Disengaged Buddhism in the second era of Trump

Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.

I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.

Meanwhile, the rule of right-wing authoritarian governments is tightening around the rest of the globe. They’ve already got an iron grip on India – the world’s largest electoral democracy – and on Hungary and Turkey; they’re in charge in Italy; and it may be only a matter of time before they take over in France and the UK and Germany as well.

Back in 2017, I still read the rise of right-wing authoritarians as teething pains on the way to a more just socialist world: working-class people were reacting against their genuine immiseration, lashing out however they could. With Jeremy Corbyn in charge of the Labour Party and Bernie Sanders having come close to the Democratic Party nomination, it seemed to me like this lashing out would soon give way to genuine hope – to people actually fixing the economic misery that Trump capitalized on, inflicted by decades of Reagan-Thatcher corporate rule. But now Sanders’s moment has passed, Corbyn’s leadership is long gone, and while Biden passed more economically progressive legislation than any other president of my lifetime, it didn’t do him (or Kamala Harris) much good. In the recent German election the Left party had an unexpected resurgence – but as far as I can tell, what motivated the resurgence was just a passionate speech against including the right-wing authoritarian party in the government. The Left inspired people to stop the bleeding, but not to have any positive vision for making things better.

Instead the narrative now feels all too depressingly continuous with that of the rest of my lifetime: right-wingers like Reagan step in to make things worse and (supposed) left-wingers like Clinton don’t reverse it; then right-wingers like George W. Bush step in to make them worse still and left-wingers like Obama don’t reverse that; now the new crop of Trumpian right-wingers step in to make them even worse yet. It’s one more step in a continuous long-term pattern where everything gets worse and nothing gets better. The left had its glory days to make government better in the New Deal through the 1960s – not coincidentally a time of unprecedented opportunity for everyone – but that’s not a time I have ever known or ever will know. In 2019 I had offered a range of possibilities about what the world of the 2020s would look like – “A steady global move to soft fascism? A 180-degree reaction moving to global socialism? A repudiation of the current mood that takes us in relief back to the warm seas of the Obama years? A devastating series of global wars?” – and the one that came closest to true were the bad ones, of soft fascism and war. Hope feels very distant – even the hope of getting back to the warm seas of 2012, let alone of any positive social change.

It’s still not clear what we can actually do about any of this. In the US of course we can vote the Republicans out in four years, but there’s so much damage that can be done in the meantime. We’re likely to remove the House of Representatives majority in 2018 – but that just stops Trump from passing legislation, and so far he’s tried to do all this by executive order and not legislation. Mostly we can give money to lawyers fighting Trump’s illegal actions in court – but even those depend on a relatively Trump-friendly Supreme Court. What we can do is not nothing – but it feels like very little. We are mostly powerless. The “mostly” matters a great deal – but the “powerless” matters at least as much.

And all this is where the Disengaged Buddhists’ advice is wise: especially the Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta (“Lion’s Roar of the Wheel-Turning King”). This Pali text is often cited to advocate politically engaged Buddhism, because people quote one short sentence – about the king not providing to the poor – out of context, ignoring the rest of the text. But in my Disengaged Buddhism article I showed how the sutta’s message is quite the opposite: it is there to induce a sense of detachment from politics and temporal goods. And that is vitally important because I think it provides us with great lessons in dark times.

The Cakkavatti’s story, above all, is one of decline. Long ago, the Buddha tells us, a kingdom had a golden age where lifespans were eighty thousand years. But the kingdom got poorer and criminal violence ensued; people’s actions got worse, their lives got worse, and lifespans got shorter and shorter, until we reach the present where lifespans are just a hundred years. But that’s not the worst of it: in the (relatively) near future it’s going to be so bad that they live for only ten. In that dystopian future time, hatred will tear families apart, they will even murder each other; even food with tasty flavours will disappear. Yet amid those disastrous conditions, one desperate group will come together and say “let us now do good”, and agree to restrain from killing. Then lifespans will start going back up and lives will start getting better.

The Buddha tells this story as a way of delivering the opening and closing message: “be islands unto yourselves, be a refuge unto yourselves, with no other refuge…” Steven Collins points out that it is intended to cultivate “a sense of detachment from, or at least a (briefly) non- involved perspective on the passage of time.” Time is cyclical and it’s getting worse – but amid terrible material conditions, we can still decide to be better, we can be light in the darkness.

The Cakkavatti, it seems to me, is tremendously inspiring in times like these. It reminds us to avoid the kind of hope I had dashed in the late 2010s, that a better world was around the corner. It warns us that things will get worse before they get better – and that the getting better may well not be in our lifetimes. Yet it also reminds us that material well-being is not necessary for moral improvement. The pessimistic slogan that comes out of it is “things will get worse before they get better”. The optimistic slogan, though, is “things will get worse but I can be better”. We can be the change we want to see in the world (a phrase which Gandhi probably never said in those words, but he expressed very similar ideas). That doesn’t mean the world will actually change with us – though it might. But even if it doesn’t, we can still know that we were light in the darkness, we did not make the violence worse, we were kind, generous, gentle. We can let our own lights sustain us through dark times.