Trump´s Impeachment and the Foundations of Sacred Politics

The impeachment of Donald Trump is proceeding, but faces partisan politics. Rabbi George Wankow in the October Tikkun referred to the notion that “'politics' is the spirituality of the whole community.” He refers to the spiritual quality of politics, as in the “demonic spirituality of Hitler´s Nazi Germany, in contrast to the sacred spirituality of the US constitutional amendments following the Civil War. However, he notes that President Lincoln´s successor vice-president Andrew Johnson, a pro-Southerner opposed to the postwar amendments, removed the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval. Stanton´s military astuteness and preparedness was thus eliminated. An impeachment effort failed by one vote, which allowed southern obstruction of racial equality and its unkind, ultimately vicious, nefarious reign concretized in the Supreme Court´s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision for segregation. At the institutional level, those policies lasted until the political turning point of Brown vs. Board of Education and the related laws that joined the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The term “spiritual,” however, while intriguing when used politically, has a common technical definition that grounds it in the word´s psychodynamic senses. Complex modern political structures themselves vary importantly, from the UK, for example, which has no written constitution to Germany´s and Japan´s constitutions written by FD-Roosevelt-New-Deal-era representatives. In a political realm, there are procedural rules and power structures that have been developed and that operate. The collective “spirituality” of politics in fact reflects the sum of individual and group moral agent vectors, in Physics´ terms, or a kind of pecking-ordered ecosystem.

Individual spirituality and its group expression was intriguingly expressed in the 1960s with people like the secular Jewish Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert who traveled to India, studied with Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and returned as a spiritual teacher with projects like the Prison-Ashram Project. In the world of political economics, railroad magnate and putative “robber baron” Leland Stanford was elected to the Senate in 1885 and unpredictably advocated worker-owned co-operatives. Decades earlier, Quaker-Friend Lucretia Mott went beyond boycotts and advocated “free (non-slave) produce.” By the 1960s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People´s Daisy Bates recalled overcoming her own victimized cycling hatred as a young woman, thanks to her adoptive father. Gandhi´s even earlier path involved important spiritual growth, beginning as a secular law student who was reoriented back to his native Hinduism by modernized Theosophy, then spurred further by high integrity Christian dissidents. His spiritual-political development later influenced Martin Luther King.

King famously demonstrated his leadership in the social movement for civil rights. While MLK´s reputation as a religious leader precedes him, his spirituality is illuminated by his biography. He wrote about his own upbringing in a stable and caring environment with a minister father, and his doubts at age 13 about the literal truth of Jesus´ physical resurrection. His undergraduate study of Sociology fueled his sense of intellectual conflict until certain Bible-related coursework helped him sort matters out by clarifying the “many profound truths” that were “behind the legends and myths.” He experienced a renewed “inner urge to serve humanity.” He fortified that sensibility with his seminary training and doctoral studies. In 1955, he became involved with segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, where a boycott inaugurated his ministerial work and his national leadership role.

MLK´s eventual influence on national legislation in particular represents the networks of people who were pursuing similar aims. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized by King, by then representing his co-founded group the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and five other principal African-American leaders, including long-time labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Widely unacknowledged, Dorothy Height, president of the National Council for Negro Women, has been credited as helping organize the event, as has Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a pioneering New York City mayoral cabinet member and later co-founder of the National Organization of Women. Two months before the August event, those leaders opened up to four non-blacks, including labor leader Walter Reuther, former president of the National Council of Churches Eugene Carson Blake, and Jewish leader Joachim Prinz. President Kennedy had initially been opposed to the large gathering, concerned about its potential negative influence on upcoming legislation. The organizers were resolute, and Kennedy changed his stance to try to ensure its success. The president´s concerns about harsh criticisms of the government were taken into account, and the organizers pursued a less confrontational angle. Other opposition to the march included Malcolm X and the FBI.

Significantly, the event´s success was filmed and translated into 36 languages by the Voice of America. The US Information Agency prepared a press conference for foreign journalists, along with other related efforts. Congress later passed landmark pieces of legislation. Martin Luther King´s “I Have a Dream” speech became an icon of the huge event.

This kind of survey touches on different and distinct attitudes identified among groups and individuals, and their sociological and economic status can be weighed and considered. Had Andrew Johnson´s impeachment in the 1860s succeeded and anything unfolded differently and against racism, we see from actual civil rights events that grassroots challenges were extensive. Trump´s impeachment would be satisfying to those who value human rights on a number of levels, but the protective response of his party is a reminder of Trump´s broader foundations in anti-social profiteering business ideology and the propaganda of misdirection. The role of economic practices and choices were hinted at by Jesus in Matthew when he referred to the distinction between God and Caesar by using a coin. At a level clearly seen in the economic efforts surrounding Martin Luther King during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, earlier anti-slavery activists in the 1800s went beyond boycotts to “free (non-slave) produce.” Gandhi then, later, inspired local self-reliance like the use of homespun cloth. Economist E.F. Schumacher, inspired by Buddhism, wrote the 1970´s Small is Beautiful about thinking globally and acting locally for sustainability. Even if Trump is impeached, big business anti-social ideology will have had just one player ejected from the game, só to speak. Pro-social market-related projects like the Mayors Climate Agreement, New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio´s pro-worker efforts, Fannie Lou Hamer´s historic social enterprise beginning in the 1960s, and Omar Freilla´s New York City green democratic entrepreneurial academy and similar projects all call us to fortify the individual, community, and economic roots of sacred political spirituality.