Rod Dreher's Blog, page 604

Escape To Flyover Country

This is a neat story. Last year, Christopher Ingraham, a Washington Post reporter who writes stories based on what he finds mining data sets, did a piece on the best places to live. According to the data he was using, the worst place in America was rural Red Lake County, Minn.

When he called it that in the paper, people in Red Lake County were upset — but very polite about it! Someone invited him out to visit, and Ingraham went. It turns out that Red Lake County is a beautiful place to live. He liked it a lot. And then he got to thinking:

My wife Briana and I have twin sons who are now two years old. Being from small upstate New York towns ourselves, we began talking of raising them — at least for a time, before they start school — out in the country. Somewhere with a little more space than our 900-square-foot Baltimore County rowhouse which, while a lovely place for a couple to live, was starting to chafe against the energy and enthusiasm of a pair of raucous boys.

Life along the I-95 corridor was starting to lose its charm too. I commute in to D.C. most days. A one-way trip, involving car, train, metro and a walk takes about 90 minutes on a good day. I count myself among that woebegone 2.62 percent of workers who spend 15 hours or more each week stuck in traffic, shivering on subway platforms, and otherwise squandering a huge chunk of their waking hours on one of their most-hated activities.

For me, a 15-hour commute meant a lot of things. It meant going on blood pressure medication at the age of 34 because there’s no time to exercise. It meant getting to see the kids for maybe 30 minutes on a good night, at the end of the day when we’re all tired and ornery. It meant missed opportunities to read, write and think, because it’s hard to do justice of any of those things in the calm intervals of a commute involving four modes of transit.

Yep, they’re moving to Red Lake County. I hope he has a chance to read The Little Way of Ruthie Leming — I bet the Ingrahams find in Red Lake County a lot of what we found here in West Feliciana Parish.

Ingraham can do this because, like me, he works online — and because, like me, he has an employer generous enough to let him work far outside the office. He understands how privileged he is in this respect:

When I get to Red Lake County this spring, I’ll still be doing what I do now — writing on data — just remotely. The most important tools of my trade, after all, are a phone line and a good Internet connection. You can download arcane government datasets — like that natural amenities index — just as well from Minnesota as from D.C.

That fact that I’m incredibly fortunate to be in this position isn’t lost on me. Many of my fellow commuters on that train — the doctors and construction workers and the retail managers — don’t have the luxury of doing their work from anywhere. For the time being, at least, they’re forced to make an all-too familiar trade-off.

I know just what he means. I never imagined that there would be a time in my life in which I would enjoy living a quieter life in the country, but every time I go back to a big city on business, I realize how much happier I am living where the air is clean and life is calmer. As I type this, I’m looking out the kitchen window at the chickens in the back yard, and, well, I love that. Funny how things change.

If you have the kind of job that you can do online, I encourage you to think seriously about relocating to a small town. (Hey, if you’re an Orthodox Christian, consider relocating here to West Fel; we need more voices in our choir!) For me, the things that I loved so much about a big city, but didn’t have when I was growing up in a small town — access to bookstores and movies — are now available here thanks to the Internet. There are other great things here that you can’t get in the big city, or over the Internet. It’s not an answer for everybody, but if you are like Christopher Ingraham, and have the liberty to move, and are worn down by the stresses of city life, why not think seriously about it?

I would like to invite readers who have made the small-town move to talk about their experiences, both good and bad. Would you recommend it? What would you do differently? What do you know now that you wish you had known then? And: why should exhausted city or suburban dwellers think about moving to your small town or rural county? Answer seriously — you’d be surprised how many people read this blog. Somebody might just take you up on it.

Secret Trump Voters

In a comment on the Trump the Trickster post, Sam M went all Occam’s Razor on us:

Strangers to the primitive. Jungian analysis. Psychogenic storms.

Gadzooks. Maybe that’s our Loki right there. I mean, look. We can talk all day about what kind of mass psychosis is leading to Donald Trump. Maybe sometimes the hardest thing is seeing what’s right in front of your face.

In 1993, while I was in college, I got a summer job in a factory in my hometown. I made $11.66 an hour and time and a half for anything over eight hours in any day. I worked a ton and made about $10,000 in three months. Guys in my high school class who were working there full time made about 30-40 percent more per hour.

Right now, the starting wage in this area is more like $9.50 an hour. The plant I worked at is gone.

Twenty three years later, and the NOMINAL starting wage has gone DOWN 18.5 percent. Of course, $9.50 an hour today is the equivalent of about $5.60 an hour in 1993. So the real starting wage has gone down more like 53 percent.

Over that time a regular-cab Ford F-150 has gone from starting at about $11,000 to starting at about $26,000.

In 1993 I could have put a 90 percent down payment on a new truck by working part time at a summer job for a few months. Twenty three years later a guy would need to work the same job for a year and half or so. Except he can’t because that job went away.

In the summer of 1993 I earned enough to pay for TWO full years of tuition at Penn State. Today a kid in my position might earn enough for half a semester.

So that guy is mad. And now he’s hearing that he’s a racist, the big problem for college kids is racist chicken dishes in the cafeteria and an insufficiently militant attitude toward sombreros, and by the way tell your daughter to watch out for the occasional penis in the school locker room. Because she will need to graduate and get a good job to pay all the reparations required to pay for her unfair privileges.

Do we really need to look to Jung to see why this guy thinks he might need to pull the level for someone other than Mitt or Jeb or Hillary or any of the other politicians who oversaw that transition? Is it really that mysterious? Do we need to bring Joseph Campbell into it?

Heh. Reminds me of this fascinating piece in The Guardian, in which some of the left-wing British newspaper’s American readers told them why they are voting Trump, but not telling a soul. Excerpts:

The gay Arab Muslim student (20, Missouri)

As a gay muslim, the Republican Party has not been kind to me, to say the least. However the Democrats almost arrogantly expect me to hand my vote to them because of who I am, which insults me.

I am a son of immigrants but we have always followed the law to the letter. Donald Trump’s discussion on immigration is extremely relevant. I even support the temporary ban on Muslims, even though I still have many law abiding family members in Syria who deserve the opportunity to come to the US and escape the horrors of the war. We don’t vet these people properly. To let them in willy nilly is ludicrous.

Trump will break the poisonous bonds that hold America and the cult state of Saudi Arabia. Clinton would never do that; she would continue supporting Saudi Arabia while bombing Islamic countries left and right.

My parents are horrified at the thought of a Trump presidency. They say things like “Trump is going to round up all the Muslims and put them in camps.” For all his bombastic remarks, Trump will not attack innocent Muslim countries. Ironically enough, he may be the best thing for moderate average Muslims. He isn’t our enemy, he is the enemy of the globalist Wahhabi cult that has propagated mass violence and murder through out the world.

The anti-PC college professor (50, California)

‘I’m angry at forced diversity’

I’m a liberal-left college professor in the social sciences. I’m going to vote for Trump but I won’t tell hardly anybody.

My main reason is anger at the two-party system and the horrible presidencies of Obama and Bush. But I’m also furious at political correctness on campus and in the media.

I’m angry at forced diversity and constant, frequently unjustified complaints about racism/sexism/homophobia/lack of trans rights. I’m particularly angry at social justice warriors and my main reason to vote Trump is to see the looks on your faces when he wins.

It’s not that I like Trump. It’s that I hate those who can’t stand him. I want them to suffer the shock of knowing all their torrents of blog posts and Tumblr bitch-fests and “I just can’t …” and accusations of mansplaining didn’t actually matter. That they’re still losing. And that things are not getting better for them. They’re getting worse.

Read the whole thing. It’s enlightening.

UPDATE: You may be wondering, “Why is Dreher posting so much on Trump?” The answer is because he is the biggest political story since Reagan, and maybe even bigger than Reagan — not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. That is, what he’s a symptom of.

Trump The Illusion-Shatterer

Jonathan Chait has a pretty good article about why Trump puts such fear into the hearts of GOP establishment intellectuals:

The secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished product. Trump has shown movement conservatives how terrifyingly rickety that machine is and how easily it can be seized from them by a demagogue and repurposed toward some other goal.

He’s on to something, but I would suggest a somewhat different spin on it.

At least since the days of Reagan, movement conservatives have thought of themselves as outsiders, as men (and women) of the people, the Real Americans. Even after they had spent years in Washington, they thought of themselves as in Washington, but not of it. They believed themselves to be representatives and advocates of the patriotic heartland. Unlike liberal coastal elites, they loved America, were proud of America, and defended her and her interests. Elites may try to foist their agendas on We The People, but in the minds of Republican elites, it was they who stood in the breach fighting those Elites. When National Review, in a Clinton-era cover story, crowned Rush Limbaugh “Leader of the Opposition,” they were not wrong. This is what the Republican Party had become. Its leaders saw their interests perfectly aligned with conservative talk radio’s, which represented the views of the People.

In this narrative, to use Bill Buckley’s famous phrase, the liberal Democrats were the faculty of Harvard University; the conservative Republicans were the first 500 people in the Cambridge phone book. Washington Republicans were of the people. Or so they thought, so long as the People were voting for them.

Now it turns out that the People prefer Trump and Cruz. It turns out that the People were actually absorbing all that GOP anti-government, anti-elite rhetoric these past 35 years, and have now turned it on the Washington class that used that rhetoric so effectively to mobilize the People against liberals. This is such a shock to the Establishment Republican class because they really did believe their own story. 

Pascal-Emanuel Gobry recommended the other day, as a guide to understanding the Trump phenomenon, a classic World War II memoir, historian Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat. You can get it for only $2.99 on Kindle, and I did; it’s worth it. Bloch wrote his analysis shortly after France’s 1940 fall to the Germans. Bloch, a veteran of World War I, had been a French officer facing the German blitzkrieg. He went underground and served in the Resistance, and was captured, tortured, and killed. His manuscript survived, and was published after the war.

PEG sums up the relevance of Bloch’s unsparing analysis of France’s fall to our political situation here:

Even though Bloch is not kind to the common people, it is clear that the biggest problem is a widespread failure of French elites to look to the common good and offer a vision for the future. Similarly, since the Bush presidency collapsed under the failures of Iraq, Katrina, and the financial crisis, almost everybody who counts for something in the Republican Party has been implicated in a failure of imagination and a failure to seek or promote a vision and a governing agenda.

The GOP establishment has been preoccupied by appeasing donors while throwing as few bones as possible to the base. The big money guys have been focused only on winning elections. The Tea Party tried to destroy the establishment, but did not suggest how to replace it with anything better. The GOP has been unimaginative and cowardly and too preoccupied by narrow self-interest. The institution is a stately mansion where decades of water damage have weakened the foundation. It only takes a small storm to bring the whole thing down.

This is the lesson of Marc Bloch for today’s Republican Party. Who is to blame? Everyone.

On that “failure of imagination,” Bloch is relentless in faulting France’s High Command for fighting the last war. As a military analyst, Bloch says that the Germans’ greatest advantage was speed. The German High Command had absorbed the fact that great leaps in technology since World War I had dramatically accelerated the pace of war. Much more ground could be covered in much shorter amounts of time than only two or three decades earlier. Even though there was no reason for the French High Command to be blind to the same lessons, they were — even after the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland the year before revealed exactly what the German battle plan was: speed and ruthlessness.

Bloch shows that the French High Command was so enamored of the lessons of World War I that it blinded itself to real and important changes in the way war was fought. We all know the cliché about how generals are always fighting the last war. Bloch shows in his short book that it really was true in the case of France’s High Command — and it left them shocked and powerless in the face of the Germans.

Reading Bloch puts all this idiotic Reagan worship of the GOP High Command in perspective. The devastating failure in Iraq, the massive structural changes in the economy over the past 20 years, the skyrocketing illegal immigration from 1990-2010 — none of this penetrated their thinking.

Again, consider how crazy it is that until Donald Trump broke the taboo on stage earlier this year in the South Carolina debate, no Republican presidential candidate from 2008 onward had ever dared to say the Iraq War was in any way a failure. This is not a healthy party. This is not a healthy party elite. I don’t believe that this election is all about Iraq, or even mostly about Iraq, but the way the elites (candidates, consultants, Congressmen, party officials, intellectuals, et al.) have handled, or failed to handle, the Iraq issue is indicative of their entire approach.

They were still living in the glory years of Reaganism, oblivious to the many failures of the party’s leadership. For the French generals in Bloch’s narrative, it was perpetually 1918, because those were the days of their youth, and those were the days where the memories made on the Great War’s battlefields were seared into their minds. But they became old men, and because they were old men, they led their nation’s army into catastrophe. In terms of the Republican Party, you think back to 2008 and 2012, with the GOP candidates standing on debate stages trying to outdo each other in posing as the heir to Reagan, and you realize in retrospect that you were looking at French generals who thought they were gearing up to re-fight the Great War.

As for the rest, PEG is right: Bloch spares no one. He says that parochial interests prevented not only France’s leaders, but ordinary Frenchmen, from thinking about what was best for the country, and laying their own interests aside for the sake of the common good. For example, in his section talking about how the trade unions weakened France, he talks about a neighbor of his who went to work in a factory that was ramping up for wartime production. Other unionists hid the man’s tools to prevent him from working as hard as he was prepared to do; they didn’t want to do more work than the union work rules required of them. Bloch says this was suicidal for France, given the peril it was facing, but typical of French trade unions. It wasn’t only the unions, either. Industrialists had their own part in the collapse, as did the media, and others. Everybody was thinking about themselves; nobody was thinking about the common good.

There’s a lot to learn from Bloch’s analysis. PEG concludes his column like this:

Whatever happens next, the house is in ruins. Does anyone have what it takes to rebuild it?

That will be the key question going forward. First, we are going to have to see if the GOP Establishment — the generals of the Republican Party, and the industrialists of Conservatism, Inc. — can yet bring themselves to grasp the magnitude of their failure. We will see what happens when they gather on the Meuse in Cleveland in July.

The crisis reveals the rot in the Republican Party today. If I were the Democrats, I would be careful with the Schadenfreude. Hillary Clinton is the epitome of the Establishment, whose hold on the Democratic faithful seems solid today. Just wait.

UPDATE: Great piece on RCP by Bruce Haynes, tracing 25 years of policy and events that brought us Trump. Excerpts:

The surge in foreign imports, driven by the North American Free Trade Agreement and by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, has unquestionably hurt job availability and wage growth for the American middle class. The jobs that were supposed to replace them have not come into being or have been replaced by automation or with upper-middle-class jobs in engineering, chemistry, biotechnology or skilled service-sector jobs. A “cut and sew” textile worker can’t easily transition to a biopharmaceutical plant. These lower-skilled workers did not just lose their jobs — they lost their dignity.

These were the policies fought for and advocated by the political and cultural elites of both parties. In the minds of voters, those elites are squarely to blame. Trump holds up a mirror to this and says he’s going to stop it. And that is just one reason they are drawn to him.

That’s one. “Make America Great Again” means “Make Me Great Again”. Haynes talks about rapid and destabilizing cultural change, and then about how the elites responded to the Wall Street crash and Great Recession:

The belief was and is that the political, cultural and financial elite in America sold the country down the river. They’ve profited from economic globalization, downsizing and outsourcing jobs to Mexico and China. They’ve lectured and hectored us in print and on television and social media about the triviality of our views on traditional societal norms and institutions. Struggling Americans saw the laws they passed in response to the Great Recession as feckless talking points that did nothing to help. Other laws, like the bailout and Obamacare, seemed to help the upscale and downscale, while doing nothing to improve middle America’s economic outlook or, in the case of Obamacare and the subsequent rise in health insurance rates, straining its resources even further.

The prevailing view was that when the anvil came down, the elites used their money, power and influence to raid the U.S. Treasury to protect their wealth. Middle-class Americans got nothing. Worse, they lost overnight what they had fought and worked to build for generations. They worked hard, played by the rules, and got screwed.

Read the whole thing. 

Trump the Trickster

Driving home from Texas yesterday, I heard NPR’s Rachel Martin interview Don Reid, a genial Republican — he sounded like the kind of guy you’d love to have a cup of coffee with — and former city council member in Charlotte, NC. Reid is a Trump supporter. Excerpts from the interview:

DON REID: I just absolutely love the fact that Donald Trump is challenging the establishment Republicans. He’s redefining the party and, hopefully, destroying the power that has been in that little oligarchy of establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C.

MARTIN: All right. So let’s talk a little more about that. Why do you think the party has failed you?

REID: Well, since Reagan, they’ve offered people like me the choice of either voting for a loser like McCain or Dole or voting for the Democrat. And since I’m a conservative Republican, I held my nose and voted for the Republican. But they did nothing about illegal immigration. They did nothing about the debt. They shipped our jobs overseas. And so they’ve used the conservatives just like the Democrats have used the minorities to control the party.

There’s some interesting stuff buried in there, if by “conservatives” you mean “working class and religious conservatives.” But what does Reid mean that the “oligarchy of establishment Republicans” only offered him McCain and Dole to vote for? Dole and McCain were not selected by party officials. They both won contested primaries. Bob Dole won 71 percent of the GOP primary vote in the North Carolina primary in 1996. John McCain won 74 percent of the GOP primary vote there in 2008. Nobody forced Dole and McCain on GOP voters. They were chosen. It’s awfully convenient to blame party leaders now for choices that party voters made.

More:

REID: … To me, the illegal immigration is the biggest problem that our country faces. It will destroy this country and our culture, and we must do something about it.

MARTIN: You think Donald Trump can actually fulfill his promise to deport 11 million illegal immigrants?

REID: I don’t know. I think that it’s unfair to ask him all the details about it. But the fact that somebody says – I will do it if I get in office. I’ll find the people to help me, and I will build a wall. All those things can be done if we have the resolve to do it. And if we don’t have the resolve to do it, let’s just fold our tent and forget that we’re a country and become a Greece.

To be clear, illegal immigration is a huge problem, but it is a problem that has leveled off after skyrocketing in the Clinton and Bush years. I think there are far more threatening problems facing America than illegal immigration today, but I respect someone who believes otherwise. That said, why on earth is it “unfair” to expect Trump to explain how he plans to deport 11 million people? This is classic American magical thinking: if we want to do a thing badly enough, we can do it. Like bringing democracy to Iraq. All Reid expects of Trump is that he express sufficiently strong feelings regarding illegal immigrants.

How does this make a lick of sense?

One more excerpt:

REID: … I’m very – a strong – a social conservative. I don’t believe Trump is. But social conservatism can be put on hold for four years. Doing something about illegal immigration, security of our country, building up our military, doing something about our national debt and the jobs – that can’t wait. Otherwise, nothing else matters.

“Something” about illegal immigration? OK, I agree, illegal immigration should be stopped. So what will we do? Reid doesn’t care. “Building up our military”? The US defense budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the ten next biggest national spenders . “Doing something about the national debt”? Many Trump supporters don’t care about federal spending; in fact, they depend on it.

Look, I think most people vote attitudinally, not by examining a candidate’s positions and plans rationally. That’s just how people are. But in Trump’s case, it’s amazing how little his supporters care about this stuff. Most candidacies bring out the magical thinking in the masses (‘memba Obama the Lightworker?), but Trump is just off the charts. Why?

Consider the take on Trump that Corey Pein offers in The Baffler. Pein says trying to understand Trump by conventional means makes no sense. Trump is better understood as a religious phenomenon. Excerpts:

Something more profound is occurring. An election is, at its core, a form of mass ritual. What dreadful forces are being summoned this time? Tremors ripple through the noosphere. Can you feel them? It’s eerie, as though the dogs have all stopped barking at once, the birds have flown away together to parts unknown, and the sky has turned green.

The strangeness of the moment exceeds the descriptive capacity of what passes for civil discourse. Even the people who are right on the particulars are wrong on the whole. What’s worse, any attempt to explain Trump’s popular ascent is doomed because these events cannot be explained in the empirical fashion to which modern people are accustomed. The election is nothing less than a psychogenic storm. As such it can only be discussed in metaphysical terms that sober, prudent, smartphone-having people are unwilling to countenance.

The press in particular is doomed by its methodology, which assumes that human events are dictated by discrete, quantifiable forces. Watch how desperately they cling to the mistaken belief that some combination of polling data and campaign finance-flow explains the dramatic subversion of expectations that is the looming Trump nomination. This is all in vain!

The key to understanding this election cycle—and its energetic locus, Trump—is to accept that we are not dealing with an ordinary man, bound by the rules of decorum and the presupposition of coherence. I have another idea. I propose that Donald Trump is the personification of a Norse god named Loki.

Think about it. Everyone keeps asking, how does he do it? How does he get away with the outbursts of expletive and blasphemy, with cruel mockery of disabled people and torture survivors, with the rambling incestuous fantasies? What I am saying is that Trump doesn’t need to play by the rules because he is the fabled shape-shifting trickster wearing the orange skin of a man and the hair of a wily red fox. That is how he gets away with it.

Pein is not saying that Trump is literally the incarnation of a mythological Norse god. He’s saying, following Jung’s interpretation, that the gods are symbols of psychic forces active in society. Pein concedes that you might think “it’s unfair to attribute disagreeable voter behavior to mass psychosis. To which I say, keep watching the news.” He continues:

The only contemporary observers who fail to grasp how dire economic circumstances might inspire irrational and destructive impulses in wide swaths of the public are the fortunate few who’ve managed to avoid job loss, eviction, a health crisis, or any other potentially life-destroying random event over the duration of what has amounted to an eight-year depression. Such lucky bastards abound within the ranks of the clueless political press corps and the establishmentarian loyalists in both major parties. Once upon a time they were called the bourgeoisie but it might be simpler to call them “out of touch.” Loki pities them not.

Pein says that if terrible Wotan represents the German national spirit (as Jung believed), then Loki is quintessentially American:

The trickster god has visited this young nation before, in the person of P.T. Barnum and in the character of Tom Sawyer. Even the foundational myth of George Washington and the cherry tree bears Loki’s mark. Little George did a bad thing, but his candid admission earned forgiveness from the father figure. Now, highfalutin’ historians might tell you that the cherry tree story is a fabrication and that Washington did tell lies, but the power of the myth stands, impervious to those facts. Similarly, journalists may lose their breath trying to keep up with Trump’s constant fictions, but his supporters don’t seem to care about something so trifling as veracity. Like Little George, they forgive him because he at least gives the impression of honesty and doesn’t hold back.

Read the whole thing. Yeah, I know, it sounds like Joseph Campbell lit up on a barstool, but there’s something to this. Back in 2007, Caleb Stegall circled a similar point about American political culture, and how we are at a loss to explain forces at work in our culture because we are strangers to the primitive. Excerpts:

It is true that we have not and cannot escape completely from the pagan world full of gods. However, Weber was right that the gods have been dispersed.

To put it another way, our late-modern existence is characterized just as much as any age by magical thinking. Just look at the rhetoric surrounding Iraq. Or your local lottery ticket sales. The problem is in who people craving some magic turn to as witchdoctors. Armies of materialists: therapists, experts, politicians, scientists, etc.

More:

The foremost problem is that Christianity as a depaganized political religion is Liberalism, radicalized and out of whack with reality in which one must at times do evil and even commit mortal sins for temporal goods that are the charge of those with political power. And then seek absolution in the magical appeasement of the gods. The medieval church allows, or found a way to admit and cope with this. It is a deal with paganism. Take it away and you get a devolution from Protestantism into liberalism. You get the new American personal faith Christianity (evangelicalism) with the magical thinking of overbought homes on ARMS and credit cards and daycare and building democracy in Iraq and all the other delusional magical thinking of late-modernity in the capitalist-state. And you get a whole new class of materialist therapeutic witchdoctors rising up to give the newest incantations: your best life now! your purpose driven life! or whatever.

Or “Make America Great Again”. More:

This is completely flattened out in a rationalistic modernizing deracinated disenchanted liberalizing protestant culture. And the inchoate need for magic and appeasement of the gods gets shifted in very unhealthy materialist directions which can be exploited by those who understand the psychology. Just read some of the high-end literature on advertising today.

Read the whole thing.  And take a look at this short 2009 Stegall post on Front Porch Republic, which looks prophetic today. He talked about “dangerous” state of our politics, given that both the underclass and “boomers” (by which he means not Baby Boomers, but rather in the Wallace Stegner/Wendell Berry sense), have degenerated. Excerpt:

What both the underclass and the boomers have in common is dependence on the State (they are relationships of mutual exploitation) and, in my judgment, the inability or refusal to work.  America has ceased being a people who work for themselves.  Self-government cannot long last in this climate.  For if you won’t work for yourself, eventually you will be enslaved, perhaps even willingly.

Willingly.

In the Trump case, it’s like people want to be lied to. Heidegger famously said, toward the end of his life, “Only a god can save us.” What if the god people look to as savior is … Loki?

When you point to Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger to shed light on Donald Trump, you can be assured that you are overthinking things. On the other hand, the magical thinking aspect of Trumpism, and the imperviousness of Trump to standards of logic and, well, standards, does make you wonder the language of election as “mass ritual” and “psychogenic storm” have something to tell us about a phenomenon that defies conventional analysis.

Remember over the weekend I told you about a conversation I had with a Texas man whose working-class male relative’s life was flying apart, and who was (therefore) susceptible to radical magical thinking to try to make sense of his world, and who was a big Trump supporter? Said the man, “Trump is talking to people like him, not people like you.” Think about that, and think about Loki as a symbol of a force rising in the body politic. Discuss.

 

A ‘Missionary’ for Religious Liberty

I found out yesterday that my friend Hunter Baker, a political science professor at Union University in western Tennessee, has decided to run for Congress. He will be seeking Tennessee’s Eighth District seat being vacated by Stephen Fincher, retiring after three terms. Baker is an Evangelical. Last year, when I visited the Union campus, Hunter and I had serious discussions about the threat to religious liberty. When he told me he was running for Congress particularly to fight for religious liberty, I asked him if I could send him some questions. He said yes. Here’s our short interview:

​

1. Why are you running for Congress?

​The answer is basically spiritual in nature. I feel called to run this race. I have a great life (at age 45) teaching and writing. My life goal was to write books. I’ve done that. I’ve given endowed lectures and spoken in some great settings. There is really no itch that I’m trying to scratch. The reality is that winning would be a challenge to me in terms of re-ordering my existence and making the whole thing work from a family perspective. But I realize that the seat in our district is a special seat. The voters want a conservative candidate who shares their values and is capable of articulating and defending them. I am committed to doing that at a high level in hopes of generating greater respect and appreciation for our point of view.

In addition, I think we need a person who doesn’t see Congress as a career or wealth-building opportunity. With my yes being yes and my no being no, I will tell you that I will not go to Congress only to become a lobbyist and influence peddler when I’m done. I will go to defend life, religious liberty, and to moderate the appetites of the state so that freedom and self-government remain.​

2. Is there something about this particular political moment that inspired you to make this decision?

​The issue that has compelled me to make this run is religious liberty. I have been waiting for years to see the Obergefell shoe drop. I knew that if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, it would create a perfect path to undermine Christian institutions and Christians in public and professional life everywhere. We need as many people dedicated to preserving religious liberty as possible to run for office and to contend for this Christian and American ideal. ​

3. I have to tell you that I have no faith in Congressional Republicans to stand up for religious liberty. They’re owned by Big Business, in my view. Am I wrong?

​Big Business is a serious problem for religious liberty. Few people adequately understand that Big Business and Big Government go hand in hand. Corporations don’t like localism and various exemptions aimed at respecting rights of faith and conscience. They just want a monolith that they can understand and work with in a turnkey fashion. I have no interest in being the corporate candidate. The business executives of the world need to understand that when they undermine our liberty as people of faith, they are ultimately undermining liberty of all types, including economic liberty. I will fight for the soul of the party on this issue, just as many have bravely fought to keep the party pro-life.​

4. I was talking the other day with a well-known social conservative, an academic, who agreed with me that most American Christians have no concrete idea how threatened their religious liberty really is. Do you agree?

​The realization is slowly dawning. A few years ago, I don’t think Christians worried much about religious liberty unless maybe they were homeschoolers or were being marginalized in the public schools. Now that they see many persons being threatened in terms of their businesses or professions because of their beliefs, they are getting the message. Gay marriage, civilizationally-speaking, is a neck-breaking turn. But for most secular liberals, the line from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement is a straight and unerring one. They will not feel they’ve met their goal until they’ve won compliance with their vision. There are ways in which it will be illegal to be an orthodox Christian if we don’t counter the wave.

I mentioned the pro-life movement before. I have been sensitive to rights of liberty and conscience because I learned about those things during summers at law school when I worked at the Rutherford Institute and then Prison Fellowship. But I saw it up close when my wife’s residency program tried to require her to spend time at a Planned Parenthood clinic. She refused. It is important that people have that right.​

5. Do you have the support of the party establishment where you live?

​I don’t have anything against the party establishment, but this race isn’t about that for me. I’m running as a Republican because I am one, but there is part of me that is repulsed by the idea that you need to visit this local powerbroker and that resident warlord to gain their support to run. I want to take my case to the kinds of people who live in this district and offer myself as a champion for their cause. If they want me to be their advocate, I will. If they don’t, I will happily stick with my academic life and not having to juggle D.C. with local living.​

6. Why should voters take a chance on a college professor of political science with no legislative experience?

​I’m old enough to have learned not the disdain experience. I respect it. No question. But I would make two points. First, my opponents would have state or local experience, not federal legislative experience. The two things are different. We should have a sharper sense of the difference in terms of jurisdiction. ​I have to believe that as a person who has achieved a strong academic pedigree with studies in economics, political science, public administration, law, and church and state, I am about as well-prepared in terms of knowledge as anyone out there. Second, I have had legislative experience outside of holding office. I have testified before committees (including going up against Planned Parenthood in Georgia), written policy memos for office-holders, personally lobbied legislators and staff, and have a lot of experience as a writer and speaker. There is nothing about being a legislator that is really alien to me.

But I will tell you one thing. If I am elected, I will not be there to create a career in Washington. My goals are clear. I will be there to do the work of the people of this district. Walter Rauschenbusch once said that if business were an island, we would send missionaries to it. I feel that way about Washington, D.C. I want to go leaven that loaf on behalf of the people of West Tennessee.

This is significant. To the best of my knowledge, Baker’s candidacy is the first one inspired by a reaction to Obergefell.

Chianti Needs Cajuns

Cinghiale girls in Norcia, in winter fashion (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Oh dear:

Fences are rising. There is talk of a brutal and destructive insurgency, invasions and a slaughter that could include hundreds of thousands in the years ahead.

If that sounds something like a war, the battlefield is the prized vineyards of Chianti, Italy’s vaunted wine region in the heart of the rolling hills of Tuscany.

And the enemy? An exploding population of voracious

Cinghiale sausage for sale!

wild boars and deer that savor the sugary grapes and the vines’ tender sprouts, but that are also part of the region’s famed landscape, hunting traditions and cuisine.

Long allowed to thrive as part of that heritage, the wild ungulates, the group to which these species belong, are now four times as numerous in Tuscany as they are in other Italian regions. In Europe, only parts of Austria have more.

Wine growers and farmers here say that population now threatens a delicate Tuscan ecosystem, in addition to provoking hundreds of car accidents a year and damaging the production of their treasured Chianti Classico.

Read the whole thing.

Isn’t the answer obvious? Chianti needs Cajuns. You can get absolutely delicious wild boar (cinghiale) sausage in Tuscany and Umbria, but there aren’t enough Italians to eat it, I guess. This is where we come in. Cajuns will cook and eat anything, and make it delicious. Anybody up for a cinghiale sauce piquante?

Area nitwit and his boar

Trump & Violence

Peter Beinart hears jackboots on the cobblestones:

What will happen to American politics if, as now appears likely, the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump? Here’s one bet: It will get more violent.

The United States is headed toward a confrontation, the likes of which it has not seen since 1968, between leftist activists, who believe in physical disruption as a means of drawing attention to injustice, and a candidate eager to forcibly put down that disruption in order to make himself look tough. The new culture of physical disruption on the activist left stems partly from disillusionment with Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama’s election sparked unprecedented excitement among young progressives. But that excitement was followed by deep disillusionment as it became clear that even a liberal black president could not remedy the structural injustices afflicting people of color.

So Millennial activists began challenging politicians directly. In June 2012, two protesters connected with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance occupied the Obama campaign’s Denver office for six days and threatened further takeovers unless the president stopped deporting the young undocumented immigrants dubbed “Dreamers.” Two months later, activists for undocumented immigrants sought to disrupt the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

A year later, the Black Lives Matter movement was born in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin.

When BLM protesters began disrupting Democratic events and Republican events…:

After some initial hesitation and defensiveness, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Hillary Clinton reacted to these disruptions by meeting with activists and embracing much of their agenda. Most Republican candidates ignored the protests as best they could.

But Donald Trump saw them as an opportunity. Asked last August about a Bernie Sanders event in which Black Lives Matters protesters spoke at length from the stage, Trump called the senator from Vermont’s response “disgusting.” He added: “That will never happen with me! I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or other people will, but that was a disgrace. I felt badly for him. But it showed that he was weak. Believe me, that’s not going to happen to Trump.”

It’s no coincidence that Trump raised the specter of violence. The Black Lives Matter disruptions had been peaceful. But as Trump’s campaign took off in the summer and fall of last year, he began depicting entire categories of overwhelmingly peaceful people as a physical threat. Undocumented Mexican immigrants were potential “rapists.” Syrian refugees were “strong, powerful men” who might be a “trojan horse” for ISIS.

Beinart goes on to say that if Trump gets the GOP nomination, the left-wing militants are going to keep pushing, and Trump will urge his supporters to push back hard. This is not going to end well. I think he’s right to be worried. Me, I say if you had fun at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, you’re going to love the GOP 2016 convention in Cleveland.

It is undeniable that there is more than a bit of the Brownshirt about Trump. What drives me crazy is that the Left and its Business Republican fellow travelers cannot grasp that Trumpian violence is largely (but not entirely!) a reaction to violence and destruction that has been inflicted by them on many of Trump’s supporters for a long time. This is not, please understand me, to justify Trumpian violence, but to explain it. As ever, the Left, as well as right-thinking folks on the Right, are so convinced of their own righteousness that they don’t understand what’s happening. I’m not convinced that I do either, not fully, but here’s an attempt.

For some time I have said in this space that people who embrace racialist thinking when it occurs among blacks and other minorities should be careful about that sort of thing, because “Black Lives Matter” (and its cognates among other minority groups) inevitably conjures up white consciousness and power movements. This makes no emotional sense to many middle-class, educated people — most of them white, note well — who naturally embrace a double standard. This is why you have the white corporate manager who talks breezily about “embracing diversity,” completely ignoring the fact that this often amounts to legitimizing and moralizing discrimination along racial, gender, and sexual identity grounds. When you seek to hire, promote, or otherwise privilege individuals based on their race, gender, or sexual identity, that is discrimination. In some European countries, they are more honest about it, calling in “positive discrimination” — in other words, discrimination for a socially beneficial reason.

The social beneficence of policies like that are only apparent to those who are not being discriminated against. I have never seen a white corporate manager surrender his job so that a minority can have it. “Social justice,” as they define it, always occurs at the expense of other people.

Thinking about the Beinart piece, I was reminded of a few conversations I’ve had over the past 20 years with white working class people on visits home to Louisiana. On the occasion in which politics and race have come up, if there was somebody present who knew me, they would often make a wisecrack at my expense, saying that I was “liberal” and warning everybody to “watch their language” around me. (Translation: don’t use racist language, because Yankee Boy here won’t like it.) This was a backhanded way of being considerate of my sensibilities, and I appreciated it. But then they would talk about situations in the area, or at the plant, having to do with race and behavior, and it was impossible to deny that there was a real problem present.

I remember one discussion in particular in which white guys who worked at a mill were talking about how aggravating it was to have to do extra work to correct mistakes made by black co-workers who had been hired under the company’s affirmative action plan. These white guys were furious not only that they had to do extra work, but that they could not speak openly about it at work, or be cited by the company for racism. In that conversation was a white working-class woman who gave an example of the same thing happening in her workplace, and who looked at me with visible disdain, as if educated white people like me were somehow to blame for the racial dishonesty they had to live with on the job — this, because their bosses talked like me.

I recall that conversation — must have been 2007 or so — so well because it occurred to me that people of my social and professional class would, in general, not allow ourselves to have conversations like this even in private. In my (white) circles, the difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives tended to notice these things, but find ways to euphemize them, even in private conversation, as if noticing them embarrassed us — while liberals, they would not notice them at all, and pass harsh judgment on those who did. In fact, looking down on the white working-class and their racial insensitivity is a way of virtue signaling among white people, both liberals and conservatives. I’ve done it myself.

In recent times, we’ve seen race riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. I think it’s generally well understood that police brutality is a real problem in our country. One strong narrative in the media coverage and cultural conversation about these riots is that they are in some sense justified as “rebellion,” or at least an understandable reaction of frustrated people. And you know what? Critics are right to point out that the difference between a “riot” and a “rebellion” is often a matter of politics. My point is that someone taking their cues from the US media’s discussion of Ferguson and Baltimore would likely conclude that the violence in those places was regrettable, but perfectly understandable, because racism.

Back in 2003, I interviewed a white middle-class homeowner from a neighborhood in Irving, Texas, an inner-ring suburb of Dallas. He was selling his house and moving his family to a better place. His nice, settled neighborhood was becoming unsettled because of illegal immigration. Absentee landlords on his street were renting houses to immigrants, who were piling up in the house — all working-age Latin American men. They were blatantly violating codes, living 20 or more to a single-family house, and being incredibly disruptive. The man decided he had had enough when he came home from work one day and found that the SWAT team had blocked off the street because of yet more trouble from that house. The homeowner got no help from the city. I remember driving to the governmental office and asking the right city officials about that particular house, and that case. The response: they couldn’t do anything about it because the men who lived there stayed away from the house until after the city’s work hours. No code inspector was going to work overtime to go deal with the problem. Too bad for the middle-class homeowners (including Mexican-American citizens) who lived there.

That man was pushed out of his neighborhood by illegal immigration and an unresponsive city government. Was he not in some real sense the victim of violence? Bet it felt that way to him.

This past academic year, there has been an immense amount of attention paid to left-wing activism on campus, most of it inspired by Black Lives Matter. Activists have disrupted campus events, invaded administrative offices, mobbed a library (at Dartmouth), and undertaken a wide variety of illiberal activities towards illiberal ends. And in most cases, they have gotten away with it. Craven administrators have given the kids what they wanted, and in many cases created a climate of fear on campus in which people — white people in particular — who did not agree with the goals or the tactics of the protesters were afraid to speak out for fear of being denounced as racists. Is this not a form of violence? If you are silenced because of legitimate fear of being stigmatized or punished by the mob and its administrative facilitators, it may feel an awful lot like violence to you.

To be sure, words are not the same thing as acts. Maintaining the distinction is critically important. But the double standard in American society over what is permissible to say and to think is real. And Trump speaks to (white) people who are tired of being pushed and pushed and pushed, and told that they have to shut up and take it because they are white and therefore bad, because racism.

It cannot be denied that Trump does attract a significant number of white supremacist followers, people who are racist and anti-Semitic rabble. But the Left (and Business Republicans) have done such a thorough job of politicizing the public square, demonizing dissent and weaponizing the grievance/rights movements, that someone like Trump, who doesn’t give a damn about offending people, can seem a liberating figure.

So, when Black Lives Matter protesters invade a Trump rally and try to disrupt it, why should we be surprised when Trump staff and police throw them out?  If right-wing protesters tried to break up a Hillary Clinton rally, they ought to be thrown out too. Bernie Sanders allowed BLM protesters in Seattle to break up his own rally there last year. Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent critic of police brutality, wrote critically of BLM’s action there, and later published an interview with a black woman from Seattle who dissented from his point of view. Excerpt (the speaker is the woman, Martha Tesema):

You write, “I don’t think the boos from the crowd illustrate that its members were racist.” When people are silenced––when a “progressive, liberal” audience attempts to silence a marginalized people––they are not acting in solidarity.

And I am not only talking about the Westlake event, but the broader political conversation happening in this election. No matter how down people say they are with the cause, when they act like being slightly inconvenienced is more important than the lives of people of color, that suggests they probably never truly supported the movement. Marissa, Mara, and allies were not invited. They forced themselves on stage, so the reaction of the crowd was instinctive and understandable, to a certain degree. But if we look deeper at why they chose this provocative way of approaching this Seattle crowd, it says a lot about the urgency of Black Lives Matter and the lack of awareness among this progressive, liberal audience.

The idea that black protesters, and those presuming to speak to them, are so sacred, and their cause is so urgent, that they have a right to silence the voices of others — do you see where this principle takes us? Trump emphatically and specifically rejected the Bernie Sanders approach to this kind of thing (which is to let the loudmouths have their way), calling Sanders “weak” for allowing them to get away with it. Which Sanders certainly was. You don’t have to support Trump — I do not — to recognize that at least he has the guts to stand up for free expression. What a depressing moment when it falls to Donald Trump to defend free speech against its progressive enemies.

In Europe, we see over and over that the weakness of the Establishment politicians of both left and right in the face of the immigration wave and immigrant provocations only empowers the far-right, including bona fide fascists. When reasonable people see those in authority refusing to take a stand against things harmful to their interests, they start to listen to unreasonable, even violent, people. Violence and intolerance calls up violence and intolerance.

Back in 2012, examining studies of the white working class and its despair, Jordan Weissman of The Atlantic wrote:

The question isn’t so much whether these sentiments are misguided. It’s where will people turn to for economic answers when they’ve lost this much trust for the people even somewhat in control? I don’t have an answer for that. I’m not sure anybody does.

Now we know. It’s to Donald J. Trump.

Beinart:

Between now and November, Trump could hold hundreds more rallies, many in areas with large African American and Latino populations, in an atmosphere of mounting hysteria as Election Day nears. The young left-wing militants who have already braved danger in places like Ferguson, and who hold their more conflict-averse elders in contempt, are unlikely to stop their disruptions. Trump will keep baiting and threatening them because it’s how he rouses his fans.

How will Americans react if something truly terrible happens? Given the events of recent months, it’s impossible to know.

As Ross Douthat said the other day (I paraphrase), “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.” A right whose spite, resentment, and willingness to engage in violence is not restrained by religious scruple, or by the opinions of “respectable” conservatives like me who don’t work at the mill, and who has not seen my job outsourced, my marriage fall apart, my kids’ lives screwed up, and still have to be told by the media and other white people whose lives are going well that I, with my white privilege, am the problem with the world.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Not sure if you were watching, or had any interest in watching, the Democratic debate tonight, but when I came across this quote from Bernie Sanders, it hit me like a thunderclap how right you are that poor whites are invisible to cultural elites. That’s certainly true among Republicans, but hoo boy is it true among Democrats, even champion of the people Bernie:

“When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in the ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

Yep. Read Victor Tan Chen. Read James Miller. Read Stephanie McCrummen. Read Kevin Williamson. And look:

Vladika Dmitri: A Witness’s Testimony

Vladimir Grigorenko is the iconographer at St. Seraphim Orthodox cathedral in Dallas. He was also a faithful friend and servant to the late Archbishop Dmitri (Robert Royster) of Dallas, who died in 2011. Vladimir is also my godfather and friend, and there is no one in the world I trust more than I trust him. He was present for the five days between Dmitri’s 2011 death and burial, and he was present for Dmitri’s exhumation this past Friday. Here, from his Facebook page, is Vladimir’s testimony. All the photos accompanying this post are his own. Because some of these images may be disturbing to some readers, I have put most of them below the jump. Please take a look if you like. By the way, “Vladika” is an informal title that Orthodox Christians in the Slavic tradition use for their bishop:

Yesterday we put Archbishop Dmitri in his final resting place in St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas.

I was blessed to be a part of a team, which uncovers Vladika’s earthly remains and transfers them into new coffin to be buried in the crypt of the Resurrection Chapel and probably should offer some comments about these events.

It was Archbishop Dmitri wish and our deep desire that he would be buried on the premises of St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas. We started to plan that next morning after his departure in August 2011.

Unfortunately, we had not enough time to satisfy all requirements of the City Code, which is why Parish decided to bury our beloved Pastor at the Restland Cemetery, on the spot own by the Cathedral. The idea was that we would bring his earthly remains to Cathedral as soon as proper burial place will be build.

Due to lack of space under Cathedral foundation, we have to build Memorial chapel adjusted to the Cathedral with underground Burial Chamber in it. This building process, together with filing all necessary paperwork and receiving all permits, took us little over four years. We scheduled Vladika’s re-internment on closest date available.

In accordance with Federal law as it had been presented to us by Restland Cemetery Funeral Director, in order to be moved to the new place, the body of diseased person has to be transferred to the new sealed coffin by Cemetery employees, who will deliver the body on the Church site.

I personally negotiated with Funeral Director that Church representatives must be allowed to oversee this transition. I have to admit, during this negotiation Funeral Director (with 25 years of experience) explained to us in details what horrific picture we will see if we will choose to be present.

Several people, Clergy and Laity from different parishes thorough the diocese, including me, was chosen to participate. Dr. Ron Rodriguez, MD, Vladika’s primary physician, was one of them.

In the early morning of March 4, when Restland employees opened the concrete vault that contained Vladika’s wooden coffin, I was ready to see all these horrible things I was told about.

To our amazement, Vladika’s coffin was found intact amidst wet atmosphere of sealed vault and was easily opened.

Funeral Director who was present there in complete haz-mat mask, stated that she never saw non-embalmed body in such condition after 5 years in the grave, and that she believe that this is a miracle.

From this moment on, Restland employees stepped aside and allowed us to do everything we need.

Vladika’s body was found incorrupt and covered with several layers of soaking wet vestments. I will not go into much detail here – you can see a lot from few pictures attached.

His skin was dry but covered with condensed water, Pectoral cross and the Panagia are tarnished, and enamel images are peeling off and destroyed by harsh conditions.

Since we were obliged to transfer Archbishop to a new coffin and condition of his body allowed that, it was decided on the spot to remove old vestments and cover him with a new set. It was done with great reverence, and no damage to the body was done. [Note from Rod: A friend who was present at this rite said that Dmitri’s body, after four and a half years in the tomb, was completely flexible. — RD]

Vladika Dmitri new coffin was then sealed and transferred to St. Seraphim Cathedral, where memorial service was served by OCA metropolitan Tikhon, Bishop Alejo of Mexico, with over 20 priests and few hundreds of lay people from all around of USA and Mexico.

Next day, after Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, Archbishop Dmitri relics were placed for eternal rest in closed underground chamber in Resurrection Chapel of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas.

Few personal notes:

Obviously, I was glad to see Vladika’s body incorrupt, but be it otherwise, it would not affect my opinion about his sanctity at all.

The body of St Seraphim of Sarov, the Patron of our Cathedral, was corrupted, but it does not change the fact that he is one of the most beloved Saints around the world.

We all know that incorrupt body alone is not the reason of glorification.

Knowing Vladika for 11 years, seeing fruits of his life in the Lord, I personally convinced that he is a Saint. I believe that there are many more people all over the country, who share that conviction.

There is no decision of any group of people, respected (or not) would be able to change that. If his body will be corrupted in two, 20 or 200 years (as some may wish), or will start to stream myrrh (as others may desire) it will not be changed.

No one can stop me or anyone else from addressing Vladika Dmitri in prayer, and feel his response and intercession; same way as many others all around US feel his love and help.

All pictures I made during transfer of Archbishop Dmitri body will be forwarded to proper Church authorities together with my written statement for consideration.

He’s right: this “proves” nothing. But it is a wondrous sight to see. Photos of his his incorrupt hands below the jump:

The moisture on his hands is condensation from the damp inside of the tomb (Photo by Vladimir Grigorenko)

In new vestments, ready for reburial. Conditions inside the tomb tarnished the metal and eroded the enamel on his cross and pendant (compare to photo on first page) [Photo by Vladimir Grigorenko]

Preparing to open his casket at Restland Cemetery. Notice cemetery worker in Hazmat suit (Photo by Vladimir Grigorenko)

Photo by Vladimir Grigorenko

Pastor: ‘Get Big or Get Out!’

Atlanta megachurch pastor Andy Stanley preached this the other day:

“When I hear adults say, ‘Well I don’t like a big church, I like about 200, I want to be able to know everybody,’ I say, ‘You are so stinking selfish. You care nothing about the next generation. All you care about is you and your five friends. You don’t care about your kids…anybody else’s kids.’ You’re like, ‘What’s up?’ I’m saying if you don’t go to a church large enough where you can have enough Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers to separate them so they can have small groups and grow up the local church, you are a selfish adult. Get over it. Find yourself a big old church where your kids can connect with a bunch of people and grow up and love the local church.”

“Instead… you drag your kids to a church they hate, and then they grow up and hate the local church. And then they go to college and you pray that there will be a church in the college town that they connect with. And guess what? All those churches are big.”

Stanley later apologized for these remarks.

Still, the topic is worth talking about. Listening to Stanley’s remarks (see the clip above), I was reminded of the infamous command of Earl Butz, Nixon’s Agriculture secretary, who blasted small farmers and promoted industrialized agriculture, ordering the little guys to “get big or get out.” You can imagine what Wendell Berry thinks of Butz and his philosophy.

The late Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas — whose body was discovered on Friday to be incorrupt after four and a half years in the grave, unembalmed — had a principle about the size of churches. I can’t remember the number precisely, but it was something along these lines:

When the size of your church reaches 300, it is time to start a new church. A church any bigger than that cannot do for individuals and families within it what the church is meant to do.

I invite your thoughts on this matter. I will be away from the keys for the rest of the day, making the long drive back home to Louisiana. Please be patient; I will approve comments as I can.

When Trump Disappoints

Reader CStrom writes:

Trump’s apparent switch on the H1b issue during the debate hit me the wrong way as well, and I don’t know how I can support any candidate who will not address that issue. I went back to school in my 30’s to get a degree in engineering. I paid for it with everything I had at a very expensive school. Tuition and living expenses cost me over 125,000, with the promise that I could make it up with a good skill that was to be in high demand according to the BLS for years to come. I even had to take a small loan at the undergraduate level which I paid off after graduation and was working. I was able to gain about 4 years’ experience in the workplace before losing a position – all related to the economy and budget cuts and furloughs at a state entity. I haven’t been able to find a position in my field since that time. This has been just over 5 years. All I find are temporary and seasonal jobs at a low hourly rates. I’ve lost a home. I have nothing toward retirement now. I have tried to stay in the game by taking master’s level courses during this time, but all that is doing is putting me deeper in debt. Like the other commenter, I am at a loss and have begun to lose hope. There will come a point where people will tell me I’m too old or something. This is not how I envisioned my life.

The government was and is in essence encouraging American citizens to get degrees the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines. They encourage citizens to accept Pell Grants and Student loans all guaranteed by the taxpayer. At the same time, they have been encouraging business to use H1b green cards and visas to import foreigners who have degrees in the STEM disciplines. Who is benefitting? The banks, business, the American citizen with the STEM degree?

One of the reasons I have kept Trump on my list of possibilities is because of business expertise. Unless there is just something about him that is unknown, I have believed that he knows how to budget, manage and make things happen. And I have known how the infrastructure of the country is so far below par (ASCE rates most facilities at D+ or D-), that it is imperative that something be done. I viewed him as someone who could set that in motion and get our economy rolling in the very least. But I have waited to hear some unequivocal positions and plans. Because he said when he announced that “the system works, and I know how to work it.” He also said, “I was the Establishment – I knew who to pay to get what I wanted.” Those are troubling statements. And I’ve waited for clarification and definiteness from him.

But with his apparent flop on the H1b visas (and none of the others seem to want to address it), I just don’t know if he is sincere about any change, or if he understands the depth of despair to which many people have sunk. And if he is not for real, does anyone have the experience or ability to shape things up. I don’t know who is going to be able to do anything to help those of us who need it now. I fear we are on the verge of something much worse than the 1930s.

There is a definite widening gap in this country between a group of haves and a group of have nots. And I can’t necessarily attribute that gap to simply an increasing manifestation of greed by some. If anything, it would be, I think, due to the actions of a government gone amok. Though the consequences of this crazy federal government may well extend to how people act as human beings. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to turn any more – and deep down nobody wants to turn to some paternalistic government. The big business schools teach a lot of good things, but increasingly whatever they are teaching is producing a lot of folks that aren’t necessarily engaged in capitalism as much as they are engaged in speculations and manipulating digits and derivatives and things. Something has got to change somewhere.

Trump has identified something real, something raw, something powerful. If he is elected, he will fail the people who have hoped in him. He will do so because he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or because he has no fixed principles and will change them as soon as he runs up against pressure (as in the H1B visa issue), or because he will discover the plain reality that no leader in a democracy has the power to command, “Jump!” and expect everyone else to say, “Sir, how high?”

What happens after Trump?

What happens in this economy to men and women like CStrom, whose backs are against the wall?

Whether or not Trump wins the GOP nomination, or the presidential campaign, I have a feeling that there will be no going back to normal, not now. Certainly not with the Republican Party (and that’s no bad thing), but not even with the country. Something has been stirred up. Don’t you think?