Rod Dreher's Blog, page 571

If By ‘Gulag’, You Mean Irrelevance

Here’s an Open Letter To The American People signed by “writers [who] are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power.” What do they wish to convey to their countrymen? That:

we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States.

Golly. That should do him in.

It’s amusing to contemplate the chasm between the power these writers think they have in our popular culture, and the power they actually have. You can write anything you want in American culture, and nobody much cares. We don’t have a Havel or a Solzhenitsyn — writers whose words mattered — because there’s nothing at stake in the lives of our writers. They are taking no risks in signing a petition denouncing Donald Trump — and hey, I think we should be glad that we live in a society in which a writer can denounce a presidential candidate without drawing retribution to himself.

But come on. Really, writers? A manifesto contra Trump? I’m reminded of these lines of Walker Percy, about the political role of the American writer, whose opinions on such matters move nobody, because only other writers take writers seriously as wise men and women on public matters:

He is like the wretched man in Dostovesky’s Notes From Underground, who swore to get even with his enemy by walking directly toward him on the sidewalk and forcing him to yield and who at the last second yields himself, without the other even noticing.

The kind of people who would care about an “Open Letter To The American People” instructing them to shun Trump are the kind of people who would never in a million years vote for the guy. But what do I know? I will print out copies of this Open Letter, signed by people 99 percent of America has never heard of, and leaflet local trailer parks.

Aleksandar Hemon, a writer who hates Trump, writes about why he didn’t sign the letter. Excerpt:

One has a hard time recalling a novel that has forcefully addressed the iniquities of the post 9/11 era: the lies, the crimes, the torture, the financial collapse, not to mention Americans’ complicity in all those glories, including the fact that Bush had approval ratings reaching the nineties on the eve of the Iraq invasion. If some future historian attempts to determine what occupied the American writers’ minds since the beginning of the millennium by reading all the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners between 2002 and 2016, s/he would find few traces of Bush, or Iraq, or Abu Ghraib, or Cheney, or the financial collapse, or indeed any politics. Apart from The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has some things to say about American exceptionalism, the closest to political engagement a recent Pulitzer winner comes is by way of North Korea, the setting for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, addressing the outrageous misdeeds of a reassuringly non-American regime.

There is a good case—literary or not—to be made for ideological continuity between the Bushite and the Trumpite America, but exposing that evolution would require a lot of writing, which might interfere with all the open letters re: present calamity that clamor to be written.

Hemon has their number: denunciation is easy; writing is hard. The thing that’s funny about this Open Letter is not that the writers denounce Trump. Lots of people feel that way about Trump. It’s that they do so as writers, with a sense of solemnity and dignity that is quite comic, considering that there will be no consequences for them taking this stand (no FBI agent at the door, no loss of jobs or status), and because for better or for worse, almost no Americans take seriously what novelists have to say on politics seriously. These scribes might as well have signed a document calling for the restoration of the Hapsburgs. Still, it’s delicious, in kind of a mean way, to imagine the gravity with which the drafters of the Open Letter went about their work, and with which its signatories pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to affix their names to it.

Transgender McCarthyism

Last week, Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk wrote a piece for The New Yorker online saying that the Obama administration’s recent transgender “guidance” for bathrooms, locker rooms, etc., could well create a Title IX crisis. Excerpt:

But there is also a growing sense that some females will not feel safe sharing bathrooms, shower rooms, or locker rooms with males. And if a female student claimed that a bathroom or locker room that her school had her share with male students caused her to feel sexually vulnerable and created a hostile environment, the complaint would be difficult to dismiss, particularly since the federal government has interpreted Title IX broadly and said that schools must try to prevent a hostile environment. This is not wholly hypothetical. Brandeis University found a male student responsible for sexual misconduct for looking at his boyfriend’s genitals while both were using a communal school shower. The disciplined student then sued the school for denying him basic fairness in its disciplinary process, and a federal court recently refused to dismiss the suit.

Continuing to have segregated bathrooms could also put schools in a bind on Title IX compliance. According to the federal government, a transgender girl who is told to use the boys’ locker room, or even a separate and private stall, instead of the girls’ facility, has a claim that the school is violating Title IX. A non-transgender girl who’s told she must share a locker room with boys may also have a claim that the school is violating Title IX. But would she not have a similar claim about having to share with students who identify as girls but are biologically male? Well, not if her discomfort and “emotional strain” should be disregarded. But this week, in a letter, dozens of members of Congress asked the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education to explain why they should be disregarded. The federal government is putting schools in a position where they may be sued whichever route they choose. (Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, declined to comment on this issue.)

A reasonable point, yes? The response of a transgender Slate writer was typical of this pseudo-debate. Excerpt:

To comply with the “surprising” guidance, Suk posits, schools are left with two options: Either allow transgender students access to restrooms and other single-sex facilities in accordance with gender (as Title IX requires) or abolish single-sex facilities altogether. Those two options are radically different. Yet, Suk assesses them both on the same terms—and in the process reveals that she, like the lawmakers who have since filed lawsuits challenging the guidance, believes them to be effectively the same. In her view, transgender girls “are biologically male.” That is an offensive and inaccurate notion, the kind of error one would hope not to find on the website of the New Yorker.

But transgender girls are not “biologically male.” To reiterate the idea that a transgender girl is, really, “male,” as Suk does repeatedly in her piece, is to reinforce the very anti-transgender rhetoric that has been carefully crafted by opponents of transgender people. Suk and others might believe that a person’s genitals define their “biological” sex, but that does not make it so. Continuing to put forth that narrative without challenging it as an ideological position, as opposed to a fact, is extremely harmful.

Though Suk does not bother to complicate what she means by “biological sex” by juxtaposing gender as belief with sex as biology, she plays right into the hands of those invested in undermining the authenticity of trans identity. This idea that our bodies and our “biology” could somehow betray who we “really are” drives not only the anti-trans conversation playing out in state legislatures and courts, but also the tragic violence targeting trans people—particularly trans women of color, whose existence is all too often seen not only as inauthentic but also criminal.

Who is that hatey-hater Jeannie Suk to claim that having a penis and male chromosomes make one a biological male? Haaaaaaaaaaate!

The hate is spreading, it appears. Maya Dillard Smith, an African-American woman who heads up the Georgia ACLU, resigned her position over the organization’s stance on transgender rights. From Atlanta’s NPR station:

Smith says she wasn’t well-versed in transgender issues and wanted to learn more. But, she says there was no room for dialogue at the ACLU.

“It’s through communication that we develop empathy and understanding, and I think that our democracy requires us to allow for exchange of ideas, without people being labeled one thing or another,” Smith says.

Lifesite News has more:

“I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered,” she wrote.

“My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer,” she continued.

In a statement, she said that the ACLU has become “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights.”

The “hierarchy of rights” the ACLU chooses to defend or ignore, she wrote, is “based on who is funding the organization’s lobbying activities.” She did not elaborate on the group’s funding.

In case you miss the point, Dillard Smith is a progressive black woman with a Harvard Law degree. And she quit her prominent job allegedly because the ACLU will not allow dialogue about the issue within its ranks. Dillard Smith has started a website to promote honest talk about women’s concerns.

Here’s a powerful video the Alliance Defending Freedom produced, featuring the stories of female survivors of sexual abuse, speaking out against these new bathroom laws. Note the second woman in the series, a communications director for a local YMCA who was forced to resign because she objected to the new trans bathroom policy. This is madness on its face, madness compounded by the fact that nobody is allowed to question any of this without being accused of bigotry:

Real Leni Riefenstahl stuff, I imagine the LGBT lobby will say.

Did you notice Maya Dillard Smith’s comment that the ACLU’s priorities are being driven by its donors? I did. A source who works on religious liberty lobbying tells me that the LGBT lobby is incredibly well-funded. This is a David vs. Goliath situation. I’m sure she and I agree on exactly nothing politically, but I honor the courage of Maya Dillard Smith for being willing to be David in this situation, to protect women and children.

When the shaming, shunning, and censorship around the transgender issue is so bad that even a black female ACLU lawyer resigns in protest, you know a line has been crossed.

Last Words Of A Drowning Man

That was the last message sent from Darren Mitchell, who drowned when flood waters overtook his truck. Excerpt:

Lashandoe Smith, who said she watched in horror when Mitchell’s truck was swept into the water, filled in the blanks Friday when she returned to the scene.

“And he got out of his truck, he got in the bed of his truck, he got back out, on top of his truck, and then all of the sudden he got back in his truck. And like maybe 10, 15 minutes after he was in his truck, it just flipped and he topsided into the water,” Smith said as she choked back tears. “It just disappeared. Once it flipped, you didn’t see tires, his truck, nothing. It just tumbled over.”

That poor man. I bet he couldn’t swim. That image, and the message with it, is one of the saddest things I’ve seen in ages.

I can’t wrap my mind around what it means when a man who is about to die sends out his last words on social media.

Three Ben Op Principles

Alan Jacobs says as far as he can tell, the Benedict Option stems from these three principles:

The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.

More:

From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention  than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.

Read his whole post. Alan says he doesn’t understand how any thoughtful Christians can dissent from this, and asks those who do to explain why.

I’d like to know too. There are good faith and bad faith ways to answer Alan’s query. The bad faith way is, “Because if 1, 2, and 3 are true, then I would have to change my way of living more than I am comfortable doing. Therefore, I will not take it seriously.”

But nobody actually says that. The difficulty is trying to figure out when apparently good-faith criticisms are really bad-faith ones in disguise, ones that don’t deserve a response.

Thrive Or Survive?

Leah Libresco has been reading Hauerwas and Willimon’s classic book Resident Aliens. She says she was particularly struck by a passage in which the authors say that Christian ethical claims can’t always be restated in the language of secularism, and that Christians who believe that they can be risk losing something essential to their point of view. In other words, some things simply cannot be translated.

Leah says:

If you’d like a non-religious example of a divide where each side’s common sense sounds like lunacy to the opposing side, try Scott Alexander’s Survive vs Thrive model of political divides. (In brief: do you think the world is pretty stable, and we’re figuring out how to best share this lasting prosperity, or do you think the world is teetering on the edge of near collapse, and unless we’re very careful, everything will crumble).

Survive vs Thrive has become one of the background assumptions I automatically ask about when I’m in a dispute with someone I already know and respect. It’s turned out to be lurking behind a lot of the disagreements I’d find most repulsive or hard to debate — my interlocutor is usually much farther toward the “Survive” end of the spectrum than I am, and is ready and willing to do last ditch things.  (When I turn out to be the closer-to-Survive one, the Thrive person tends to feel to me like a Jenga player who hasn’t heard of gravity).

I read the “Survive vs. Thrive” essay, and found myself — surprise! — very much on the Survive side, with an important caveat. The thing that I am worried about surviving is not this country (at least not primarily), but Christianity in this country, and in the West more generally. I think we’re in a critical moment regarding that question. I tend to be less worried about the US as a whole, believing that absent some catastrophe like a return of the Great Depression, we will continue to muddle through while managing our decline slowly. That still puts me much closer to Survive than Thrive, but I don’t feel all that urgent about it — probably because my personal life is pretty stable. If I were poor or otherwise struggling, it would probably be a lot different, and I would probably be a lot more drawn emotionally to someone like Trump — even though he is a chaos candidate who would create a far less predictable world than Hillary Clinton would.

Anyway, Survive/Thrive is a pretty interesting way to think about political orientations. The other day I got a friendly but concerned e-mail from a pal back East who says he can’t understand the alarmism on this blog. He just doesn’t see things falling apart like I do. We’re a lot alike in many respects, but this is a real gap between us. I bet we could spend a rewarding long afternoon drinking beer together, and still come no closer to convincing each other of our perspectives. We’re still going to be friends, but a lot of Americans have lost the ability to pull that off. Without question the most bigoted, uptight, intolerant people I’ve ever dealt with personally come from the educated white coastal liberal demographic. Your Mileage May Vary.

Are you closer to Survive or to Thrive? Let’s have a poll of readers. Say what your political orientation is, then explain what persuades you to one side or the other (Survive or Thrive). Me first:

I’m a Red Tory conservative who is far more Survive than Thrive. This is because 1) Christianity is in steep decline, probably irrecoverable in my lifetime; therefore 2) the traditional basis for our society and culture, and its unifying, moralizing force, is dissipating; 3) the family is unwinding among many Americans, especially the working class and the poor; 4) there are things regarding the formation of the next generations that only the family can do, not the state — and these things aren’t getting done; 5) the people at the top of the economy and in positions of cultural authority (including the media and entertainment industries) are committed, however passively and uncomprehendingly, to popularizing policies and beliefs that fracture the country further, and that make it less cohesive and resilient; 6) eventually there will be a grave economic crisis that will put us to the test, and we will find out just how much spending down all our social capital costs.

 

A Benedict Option Convert

Reformed theologian Carl Trueman has pretty much come out as a supporter of the Benedict Option. He came to hear my speech in Baltimore the other night, and says it answered some of the questions he had about the Benedict Option. Excerpt:

The talk on Friday night made all of that clear. And it offered an outline of the assumptions of the Ben Op, which might be summarized as follows:

Conventional politics will not save us. Nota bene: This is not the same as saying that political engagement must cease. It is simply a claim about the limited expectations we should have regarding political engagement, particularly at the national level.
The church is not the world. As Rod merely agrees with Jesus on this point, it should not be too controversial.
Christians must retrieve their own traditions as the fundamental sources of their identities. Again, with the Apostle Paul on his side here, Rod is hardly breaking dangerous new ground.
Christians must prioritize the local community as their sphere of action. Once more, nota bene: This is not, repeat not, the same as saying that Christians should head for the hills. It is simply to say that they should be far more concerned for what is happening in their neighborhood than on Capitol Hill.
What we face is not a struggle within a culture but, strictly speaking, a clash of alternative cultures. This is where the language of the end of the culture war needs to be understood correctly. It is not that we are to surrender to the dominant culture. It is rather that we are to model an alternative culture. And we are to do so first in our local communities.

Erroneous readings of the above points are what have led to the most heated criticism of the Ben Op proposal as alarmist and defeatist. Some criticisms are rooted in generational differences. Those who grew up in an era when homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name seem blind to how completely the politics of sexual identity has transformed the cultural, political, and legal landscape. What can one say to such other than “Open your eyes!” or “For pity’s sake, talk to your teenage grandchildren!”? Other criticisms are perhaps the result of Christians’ being so in thrall to the tropes and conventions of Western politics, and so convinced of their own social importance, that they hear any call to break with that culture as a call for unconditional surrender. But Rod is not calling for surrender. He is calling for new terms of engagement.

That’s right. Read the whole thing.  There’s a lot more. Thanks, Carl! I was listening yesterday to this excellent BBC Radio 4 show about the Rule of St. Benedict, the link having been sent to me by reader CatherineNY. In the 30-minute program, one of the guests says that it’s hard to overstate how much the West owes to the Benedictine order. One of the guests, a medieval historian, said:

Monasteries provided a space for culture to survive at a time when it was really in danger. But monasteries also provided schools, hospitals, and large numbers of the poor are fed at monastery doors each day.

Yes, this. How can we live out something like this as lay Christians, serving the world even as we provide a space for Christian culture to survive at a when when it is really in danger?

 

Trump As Tribal Leader

Trump called the press to a conference yesterday to tell them what a pack of scumbags they are:

The offense reporters committed this time: asking whether the money he said he had raised at a January benefit — organized in place of a Fox News debate he was skipping — had really made it to the beneficiaries, and if so, how much.

A candidate said he would do a thing; reporters tried to confirm whether he had. (Last week The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had not yet made his own donation.) This, to Mr. Trump, was an outrage, an affront, not very nice treatment at all. He said he had not wanted to claim credit for his deeds — which he promoted, allowed to be covered on television and referred to during the campaign — but the nosy press had forced his hand.

So he showed up at the news conference with a list of donations and recipients, as well as a list of grievances. Tom Llamas, a reporter from ABC News, was a “sleaze,” he said; Jim Acosta, of CNN, “a real beauty.”

No candidate ever went broke attacking the news media. But if he becomes president, he’s going to make Nixon look like a model of prudence and sanity.

David Frum has a long, rewarding essay analyzing the seven ways Trump’s candidacy has demolished the guardrails of our democratic politics. Excerpts:

During the election of 1800, Hamilton warned his friend Harrison Gray Otis that Aaron Burr “loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement” and could not, consequently, be trusted to honor any agreement with his political opponents. Trump’s political allies have said the same and worse of him, while yet grudgingly pledging to support him in the end. Something’s obviously changed in the American definition of acceptable behavior in those who seek power. That guardrail is down.

What’s new about Trump is that he doesn’t even pretend to respect standards. He’ll talk about his penis on national TV, so what? You can’t shame someone who is shameless. The power of his narcissism is such that he seems to believe that he creates his own reality, that he is beyond judgment.

Read the whole thing.  I would quibble with Frum about a few of his judgments, but not his general point that Trump’s candidacy is a profound challenge to political stability in this country.

 

The thing that frustrates me, though, is that so many of the anti-Trump people seem to think that Trump is some kind of aberration, that the system was more or less fine before he barreled in and started tearing it up. Not true. He was only able to accomplish this because the Republican Party, and indeed the entire edifice of our political system, has grown weak at its foundations.

Frum says the white identity politics Trump embodies is evidence of the guardrails being down:

As community cohesion weakens, moral norms change. What would have been unacceptable behavior in a more homogenous national community becomes tolerable when a formerly ascendant group sees itself at risk from aggressive new claims by new competitors. Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.

And so breaks another guardrail.

I think Frum is right about that, but it will never fail to astonish me, the degree to which the Left is blind to how its own principles and illiberalism strengthens Trump. We all see how Black Lives Matter and related leftist groups trample all over institutional authority in colleges with race-based special pleading, some of it flatly racist, and administrators yield. We see how any questioning or criticism of whatever new thing the LGBT movement demands this week is denounced harshly as evidence of bigotry, and people clam up for fear of their jobs. And so on. Given that reality, how long did they think it was going to be before a white candidate emerged who would defend white tribal interests, and who didn’t care what any of them thought about him? If Trump is the champion of white identity politics — and he pretty much is — then the Democrats should think about how their practicing tribal identity politics has contributed to his rise on the Right. I’m not blaming Trump on the Democrats, but I am saying that their “diversity” rhetoric, and the way they have mobilized their own tribes, has helped to create the social and cultural conditions that brought us Trump.

Conor Friedersdorf conducted a fascinating e-mail dialogue with a 22-year-old Trump supporter. The young man lives in the Bay Area, and is engaged to be married to an Asian-American woman. They’re both voting Trump. Excerpts:

Trump Voter: We are young, urban, and have a happy future planned. We seem molded to be perfect young Hillary supporters. But we’re not. Both of us voted Libertarian in 2012, and ideologically we remain so. But in 2016? We’re both going for Trump.

For me personally, it’s resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture. That’s where it’s almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion.  Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. There is no saying “Hey, I disagree with you,” it’s just instant shunning. Say things online, and they’ll try to find out who you are and potentially even get you fired for it. Being anti-PC is not about saying “I want you to agree with me on these issues.” It’s about saying, “Hey, I want to have a discussion and not get shouted down because I don’t agree with what is considered to be politically correct.”

In my first job, I mentioned that I enjoyed Hulk Hogan to a colleague who also liked the WWE. I was not aware at the time, but Hogan had recently made news for his use of some racial or homophobic slur. I was met with a horrified stare. By simply saying I liked his showmanship, I was lumped into saying I too was racist or homophobic.

I feel like I have to hide my beliefs.

I cannot say openly that I identify with Republicans, lest I see friendships and potential professional connections disappear with those words. When I see Hillary Clinton, I see the world becoming less and less tolerant of right-leaning views.When I see Facebook censoring conservative outlets and then see The Atlantic defending the practice, that worries me. When I see the fear that reddit users have about admins banning subreddits because of political beliefs, that worries me.

Normally, I would be very concerned with the throwing of the potentially false accusations of rape. I am in the camp of “comfort the accuser, but don’t get ready to hang the alleged criminal until we’ve had due process.” I am concerned with some of Trump’s reversals, but this is not one of them. Why? If false, Bill Clinton will not suffer any real consequences from this. There will be no risk of jail for Bill, which is what the biggest worry is for false accusations. If Trump knew that these allegations were true, I’m not going to defend his conduct. But I will accept it.

This is a war over how dialogue in America will be shaped. If Hillary wins, we’re going to see a further tightening of PC culture. But if Trump wins? If Trump wins, we will have a president that overwhelmingly rejects PC rhetoric. Even better, we will show that more than half the country rejects this insane PC regime. If Trump wins, I will personally feel a major burden relieved, and I will feel much more comfortable stating my more right-wing views without fearing total ostracism and shame. Because of this, no matter what Trump says or does, I will keep supporting him.

“Total ostracism and shame.” If you lived and worked in a cultural environment in which you were at risk at every moment of saying the “wrong” thing, and being made to pay a severe price for it — even when you are merely stating a conventional conservative opinion — well, wouldn’t you be emotionally attracted to a man like Trump? Again, many liberals haven’t the slightest idea how their own behavior has fueled the rise of Trump. More:

Trump supporter: I don’t know how to describe it, exactly, but I feel in a lot of ways that my identity as a white man is shamed. I am in zero ways a white nationalist or supremacist, and I consider myself a feminist. I will likely sacrifice my career goals, either with fewer hours or relocation as needed, so that my fiancee can pursue her ambitions and goals. But I do not want to be shamed or held back or attacked for just being what I am.

Everything about his professional and personal milieu tells him that he is a second-class citizen because of his sex and the color of his skin. Friedersdorf gave him anonymity for this interview because the young man feels — rightly — that if people knew what he really thought, he would find it hard to get a job. This, because he has expressed opinions forbidden by the left.

Friedersdorf adds:

My correspondent has come to believe that political correctness is transforming American culture in a way that puts his interests at odds with activists who are pursuing social justice and Hispanic immigrants who might benefit from affirmative action. His perception of these changes is causing him to engage in zero-sum thinking. If identity-based tribalism is America’s lot, he intends to vote his group interests, whereas he was previously inclined toward a more individualist ethic.

That shift alarms me.

Neither the pursuit of social justice nor immigration policy nor relations among people of different ethnicities are inherently zero sum in nature. Quite the contrary, if sound policies and social norms are in place. If there is an uptick in white people shifting from a liberal mindset to a tribal mindset, something has gone very wrong.

What?

They finally rejected the double standard and started to apply the Left’s diversity rhetoric to themselves. If black lives matter (for example), then why don’t white lives matter? That sort of thing. For a very long time, much liberal rhetoric has been focused on left-wing identity politics, not appealing to what unifies us as Americans, but on our tribal divisions. But they call identifying and exacerbating difference “diversity,” and claim it as a virtue. Until whites start seeing themselves in the same way left-liberalism has taught blacks, Hispanics, gays and others to see themselves: as one tribe among many.

Yes, Trump’s rise, and his rise as a white identity candidate, is frightening. But he didn’t come from nowhere, nor is he solely the creation of conservatism (indeed, he’s barely a conservative at all). I expect Hillary Clinton to use a lot of unity rhetoric this fall. But here’s the thing: if she wins, I fully expect her to govern as someone who treats my own tribe — conservative Christians — as the enemy. That does not mean I will vote for Trump, or will vote at all. I know conservative Christians who fear and loathe Trump so much that they’re going to vote for Hillary, a candidate they believe despises their kind, for the sake of the common good. I know Christians who despise Trump but who are voting for him, or withholding their vote, because they cannot cast a ballot for a candidate (Hillary) they are certain will name Supreme Court justices who will roll back religious liberty.

The point is that the nation is fractured and fracturing. Both political parties have benefited from the ideological divide they have created, and that historical circumstances have created. What’s new about Trump is that for the first time, many whites are seeing themselves the way Democrats and the liberal media have encouraged blacks, Hispanics, and gays to see themselves: as a tribe.

That particular guardrail was being dismantled long before Trump ever thought about running for president. It didn’t take much to push it over. Only audacity, really.

 

 

The Life-Saving Virtue Of Patience

Here’s an absolutely extraordinary letter from a reader:

I am writing you because three years ago, I was almost murdered. (Yes, I know that’s a grim topic, but trauma can still bring insight nonetheless. Please if you use this email, keep my name anonymous as it is my email. ). Three years ago at the age of 24, I was almost beat to death in a bar in the town where I went to college. My entire face was broken. All of it, essentially. The best example to illustrate the damage that I can give is crushing wet cubes of ice to bits. My attacker got a light felony sentence: two months in jail.

The injury caused severe nerve pain. I was on a serious concoction of a myriad of different opioids- including morphine for around a year. I stopped taking the pills because my body was starting to fail: I was unable to defecate or urinate and nearly lost my ability to breathe. The morphine withdrawals were far far far far far worse than nearly getting murdered and far more horrifying because of the complete social isolation of the trauma. Simply put when you have opioid withdrawals you do so alone; you go out to the fields away from the herd to die alone because nobody cares to know what’s happening. Luckily, I was able to survive that as well with the help of God whose presence I felt when I was vomiting and puking my brains during the withdrawals. Later, I was able to forgive my attacker because of God working in me.

I spent two years unable to maintain full time work due to trigmenial neuralagia which is a severe type of nerve pain. Why this even matters is because when you become down and out- a modern leper if you will- you learn a great deal about the state of man and society writ large. This letter is one of despair, not in God’s plan, but in the societal and cultural black hole emerging. I wish to discuss a few themes: let down and how to respond when you’re wronged.

Currently America is in a state of pure shock and has no hope to latch onto because we have abandoned all societal networks. All I see in our society is only despair and trembling. There is no hope for the system, most people have long ago abandoned. There is no hope in the dreams of most Americans. The christian notion of pain or suffering being redemptive is long gone from most, pain, instead, has become an object of derision. There is no presumption that pain has a higher telos or end, it’s simply something to be avoided and reduced for the individual that encounters it. This absence of finding meaning in pain has profound consequences for society writ large. First off, the stock response to pain or let down or any type of hardship has become to lash out in moral superiority-e.g. the Sanders campaign or Trump whenever someone says something marginally truthful about their campaigns.

Case in point our current political elections. The main trope the two remaining populist candidates have been hammering day in and day out for the last year is: you got screwed and now is the hour of discontent by any means necessary. To Trump, and for that matter Sanders, the only prerogative is simply to scream- I’ve been wronged-and expect the whole world to meet your every demand. Both Trump and Sanders are constantly at war with their own nation demanding outrageous things for past wrongs that the system can’t deliver.

One of the lessons that I learned during my time in the wilderness was how foreign trauma and catastrophe are to a large portion of the nation and for others how it is an everyday fact of their existence. More and more the latter group is growing unable to articulate completely and fully the extent to which they have been wrong because they have no communal language to do so. That is largely gone. The only language we have in America to address pain and suffering is how to reduce it; obviously in and out it self this is not a bad thing, but it presupposes that nothing can be gained from pain and hardship. That when you die from cancer, you simply cease to be. That you get shot, even if terribly, there is no good that can come out of it. This believe, that I see growing, that pain can never bring anything good or redemptive is likely to grow and accelerate in dominating the social, cultural, political, and what’s left of the religious landscape for decades to come.

Now to the second part. How do ought America respond to let down? This is a lesson that I first saw in action Spain and secondly in my life. I lived in Spain for about 3 months after I graduated from college in 2012. What I saw in Spain was an economy and a society in far worse shape than America ever has be en: 30% unemployment, high inflation, a receding economy. What shocked me the most however was how most Spaniards responded to the economic crisis-or La Crisis en espanol. Their response had little to do with the total despair that has invaded America. Their response was shocking because it seemed that their world around them was falling apart but many still were good Catholics and Europeans, still filled with hope of a better tomorrow. I have this picture of their demeanor still in my head: imagine the world falling apart, blowing up around you, and all you do in response is to go to Cafe at 6pm, talk to your friends and engage with what’s left your community. There was a certain patience with suffering that most Spaniards that I feel is missing in America.

My host mother told me in Spanish about how terrible the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century was and all the pain it brought to the country. Most of the elder adults have a clear and distinct memory of el Generalissmo Franco. The cultural memory of the last century lessened the blows of the crisis. There was a long lasting patience that most had with their situation that is missing in America. I learned a ton from my time in Spain. Especially how to wait. Time moves slower in Spanish speaking countries. Life isn’t filled with the hustle and bustle of America. They focus on the immediate: friends, family, and faith and community. Engaging with the immediate helped me endure a crisis of my own. Learning to be patient with the slowness of time taught me not to give up hope. Seeing Spaniards cope with the implosion of their society gave me a rubric to deal with my life imploding for a few years.

Americans and America need to learn how to deal with pain. If you respond to pain and trauma the wrong way, which I think we are, it can poison your soul and your life. I believe this is happening to our country. Hopefully this won’t be a long term trend. Letting go of resentment is a key to survival after betrayal and let down. America must do this if we are to prosper.

I can add nothing to this testimony except: Thank you.

Well, I have one thing to add: when American Christianity repents of its therapeutic heresies, and learns once again how to suffer patiently, communally, and in love, maybe we will have something to teach the broader society.

Will Social Conservatism Survive Trump?

John McCormack at the Weekly Standard has a good piece asking whether social conservatives will be discredited by the Trump phenomenon. He begins by asking if social conservatives should vote for Trump, despite everything. Princeton’s Robbie George says the only thing that could justify such a vote is the Supreme Court — a huge reason, he says, but it’s not an open-and-shut case. More:

“What really concerns me about social conservatives, especially people like Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson—I’d include Bill Bennett in this—are people who have written books about the importance of character,” says Michael Cromartie, who directs the Evangelicals in Civic Life and Faith Angle Forum programs at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

“Evangelical social conservatives are going to lose any cachet in bringing up character questions in the future about anything,” Cromartie says. “They’re just going to lose all credibility.” Cromartie is holding on to a glimmer of hope for a third-party candidate that he can vote for in good conscience.

Maggie Gallagher, the former president of the National Organization for Marriage who now works at the American Principles Project, is another social conservative leader who has already decided that she can’t vote for Trump in November. “The degradation is certain and the benefit is so uncertain that I could not persuade myself to do it,” says Gallagher. Trump lost Gallagher during a debate in March when “the guy who wants to sit in the White House started voluntarily discussing his genitals on national television.”

Gallagher says that supporting “a guy who says crude, disgusting, hateful-to-women, highly sexualized, racist things that violate American principles” would “establish that we don’t care about any of those things.” She fears that a Trump presidency could do more to hurt the conservative project in the long-run than a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court appointment.

I see what Cromartie and Gallagher are getting at, but I have a couple of skeptical questions.

To Gallagher, whose views on Trump’s character I completely share, I would ask: what is the “conservative project”? I don’t want to see a trade war with China either, but it sounds to me like her assumption is that the old Reagan-era coalition of free marketers + national security conservatives + anti-statist libertarians + social conservatives still stands. It does not. After the Indiana RFRA, I consider Big Business the open enemy of my interests as a Christian conservative. That does not mean trade is something to be desired, but it does make me even more skeptical of anything Big Business wants (and I was skeptical anyway). The “conservative project” is dead.

For Cromartie, to what extent do Evangelicals have any credibility on matters of public policy anymore? I don’t ask it in a hostile way, heaven knows, but it’s not clear to me that Evangelicals, speaking as Evangelicals, have much influence to preserve. Is this a way of saying, “If we support Trump, they will kick us out of the public square?” Sounds like it. But has this not already happened? If social and religious conservatives don’t support Trump, it’s not going to win them any friends on the left.

That’s no reason to support Trump, please understand. It’s only that whether or not an Evangelical leader does so likely matters less to his future influence than he thinks.

An Evangelical friend, a college professor, wrote today to point out that “a society can get to a point where it is so corrupt that constructive engagement is no longer a possibility. This is a central teaching of the whole Western tradition. The question is, in part, a prudential one as to when you have reached that point.”

To that question, my friend Jake Meador, the Evangelical writer and Benedict Optioneer, continues to show why he is one of the most important and visionary Christian voices of his generation.

In this post, reflecting on what monastic stability should mean to Evangelicals, Jake says it could mean to quit thinking about influence in the public square, and to surrender the world’s definition of success. Excerpt:

The greater lesson we should learn from monks is not to pursue stability, important as that is. It is to cultivate the virtue of indifference—indifference to results, indifference to the opinions of the sophisticated masses, indifferent to the trends and norms that shape popular culture. That is the key in my friend’s comments—the monastery says “We do not care about 90% of what the world cares about,” and that is one of the fundamental beliefs that explains and preserves the life of the monks.

This sort of indifference is something largely alien to most evangelicals. One of the lessons that can be learned from many of the memoirs being written currently by millennial evangelicals is that we are piercingly aware of ourselves as individual brands and are deeply concerned with cultivating the right sort of public image. This is, to be fair, something our parents taught us, for one of the consequences of the seeker-sensitive movement of the 1980s is that churches and their members learned to think of themselves as products that must be marketed correctly in order to gain new customers.

As is often the case, despite our protestations to the contrary, the greatest problem with younger evangelicals is not that we are unlike our parents, but that we are like them in many mostly bad ways. We did not reject them so much as we learned the wrong lessons from them. The power we give to the opinions of our peers is one area in which we are eerily and distressingly like the generation that came before us.

To be indifferent is, in the sense we are speaking of today, to be confident in the goodness of a certain way of life. It is to be immune to the appeals of popularity and relevance, committed instead to the work we have been given to do. It is to be convinced enough of your vocation that you don’t need to be bothered by many of the things that consume the attention of your peers. It is to say that you are not concerned with finding your next promotion, accumulating life experiences (which you use to build your brand on social media as well as your CV), looking for your next big house, or seeking out the right school to advance your child’s career prospects. It is to be content with the life you have been given and to work in one’s home place for its improvement rather than seeking a better place somewhere else. It is, to borrow a phrase from Berry, to acquire the joy of sales resistance.

The whole thing is very much worth your while.

In a subsequent post, he reflects on the church’s entanglement with Republican politics, and says if the church is dying, it deserves to. Excerpts:

For years, conservative evangelicals, including writers at this site, have tried to defend the religious right where we could, arguing that what we need is not a repudiation of the religious right but a better religious right. We needed a religious right more understanding of how institutions work. We needed a religious right that understood that fighting a culture war requires actually having a Christian culture. We needed a religious right that paid as much attention to daily rituals as it did to world views. But the religious right’s overall project was basically sound and the men leading it were trustworthy. That’s what we told ourselves. So we defended many of the men who have now proven themselves to be so cowardly and lacking the very thing they said the secularists and liberals were missing—a moral compass.

He says the shameful spectacle of older Religious Right leaders prostituting themselves to Trump is

also a cautionary tale about seeking to acquire power and influence while lacking the sort of Christian practice necessary to sustain virtue in the teeth of success. We chased fame and prestige as it is defined by the world and we had it… for awhile. It’s just too bad it clearly cost us our souls. Now the party we pledged ourselves too and which clearly never saw us as anything more than useful idiots is ready to kick us to the curb. But rather than standing by our principles, the purported moral voices of the old religious right are cravenly throwing themselves after the scraps that a racist, womanizing, vulgar, and laughably insecure rich boy brushes off his table.

Whole thing here. You’ll want to read and ponder the last paragraph.

So: maybe the best social-conservative answer to the question, Will social conservatives survive Trump? is to ask in return, Who cares? Concealed within the original question is the assumption that protecting political power and a place in the public square ought to be something religious and social conservatives are worried about. Maybe that’s wrong.

View From Your Table

Lyon, France

M. l’Avocat continues his French holiday, describing his and his beautiful wife’s lunch:

Baguette, St-Marcellin cheese, goat cheese with ash, a mild Roquefort, mixed fresh olives, demi-sel butter, cherries, dates, goose rillette, two kinds of saucisson Lyonnaises and a pâte´ de canard en croute — like Bourdain showed off — and an adult Beaujolais expertly recommended by a wine-store guy to match the food. Eaten over 90 minutes in our apartment (half the price of a hotel) while listening to Charlie Parker.