Wrath versus Sloth

In my more pessimistic moments, I think our immediate political future in this country boils down to a war between vices. Which will prove stronger: wrath or sloth?

Right now wrath feels like it's winning. I was talking to my partner today about Joe Biden's recent angry challenge to a voter in Iowa. The voter, an unnamed 83-year-old farmer, said Biden's son Hunter had been up to no good in Ukraine. Biden called the man a "damn liar." The heated exchange continued, with the farmer claiming Biden was too old to run. Biden responded by challenging the man to a push-up contest and an IQ test.

My partner thought this was a good look for Biden. Biden has to beat a bully, he reasoned, so he has to become more bullish.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise had a testy exchange with a reporter from Sinclair news asking if she hated the President. She forcefully refuted that thought, attesting that she prays for the President every night. She had no patience, she said, for the insinuation that she operates from animosity. "Don't mess with me," she told the reporter.

This, too, my partner says, is a good step for Democrats. "It's time Democrats stopped being the nice pushovers."

"No Republican," I responded, "not a single one that I read, believes that Democrats are too nice." Quite the opposite. The rude, judgmental liberal is a staple of media discourse on the right. Indeed, if you hid the names and affiliations of players in most political news stories, folk on the right and the left would likely automatically attribute tales of rude remarks or angry outbursts to the other side. Both sides, at least online enclaves, seem certain that the other team operates in bad faith. Each loathes the other.

Beneath this wrath lies quite a lot of fear and no small amount of despair. It's gospel in most parts of the online right that a President Hillary Clinton would have ended the Republic, declaring martial law and extending her totalitarian powers into a permanent police state. Obviously progressives think we're seeing the start of just such a devolution in the Trump presidency.

I used to worry, in my naivete pre-November 2016, about what Trump's base of support would do the day after he loses the election. Would Trump respect the results? Would he cede the election? Would his followers declare civil war? Now I wonder about whether some on my own side won't panic in similar ways should Trump be re-elected in 2020 (I consider this a likely outcome).

The specter of civil war sometimes doesn't seem that far away.

But the kryptonite of wrath is sloth. Inertia, to paraphrase Rick James, is a hell of a drug. Aside from being an awful humanitarian catastrophe, civil war is just so energy intensive. It takes so much work. The pacification measures laced into our lifestyles and media are quite powerful. Barely half the eligible populace even votes. Of course, such widespread lassitude can make coups d'état much easier to accomplish. But even that level of effort and organization seems unlikely in the USA absent some significant changes.

It bears remembering, though, that sloth isn't necessarily better than wrath. Sloth, after all, doesn't mean laziness. The old term acedia names more a kind of depressed inaction brought about by a lack of hope. It's more like despondency. It is the sin that, alongside pride, I am most vulnerable to. It describes my personal gravitational pull away from God.

I hardly want civil war or fear-based rage to rule the day. But a hopeless, despondent inaction, a suicide without death, is surely not much better.