Rod Dreher's Blog, page 603

A Glimpse at the Scuola Chesterton

Mural at the Scuola Libera G.K. Chesterton (Photo by Rod Dreher)

I mentioned to y’all the other day when I was in Italy that I had been deeply impressed by the Tipiloschi, an orthodox Catholic community in San Benedetto del Tronto, and especially their community school, the Scuola Libera G.K. Chesterton (G.K. Chesterton Free School — the “free” means it is not government supported).

While there, I saw a short promotional clip the school prepared for its English-speaking donors. It was charming, and really captured the sweet spirit of the school. I asked Marco Sermarini, the school’s co-founder and a leader of the Tipiloschi, if he could send the clip to me. Today, the school sent this link to the clip, which I share with their permission. Watch all the way to the end to see Marco and his wife Federica, the school’s principal.

Here’s a link to my post about being with the Tipiloschi last week. Excerpt:

The school’s motto is a quote from Chesterton: “A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

That’s how they roll. They are fiercely, joyously countercultural Catholic traditionalists. I visited the school, had pizza with parents, and the thing you notice most of all is how happy these people are, and how … normal. They are open about how serving Jesus Christ is the guiding principle of everything they do. And they do a lot. There’s the school, which they open to people outside their community, and keep tuition low so working people can afford it. As distributists, they run several cooperatives, including one called Hobbit (they’re big Tolkien fans), that organizes gardening, plumbing, and other kinds of manual labor; part of its function is to give jobs to prisoners trying to transition back into society. They run a sports club, and pooled their resources to buy an abandoned piece of property on top of a hill overlooking the Adriatic. The group and their families have been working to restore it as a retreat. They meet there for sports, for picnics, for mass, for catechism lessons, and for gardening. They have a small farm there to teach their kids (and any other kids who want to come around) how to raise fruits and vegetables.

These people are the best. A model Benedict Option community. Do watch to the end of the Chesterton video clip. You need to see and hear Marco and Federica to get an idea of their spirit, which is the spirit of the school, and the Tipiloschi. To learn more about the Scuola Chesterton, including how you can help them in their mission, click here.

Trump Thuggery

Look, I don’t feel sorry for people who try to disrupt Trump rallies and then find themselves escorted out by cops. I would expect that to happen to anyone who tried to disrupt a political rally and keep the speaker from speaking, and the audience from hearing.

But what happened at the Trump rally in North Carolina last night is incredibly disturbing:

The alleged sucker-puncher, a 78 year old man, was later arrested and charged.

You have probably heard about Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski allegedly manhandling a female journalist for Breitbart — which would not stand up for her.

If Trump becomes president, we are all going to look back on Nixon as a gentle soul. The story goes that stone-cold Nixon enforcer G. Gordon Liddy used to shock party guests by holding his hand firmly over a candle flame without flinching. “What’s the trick?” the shocked guests would ask. Said Liddy, “The trick is, I don’t care.”

With Trump and violence, the trick is, he doesn’t care. It helps his image. Tough guy.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this does have a certain logic. While college administrators and other authority figures fall to pieces over microaggressions, Trump’s people commit actual aggressions, and he doesn’t give a rip.

UPDATE.2: The old coot who socked the protester told Inside Edition, “The next time, we might have to kill him.” Throw the book at that cretin.

Mizzou Pays The Price of Appeasement

Well, the University of Missouri deserves it. David French reports:

For months, news has trickled out of Missouri regarding the negative fallout from the fall student protests. The university capitulated in the face of a racial “crisis” wholly of the protesters’ manufacture (demanding a chancellor’s resignation over random racial incidents completely outside his control), and the chickens are truly coming home to roost. Previously, I’ve posted about declining student applications and declining donations, yet the true dimensions of the financial disaster are only just now coming into focus.

Fox Sports obtained a copy of an e-mail the interim chancellor sent out to the university community, which starts like this:

I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news.

The anticipated declines—which total about 1,500 fewer students than current enrollment at MU€”—in addition to a small number of necessary investments are expected to leave us with an approximate $32 million budget gap for next year.

“Unexpected”?! Please. The entire country knows that Mizzou is a place where student radicals—including the football team—and their faculty and staff supporters bullied the craven administration into caving to their absurd demands. See here for this blog’s coverage last fall of the implosion of administrative character there.

French adds:

Cowardice has its costs. Flagship state universities—backed by the full financial might of the state and its taxpayers—are for now too big to fail, but they’re not too big to suffer. It remains to be seen whether other university administrators will learn the correct lessons from Missouri’s capitulation.

Good. This is all to the good. I hope it happens to every single university that caved. A conservative friend in Kansas says lots of Kansas parents are not considering KU for their kids because of the same kind of nonsense on that campus.

Hit them in the purse. That is the only thing these politically correct college administrators will listen to. Sensible parents don’t want their kids to go to a university ruled by PC stupidity. Bowdoin College in Maine is revealing itself to be a confederacy of crackpots with its insane reaction to the sombrero party. At some point, they must be made to pay a price, or the madness will not end. We are starting to look at colleges for our oldest, and there is no chance—none—that we will consider a college or university that has made free speech, open inquiry, and normal college life hostage to political correctness.

Let’s revisit Jonathan Chait’s essay from last November, responding from the left to the p.c. wave on campus—Mizzou’s in particular. Excerpt:

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

A movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. There you have it. Yielding to left-wing campus bullies has consequences, as Mizzou’s administrators are finding out. May the reckoning spread.

Readers Read Trump

Lots of good Trump commentary today from you readers. Here’s one from Roger H.:

I’m one of those doing quite well, and supporting Mr. Trump’s bid for the Presidency. I’m a degreed mathematician doing research and development in cybersecurity, with a growing portfolio of professional publications, and patents pending. I’m a Marine veteran of the Iraq war whose ‘eggs aren’t too scrambled’. I married woman who went to one of the best schools in the UK and graduated with honors from one of the best universities in the US. I truly believe that my wife, my child, and I will be fine no matter who wins this election.

But I’m cheering Mr. Trump and planning on voting for him.

I come from a medium-sized city in Virginia that has hitched its wagon to the fortunes of the major state university there, as well as the two private colleges in the area. (One of which was briefly mentioned on this blog in the past year.) My hometown is historically a pretty rural area, but that’s changing.

As a case study, I would point you to our local poultry plant. It used to be the case that this plant provided good jobs to a lot of the locals who weren’t college material, but now you’d be hard pressed to find many people who grew up in the county working there. You’d be hard pressed to find more than 15% or so of the workforce fluent in the English Language. The local workforce was replaced by cheaper immigrant labor.

While this has happened, my hometown has become a major drug smuggling point in the East Coast. One of my childhood friends got caught up in the synthetic drug trade and is serving a 30-odd year sentence. There are gangs — Gangster Disciples, SUR 13…I believe I remember hearing about Bloods in the area. This is not the happy, little rural college town that I remember from my childhood. (And I do recognize that it may never have been the town of my childhood memories, but what it has become is NOT an improvement.)

I also LOVE that Mr. Trump is standing up to the blatant dishonesty of political correctness. (But the PC rant is another topic that I haven’t time for this morning.)

Why am I supporting Mr. Trump? My close circle might well benefit a little bit more with another candidate, but I maintain a memory and fondness of the place that I came from and the people there. I’d like to see their world built back up, or at least to see its eroding and creative destruction ceased. Will Mr. Trump accomplish this? I don’t know. He is pretty plainly stating that there’s a problem, diagnosing it reasonably well, and claiming that he can do something about it. That’s something. It’s more than the lip service that we hear from the other candidates. Mr. Trump is…a deeply flawed candidate and man, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Here’s one from Erik Lonnrot:

Rod, at what point do we need to stop merely trying to understand Trump supporters and start trying to stop them? All due respect, there’s nothing about their support for him I don’t understand. I understand them thoroughly. At the end of the day, they support a man who is now a monstrous demagogue and who would be a monstrous tyrant. I empathize with Charles Featherstone, who lucidly recognizes his attraction to Trump as envy. But he’s also lucid enough not to vote for the guy.

Look, I get not want to bolt over to Hilary Clinton. I also get being irate at the GOP and not wanting to vote for any of them in the general election. I would even get not voting in the primary, since virtually everyone except Rand Paul who is not Trump ran on some variation of the policies that got people mad at the party in the first place. (And Paul’s economic ideas are less than feasible at this point in our history.) None of that is a good reason to vote for Trump. If the country really is in decline, Trump is the person who would leave it a smoking crater at the end of four years. Voting for him is madness. Yes, an “understandable” madness, but madness nonetheless.

So. I’ve heard the sob stories. I’ve heard the litany of betrayals. I’ve heard the indictments of the GOP’s bad faith. I swear to you that I get it. None of that is sufficient, in my book, to protect Trumpkins from the fundamentally true criticism that they are knowingly supporting a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, ignorant bully who encourages violence at his rallies and openly brags about abusing the system to make himself richer (and, by logical extension, to make the rest of us poorer). If the Trumpkins get that, and they don’t care, what do we do, Rod? I mean, it’s all well and good to give these people space to air their grievances and disappointments, but from where I sit, they are one hundred percent committed to the wholesale decimation of what precious little respect, civility, and coherent policy debate still remains in national politics. Doesn’t this merit a vigorous, sustained rebuttal or denunciation?

This is important, because Donald Trump is not “single-handedly destroying the Republican Party.” He’s doing it with the hands of every single person who has voted for him, and who has pledged to support his candidacy, however much longer that lasts. And if, God forbid, Trump actually makes it to the White House, he will not be “single-handedly” destroying the United States of America. He will do it with the help of every single one of the people who voted for him. I’ve no love for the Republican Party. They certainly, as they say, had this coming. But Trump is a menace to more than the GOP, and there are ways to weaken and destroy a political party that don’t involve running a crypto-fascist as a viable primary candidate.

At what point, Rod, do his voters start sharing culpability for every racist, misogynist, xenophobic, ignorant thing he says and every act of violence he encourages? Because your posts have made it very clear that they know exactly what kind of person he is. They’re supporting him anyway. Which means that they are knowingly supporting all the evil crap that goes along with it. People of good conscience don’t support that kind of stuff. As I said at the outset, I totally get refusing to vote Republican or Democrat. I get why people are angry. I get why, in theory, they want to vote for someone who will dismantle the status quo. And while I do totally understand why people vote for Trump, a huge part of that understanding is the knowledge that every single one of these people has endorsed, with eyes wide open and their consciences apparently clear, everything diabolical about his campaign as well.

How much time are you going to spend trying to understand that?

Here’s one from BCaldwell:

To the liberals and progressives who still dismiss the travails of the white working class, you only reinforce their alienation and disdain …for you. Here’s a fact that sometimes is lost on liberals and progressives. If the white working class, particularly the white male working class is becoming manifestly unhappy, unmoored and alienated, then the body politic has major problems on their hands.

Some of you have said that they have ignored the Democrats whose economic policies would be better for them and that they voted for the Republicans so they get what they deserved. Well, economically that may be true, but you forget about the other side. If someone was constantly denigrating you , calling you a racist, calling you a bigot and belittling those values that you held as integral , like traditional family, childbearing AFTER marriage. The natural order of things like if you are born a man then , guess what Bubba? You’re a man and no amount of dress up and prosthetic surgery is going to change that. These were values that had kept their grandparents and parents world stable and sustained. Democrat elites look at those people in that world with a more than obvious dose of condescension. Their response: ” I’m not doing you any favors.”

Progressives are beginning to reap what they sowed when they started minimizing and denigrating the “white European heterosexual male…and female.”

Y’all have fun reading and discussing among yourselves. I am going back to bed. Today marks week two with this damned sinus infection, and I am a mess. The antibiotics course ends tomorrow, and I’m still sick.

UPDATE: Doctor’s appointment tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, more good comments while I was crashed. Including:

Another thought provoked by Dancer Girl’s comments:

“I just wish [Trump voters]’d leave him behind and rally around Bernie Sanders.”

Well it would be nice if poor Southern Blacks would do the same.

It’s obvious to many commentators that working-class Republican voters are voting against their own interests by allowing themselves to be fooled by cultural cues and dog whistles. But the big unreported story is that the same thing is happening in the Democratic primaries as well. Poor Southern Blacks are voting by colossal margins for the Wall Street version of the Democratic Party over the socialist version of the Democratic Party. Why? Because the Wall Street candidate is married to a guy who has all his Southern fried cultural cues and dog whistles working right and the socialist has spent too much of his time among up-tight Yankees in Vermont.

Just one more way in which salt of the earth Blacks and Whites aren’t all that different and are, in everything except tribal allegiance, getting more similar all the time. Both put racial honor and dignity over economic self-interest, and for a technocratic, policy-oriented politics aiming to just make lives better, that’s a real problem.

Here’s one from Elli:

I’m having tree work done today. As when I had my roof replaced, there is a white American company owner, and a crew of Hispanic immigrants, most them speaking English with an accent.

We have been struggling. Our income peaked 17 years ago, even with me going to work since then. It helps us that when we need work done we can’t do ourselves that the workmen are being paid only 12 to 15 dollars an hour. But it isn’t right. Those men are doing skilled and dangerous work.

Americans should be doing that work, and they should be being paid more.

And when my husband applies for jobs, he shouldn’t see that half the time, the application is to be sent to the local H1-B center.

And when I apply for jobs, I shouldn’t read “minimum two years experience” while the hospital industry cries shortage and lobbies congress for more foreign nurses.

When I go into an assisted living facility or group home, I shouldn’t see that nearly all the aides are from the Caribbean or Africa, doing difficult and often dispiriting work, that requires great compassion, patience, and observational skill, because the industry – our society – has decreed that that work is worth, at most, 12 to 15 dollars an hour, in one of the most expensive states in the country.

When my son looks for a job with his STEM degree, he shouldn’t read about companies saying STEM shortage, increase the visas, because you know on the job training is impossible.

And yet, somehow, a vulgar, louche, bombastic braggart, who has used eminent domain law to attempt to force a widow out of her home to build a casino parking lot, who has brought in foreigners on temporary visas in preference to hiring Americans, who is accused of fraud by students at his “university” – somehow that man is my family and my countrymen’s best hope, because he MIGHT mean what he says about curtailing immigration – he MIGHT stick with this horse he is flogging towards the election.

 

The Limits of Sympathy

I’ve been blogging a lot here about the white working class and its travails, with reference to Donald Trump’s candidacy. I’ve generally taken the line that however wrong they might be to vote for Trump, and to think that he will do anything for them, their alienation and their instincts ought to be at least understandable, given how things have gone for them, in general, in this country over the last generation.

I want to put up a caution, though. We must not think of the poor and the working class, of whatever race, in the abstract. To regard them mere objects of pity is as mistaken as regarding them as mere objects of scorn. That is, to see them as in no way responsible for their fate is the flip side of seeing them as entirely responsible. It is truly despairing to tell a man that he has no agency to change his life, that he is stuck without hope. It is also, in most cases, a lie, and a seductive lie.

We on the other side of the class divide may look at poor people — white, black, Hispanic, whatever — and tell ourselves that they got what they deserve; this serves the purpose of relieving us of any sense of responsibility to help. Or, we may look at them and tell ourselves that they are innocent victims; this serves the purpose of relieving them of any sense of responsibility for their own lives. Both instances rob both them and us of human dignity.

It’s simply a fact that some people can’t be effectively helped, because their way of life is so destructive, and self-destructive, that they will always be poor, chaotic, and miserable. An extreme example is the White clan of mountainous West Virginia, who were the subject of a documentary a few years back (trailer here). They are so outrageous and dysfunctional that they make the average Jerry Springer Show episode look like the Congress of Vienna. The movie was produced by the people who brought us Jackass, and that makes it kind of a celebration of these crazy hill people and their rebel lives. The Whites keep it real, 24/7.

The thing is, there is nothing beautiful or dignified about their lives. It’s nothing but chaos, drug and alcohol abuse, broken marriages, poverty, law-breaking, and violence, always violence.  They are a threat to their neighbors, and a threat to themselves. A more anti-social family you can hardly imagine. There’s a point in the movie in which one of the clan looks around at the disaster of their collective life, and wonders how in the world it got to be that way. And you, the viewer, may be thinking, “Are you serious? Nobody could live the way you people do and expect anything else.”

All the welfare money and job training in the world cannot overcome what cripples the Whites. It’s an intergenerational culture of poverty — or rather, an intergenerational culture that guarantees poverty for anyone who stays within it. You may well pity the Whites for being so lost — and are they ever; God help the child born into that mess — but when it comes to considering justice for people like that, you would be hard pressed to imagine any other outcome for them, given the way they choose to live.

Granted, the Whites are an extreme case, but they do raise the question: What is a just society? What does a just society owe to people like the Whites? A basic income so they don’t starve, certainly. The opportunity to escape their degradation. But you cannot compel people to change. It is hard to look at the White family and think of their fate as society’s failure. Again, that is not to say that we, as a society, should not try our best to help them. It is to say, though, that their failure to thrive is largely their own fault, and that they will never change anything for them until and unless they change the way they live.

It’s easy for middle-class people and above to look at the very poor, and the nearly-poor, as a Rohrshach test, failing to see the complexity of their lives. For many of us on the other side of the class divide, they are either 100 percent victims of society, or 100 percent to blame for their own misery. But this is rarely the case in real life.

I used to know a guy I’ll call Bobby. White guy. Working-class family. Hard childhood. We all went to the same school. I didn’t know Bobby that well, but I knew him well enough to know that he had it rough at home. His dad was the kind of man who drank and blamed rich people for all his problems. But Bobby was also smart. Problem is, he had a habit of feeling sorry for himself. I know this because I would hear our teachers over the years tell him that he really could do better, and offer to help him. Bobby got really good at giving excuses for why he couldn’t change, why the world was stacked against him.

I haven’t seen Bobby for many years. He doesn’t live in our town anymore. Last I heard, he was barely making it. If he’s anything today like he was back then, he’s still believing that the world has it in for him. To be fair, I don’t know precisely what has happened to him since school days. Maybe he really has been the victim of unjust circumstances. I’m thinking of him this morning, though, because in retrospect, you could see that his personal culture, the one handed on to him by his parents, has been a tremendous burden to him. His parents crippled his imagination. I would not be surprised if Bobby had turned into his dad, and sabotaged his future.

Now, it is true that there aren’t as many opportunities for good working-class jobs around here today as there were when we were kids. But they are still there. Is it Washington’s fault that Bobby suffers? Maybe, to some degree. On the other hand, what responsibility do Bobby’s parents have in what their son became? What responsibility did, and does, Bobby have?

Friends of mine who teach in public schools that have a lot of poor kids in them tell bleak stories, stories that don’t have a lot of hope. The kids see no natural connection between their worldview and their practices — I mean, how they see the world and how they live in the world — and their ultimate fate. They believe, generally speaking, that everything is rigged. They and their parents — or more often than not, parent — are sabotaging their own future by training them to see the world as random, chaotic, and disordered, and to believe that an ordered life has no natural connection to stability and prosperity. It’s very, very hard to break that illusion, I’m told.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring some balance to the Trumpsplaining. Go back and take a look at two Julian Sanchez posts from 2009, about Palin, conservatism, and the politics of ressentiment (resentment). Excerpts from the first post:

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

More:

The elevation of figures like Palin represents an attempt to reappropriate an oppressive stereotype, akin to the way some hip-hop embraces a caricaturish racist vision of violent black masculinity. To be sure, most of what gets cast as “oppression” here is just the decline of privilege, but the perception is what matters for the social dynamic.

Ultimately, this is a doomed project: Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem, assuming they’re not willing to go the Pol Pot route. At the same time, it signals a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies.  It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.

Hence Trump. You people think we’re trashy anyway? OK, we’ll show you — we’ll be who you think we are. Excerpts from the follow-up post:

As for the specific claim that the populist right is currently animated by ressentiment, I don’t think this is a matter of excavating hidden drives from the subconscious; I’m talking about what’s right out in the open. In fact, I want to suggest we need to read a lot of our current political rhetoric more literally and less symbolically. When Fox anchors make fun of Barack Obama’s choice of fancy dijon mustards, or the way he pronounces “Pakistan,” or say he’s “apologizing for America,” we naturally read these as coded claims about something else—as implying effeminacy and insufficient toughness for a commander-in-chief, or a class divide that shows he’s out of touch the concerns of ordinary workers, or an inability to project strength in foreign affairs.  I want to suggest that we take them absolutely literally: This guy eats different mustard than you do, pronounces words differently than you do, and doesn’t share your affection for national symbols. The coded meaning is actually a red herring—it’s just there to obscure the fact that the surface message is the one that matters.

We don’t need to do some kind of probing psychoanalysis, because this stuff isn’t subtext; it’s text.  Remember Palin’s infamous “death panels” post? It wasn’t just a claim that the government would deny care; the fear was that this was Obama’s “death panels” getting to decide how worthy you are. Liberals treated it as a generic argument about “rationing,” but by its own terms it was an argument about being judged. Conservatives’ favorite photo of Obama has him with his nose in the air looking down on the hoi polloi, testifying to his purported arrogance. Then the outrage over a strained reading of an Obama remark about “putting lipstick on a pig”: He’s calling Sarah (and therefore you!) a pig! The message is pretty insistent: They think they’re better than you. It’s not, again, that I’m asking why people hold certain policy views and concluding that it’s really about this kind of cultural resentment. I’m asking why the political coalition organized around this set of views is putting so much emphasis on this frame, and whether it isn’t ultimately a bad idea to.

More:

Maybe because I write a lot about technology and media, I’m biased toward an account of where this is coming from that stresses those changes. When people want to talk about how television changed politics, they invariably cite the Kennedy/Nixon debate, where folks who heard it on the radio thought Nixon won, but those who watched it favored Kennedy. The effect of a media form, however, may depend significantly on the degree of media saturation: We don’t just see the official  debate and a few news clips in the months before the election. We see national political figures constantly—and maybe we’re even Facebook friends or Twitter followers. And when they appear for those big-ticket events, we’re often networked with fellow-travelers in realtime dissecting every gesture and expression. It seems to be offline now, but recall Jon Chait’s New Republic piece about hating George Bush? That smirk! That swagger! The way he mangles English! The visible and audible signifiers of group membership loom much larger. At the same time,demographic clustering is probably increasing the correlation between political ideology and these other cultural markers.

It’s a bit of a truism that new transit technologies always have their greatest transformative effect on those who were previously at the periphery. If you sat in on the media and tech forums at the last CPAC, this was a source of great excitement: Liberal elites used to hold all the levers of media power, and the great boon of the Internet for the right is that they now have a way of bypassing Hollywood and New York. So no big surprise that a lot of what’s initially released will be tinged with previously suppressed resentment aboutnot having that media power, about being immersed in an alien-seeming media stream where the image of who’s glamorous or cool or important or serious doesn’t match your friends, and the admissible moves in the public conversation don’t sound like your conversations. People have read racial undertones into the rallying cry “I want my country back!” and its cognates—probably because this is a strange way to present opposition to a policy agenda, however misguided you might find it. The instinct is right, but I think the conclusion is wrong: Race—and communism, as Tim Curry would remind us—is another red herring. What we’re seeing is the natural sentiment of people who think of themselves as quintessentially American looking at an American popular and public culture that presents them as marginal. Palin or Joe the Plumber reintroduce to politics the promise of reality television: You too can be a celebrity—if not personally, at least by proxy!

Donald Trump is a reality show presidential candidate.

What’s so difficult about all this is that the Trump phenomenon is speaking to real, legitimate grievances, but at the same time is working the politics of ressentiment. How do you discern one from the other? The Republican Party elites have preferred to think of Trumpism as being only about ressentiment, because that delegitimizes it. I think this is a mistake. But it is also a mistake to make it only about the white working class and threatened middle classes finding their voice, and demanding reform. People generally don’t get passionate about politicians on rational grounds. They respond to the story the politician embodies. Barack Obama’s story was irresistible to many Americans in 2008. The Trump narrative is too, for many Americans, in 2016. The left, in particular, never can seem to grasp that cultural identity matters just as much to white working class people as it does to gays, to racial minorities, and other demographic groups that they favor. When people feel dispossessed, throwing more money at them, and treating them as if they were nothing but materialists who would feel differently if only they had better jobs, does not address the problem.

Trying to figure out when to say to Trumpism, “yes, you’re right, we have to change,” and “no, you’re wrong, get over yourselves” is at bottom a question of social justice. And that, in turn, is a question of the common good. Our problem in this country is that we have no real conception anymore of the common good.

American Dignity

I am preoccupied with Trump, and what he means for our nation. He is single-handedly destroying the Republican Party. We haven’t seen a political party collapse in this country in well over a century. It’s happening now. Institutions that are strong don’t collapse overnight. I don’t know that even Trump saw the rot in the GOP. But it was rotten, and that’s why it’s collapsing.

Consider: the last two men standing in the GOP primaries are the two candidates most hated by the Republican establishment: Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Sure, Rubio and Kasich are still officially in contention, but they’re not going anywhere. After next week, Rubio will be out, and even a Kasich win in his home state of Ohio will only prolong the inevitable for him.

Though a conservative, I have not considered myself a Republican for almost a decade, and have come to expect nothing from the Republican Party except more of the same stupid mistakes and policies that brought the country low under the Bush presidency (for which I voted twice). But I had come to think of myself as one of those TAC eccentrics, standing outside of institutional conservatism, throwing brickbats. There seemed to be no cracking the bubble. The GOP machine was going to keep churning out candidates for whom it was always 1980, and that was just how it was going to be.

And now Trump. I think back to watching his Mobile rally — August 21, 2015 — on TV, the first time I had seen an entire Trump campaign speech. Thirty thousand people came out to hear him. And the speech was ridiculous — a rambling mess. I snorted that anybody would be taken in by this nonsense. I didn’t care for any of his competitors either, but at least they gave coherent speeches. This guy? Clown.

Seven months later, he’s still giving the same speeches. And now he’s probably going to be the Republican nominee. It’s an incredible thing. Nobody has ever seen a thing like this in American politics. How did the once-mighty Republican Party fall like this? Why did its authority collapse so thoroughly, and so quickly?

It took an outsider so rich that he didn’t have to depend on the party’s donors to fund his campaign. But Ross Perot was that rich guy back in 1992, and he choked. But that was near the beginning of globalization. A quarter-century later, and we’re living in a different nation.

I want to share with you an insightful post by Charles Featherstone, who is a friend of this blog’s. Charles, as you may recall, wrote an amazing memoir about his difficult life, his passing through Islamic radicalism, and hearing a divine call to become a Christian on 9/11, as he worked in downtown Manhattan. Charles’s book began as a long e-mail to me, a critical response to something I wrote about Pope Francis. Here is the original letter from Charles; I suggest you read it in preparation for what I’m about to quote. The point is that Charles has been beat up pretty bad by life. It’s still happening. He’s a middle-aged white guy struggling for work, struggling to find solid ground.

And he likes Donald Trump.

No, he’s not going to vote for him. Charles is not particularly conservative, either. But he likes Trump, and he explains why in this post. Excerpts:

As someone who was told, by the respectable heads of a deeply respectable institution, that I am not a respectable person and have no place in respectable society (and I have heard some version of this my entire life), to see Donald Trump succeed is … well, gratifying. There is nothing respectable about the man. His tawdry, messy life is an open book, his mouth something of a festering, running sore. He’s not much of a thinker. His use of the law to advance his fortune is rather shameless. But honestly, I wish I could live that shamelessly, with that kind of courage, and that kind of persistence, and not have my life and my words constantly held against me. Or not care, because the judgements of gate-keepers don’t matter. Trump is poking all of the right people in the eyes for all the right reasons. I don’t so much care that he wins, but I am enjoying the spectacle of watching someone live so openly and so honestly. He’s coarse and crude, but he appears to make no pretenses. He offends all the right people. He seems to be honest about who he is. That’s not the same as speaking the truth — Trump speaks very little of that. But as someone who has lived in a world that has held the fact that I am Charles Featherstone against me, I am in awe.

I wish I could do that. I wish I could get away with it. And succeed as spectacularly as Trump is.

Past that, though, what he actually says resonates with me. Some. Mostly his anger, the anger he channels of people who do not matter, and who know they do not matter, who know the world is increasingly rigged against them.

Charles talks about the immigration issue, and how he has benefited personally from immigration — for example, in the friends he has met who were immigrants, and who cared for him when nobody else would. More:

But it always struck me there was some other agenda to the immigration. That there still is. I’m not sure what. So immigration — legal, illegal, refugees — makes me uneasy. And I hear, somewhere in the background as I struggle and try to eke out a marginal existence, unable to find meaningful work or care for the people I want to care for — from the advocates for immigration, whether progressive or conservative: “You are privileged, and so you must sacrifice, you must be made to sacrifice. We will take from you and we won’t care what becomes of you. Because you no longer matter.”

So, as horrific as Trump’s pronouncements on immigration are, honestly, they speak to me. They shouldn’t, but they do.

Trump channels something — the rage and desperation of a people who know they don’t matter anymore. Whose lives and wellbeing have become a blight, an embarrassment, who are now disposable. Yes, they have may been a privileged people once, knowing the order of the world arising from the great struggles of the first half of the 20th century was arranged for them, and may be struggling for privilege again, but they also know politics has told them — economically and socially — “lie down and die.” That they are white, and crude, and prone to brutality and violence, frequently not very compassionate or empathetic, all-too-often confused by the world, and that their religion is simplistic and mostly idolatrous, all that makes it hard to sympathize with them. (I find it hard.) But you leave people behind at your peril. You can tell them to “lie down and die,” and some will. But many won’t.

Read the whole thing.  Charles foresees tragedy. He compares Trump to Hugo Chavez, who rose to power by making the masses of people who are nobodies in their country feel like somebody was standing up and speaking for them. Yet (says Charles), Chavez ruined his nation. Would a President Trump do that to America? Charles believes the country is already well on its way to ruin.

Charles Featherstone is not an optimist.

Look, not everybody who votes for Trump is poor, or working class, or struggling economically. One Trump supporter I know lives in a million-dollar house; he just hates what his party has become, and voting Trump (as he did in his state’s primary) is a way of sending a message to the RNC. He might have sent it before with his vote, but there was no message candidate to vote for. Point is, Trump is drawing from all demographic groups. Come to think of it, it might actually be more interesting to find out why Republicans for whom America has been working pretty well are going for Trump.

Still, voices like Charles Featherstone’s must be heard. Here’s something by Michael Cooper Jr., a lawyer writing from his home in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina:

Now, I walk into the courtroom every week and see the faces of childhood friends in a town where 23 percent of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent never finished high school.

So if there are winners and losers in America, I know the losers. They lost jobs to China and Vietnam. And they’re dying younger, caught in an endless cycle of jail, drug charges and applying for disability to pay the child support bill.

They lost their influence, their dignity and their shot at the American Dream, and now they’re angry. They’re angry at Washington and Wall Street, at big corporations and big government. And they’re voting now for Donald Trump.

And:

His supporters realize he’s a joke. They do not care. They know he’s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who’ve long ignored their interests.

When you’re earning $32,000 a year and haven’t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn’t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America’s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price.

Reading these essays made me think about the future for my three kids. The oldest is 16. It never occurs to me that they are going to have trouble making it in the world. They’re going to graduate college, and get on the career track. Or so I tell myself. Truth is, I don’t know this to be true at all. I live in a bubble. America “works” for me and mine … until it doesn’t. Then what?

I haven’t cast a vote for president in the last two elections (a write-in protest vote in ’08 doesn’t count) because I have no faith in either party. Michael Cooper Jr. writes:

As productivity climbed, working-class Americans wanted their wages to rise also. Instead, Republicans gave them tax cuts for the rich while liberal Democrats called them racists and bigots.

Yep. And I would add that Republicans gave them needless foreign wars. Who needs a conservative party like that? A conservative activist chided me on Twitter yesterday for not getting behind Ted Cruz, who is “a Reagan conservative.” As if the Soviet Union were still a menace, and there was no economic problem that couldn’t be fixed by tax cuts and deregulation.

Let me say it again: I think Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a demagogue who would be a terrible president, possibly even a tyrant. But I get why people less secure economically than I am don’t care, and are for him anyway. Hell, in Louisiana, our crackpot Gov. Earl K. Long was a total buffoon, and probably insane — but he came from somewhere, and he did a lot of good for poor people who were ignored by proper, respectable people in the establishment. If you are a mainstream Republican or Democrat, and aren’t trying to understand Trump’s appeal (as opposed to simply writing his backers off as racist clods), then you are making a big, big mistake. Trump may be denied the GOP nomination, in the end, and he probably won’t be elected president. But the people he motivated, and who voted for him, they aren’t going away — and neither are their problems and concerns.

Who will speak for them then?

 

Time of the Pig-Man

It’s a new world:

It would require a grueling series of operations, but transgender women now see hope that they could one day become pregnant — despite having been born biological males — thanks to pioneering uterus transplant surgery.

“I hope it becomes a reality,” said Chastity Bowick, 30, a medical case manager in Worcester, Mass. “I absolutely would be willing to do it.”

Bowick began her gender transition at 19, but she knew she wanted to be a mom long before that. “Ever since I was old enough to understand the concept of parenting, I wanted to be a mother,” she said. “I didn’t know how that would ever happen, but that’s what I wanted.”

Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic on Monday introduced the recipient of the nation’s first uterus transplant, performed late last month. The 26-year-old patient, identified only as Lindsey, said she has adopted three boys through foster care but has always dreamed of the opportunity to carry a child. The Cleveland Clinic team plans to do at least nine more transplants as part of a clinical trial.

A psychologist weighs in:

“If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” she said. “Looking like a woman, feeling like a woman, and being able to bear a child like a woman. The whole notion of being like anyone else who wants to carry a baby — the opportunity for that is blowing people’s minds, in a good way.”

Livin’ the dream. News today that the uterine transplant has failed. But of course they will keep trying. Until they make a man pregnant with another woman’s uterus that they have transplanted.

Fifteen years ago, J. Bottum wrote:

On Thursday October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don’t want to go together.

Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig’s egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to 32-cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow.

There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use. The only intended use is to make animals, the head of Stem Cell Sciences, Peter Mountford, claimed last week, backpedaling furiously once news of the pig-man leaked out of the European Union’s patent office. Since the creatures are 3 percent pig, laws against the use of people as research subjects would not apply. But since they are 97 percent human, experiments could be profitably undertaken upon them and they could be used as living meat-lockers for transplantable organs and tissue.

But then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators’ purpose is not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it. The creation of the pig-man is proof that we can overcome the genetic barriers that once prevented cross-breeding between humans and other species. At last, then, we may begin to design a new race of beings with perfections that the mere human species lacks: increased strength, enhanced beauty, extended range of life, immunity from disease. “In the extreme theoretical sense,” Mountford admitted, the embryos could have been implanted into a woman to become a new kind of human — though, of course, he reassured the Australian media, something like that would be “ethically immoral, and it’s not something that our company or any respectable scientist would pursue.”

But what difference does it make whether the researchers’ intention is to create subhumans or superhumans? Either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity.

It’s all of a piece. Here is philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie, from his book The Theological Origins of Modernity, on the failures of the radical Hegelians of the 19th century, and beyond:

In place of the existing order they imagined a world in which everyone would be able to do whatever they wished, to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and be a critical critic in the evening.” However, such universal freedom and prosperity could only be achieved if nature were completely mastered. To achieve this goal, they believed it would thus be necessary to free human productive forces by means of a revolutionary overthrow of the existing social and political order.

It wasn’t Marxism, but market capitalism and bourgeois individualism that would be far more effective at overthrowing the social and moral order that stood in the way of the revolution. More Gillespie, on what events of the first half of the 20th century did to the revolutionary dream:

Modernity, which had seemed on the verge of providing universal security, liberating human beings from all forms of oppression, and producing an unprecedented human thriving, had in fact ended in a barbarism almost unknown in previous human experience. The tools that had been universally regarded as the source of human flourishing had been the source of unparalleled human destruction. And finally, the politics of human liberation had proved to be the means to human enslavement and degradation. The horror evoked by these cataclysmic events was so overwhelming that it called into question not merely the idea of progress and enlightenment but also the idea of modernity and the conception of Western civilization itself.

We never learn. The world that came into being when the 14th century nominalists decided that matter has no intrinsic meaning, and we humans can do with it whatever we will “for the relief of man’s estate” (as Francis Bacon said in the 16th century) is reaching its ripeness. And people who think things like this are not only normal, but a moral advance, dare to speak of Trump’s “depravity.” Yeah, I agree that he is depraved. But we lived in twisted, depraved times. The time of the pig-man, and the man who thinks he’s a woman who wants to have a uterus implanted so he can bear a child. No limits. None.

A Catholic Neocon Collapse?

I’m getting e-mails from conservative Catholic readers who are ticked off by the “open letter” from conservative Catholic leaders, urging Catholic voters to reject Trump and to vote instead for “a genuinely reformist candidate.” The signatories are a Who’s Who of prominent conservative Catholics, among them Robert P. George of Princeton, and George Weigel. I’ll cite two that came in at about the same time.

One reader, a regular churchgoer, writes with disgust, saying that there are no “genuinely reformist” candidates, just Republicans with the same old same old. Plus, says the reader, the signatories say the Republican Party has been an imperfect vehicle for Catholic interests, but she hasn’t seen these signatories criticizing the GOP for falling short of Catholic teaching.

Another conservative Catholic reader, a lawyer who is also a regular churchgoer, writes to say that this open letter, and the Pope’s recent remarks critical of Trump, have pushed him into Trump’s camp. He was already furious over George Weigel’s backing for the Iraq War, and what he believes is the “Catholic neocon establishment”‘s failure to pay any kind of price for its failure in allying itself so closely with the Bush Administration. He writes:

I haven’t voted since Bush Jr.’s first term. I think I’m going to do it this time. To hell with the Republican establishment and the Catholic neocon establishment. And to hell with the Pope for his comment about not being a Christian for wanting to build walls.

This is an astonishing political and cultural moment on the Right. When grassroots orthodox Catholics no longer believe that their leaders, both ecclesial and lay, speak and lead in their interests, the world as we conservatives have known it for at least the last 30 years begins to fall apart. Personally, I don’t fault these Catholic leaders (some of whom are friends of mine) for taking a stand on an issue that they feel strongly about, especially one as critically important as the American presidency. But I also understand why these conservative Catholic readers interpret the statement as an attempt to shore up a party establishment that has failed, even on Catholic terms.

I’m reminded of something a friend of mine, a well-known journalist, told me about a conversation he had during the run-up to the Iraq War with a prominent conservative Catholic. The journalist, a secular liberal, said he challenged the conservative on why he and his Catholic ideological confreres were standing in favor of the Iraq War, and against their hero, Pope John Paul II. He said that the conservative Catholic told him that yes, he had more misgivings than he was letting on publicly, but it was important to maintain solidarity on the Right. If we (meaning social conservatives) want to see progress on the issues we care about, the conservative reportedly said, then we have to give on these other issues.

Even war.

That’s Realpolitik, I suppose. But now the conservative Catholic establishment might be paying a price for its overidentification with the Republican establishment. This may be like Evangelical grassroots conservatives defying Evangelical leaders and voting for Trump anyway.

I could be wrong. These are only two readers, mind you, but I have heard similar things from other readers prior to the “open letter,” and I would not be surprised if there were many more like them. And if so, that means that the long alliance between conservative Catholics and the Republican Party may be drawing to an abrupt end. It’s not that they’re going to the Democrats, not as long as the Democrats remain pro-abortion and sold out to the Sexual Revolution. But if the sentiment in these e-mails is representative of a significant number of conservative grassroots Catholics, the Republican Party is watching the collapse of the Neuhaus-Weigel-Novak pillar of Catholic neoconservatism.

Does anybody have any non-anecdotal evidence of this? Or evidence that counters this hypothesis? It has been pointed out that Evangelicals who are regular churchgoers are generally not Trump supporters. What about Catholics? Both of the readers who wrote me are regular churchgoers, but again, that’s just anecdotal. If you find any hard polling evidence, let me know.

Today In Trumpsplaining

A couple of good pieces for your consideration, one from the right, the other from the left. First, from the right, here’s one by Trump backer John Kluge, a lawyer and veteran of two Mideast deployments. Excerpts:

Let me say up front that I am a lifelong Republican and conservative. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life and have voted in every presidential and midterm election since 1988. I have never in my life considered myself anything but a conservative. I am pained to admit that the conservative media and many conservatives’ reaction to Donald Trump has caused me to no longer consider myself part of the movement.

I would suggest to you that if you have lost people like me, and I am not alone, you might want to reconsider your reaction to Donald Trump. Let me explain why.

OK, let’s hear it.

[I]t doesn’t appear to me that conservatives calling on people to reject Trump have any idea what it actually means to be a “conservative.” The word seems to have become a brand that some people attach to a set of partisan policy preferences, rather than the set of underlying principles about government and society it once was.

Conservatism has become a dog’s breakfast of Wilsonian internationalism brought over from the Democratic Party after the New Left took it over, coupled with fanatical libertarian economics and religiously driven positions on various culture war issues. No one seems to have any idea or concern for how these positions are consistent or reflect anything other than a general hatred for Democrats and the left.

Lost in all of this is the older strain of conservatism. The one I grew up with and thought was reflective of the movement. This strain of conservatism believed in the free market and capitalism but did not fetishize them the way so many libertarians do.

This strain understood that a situation where every country in the world but the US acts in its own interests on matters of international trade and engages in all kinds of skulduggery in support of their interests is not free trade by any rational definition. This strain understood that a government’s first loyalty was to its citizens and the national interest. And also understood that the preservation of our culture and our civil institutions was a necessity.

All of this seems to have been lost. Conservatives have become some sort of schizophrenic sect of libertarians who love freedom (but hate potheads and abortion) and feel the US should be the policeman of the world. The same people who daily fret over the effects of leaving our society to the mercy of Hollywood and the mass culture have somehow decided leaving it to the mercies of the international markets is required.

Tell us more:

Third, there is the issue of the war on Islamic extremism. Let me say upfront that I am a veteran of two foreign deployments in this war. As a member of the 1% who have served in these wars which movement conservatives consider so vital, my question for you and every other conservative is just when the hell did being conservative mean thinking the US has some kind of a duty to save foreign nations from themselves or bring our form of democratic republicanism to them by force? I fully understand the sad necessity to fight wars and I do not believe in “blow back” or any of the other nonsense that says the world will leave us alone if only we will do the same. At the same time, I cannot for the life of me understand how conservatives of all people convinced themselves that the solution to the 9/11 attacks was to forcibly create democracy in the Islamic world. I have even less explanations for how — 15 years and 10,000-plus lives later — conservatives refuse to examine their actions and expect the country to send more of its young to bleed and die over there to save the Iraqis who will not save themselves.

Read the whole thing here.

Next, from the left, here’s a Trumpsplainer by Thomas Frank, author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? Frank begins by talking about how the chattering class talks constantly about how the reason for Trump’s success is RACISM. And Frank concedes that there is real bigotry in Trump’s campaign and among his supporters. But this fact, he says, justifies serious blindness on the part of outsiders. Excerpts:

Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

More:

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?

Frank interviews a couple of labor leaders and researchers, who tell him that from what they see, the Trump phenomenon is driven by despair over the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Lots of blue-collar Democrats are backing Trump because they (rightly) see Hillary Clinton as a candidate of the kinds of trade deals that send their jobs overseas — which makes her no better than her GOP alternatives, save one. Frank says these are the kind of people the Democratic Party was supposed to help, before it became the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. More:

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

Read the whole thing.

Trump University (Not What You Think)

A reader who is a college professor writes:

What I’ve been reflecting on is the possible parallels between the Trump phenomenon and the current situation higher education.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the growing economic-power gap between the administrative class in higher education and those who actually deliver the goods: the professors, but especially the exploding sector of adjuncts and those who manage on-line courses.  The latter are, of course, barely compensated and overworked.  They cobble together inhumane teaching loads in order to make a living.  Meanwhile, the administrative class, whose historic role has ostensibly been to serve and to protect those who teach, continues to cash in (quite literally) through their efforts to “streamline delivery” in higher education.

Here’s just a sample of what’s out there on the trend of administrative bloat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0

http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/

https://www.higheredjobs.com/articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=623

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html

Granted, there are different ways of interpreting what is happening in higher education.  Some of it is mid-level administrative bloat (for an increasing array of student services) and not merely increases in executive compensation.  Still, I think an argument can be made that the “working class” within colleges and universities (i.e., the professoriate) – especially those who teach in non-professional disciplines (e.g., general education, liberal arts courses) – feel an increasing distance from the “administrative establishment” that “governs” them.  An example of this is the recent debacle at Mount Saint Mary’s College.

Obviously, faculty in higher education don’t always straightforwardly “elect” the administrative class.  But if Trumpism in the civic realm is partly explained by the sense that many voters have of being let down by the leadership who should have been looking out for their interests, and if my instincts about there being a parallel phenomenon taking place in higher education are right, then higher education in America could be in for the kind of bumpy ride that the GOP has been experiencing during this election cycle.

How that tension in higher education might play out will likely be different than how it’s playing out in the current presidential race.  Barring poor job performance (as defined by the administrative class), college and university executives aren’t regularly required to vacate their seats of power in the manner of our elected officials.  Thus, there’s a sense in which administrative protectionism (i.e., protecting one’s set of power) in higher education might even be stronger than it is in politics.  And the edifice that protects that power in American higher education (e.g., federal funds and the policies that govern their use, accrediting bodies) is big and powerful.

Perhaps the only “solution” for those who see the situation in American higher education in this way is to establish alternative institutions of higher education in the spirit of your Benedict Option.  The difficulty here is that doing this will likely require more courage than most academics possess, myself included.  Our felt need for academic credibility and peer validation makes us beholden to the academic establishment.  Trumpism in the political realm costs little; it’s just a vote.  An anti-establishment vote, one motivated by a sense of administrative betrayal in higher education, would mean academic exile, effectively a form of academic suicide.

Readers — especially college faculty, staff, and administration — what do you think? What would a “Trump movement” in the sense this professor means look like if it took off on campus?