The test of a person's real commitment to a process is when it yields results they can't stand.
By that measure, most people, or at least a lot of people, have no commitment to the processes they claim to hold dear. And we have that example in the form of two people whose ideals couldn't be more distant. . . Donald Trump and Pope Francis.
A lot of people don't like Donald Trump or Pope Francis. I don't have any idea what the two men think of each other, assuming they often do, but to the extent there's been commentary by one about the other, Trump has taken some heat from Pope Francis. He appears to have wholly ignored it, as we'd expect him to do. As far as I know, Trump hasn't made any significant comments about Francis, but he may have. Clearly they don't see eye to eye on nearly anything.
Which brings up the question of how can I link them in a common comment and what the title of this entry is about.
Donald Trump was elected President under the electoral system mandated by the United States Constitution. During the primary that ran up to his election the Democrats were horrified by him as well as a lot of traditional Republicans. On the latter point, there was real doubt that he'd have the support of any Republicans at all when he took office, but he has, probably largely as the GOP determined it had no where else to go.
Trump has horrified a lot of people for a variety of reasons that all boil down to his personality in some ways. He's brash, rude, crude and seemingly doesn't abide by any rules and often appears to be making things up as he goes (which later on appears to be less the case than it might at first seem). Democrats have absolutely hated him from the very first moment of his Presidency but he's far from popular with a lot of Republicans and independents.
In some ways he's a Rust Belt throwback that looks upon the United States as it was imagined to be in the 1950s and has acted to try to take the country in that direction. In other ways, he's the President that the guys who have Confederate flags on their trucks and who claim to be Tea Party members wanted and still love.
Pope Francis, like most popes, was unknown to the world when he first became pope, but it didn't take long for him to gain the ire of Traditionalist Catholics. His first encyclical, on economic matters, horrified them and he started to get assertions that he was a closet Socialist. Since that time his vague statements to the press, poor choice of press correspondence, and constant flirting with what may be regarded as the hard edge of Liberal Catholicism has caused Trads to now hold him in contempt.
They aren't each other, to be sure, but they've acquired a nearly equal level of animosity.
And that animosity has grown so extreme, it betrays the principals, or the declared principals, of their opponents.
All American political parties have asserted, since the very onset, that at their core, over everything else, its democracy that they value. So surely with Trump the thing is that his opponents will simply wait until 2020 and seek to secure an elected replacement. Well, not so much.
From the very first moment of his presidency he's secured uniquely hostile opposition. Talk of removing him started in some quarters as soon as he took office. Into office there was serious discussion of removing him through a never used Constitutional vehicle to go around impaired Presidents on the basis that surely he's impaired, as nobody who thinks the things he evidently does could not be. Right now, an effort to remove him is going on in Congress even though the election is only one year away. That process, the impeachment process, has been badly used twice before, but at least as of right now it appears that there's no illegality involved, just more of Trump's incredible willingness to mix the personal with the political and act in a fairly crude and brash manner.
With Trump it's now clear that there have always been insiders and officials who have pretty much ignored his instructions. Indeed, it's amazing how many people who have had high jobs have just ignored him, to be celebrated for that fact later. Trump came in with some raving about a "deep state" that was anti democratic and, as Victor David Hanson has recently written, recent events have shown that while there's no "deep state", political insiders and career bureaucrats are so vested in their concepts of a large state and how things should run that they have worked against the Chief Executive continually.
Pope Francis in turn has met with an unmatched level of opposition in recent years. Clerics whom we did not previously know of have publicly gone against him on some things. He's received a Dubia (not without justification I might add), a process so rare that the authors of it were not themselves sure of how to go about it. An insider wrote a book accusing him of being mean and dictatorial Most recently, and shockingly, some senior figures have accused him of heracy publicly and some senior church officials have questioned the legitimacy of his election as Pope. That latter claim was one that was previously regarded as the province of nutty sedovacantist but as recently as a couple of years ago that started to evolve to where some of the Cardinals in the College were accused of violating a prohibition against campaigning and then now there's some well known Catholic figures in the Traditionalist camp who basically hold his election to be invalid, even though they don't quite go so far as to say that.
Well, what of this.
Americans claim that they value democracy as the primary virtue of politics. If so, they ought to wait for elections rather than seek a judicial or political bypass to them. We haven't been doing very well at that recently. Indeed, since 1973 we've been giving up on that at an increasing rate.
It doesn't matter if you like the President or not. Those who go back and read my comments on the 2016 election will see that I was stunned Trump was nominated and assumed that he would be defeated and worried what his election would mean. But here we are. There's a year to go. If people who find that Trump offends them are offended, they should find a candidate to take the offensive.
Notably, on that last point, the candidates most qualified to take on that role are the ones getting the least attention in the Democratic field while those least likely to prevail in 2020 are sucking all the air out of the room.
Orthodox Catholics assert that the Holy Spirit protects the Papacy from causing permanent doctrinal error. Therefore, while they can make their displeasure over Pope Francis' papacy known, and I'll place myself in the camp that frankly finds him to be not only a disappointing Pope, but one who I really wish had not been elected to the position, that doesn't mean that they can morally engage in wild sedovacantist theories (Patrick Coffin . . . are you listening?). He was elected the Pope. Even if several Cardinals violated the ban, to their own detriment, against campaigning, that doesn't impact that fact. He's the Pope.
We betray our real beliefs by what we want when we don't get what we want. The real measure of our commitment to something is supporting it when we don't get that.
Institutions that are damaged by their disloyal supporters take a long time to recover. Impeaching a President because he's the antithesis of liberal values and polite society, no matter how much his policies may be despised, means it will happen again and that the rift in the nation's politics will solidify for a generation. Trump's supporters already feel that Liberals are engaging in a constant effort at a coup to their detriment. Removing a President on thin legal grounds will in effect actually do that. Even trying the President on such claims will anger them for decades to come. If there's any doubt, the mere fact that an impeachment is even being considered is due to the GOP making that same attempt on President Clinton in spite of completely lacking any legal grounds to do so.
The Papacy will survive I have no doubt. And no lasting damage or iffy doctrine will result. But Traditionalist hanging around in the near sedovacantist camp is doing damage if for no other reason that it casts doubt on their beliefs.
There is a way to be a loyal dissenter. It's hard, as it requires a person to act in accordance with their stated beliefs, rather than their deepest desires.
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