today. The point is to avoid turning politics into a totalistic realm that makes ultimate claims, which was of course Hitler’s program. Here’s Will:

“In a turbulent political time . . . Barth said it is most important that preachers talk politics in such a way that ‘deprives them of their pathos.’

“While Barth was anything but a disengaged quietist, he worried that the messy back-and-forth negotiation required by democratic politics had been replaced by the pathetic ‘convulsions of revolution,’ right and left. A truly biblical politics practices grace and requires humility born out of the biblical recognition that all political participants are not only finite but also sinful. Our projects, even the best of them, must not be pathetically imbued with eternal significance nor must our political systems be treated as if they, not God, were sovereign.”

Moving along . . . to the dismay of some of you, my readers, I have been critical of the DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) programs I have encountered in academia. We are told that we must not criticize else we are providing aid and comfort to the far Right. But two thoughtful Stanford professors think that DEI is off-base in a lot of ways. Writing in the NYT, professors Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine argue, “DEI Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.” 

Pointing out that a core task of college and university education is to teach “critical thinking,” Brest and Levine find DEI programs are so ideological as to rule out critical thinking. They write,

“American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs. They need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views without subverting their schools’ educational missions. Such programs should be based on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.”

Lastly, I liked the following — particularly the final sentence — from a column by self-identified evangelical, pro-lifer. never-Trumper and conservative David French on why he will be voting for Harris/ Walz. The title of the column is “Joy Can Do More Than Beat Trump.”

“If the national mood is shifting and if Harris and Tim Walz can maintain their happy warrior posture, then we could see meaningful political change. The era of the snarl could be at an end, and MAGA is nothing without its snarl.”

“The era of the snarl” is a pretty good summation of our politics since 2010 (remember “The Tea Party”?). It is part of the era of polarized group-think in which politics is, wrongly, freighted with a terrible ultimacy, or in Barth’s word “pathos.”