2025: The Year of Violent Absurdities

In the past week or so, as I write this, the President of the United States has called a reporter “piggy,” the Governor of Minnesota “retarded,” and an entire ethnic group “garbage.” Also in the past week or so as I write, prominent U.S. legislators have suborned sedition by the U.S. Military, a Minnesota legislator (and countless other pols, pundits, and talking heads) called President Trump a Nazi, and a Texas congressperson has appeared on about 798 news shows spewing raw, rancid racism against white people, without ever being called out by her hosts.

Of course, none of this is exactly news, as it has been the persistent quality of political discourse in the U.S. for at least the last few years. Violence, insults, name-calling, and aspersions are the lingua franca of American public life.

Among my favorite novels from one of my favorite authors is Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War. Set in Italy in 1964, the central narrative focuses on a septuagenarian World War I veteran and retired professor of aesthetics, Alessandro Giulianni, walking across the country with an earnest but naïve young man, Nicolò. The latter’s head spins with competing and contradictory political ideologies, which are exposed as the two walk and talk. Alessandro tries to give Nicolò a tutorial on the various authoritarian political ideologies through recounting his own service in the Italian Navy in the Great War. Nicolò fancies himself a communist, but has no idea what that even means. Nor does he understand that left-wing and right-wing extremism eventually meet in authoritarianism.

To illustrate the seductive danger of any kind of extremist ideology, Alessandro quotes from the real-life 1908 “Manifesto of Futurism,” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a favorite poet of 20th-century Italian fascists. “‘We sing the love of danger,’” declares the manifesto, as quoted by Alessandro. “‘We are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist,’” it continues. “‘There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war,’” the passage concludes.

After quoting the manifesto, Alessandro comments, “‘It might have been funny but not for their influence on the rest of the country.’”

And in the line that I believe is at the center of the novel’s themes, Alessandro asserts, “When people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.”

I often think of this passage from A Soldier of the Great War when I observe the state of political and broader public discourse in the U.S. Since at least the 2016 election, both sides of the political continuum have metaphorically written violent absurdities on the walls of the city. And the city has indeed become violent and absurd.

Of course, extreme—even violent—rhetoric is nothing new in American politics. On some level, contemporary politicians cannot hold a candle to the insults hurled in the mid-19th-century presidential elections, when the issue of slavery literally divided the nation. And people such as the cartoonist Thomas Nast wrote literal violent absurdities in the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, Know Nothing era of the second half of the 19th century.

But the mere fact that this kind of violent discourse is part of the fabric of American public life does not make it any less problematic in the current political climate. And while the rhetoric is shameful from both sides of the aisle, the left, especially, is committed to violent absurdities. On the right, the lunatics are confined to the fringe. On the left, the lunatics lead the party. There is no leftist fringe. From the “mainstream” left, it’s violent absurdities all the way down, from abortion to immigration, to transgender ideology, to subversion of public order.

This does not excuse correspondingly coarse rhetoric from the other side, however. This is especially the case for us Catholics. We should neither identify with one party nor hurl degrading insults at the other. Even if one can point out some good policies from President Trump, we must univocally condemn his misogynistic, xenophobic, and petulant rants. One does not clean up the violent absurdities on the walls of the city by writing more violent absurdities.

If we Catholics participate in violent and absurd rhetoric, we betray the very Gospel to which we claim to adhere.

In A Soldier of the Great War, Allesandro tried to explain to Nicolò that fascism and communism are kissing cousins. Both are committed to authoritarian government and the demonization of the other side. Both are Manichaean in dividing the world between angels and demons. Both are committed to unapologetic, dehumanizing rhetoric. And both endorse violence over reason, murder over debate, subversion over compromise.

As noted above, I do not believe it’s debatable that the “mainstream” left in the U.S. is extreme in its politics and rhetoric. To the extent that actual violence has resulted from endorsement of violence, it is almost always from the left. Almost. To the extent that the right certifies the use of violent absurdities on the left by its own violent, absurd braying, it is just as complicit as the left.

And we Catholics—of all people, we Catholics—must rise above the violent absurdities of both sides of the political continuum in American politics. Without compromising the integrity of the Gospel, we must be committed to a theology of civic friendship. One can disagree with friends without demonizing them.

As I wrote in my recent book, Citizens Yet Strangers, “a theology of civic friendship suggests that we think primarily in terms of social goods that benefit us all. Civic friendship can be thought of as the antonym of political rivalry. But in the United States, we [Catholics included] are more likely to think of ourselves as political rivals than civic friends. And this rivalry commits us to one of two political parties, both of which hold positions that are inconsistent with—if not opposed to—Catholic moral theology.”

I am not sure that we Catholics should consider it our mandate to make society better, as I believe that this distorts the real meaning of evangelization. On the other hand, however, we must not contribute to the violent absurdities written on the walls of the city by members of both major parties.

If we are not called to clean up the walls of the city, we are certainly called not to make them dirtier.

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