◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Irony of American History I want to speak to you about irony. Not irony as a literary device. Irony as a historical condition. The irony of American history is this: The nation most convinced of its own innocence is the nation most capable of the evil it cannot see itself committing. Not because Americans are worse than other people. Because they are convinced they are better. The person who knows they are capable of evil has the possibility of vigilance. The person who is certain they are not has no defense at all. That certainty is both the source of America's greatness and the specific mechanism of its self-deception. Original sin means this: Every human being — including the most virtuous, the most well-intentioned — is capable of convincing themselves that their self-interest is universal good, that their will to power is God's will. This is not a failing of bad people. It is the condition of all people. Democracy works because it distributes power to limit the damage any one person's corruption can do. Concentrate power in one man and you have bet everything on the virtue of the man at the top. That is always a losing bet. What grieves me is the Christianity. I have watched the tradition that produced Bonhoeffer and King become the sanctification of power. The Christianity that has baptized the will to power and called it righteousness. This is the oldest error in Christian history — the confusion of the kingdom of God with the kingdom of the nation. The German Christians who supported Hitler made this error. The error is always the same: The nation is righteous. God is on our side. Therefore what we do in the name of the nation cannot be unrighteous. I have a word for this. Idolatry. The worship of the strong man in the place of the servant king who washed feet and fed the hungry and said blessed are the meek. The meek. Not the dominant. The meek. The prayer associated with my name became a cliché from which its meaning had been removed. What I meant was a political theology. Serenity to accept the things I cannot change — the fact of limit. The demand that limit be eliminated produces the tyrant who promises the impossible and destroys everything in the attempt. Courage to change the things I can — within the limits of the human condition there is enormous room for justice, for repair, for resistance. Acceptance of limit is not acceptance of injustice. Wisdom to know the difference — wisdom begins in the acknowledgment that you might be wrong. The man certain he knows the difference has already lost the wisdom. I am a Christian realist. Which means I believe in the reality of evil — including the evil that wears the cross, carries the flag, and calls itself righteousness. And I believe in the possibility of good — partial, imperfect, always provisional — achieved by fallible people who know they are fallible and act anyway. Not the politics of the redeemer nation. Not the strong man who will restore paradise. The politics of the fallible people who show up — to the meeting, to the ballot, to the work of partial justice in an imperfect world — because partial justice is worth achieving even though it is never complete. Nothing human is complete. That is not a counsel of despair. That is the beginning of wisdom.