Love Your Neighbor As Yourself
A cult of selfishness defines the modern Republican Party. It threatens both public health and also the very notion of what it means to live in a society.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
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Attention-Seeking Behavior
Before I get into the heart of today’s post, a few words on Sen. Joe Manchin’s public temper tantrum yesterday. For those of you who missed it, Manchin delivered a short statement accusing House progressives of holding the bipartisan infrastructure bill hostage and demanded that they pass the legislation immediately. However, he still refuses to say whether he supports President Biden’s budget framework, which has been a months-long demand from progressives before they vote for the infrastructure bill. Manchin also raised new concerns about the legislation’s impact on the national debt.
This “performance” had all the feel of Manchin making a power play to try and show that he’s in charge and can bully House Democrats into bending to his will. House progressives, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, didn’t bite:
Progressives responded the way a parent might if their child is throwing a fit for attention. They ignored it. Good for them and, in general, the political maturity they’ve shown over the past several months has been rather extraordinary. They’re keeping their eye on the prize and not letting Manchin’s public performances distract them.
“Love Your Neighbor”
Thirty-seven years ago, when I was Bar Mitzvahed, my Torah reading came from one of the most beautiful passages of the Hebrew Bible - Leviticus 19: 9-18.
It is a passage that speaks to our moral and ethical responsibilities to the communities in which we live.
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner. I am the Lord your God,
You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another … You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind …
And at the end, it famously says, “you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This sentiment is a variation on the oft-heard phrase, “when they go low, we go high,” There are many ways to interpret this biblical command, but for me, it speaks to our larger responsibility to those around us and the imperative of treating them with respect, compassion, humility, and honesty.
My mind returned to this passage as I watched this video over the weekend.
To be clear, there are already multiple vaccine requirements for schoolchildren in Florida. Indeed, here is a list of all the vaccinations currently mandated for kids in the state of Florida (this list is cut and pasted from the Florida Department of Health website).
Diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP)
Inactivated polio vaccine (IPV)
Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR)
Varicella (chickenpox)
Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
Pneumococcal conjugate (PCV13)
Hepatitis B (Hep B)
So DeSantis is not being honest, and by refusing to mandate that children get vaccinated against COVID-19, he is potentially putting kids, particularly those who are immunocompromised, at risk. That in itself is, of course, bad.
But what is even more troubling is the message it sends about our obligations as citizens and neighbors. At the core of DeSantis's statement is an acute and dangerous message of selfishness.
The Curse of Selfishness
According to DeSantis, parents get to decide what's best for their kids and don't have to consider how those decisions might affect others. Thankfully, we don't apply this idea to everything else in our civic life. For example, we don't give parents the freedom to decide if they get their kids vaccinated against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox. These vaccines are mandated in Florida — and not just to protect the vaccinated but also to ensure that those around them don't get sick.
We don't say that when someone drunkenly stumbles out of a bar, they have the freedom to decide whether or not it's a good decision to get behind the wheel of a car. Drunk driving is a crime because it puts others at risk. The impact of one's personal behavior on the health of others is the reason that smokers can no longer light up inside bars and restaurants. Second-hand smoke kills, and it's why in most states, indoor smoking in public is forbidden. In short, as a friend put it to me, my freedom to swing my fist ends at the edge of your nose.
We willingly submit to being searched in airports, to observing traffic laws, to not shouting fire in a crowded theater, to picking up our dog's "business" and putting it in the trash, and even paying taxes (as my 9-year old daughter also pointed out, most of us willingly give out candy on Halloween, so little kids like her will get their annual sugar rush). In other words, we regularly, and without much complaint, surrender some small part of our "freedom" to further a larger set of societal goals.
Indeed, that's why there are vaccine mandates — to protect ourselves and others from a deadly virus that has killed more than 746,000 Americans. And frankly, I couldn't make this point any better than noted political philosopher Charles Barkley:
The GOP’s War on Selflessness
The Republican Party has long been at war with this notion of selflessness — and portraying freedom as a sacrosanct idea that takes precedence over our social responsibilities. There's perhaps no better example than the debate on gun control, in which a small and selfish subset of the population, which wants virtually unfettered access to firearms, prevents even the slightest gun control measures from being implemented. Their "freedom" to purchase and own guns is, in their eyes, more important than the societal costs of underregulated access to firearms. Likewise, it's a central part of our national debates on taxes, in which no politician (Democrat or Republican) would dare to suggest that we pay more in taxes to help others and ensure that our society is fairer and more equitable. The idea of shared sacrifice for a greater good feels increasingly like a quaint notion in our national politics. "Freedom," as each individual defines it, has become a dominant political construct.
Of course, this phenomenon is not new, but it's seemingly gotten worse during COVID — or at the very least, the pandemic has crystallized the issue in a way that few events have previously. The people who didn't want to wear masks or socially distance and now don't want to get vaccinated, in effect, are declaring that the freedom to do as they wish should take precedence over everything else, including the preservation of human life.
Considering that the leader of the Republican Party is a malignant narcissist, incapable of empathy or selflessness hasn't helped things, but Trump's narcissism pushed against an open door. Republicans were more than happy to embrace a politician who told them that having a social conscience was a sucker's play.
What's made this situation worse is how heartily Republican politicians have embraced these ideas. In red state after red state, governors like DeSantis have railed against vaccine mandates as an infringement on freedom, indifferent to their rhetoric's impact on public health. A year ago, they railed against mask mandates and lockdowns — refusing to take the necessary precautions to protect others. It's a big part of the reason why COVID has wreaked such havoc in America over the past 20 months. Not surprisingly, the states that didn't have mask mandates or opened up too soon have been ravaged the worst by COVID. In the pandemic, selfishness has been deadly.
But the GOP's cynical political stance is also having a deeply corrosive impact on our body politic. It's coarsening the very notion that we live in a society — one that relies on all of us thinking not just of ourselves but for others. Indeed, it turns the beautiful and timeless idea of "love they neighbor" on its head — and implicitly suggests that we have no responsibility to our neighbors and communities. That such ideas are passionately embraced by a party that piously likes to wrap itself in the mantle of religious faith is even worse — one might say sacrilegious. As a good friend jokingly pointed out to me, if the Bible teaches us anything, it's that "it's not about you." I'm not a religious person, but I've read enough of the Bible to know that if you think the dominant takeaway from that document is the preservation of freedom rather than the preservation of life, you've missed the point.
Indeed, "love your neighbor as yourself" is more than just a pretty collection of words. It's not just a moral and ethical demand. It has a practical and instrumental meaning: it's the organizing principle for a functioning, equitable, tolerant, and empathetic nation. Lose that, and you lose what it means to live in a society.
But it also means losing a part of ourselves. I could write chapter and verse about what it's like to deal with a narcissist in one's personal life, but I'll keep it brief! "Taking vengeance or bearing a grudge" takes a profoundly corrosive toll on your psyche. It leaves you embittered and angry, full of complaints and grievance. Trust me: I've been there. It's not easy to go high when others go low, and the struggle to love our neighbors as ourselves — particularly at a moment of such political divisiveness — is at times Sisyphean. I see the impulse play out every day on social media. But it's also essential to persevere. The alternative, as we're seeing in our national politics, is so much worse.
What I’m Watching, Reading, and Listening To
At some point, I'm going to stop waxing poetic about "Succession," but as long as it keeps putting out episodes as powerful as it did this past Sunday, I ain't going to stop. For those of you who are religious watchers of the show, you know of what I speak. Sunday's third episode of season three was a gut punch that laid bare the emotional vulnerability of the Roy children and their narcissistic patriarch.
At the end of the episode, there's a moment in which Logan Roy is forced to back down in the face of an FBI raid on his company. As the new CEO of Waystar/Royco, Gerri Kellman, pungently puts it when Logan tells her to tell the FBI to "fuck off" —" "these are the people who don't fuck off." Logan momentarily turns his back to Gerri and his family and looks out the window of his glass tower — a look of utter anguish on his face. Logan lives his life never showing vulnerability or weakness: not to his kids, not to his shareholders, not to his business rivals, not to the FBI, not to anybody. As he tells his estranged wife, Marcia, in episode two, "I can't eat shit." But here, he’s forced to eat shit, and it's as painful for him as the personal hurts delivered by and to Shiv and Kendall Roy earlier in the episode.
It's moments like these that make "Succession" such fantastic television. This show is nominally about an insufferable family of immense wealth and power. But, in reality, it's a show about human vulnerability and the emotional scars of living a life surrounded by selfish people who struggle to live outside their egos. These are terrible but also fragile people. "Succession" shows us how they got that way and the toll it takes on themselves and everyone with whom they come in contact.
Reading
I usually don't spend much time here talking about the books I'm reading, but I just finished two that I rather enjoyed. I decided to re-read the Great Gatsby, which I last read as a freshman in college. I wouldn't say I liked it when I read it the first time, but I absolutely loved it the second time. Fitzgerald is an extraordinary writer, of course, and you can get lost in the beauty of his prose. But the story is also such a quintessentially American tale of ambition and tragedy. If you haven't read it in a while, I recommend picking it up. Or you can join my mother and me in reading another Fitzgerald book that I've never read, "Tender is the Night." We're going to do book club, and if you'd like to join, let me know, and we can discuss in the comments or perhaps have a Zoom cast devoted to the book. A virtual book club feels very 2021 and could be a lot of fun!
I am truly a sucker for spy thrillers, which is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the British writer Ben Macintyre. I loved his book on D-Day and another on Kim Philby, but I just finished "The Spy and the Traitor," about the KGB agent turned British spy Oleg Gordievsky (and a cameo from the US turncoat Aldrich Ames). I had never heard this story before, and it's an extraordinary tale that feels more like something out of a Hollywood movie than real life. But it's all true, and Macintyre tells the story with taut suspense. I heartily recommend it!
Musical Interlude
Nirvana's "Live On MTV Unplugged" was released 27 years ago today … and though I think I posted a clip from this last year for the old Truth and Consequences newsletter, it never gets old:
> Likewise, it's a central part of our national debates on taxes, in which no politician (Democrat or Republican) would dare to suggest that we pay more in taxes to help others and ensure that our society is fairer and more equitable.
They won't even allow enforcement of tax laws where the cheats are obviously taking advantage of the rest of us
You are so correct. Trump pushed on a door that was already open, or at least unlocked and unattended. I could never have imagined that there were so many pathological and power-mad individuals on the right. There is no equivalence here. We have a political party that is dedicated to overthrowing American democracy. Even in the Newt Gingrich "Contract on America", I never thought I would see so many Americans who love democracy as long as their side wins. That isn't democracy. That is Putin-style autocracy. We are just a hop, skip, and a jump away from it. And the left side is not going to meekly acquiesce in this. It can only mean a Second Civil War.