Alert to History

I thank Isabella Simon for her thoughtful and spirited response (“Who’s Really Obsessed?,” October) to my essay on the transformation of the Democratic Party (“Magnificent Obsessions,” October). I’m sure the present political moment looks very different to someone who has as much of her life ahead of her as I have of mine behind. Perhaps because of that alone I am more alert to history’s long-term consequences.

Take the first issue she mentions: abortion. Thirty-one years after Roe v. Wade, polls indicated it was still politically possible to rally a majority of Americans in support of laws limiting access to cases of rape, incest, and immediate physical harm to the mother. But Catholic politicians like New York governor Mario Cuomo, who could have led such a charge, dare not buck this party’s absolutist position (See “Catholics, Politics & Abortion,” September 21, 2004). Even in the 2024 election, in which Trump won the “Catholic vote,” a more flexible Democratic Party stand on abortion, I would argue, might well have won for Democrats three of the five swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

As for President Biden and the working class: he did indeed support unions and always has. Alas, most working-class Americans, Black or white, male or female, do not belong to unions and only the two unions I mentioned have any political clout. Worse, some of the traditionally Democratic counties where Biden sent federal dollars to help struggling local economies actually voted Republican. The point: it was the Democratic Party, not the president who didn’t run, that was found wanting by working-class voters.

Contrary to what Simon writes, I did not use the term “culture wars”—I never do, because it’s become a meaningless crutch term. What I did argue is that class and the cultural divisions that class entails are and remain key to the Democratic Party’s electoral chances. Democratic elitism is not a charge of recent vintage. It has been hotly argued for more than thirty years. I would add that “working class” includes not only the two thirds of Americans without a four-year college degree but also many of the academically credentialed whose education was essentially high-priced vocational training. I regularly meet tradesmen who are more thoughtful than college graduates.

What I did write is that Donald Trump does not talk down to working-class Americans because he shares the very worst cultural temptation of that class: resentment. Not only of educated elites and their institutions but, as we have learned from his second term, of excellence of any kind other than wealth and those who accumulate it. Indeed, our president constantly talks trash as if that were the idiom proper to public life.

I certainly agree with Simon that supporting the rights of minorities in no way requires denigrating those of others—not the least because so many Americans belong to one sort of minority or another. She sees zero-sum thinking where it doesn’t exist. What should not be ignored is the history of how our political parties have at different times changed—both in terms of what they stand for and the constituencies to which they appeal. If I understand Simon aright, we both agree that change is necessary. We differ on what those changes should entail.

Kenneth L. Woodward
Chicago, Ill.

Hitting the Right Note

I read Paul Baumann’s article “The Real Christopher Lasch” (December) with great interest. Lasch was a man who fit uncomfortably in the world; especially the world of ideological camps.  Baumann is correct in noting that American conservatives can claim Lasch only partially, and only by ignoring his vigorous critique of capitalism and its real-world effects on the family and bonds of community. Lasch never fully outgrew the influence of Marx and Freud on his thinking, while at the same time becoming more and more alienated from the cultural left and the arrogance of our nation’s emerging elites. I’m also grateful for Baumann’s reference to my own recent piece on Lasch in The Catholic Thing, though he suggests that I’m too “careful not to issue any liberal-sounding admonitions about economic inequality, oligarchy, or despotism.” Instead, I end “on a pious and nonpolitical note: ‘Giving ourselves away in service to others, and receiving that same gift in return, enlarges the orbit of joy. That’s the secret of Christianity.’”

The last time I checked, a “pious and nonpolitical note” characterized the Sermon on the Mount, along with much of the New Testament. And in any case, Baumann seems to have overlooked this paragraph, among others, in my text:

For all their wickedness and mendacity, the big atheist ideologies of the last century still had a kind of “religious” dimension or metaphysics. Marxists believed—in effect, they had a vigorous kind of faith—in an eventual withering away of the state. Today’s advanced consumer economies are very different. They’re practical, not utopian, in their essence. They neither dispute nor attempt to disprove supernatural and transcendent things. Instead, they render them uninteresting, unintelligible, and ultimately absent. They’re anesthetic to the soul and stupefying to the intellect. They’re profoundly materialist, and thus more thoroughly atheist. Assimilating fully to such a culture carries with it an inhumanly high price tag—“inhumanly,” because the meaning of our humanity is precisely what’s at risk.

If that’s a high-five for consumer capitalism, we’re speaking different versions of English.

Francis X. Maier
Senior Fellow, Catholic Studies
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Yardley, Pa.

Why Forgive?

Stephen J. Pope asks, must Catholics forgive (“Must We Always Forgive?,” November)? Maybe not. Should Catholics forgive? Absolutely.

First, forgiveness is primarily something we do for ourselves as victims, and not for the benefit of the perpetrator. It is a necessary step in healing. If we can’t “forgive those who trespass against us,” the wounds of our past become ghosts that haunt us; and the anger we hold onto infects our lives, coming between us and those we love.

Second, forgiveness of the perpetrator by the victim is the only way out of the cycles of violence and revenge that plague humanity. One need not look only to Scripture or the moral teachings of the Church for support here: recent neuroscience-based research shows how revenge-seeking is instinctive and activates the same neural pathways as other addictions. We get addicted to revenge. The only way out? Forgiveness.

Of course, there are certain types of harm that we cannot forgive on our own. The story of Coventry Cathedral comes to mind as a powerful lesson in this regard. On Christmas Day in 1940, standing amid the ruins of the cathedral just six weeks after the Luftwaffe reduced it to rubble, the provost called on his fellow Christians to forgive those responsible, and commit to working together “to build a kinder, more Christ Child-like world.” On the wall behind the altar in the bombed-out cathedral were these words, which can still be seen today: “Father Forgive.”

Matthew Hancock
Glenside, Pa.