Stephen Miller, President Donald J. Trump’s repellent senior advisor, deputy chief of staff, and director of the interagency Homeland Security Council, posted on social media two months ago: 

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.” 

Miller called for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government. “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history,” he said.

Miller was presumably exposed annually from an early age to the Passover story from the biblical Book of Exodus, ritualized according to the textual telling in the Haggadah every year at this time around the seder table. Here we learn that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years and had none of the rights accorded the non-Jewish members of that society – such as they might have been living under the pharaonic god-kings. They were, you know, a “labor class” without rights.

The lesson commonly drawn from the story since ancient times is that slavery – having a designated labor class with no capacity to influence the conditions of servitude – is, you know, really abhorrently bad. This has engendered an ethic of inclusivity, an embracing of the other, that has been a core value of Jewish culture.

Let’s revisit the stirring admonition from Leviticus 19:34: “But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

This is resoundingly rejected by Miller, an Ashkenazi Jew whose family escaped Russian pogroms and the Holocaust. His forbearers along with millions of diaspora Jews arrived on our shores in the late 19th and early 20th century fleeing oppression born of bigoted exclusion by the dominant societies of the countries where they had been living and here aspiring to social and political inclusivity. They slaved away in sweatshops in this country while living in some of the most appalling conditions of poverty in the world, struggling for full participation in a pluralistic society in a nation where they would be full members.

Now that he has benefited from the activism of his forbearers and attained residency in the inner sanctum of the citadel of power he is dedicated to ensuring that others, particularly people of color, cannot be welcomed into the same privileged circle of full citizenship as he, essentially supporting the Egyptian side of that ancient conflict.

Further revealing his deeply odious philosophy, in January, Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN that: 

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The only iron in this discussion is between Miller’s ears.

His nearly unimaginable moral monstrousness exhibits an arresting consistency. If it is righteous for any stronger person to brutalize a weaker person, then one must be always vigilant, in essence perpetually paranoid, because assailants may be lurking anywhere and there is no respite, no protection, that a humane society or government can, or what is more, ought to even aspire to provide.

There are other worlds, like mystical nesting vessels, co-existing right here in the same space and time as the one Miller proclaims we live in, that are invisible to him and his supporters due to stunted and distorted dimensions of human consciousness. The world of most of the folks I hang out with features awareness of our mutuality as fellow beings sharing a fragile planetary biosphere where, in the poignant words of the poet Auden written at the outset of the second world war, “we must love another or die.” I encourage anyone who has not read his poem September 1, 1939 in a long time to revisit it now.

As the late Buddhist monk and revered teacher Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates:

“There is a tendency to be individualistic in us, a seed of egoism, but that isn’t all that is in us. There is the other seed, the seed of togetherness, the desire to help and be kind to others. If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.”

Which seed are you watering?

Jonathan Klate writes regularly about spirituality, political ideology, and the relationship between these two.