State of the Union
November 13, 2022
Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
No one felt as good or as bad as they thought they would on Wednesday morning. After a rollercoaster of an election season, we neither saw the blue sweep in response to the end of reproductive freedom, nor did we see the red wave rebuke of the President’s economic policies. It was an unusual year after a whole lot of unusual years. Some purple states went blue. Some went red. Democracy was on the ballot and people voted to save it. Ish. Some extremists won, and some lost.
Last week I brought you 6 candidates, all GOP extremists, all, as far as I can tell, a threat to our values of truth-telling, peace-making, unity and equity. Of them, 5 lost. This includes the man calling for civil war, the one who said our astrological signs can help us make decisions about our health, the one who doesn’t believe women have a place in public life, the one who rejects evolution, and the white supremacist. On the other hand, Lauren Boebert, the one wondering how many AK-47s Jesus would have owned, won re-election to her seat in Congress, even though she has either never read or completely misunderstands the Bill of Rights, and is calling for an end to the separation of church and state. But, she stands alone in that particular random grouping of candidates I mentioned last week.
The good news is that voter turnout was high, a sign of a healthy democracy and of a continued trust in the system. Without faith in the process, democracy is dead and this week we learned that most people still believe that showing up matters. Our faith in the system hasn’t been degraded such that we no longer see a value in active participation, which would have been a sign that democracy is fading. We also learned that Americans aren’t as divided as we might have thought, evidenced by the number of people who split their ballots, voting both red and blue depending on the particular candidate, rather than blind party allegiance. During interviews outside polling places, people said they were voting for balance, voting against conspiracy theories, looking for stability, maturity, and honest leadership. And whether they were thinking the democrats were rigging the ballots or the republicans were suppressing the vote, people voted for whatever free and fair election initiatives were available to them. They voted to save democracy.
I Know This Rose Will Open
There are reasons, though, for our continued diligence. While a majority of Americans want to defend democracy, there are signs of something more sinister entering the mainstream. More than half of the election denying candidates won. There were 370 running for a variety of offices across the board, and 220 won. Of the 370 running, 100 of them were extremists, claiming intentional voter fraud in the 2020 election and seeking to remove President Biden and restore former President Trump. Of that 100, 40 won.
The others were more moderate in their denial, saying things like, “we need further investigation”, suggesting that this is an open question, when, in fact, it is not. About one third of the incoming House of Representatives includes people who question or deny the previous election. Of them, about 25 are extremists. Most states have at least one Representative who casts doubt on the election. In five states, 100% of the election deniers running won. In another 10 states at least 75% of them won. Of 100 Senators, 17 will be election deniers. Some of the newly elected positions will be populated by people who were at the capitol on January 6th, people who actively sought to overturn the 2020 election. The Governor of Alabama, reelected on Tuesday, said clearly that, “fake news, big tech, and blue state liberals stole the election from Trump”, and the incoming Secretary of State in Indiana said 2020 was a scam.
The problem we’re facing is that fringe conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, finding themselves in seats of power throughout the nation where they are far more difficult to ignore or dismiss and where their extremists views are becoming normalized.
I Know This Rose Will Open
At the same time, misinformation didn’t spread at the speed it did two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reportedly removed thousands of posts with misinformation during this election cycle, usually before those posts got any traction. YouTube added $15 million to their budget to hire content moderators for both the US and Brazilian elections, establishing what they called a war room on election day to take things down in real time. Even things that got through temporarily failed to garner the attention the 2016 and 2020 elections taught us to expect. A conservative talk show host in Arizona shared a video on Twitter Tuesday about what he called intentionally broken voting machines. The video was shared 20,000 times, often by people with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. But, in an unusual turn, people stopped sharing it almost as quickly as they’d started and within a few hours, it had lost its audience.
Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights said that demand for misinformation was lower this year than in the last election cycle. We saw candidates who traded in blatant misinformation lose, like Senate nominee Bolduc from New Hampshire who said that schools were providing kitty litter to students who identified as cats, playing on fears around transgender people. There was ample evidence that Russia reactivated its massive system of trolls and bots to feed our hunger for conflict and reinforce our confirmation biases, but this year, if they punched through the nets placed on social media, we largely ignored them.
I Know This Rose Will Open
One of the more alarming things we heard from candidates, and from citizens all over this country is a call for, or an expectation of, civil war. Here in NY, those voices are muted, but we can’t deny the January 6th attempt to take down Congress and install an unelected government through force, nor can we ignore the reality that while the red wave didn’t take the country, it did crash on our state, with some of the most extreme now representing us.
Some experts who study the onset of civil wars, the loss of democracies and the rise of authoritarianism have been working hard since 2016 to get our attention. We have trusted – and maybe the whole world has trusted – that the American Constitution is strong, that our democracy is deeply ingrained in our law and culture, and that we are nearly invulnerable to any serious threat. These experts are trying to warn us that while many of us are confident that our institutions are secure, there’s a far-right movement gaining significant traction and while they started small, we are no longer able to ignore them. The presence of armed men at rallies, the visibility of paramilitary groups on American streets, and the waving of alternative symbols like confederate flags or American flags with a thin blue line have become commonplace.
We know, if we watch how this happens through history, that when governments topple, when civil war erupts, when authoritarianism takes over, many people are surprised. This is partially because we get used to the symbols of war, the symbols of democratic breakdown. We dismiss people as fringe, we see them as outsiders in some way, and we rest in the strength of our systems. But, here in NY, a far right candidate for governor got 2.7 million people to vote for him, just a few hundred thousand votes away from the winner, and four House seats flipped, all with far right, Trump aligned, candidates. We might see this shift as something happening to our south or west, but that isn’t in congruent with the facts.
I’m not saying this to frighten you, and I hope I’m not doing that. I’m saying this because I know we are ready to look at what’s real. It’s something I love about our faith. We don’t pretend. We face things directly, honestly, and we aren’t afraid to break through convention to speak truth. Today, this is our truth.
I Know This Rose Will Open
Last week when worship was over, a few of you encircled me because you were worried and you asked me what to do if a country that feels combustible actually ignites. I told you I’d have a better idea today. And I do. I’ve read key books on this subject, listened to advice from our top leaders, and have reviewed what I know from my years of study and here’s what I have. What will save us? Faith, Hope, and Love. Don’t roll your eyes at me.
One of the most dangerous things about this moment in history is our isolation. After years of pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, the rise of video as the primary way people meet, and the dramatic reduction of people working in the same physical spaces, our communities are smaller if they exist any more at all. When we add to that the disintegration we experience in families both because of real distance and because of political divisions, we are living in a nearly unprecedented time of social fragmentation.
This makes us vulnerable in a variety of ways. A good friend, living in a very conservative town, is single and has rainbow and a black lives matter flags on her home. She wondered recently if she should remove them given the political climate. Understanding how mob mentality works, she knows if people take to the streets, she will be quickly targeted. Some of you have expressed similar worries.
While history tells us that these things happen and no one is immune, we also know that people are less likely to harm someone they know. My friend will spend some time knocking on her neighbor’s doors to introduce herself. She’ll pay specific attention to those she thinks are more liberal or moderate, hoping to build a network. In that same town, she and other progressives are scheduling gatherings in each other’s homes. They’re also organizing to support more progressive policies in the school system, hoping to stave off a sharp right turn parent-activists have taken. In other words, they are building community. They are building systems of relationships, with the intention of creating safety nets for each other.
Last week, I told you that hope is active, that hope isn’t the idea that things will be fine, but they might be fine if we work to make it so. As a people of hope, we are called to active engagement. Timothy Snyder, the author of the book On Tyranny, tells us to pick an institution and commit to defending it. An institution can be as small as a local library or as large as the Department of Education. Using your own interests and skills, ask yourself what institution is necessary for a free society and protect it. I’m committed to this one, the Community Church of New York, and with it, to freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.
As Unitarian Universalists, we have a long history of fighting for justice, for centering the marginalized, for seeking equity. We pray in traditional ways, gathering our strength and expressing our gratitude, but we know if we aren’t also praying with our hands and our feet, our prayer is almost meaningless. We are a people of faith, which means we are a people of action, grounded in the shared and deep values of human worth and dignity, democratic principles, and radical interconnectedness.
Faith, Hope and Love. These are our salvation, the response to the eschatological anxiety of our time. We are not ungrounded. We are not helpless. We are not alone.
