Rod Dreher's Blog, page 609

SJWs At The Opera

A musicology grad student writes:

This is something you might want to discuss in your on-going coverage of SJW insanity in academia. Check out this article and the discussion in the comments: http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/. This has become a big deal within the discipline really quickly, even causing the president of the American Musicological Society to send out an email today about it to try to quell the controversy. To say the least, I think the critics are crazy in finding offense over the most trivial of matters. But this is unfortunately the reality of the humanities these days. How depressing to think that I’ll have to deal with absurdities such as this for many years to come.

The linked article is a short piece by Pierpaolo Polzonetti, an award-winning music instructor, who starts it like this:

When Bard College asked me to teach a three-hour class on Haydn’s Creation at Eastern Correctional Facility, I did not know what to expect. I accepted out of curiosity. Eastern Correctional Facility is a massive neo-gothic maximum-security prison built in 1900 in rural New York. Crossing into the prison’s mighty walls and passing through the security checkpoint can be intimidating. Encountering the incarcerated students has an even more powerful effect, but in a positive way. To me these men seemed to have dissolved the prison walls, thanks to their intellectual curiosity and their eagerness to learn. They opened their minds and ears to music that sounded exotic to many of them. Eighteenth-Century oratorios and operas can appear meaningless or dull to listeners mostly accustomed to the blatant lyrics and pounding beat of rap music. Classical music and opera, like rap, are acquired tastes and their value is both intrinsic and contextual. Fortunately they had already carefully read the texts I had assigned, including passages from Milton, Ovid, and the book of Genesis. This allowed us to engage with Haydn’s Creation on the basis of a shared intellectual background that made the oratorio somehow familiar and approachable.

The experience was so enlightening that I decided to teach an entire opera history class for inmates entitled “Opera and Ideas.” I taught it at the Westville Correctional Facility in Indiana during the Fall semester of 2014.

Thus far, most of the debate on education in prison has focused primarily on the issue of whether it is ethical to make educational opportunities available to criminals.

 

Polzonetti goes on to make a case that yes, we should do things like teach opera to prisoners. It’s simply not true, he argues, that these rough, violent men can’t appreciate the most complex music. He concludes by saying that in his experiences with inmates, opera taught them how to understand the misdirected human passions that determined their fate, and even gave them a sense of peace:

Mozart’s Don Giovanni gave these students a chance to better understand real-life emotions that, when repressed or out of control, can be destructive: fear and fearlessness, guilt and remorselessness, sexual passion leading to compulsion, sexual abuse, even to rape and murder. It became obvious to all of us, all the more so in prison, that our world is full of Don Giovannis. There is no other place than prison where, even when played through small portable speakers, his hymn “Viva la libertà!” resounds with more power than in an opera theater, amplified by emotions that can break the heart, but heal the mind.

Read the whole thing. Ponzonetti didn’t have to go to a prison to teach criminals about opera, but he did, and both he and his students learned something about music and human nature.

Well, the poor SOB had no idea what was coming next. From the comments section:

I’m disturbed the tone of this piece, as well as some of the specifics. We can begin with the assumption that all incarcerated males listen to rap. Do none of them listen to pop, rock, country, jazz, or other genres? Is the author making assumptions about his student population? And are those assumptions based on race?

Next the author dismisses rap as having “blatant lyrics” and a “pounding beat.” Does “blatant” mean sexual? violent? speaking a truth? Does opera not exhibit these same characteristics at times? Are there no examples of so-called classical music with a pounding beat?

Next, why does the author feel he has to point out the race of the student who shouts “never” three times, with a frightening crescendo no less, thus associating the race of this student with frightening.

The assumption that opera can “heal the mind” reduced inmates of the correctional system in a way that suggests that the author never bothered to understand the complexity of their stories and life experiences.

While there are so many other points I found racist and elitist and entitled, I’ll point out this last one–why, in the 21st century–do certain musicologists believe that an understanding of formal elements of musics trumps a visceral emotional response, that you cannot truly understand the music and your response until you know what a descending rapid staccato scale or loud ascending octave leap is? I thought we were so over that.

That the AMS [American Musicological Society] continues to support this kind of rhetoric is shameful.

 

Here’s another:

Prof. Polzonetti may not be aware of the deep institutionalized racism that underpins the US prison-industrial complex, which his essay perhaps unwittingly reinscribes through its metaphorical language and “salvation through high/European art” narrative. As a native of Italy, like Prof. Polzonetti, I am well aware of how substantially less sensitive many Italians are to institutional racism — not because we don’t have racism in Italy, but because we’ve long been able to ignore or deny it with the excuse of maintaining an imperative of high-cultural homogeneity. While I find Prof. Polzonetti’s apparent unawareness of the classist and racist undertones of his narrative troubling, I can understand it because he may not realize how problematic it is within contemporary American social politics (though I hope he considers such implications as he works to finalize the expanded version, since I believe readers of the important Italian online journal that is due to publish it deserve better). I am, however, extremely puzzled that the editors of Musicology Now did not perceive publishing this essay as a potential setback to the very public musicology they have been working to cultivate, with what I consider some success. Any individual — scholar or otherwise — who reads this paean to elite art soothing the savage beast might well think of musicologists as self-congratulatory champions of art-for-the-sake-of-art helping violent brutes finally understand what it means to have well-controlled emotions. I’m saddened that our professional society would choose that public face.

Oh no. Oh no.

Oh yes. Another one:

I am outraged by this article — disgusted even! No, not by the supposed casual racism of the prose — frankly, the outrage is a little over-the-top, IMHO. But this line here just boils my blood: “But musical forms do convey feelings with immediacy only when understood, structurally, historically, and contextually.” As an ethnomusicologist, I think this is an outrageous claim! Really? Have we learned nothing from the Meyer-Keil debate on participatory discrepancies, pleasure, and form? Who among us really believes that opera can only be immediate and feelingful through sustained study? As an opera-fan, this assertion is deeply offensive.

Read the whole thing. The happy news is that there are an equal number of sane voices speaking up, but good grief! A music professor goes to a prison to teach opera, his students find that they like it, everybody’s happy, everybody learns something — but the Social Justice Warriors can’t stand it!

SJWs ruin everything. They kill everything they touch. Why would anyone want to work in a field where these nuts run rampant?

UPDATE: Having just approved comments to this post, I don’t think many of you who have commented realize that the AMS website is not a general interest website, but is a news and information source for musicologists. The people who read it and comment there are professional music teachers and advanced students. It’s not like peering into the comments section at The New York Times.

Letters From The Other America

Here are two extraordinary e-mails that came in last night from readers of this blog.

A doctor writes (I’ve slightly edited this to protect his privacy):

I’ve been reading you for years, and have enjoyed a lot of the trails I’ve followed you down. I gotta say: I appreciate your work more right now than I think I ever have. Funny what becomes urgent – but I just had to express gratitude for the way you’re trying to empathize with Trump’s voters, who are apparently objects of contempt or fear to the journalist caste, and in either case incomprehensible. Thanks for doing that.

Conor Friedersdorf did a good thing over at the Atlantic by noting contra the common narrative, Trump is doing remarkably well in all sorts of demographic classes. Which is the other reason I write you.

I’m a physician who reads Dostoevsky, leafs through Adbusters in the checkout line at Whole Foods, and drinks craft beer. I’m also an evangelical Christian. My extended family mostly have their finances in order. I do not live in an abandoned company town, but in a dense urban area with vibrancy and artisanal lumberjacks (hey handmake single and double-bitted axes for hipster outdoorsmen; they make great gifts), and the sort of zoning that would make Matt Yglesias, very, very happy. I am, in fact, the sort of guy who knows what sort of zoning makes Matt Yglesias happy. I have relationships at church that are meaningful and sustaining and I probably break bread with neighbors in my apartment complex a couple times a week. I personally will only benefit from increased immigration, and from more churn and fiercer competition among the desperate people who pick things and wash things and nail things together. And I am probably voting for Trump.

I was firmly anti-Trump at first when I saw Russell Moore and other wise, anointed voices of evangelicalism speaking out against Trump, who’s never been a man I admired. Even though that meant they were mostly advocating for Neocon and Corporatist elites that have treated people of faith as house elves for decades. Sure, Trump’s a villain. But I’m on Twitter, you know? And I read the news, too, and the editorials. And I see the constant plaintive-yet-imperious calls for immigration, which sounds remarkably similar whether coming from Soros or Merkel or Moore or the Pope, and I see how quickly those calls slide into accusations of (a) UNCHRISTLIKE ATTITUDES or (B) RACISM, and I think, gee. Pretty obvious what the right choice is here. Clearly the answer is importing a new electorate. The old one is so…unchristlike. And kind of awkwardly white.

You hit the nail on the head when you said that right-think about immigration was a cheap way for evangelicals in comfortable neighborhoods with safe schools to signal their own virtue. That doesn’t necessitate it being incorrect, but motives matter here. Or at least the people going all takfiri  say it matters. So it must.

I am no longer listening to the imaginary consensus of the evangelicals. As soon as you accept that immigration is at least a debate worth having, Trump suddenly makes sense. Debate about immigration has been pushed out of the bounds of polite discourse by our kakistocracy for the last twenty years. Evangelical leaders have been complicit in this, perhaps because they saw this as an issue where they could find common ground with the secular technocrats they alternately lobbied and fought.  Immigration is only part of our conversation now because at least a plurality of the electorate has in spite of propaganda demanded we talk about it (is that…democracy?)  The degree to which the other Republican candidates have had to shift on this issue marks how important Trump’s run has already been. Trump may be a more open narcissist than the other candidates: he’s the only narcissist who’s been speaking the truth about immigration. And yes, this issue…pre-empts others. It is an existential issue. It is in fact a values issue. It will determine the future of the country and will probably determine the extent to which – or speed at which – people actually start pursuing your Benedict Option.

American progressives have been utterly, transparently honest about their hope and plan of demographic replacement. The American Right has just been too…naive? to take them at their word. When they’re not crowing about it in articles they’re talking about it privately. We’ve all had the conversation with the worldly-wise professional we actually like a lot who just can’t stand these people from their miles and miles of shitty suburban sprawl but oh man their days are numbered. The meaningless will kill them if nothing else does. And you know, the worst thing about these white people of Wal-Mart is that they’re all kind of racist. 

And you can’t blame the Left for wanting to do this: plans A through Z depend on it. The demographics that elected Reagan would have elected Romney in a landslide. And the demographics that elected Reagan would probably have been a lot less unequal if they’d lasted till now, with both more upward pressure on wages from the bottom due to a tighter labor supply and more pressure toward social solidarity on the top due to shared language and culture and yeah, nationality. Good Liberal Robert Putnam, bless his heart, has the honesty to at least mutter what a lot of conservatives are too blinded by ideology (or fear) to say out loud: that the makeup of a community matters for social trust, and that people are not fungible. But, when you can simultaneously talk about increasing immigration as the only decent thing to do, and the poverty of immigrant communities and the native workers they displaced as anational shame that needs fixed right now: well, you’ve got yourself a stew!

This is not just an economic issue. If you concede the country to somebody else, you have conceded the country to somebody else. They will use their power to perpetuate their own value system, not yours. It’s important to note that every setback social conservatives have suffered in the political realm over the last twenty years has happened as our portion of the electorate has shrunk. And now we’re gonna pretend it’s virtuous to compound the problem? We are the sad sack training our replacement and hoping this means the company’s giving us a promotion and an assistant.

It is an insane morality that suggests we create value by firing our countrymen for strangers. It is certainly not Christ-like. There is nothing Christian about contempt for your brother. There is nothing kind or godly about creating brain drain in developing countries, about incentivizing years of remittances and the separation of families (every time somebody tells me that deportation separates families, I have to count to ten), about literally creating inequality and massive alienation by inviting outsiders in to work at wages your own countrymen won’t accept and pass those jobs on someday to their children (and if you don’t think that’s happening, do I have news for you.)

It is an insane political ideology that serves not a nation, which has a people, but a platonic ideal of a country, which could be populated by any people. And assumes, like we did after we invaded Iraq, that we can declare any group of people like us  and see them become assimilated folk who delight in our laws.

The big story for me these last few months was Angus Deaton’s paper in PNAS. Everybody knows the basics, but I guess it didn’t hit everybody as hard. If one thing pushed me to Trump’s camp, that was it. The schadenfreude of the left was revolting (ha, whites are finally suffering! minorities have always been suffering!), and the right was weirdly quiet about it. Maybe because the implications were so clear, and so disturbing, and so unsolvable by the Club for Growth: this was a group of people collectively self-destructing. People without meaning or hope. We created this. We sold our brothers and sisters for that stew.

As a Christian, and as a physician who physically cares for genuinely wonderful and suffering illegal immigrants every day, and who cares for genuinely self-destructive American-born narcotics addicts, both white and black, I want Trump’s campaign to continue. I want him to force us to deal with immigration, and with the way we’re treating brothers and sisters like garbage people. I don’t trust Trump to do much, but I trust him to keep talking about immigration, and I think there’s a decent chance he wouldn’t actually betray his voters on it (I mean, Rubio and Cruz and Bush…). I guess I’m a Trump supporter with a (narrow) ideological motivation? If you look you’ll find more like me. I’ve got truly respectable friends in academia and the business world who know the secret handshake.

Far more than I thought I’d write. For obvious reasons, if you share any of this, I’d prefer you leave my name out of it.

Meanwhile, this letter from a Massachusetts professional in the same class as the previous writer, and who is a liberal that gets Trump:

Great posts about Trump and Trumpiana today.

I just want to respond, positively, to something you said about traveling around Louisiana over the last few years. I have actually travelled quite a bit inside the U.S. over the course of my life, and it became obvious to me a long time ago that one’s politics are usually profoundly influenced by where one lives (heck, they ought to be, if you have any meaningful relationship to the place you inhabit). I live near Boston, but I know if I lived in the country somewhere near Tucson, where I have visited (just to take one example), my attitudes about guns and border control – to name just a couple of issues — might be a bit different. Anyone inclined to pontificate about politics should travel more, and imagine how these policies look different to people in different places, before we condemn others’ views.

Anyway, one thing that has become clear lately is how devastating globalization has been to rural America. I go to Western Maine on a regular basis, and it’s apparent that there are no jobs, and that young, able-bodied people are all leaving. Rural Maine is emptying out. Those that remain are often people who would have a hard time finding employment in any circumstances. If you’re a business owner in Oxford, Maine, I’m sure it looks to you like everyone is on disability and not pulling their weight, because you don’t see the talented, hardworking young people who grew up in your town — they’ve left. I’m sure this is true across the country.

Check out this old Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Where the Brains Are.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/where-the-brains-are/305202/

It shows, graphically, how college educated Americans have become increasingly concentrated in a few major metropolitan areas over the last generation. Rural areas that used to have a reasonable share of the country’s educated citizens have lost them. The economies of the cities where they now concentrate are booming, unemployment is low, and the plight of rural Americans is invisible.

The differences between Republicans and Democrats have always been (at least in the last 30-40 years) squabbles between different factions of the American elite. Both of those factions have grown increasingly out of touch with people outside the country’s wealthy urban centers.

Democrats shouldn’t take comfort from the Trump phenomenon. On the one hand, it may be reassuring to see that a substantial bloc of Republican voters thinks the Republican establishment is full of shit – a point on which they and the Democrats may agree. On the other hand, the Democrats have utterly failed to capitalize on the alienation of this bloc from the Republican elite.

I wish I could write more. I enjoy your blog a great deal. My politics are quite different from yours, but it fascinates me that I agree with you as often as I do.

Thanks for writing, you two. Lots to think about here. In short, if the Republican leadership were not so caught up so much in their economic dogmas, and the Democratic leadership were not so caught up in its social and cultural dogmas, we would be looking at something very different, and something far less Trumpish. But they are, and we are. So it goes.

‘What’s Wrong With Trump Voters?’

At the risk of posting too much Trumpiana, I have to highlight this comment from reader St. Louisan:

National Review ran a piece this week taking Trump fans and other GOP rebels to task for failing to appreciate mainline Conservatism’s achievements, and putting them at risk. But this is what the piece gives as the “cornucopia of significant changes” for which Bush-weary voters should be grateful:

“the marginalization of wage and price controls, and of other centralizing tools; the lowering of destructive tax rates on income and other forms of wealth; the deregulation of a significant number of major industries; a renewed focus on national sovereignty; the successful reform of the welfare system; a consensus around free trade; a much lower minimum wage; a focus on both the text and the original meaning of the Constitution when discussing limits on government power; the restoration of the right to keep and bear arms; the stronger protection of freedom of expression; a national partial-birth-abortion ban; the death of speech-killing “campaign-finance reform”; and, lest we forget, the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union.”

If you’re working class, come from a depressed industrial town, or have been looking for work or stressed by economic insecurity, what on that list are you going to feel appreciative of? Lower taxes for people richer than you? Deregulation of industries that either laid you off or wrecked the economy? Free trade, so you could compete against Chinese workers making a fraction of your pay? A lower minimum wage?

There are things in that list to cheer the GOP’s donor class, to keep the NRA and national security hawks on board, and to mollify social conservatives. But there’s nothing, nothing at all, for you if your biggest concern is economic instability, depressed wages and torpid job growth, long-term unemployment or underemployment, and or rising inequality and over-concentration of wealth. It’s like the conservative movement is betting everything on no right-leaning voters being focused on those things, and don’t even realize it because those concerns haven’t occurred to them. At best, there’s the same ancient reliance on trickle-down economics that’s been stale since 1996.

There was actually a bit more to the NR piece, by Charles C.W. Cooke than St. Louisan indicates, but he’s basically right.

In related news, Chris Cillizza of the WaPo asks a great question. After going over the polling data, he says:

Why isn’t Trump being covered as the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee?

Substitute any other Republican in the race into Trump’s current position. There is a 100 percent chance that that person would be touted as the prohibitive favorite or the odds-on nominee. Imagine Marco Rubio — he of the third-place finish in Iowa and fifth-place finish in New Hampshire — with the same poll numbers as Trump in South Carolina, Nevada, and beyond. The coronation would be on. Hell, Rubio is now seen as a likely third-place finisher in South Carolina — behind Trump and Cruz — and laurels are virtually being thrown at his feet.

Cillizza goes on to say it’s because the media and the GOP establishment still cannot believe what they’re seeing. They still have hope that Trump’s going to blow his campaign up, or that the GOP wise men are going to figure out how to stop him. The idea of a Trump-as-Republican-nominee is so horrifying that they are still living in denial.

I think Cillizza’s right, and more: the fact that Trump is doing so phenomenally well means that Republican Party and conservative movement conventional wisdom for a long, long time has been … wrong. And that, in their minds, cannot be true. Charles C.W. Cooke’s NR piece says, “Had the conservative movement not held the line since 2008, Americans would have seen the quick death of the Bush tax cuts…”.

Yeah, what is wrong with those Trump voters. Republicans preserved the Bush tax cuts! Don’t they know they never had it so good?

 

Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont

Take a look at this USA Today op-ed from J.D. Vance, a Marine Corps veteran who used to support Trump, no longer does, but says he gets it. Boy, does he get it. Vance said that until last fall, he thought Trump was a stunt candidate for the white working class; he backed Jeb Bush. Until when, in a GOP debate, Jeb defended his brother for “keeping us safe.” That did it. Excerpts:

My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb’s education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.

In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to “go shopping” — something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?

Though Trump held his fire in the debate, he lit into George W. Bush on social media and in interviews afterwards. Other candidates defended the former president. They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.

More:

I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd. But as a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in a struggling Rust Belt town, I understand why many adore him — why I, if only briefly, cheered him on. He tells America’s rich and powerful precisely what we wish we could tell them ourselves: that many of the things they view as accomplishments suck for people like us.

This is a key point. A key point:

This alienation separates Trump’s voters from the constituency of another firebrand insurgent, Ted Cruz. Cruz draws from married voters, evangelical Christians, the elderly and those who identify as “very conservative.” These folks might be angry about the political process, but their anger is ideological and their lives — filled with family and church — are fundamentally intact.

Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.

Cruz’s voters dislike Jeb Bush because he has strayed from conservative orthodoxy. Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

A number of social and religious conservatives went nuts yesterday when I posted something called “A Social Conservative Case For Trump,” even though I made it clear I wasn’t endorsing that case. (This morning I posted “A Social Conservative Case Against Trump,” which I also do not endorse.) It seems to me that for no small number of intellectual religious and social conservatives, the idea of voting for Trump is so repulsive and alien that they cannot imagine why anyone with any brains or moral scruples would do so.

This is not Trump’s problem. This is their problem. Do they even know the country they live in?

I was e-mailing with a liberal friend this morning about my Trump posts. He said he was shocked by the reaction, especially considering that I was clear that I was just working out a thought experiment. He wrote:

I’m totally with you on how out of touch these people are. The Trump-ites are my people, your people. When I go home to [deleted] I see so much despair, it just feels bleak. If you have any acquaintance with actual working class folks Trump should be easy to understand. It’s disturbing really that these “leaders” can’t get this. How can you read the studies of working class white men dying, killing themselves, stuck in addiction, and more and think, “Well, more free trade and tax credits will solve this!”

I would add to this, “… and think, ‘Well, more restrictions on abortion, attempts to overturn Obergefell, and religious liberty protections will solve this!'”

You readers know that I think religious liberty is the most important question facing America today. But I don’t know many people outside my relatively small circle of intellectual Christians who share my concern. It’s not even on their radar. Hey, it ought to be on their radar, because it’s going to affect them down the line more than they realize. Still, when you’re facing the kind of problems so many Americans who are not as well off and as secure as I am are facing, the kinds of things I worry about are an abstract threat.

I believe abortion ought to be further restricted. I believe Obergefell was wrongly decided, though I think attempts to overturn it are a waste of time. I am extremely interested in more religious liberty protections — so much so that the religious liberty issue will probably determine my vote this fall.

But.

Late the other night, we got a text from a woman we know. She is one of the working poor, white, and older. She is a good-hearted woman who works very hard. She came into work one day for a friend of mine. Her hand was swollen, and probably broken. She didn’t have the money to go to the doctor. My friend offered to pay for it, but the woman wouldn’t take it. She was too proud to take charity. She went to work. With a broken hand. My friend was moved to tears by her dignity, and begged her to go to the doctor, to not worry about the cost. It did no good.

When she texted the other night, she asked us for help moving. She lives in a poor town a parish (county) over from ours. She is in a bad marriage. I’m not sure which marriage this is; she has bad luck with men. We asked her if she was safe, did she need a place to stay? No answer. We were on tenterhooks. She has grown children, but they’re a mess, for Fishtown reasons. The next day, she got back in touch with us, and said everything was fine. I’m sure everything is not fine. She’s working with a broken hand, metaphorically speaking. This is her life.

I have no idea who this lady is supporting for president, or if she even votes. But I would bet you what’s in my wallet that to the extent that she is engaged at all in politics, she’s voting Trump. Because she would be voting her desperation. When you live in a small town like I do, you see folks like her, and you get to know them. It’s not hard to see how folks like that are the authors of their own misery in many cases, but that doesn’t make them any less human, or any less our neighbor (and that is true for people of all races). The thing that gets to me about this woman is that because of my own personal social network, I know how hard she works, and at a time in life when people her age are supposed to be able to slow down and take it easy. She will be working that hard until the day she drops, because she has nothing.

What does Jeb Bush have to offer her? Or Marco Rubio? Or Ted Cruz? Frankly, I don’t think that Donald Trump has much to offer her either (as J.D. Vance grasps), but he at least sees her, or appears to. That’s not nothing.

Another story. Since I’ve been back in Louisiana these past few years, I’ve done some travel through the state with my work, and on family business. I’ve had the occasion to drive through small towns all over the state that I had not seen since I was a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s. And it has shocked me what has happened to most of these places. As my liberal friend said about his part of the country (not the South), many of these towns are pretty damn bleak, in ways they were not 30,, 40 years ago. The people who could have gotten out, got out. The only ones left are those too proud or too broke to leave. But there they are.

The Davos elites of the Democrat and Republican parties didn’t get the teenage daughters of Fishtown pregnant, or didn’t get the Fishtown sons busted for possession or fired from his job for failing a drug test. Those elites didn’t make them stop going to church, or break up their marriage, and don’t tell them to sit on their butts playing video games all day instead of trying to hustle up a living. But those elites did, in many cases, have a lot to do with why they got laid off in their fifties and can’t find work, and why their adult children have to make do with crappy service industry jobs instead of manufacturing jobs that paid well, and on which a family could build a future.

Some of these folks have sons and brothers who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan shattered. A friend of mine is an Iraq vet, a rock-ribbed Republican who won a medal for his service, and he considers the Iraq War to have been a godawful waste. (I don’t know who his candidate is this year.) And Donald Trump is the only Republican Party candidate who has the sense and the courage to say, however crudely, that Iraq was a mistake. You think injured vets give a rat’s rear end whether or not Donald Trump is being mean to Jeb Bush’s family? Some do, no doubt, but I’d be surprised if many did.

On the church thing, J.D. Vance has it right. I live in the rural South, and around here, church is primarily a middle-class thing, at least among white people. People who think Trump’s voters care that he’s a bad Christian, or a Christian in anything but name only, are dreaming.

Remember J.D. Vance:

They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.

Listen up, my fellow religious and social conservatives of the middle class. Trump may well be a false messiah; that’s an easy case to make. But we should try to remove the scales from our eyes and see the conditions that a lot of our fellow Americans live in, and ask why it is that the kind of candidate we have been voting for all these years, and have been pushing, have no credibility with these people. The Democrats tend to think of people like that as racists, and therefore beyond caring about. What’s our excuse?

Charles Featherstone once told me that when he was in ELCA (Lutheran) seminary, he often felt alienated from his fellow seminarians, because of his own hardscrabble, messy background. The others were so very, very progressive, and held on to harsh prejudices against white people who didn’t fit their neat, middle-class progressive mold. Charles was not ordained, in the end, and he’s pretty bitter about it. The other day he wrote this about his experiences, and in it, I saw a lot of myself, and middle-class Christians like me:

I think Lutherans are afraid of the world, of its rough edges, of dirt and grit, of strange smells, of babbling tongues they don’t understand, of crowded and uneven streets, and especially of dark alleys where life is lived in shadow. Lutheran good works generally involve cleaning and tidying and organizing and installing bright lights rather than meeting people where they are in chaotic darkness and then grabbing hold of them and not letting go. Because of this, I would, as an ELCA pastor, never be free to walk in that world and to witness to the love of God the way that I am truly called to do. The ELCA, for all its professed theological and social progressivism, is at its heart a very culturally conservative community — Lutherans believe deeply in certain social norms and expectations, in a right order to the world, and they harshly punish those who don’t adhere and do not conform. They may genuinely be a kind and gentle and tolerant people, but as a herd, they have the power to crush and destroy and marginalize just as easily as anyone. And they do. Far too easily and far too much.

ELCA Lutherans love, but almost always it’s love in box, love that is bounded, love that knows its limits, love that is well ordered and not allowed to overflow and make a mess. It is love that knows exactly who it is for, and why, and how. In the ELCA, love is only for certain people, who behave themselves, are good, and have the foresight to be born into the right, well-ordered, bourgeois circumstances. I said this in my book, and I will repeat it here — Lutherans may preach unearned grace, but their lived confession emphatically states, “If you truly need God’s grace, you clearly have not earned it.”

Note well, Charles Featherstone is a Lutheran complaining about his fellow Lutherans. I think his critique, though, strikes at the heart of a lot of middle-class American Christianity, including my own.

Does Featherstone’s harsh judgment of the liberal Lutherans of ELCA have anything to say to the rest of us Christians who (as I used to do) go nuts when confronted by the fact that lots of people like Donald Trump? Are we missing something important? Have we been far too narrow in our understanding of what it means to live in a Christian society, and of what it means to conserve Christian values? We have done a good job of bracketing off economic questions from social and moral ones in our politics, and now it has come back to bite us on the backside. If Trump, as Ross Douthat has suggested, may be a judgment on the Republican Party, people like you and me should also consider him a judgment on ourselves and what we have done, or failed to do, with our influence in the Republican Party and conservative movement.

A reader of this blog said that the Trump phenomenon reveals that there are two kids of social conservatives. I forget the language that he used, but I think that you have the ideological SoCons (those who operate out of a certain set of principles) and the nationalistic SoCons, who are more tribal and emotional. Cruz, and to some extent Rubio, appeal to the ideological SoCons; Trump, to the nationalists. Trump social conservatives probably don’t much care about abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty; the society they care about conserving is the one they see around them now, and see falling apart because of forces they (rightly and wrongly) see as beyond their control.

I’ll leave you with this essay on the present and future class war, by Joel Kotkin. Excerpts:

More Americans see themselves as belonging to the lower classes today than ever in recent times. In 2000 some 63 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, considered themselves middle class, while only 33 percent identified as working or lower class. In 2015, only 51 percent of Americans call themselves middle class while the percentage identifying with the lower classes rose to 48 percent.

The bulk of this population belongs to what some social scientists call the “precariat,” people who face diminished prospects of achieving middle-class status—a good job, homeownership, some decent retirement. The precariat is made up of a broad variety of jobs that include adjunct professors, freelancers, substitute teachers—essentially any worker without long-term job stability. According to one estimate, at least one-third of the U.S. workforce falls into this category. By 2020, a separate study estimates, more than 40 percent of Americans, or 60 million people, will be independent workers—freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees.

This constituency—notably the white majority—is angry, and with good cause. Between 1998 and 2013, white Americans have seen declines in both their incomes and their life expectancy, with large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse. They have, as one writer notes, “lost the narrative of their lives,” while being widely regarded as a dying species by a media that views them with contempt and ridicule.

In this sense, the flocking by stressed working-class whites to the Trump banner—the New York billionaire won 45 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters who did not attend college—represents a blowback from an increasingly stressed group that tends to attend church less and follow less conventional morality, which is perhaps one reason they prefer the looser Trump to the Bible-thumping Cruz, not to mention the failing Ben Carson.

Many Trump supporters are modern-day “Reagan Democrats.” Half of Trump’s supporters, according to a YouGov survey, stopped their education in high school or before. Trump’s message appeals to these voters in part by preserving Social Security and other entitlements. He appeals to populist rather than the usual GOP free-market sentiment, and decisively won all voters making under $50,000 a year. Tellingly, among Iowa Republican voters who called themselves “moderate or liberal,” Trump trounced Cruz, and duplicated the feat again in New Hampshire.

Conservative intellectuals dismiss Trump as both too radical and not conservative enough. He offends pundits in both parties by pushing things verboten in polite circles, such as trade with China, which has been responsible for the bulk of U.S. manufacturing losses. He also has embraced curbs on immigration, something that rankles the established leaders in both parties. “There’s a silent majority out there,” Trump says. “We’re tired of being pushed around, kicked around, and being led by stupid people.”

Trump is the revenge of Fishtown against Belmont.  As Charles Murray has written:

Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are. The members of America’s new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don’t go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don’t share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.

Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisors, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.

And it is a problem when Christians who run things, and live in nice neighborhoods, and are able to afford to send their kids to good schools, cannot empathize with the priorities of people who drive pick-ups with Trump stickers on the bumper. I’m seeing those around my town. I have yet to see a sticker for a single other Republican candidate. Not one.

The Pope Vs. The Donald

The news keeps getting better for Donald Trump, a man who is fortunate in his critics and enemies:

Inserting himself into the Republican presidential race, Pope Francis on Wednesday suggested that Donald J. Trump “is not Christian” because of the harshness of his campaign promises to deport more immigrants and force Mexico to pay for a wall along the border.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said when a reporter asked him about Mr. Trump on the papal airliner as he returned to Rome after his six-day visit to Mexico.

Says the Pope who wants Europe to fling its doors open to the migrant horde from the Middle East and Africa. More:

Asked whether he would try to influence Catholics in how they vote in the presidential election, Francis said he “was not going to get involved in that” but then repeated his criticism of Mr. Trump, with a caveat.

“I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that,” Francis said. “We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.”

Meanwhile, Catholic World Report had some disturbing news this week:

However, in his direct addresses to the Mexican people, the pope has touched less on universal themes and more on ideologically-charged issues that tend to fall under the rubric of liberation theology, a tendency that was fought vigorously by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger during the papacy of the former.

On Monday, the pope prayed before the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, former prelate of the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, a controversial figure famous for his perceived support for neo-Marxist movements in the state of Chiapas, where a military uprising allegedly inspired by his highly politicized pastoral approach took place in the mid-1990s. Ruiz was reputed to encourage a syncretistic approach to indigenous cultural practices, seeking to promote indigenous traditions rather than teaching the gospel to the locals, and resulting in a mixture of pagan and Catholic practices among the Maya of the region that remains to this day. His emphasis on politics was so strong that the sacraments were reportedly neglected by his activist clergy; membership in the Catholic Church plummeted and 30% of children in his diocese were reportedly unbaptized when he left office. He also publicly associated with notorious condemned exponents of liberation theology, such as ex-priest Leonardo Boff and others.

Ruiz’s activities were regarded as so subversive of Catholic doctrine that he was denounced in a letter to the Apostolic Nuncio to Mexico by Cardinal Bernadin Gantin, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops, and consequently asked to resign by the nuncio in 1993. However, he refused to do so and held out until his 75th birthday, submitting his resignation in accordance with the Code of Canon Law in 1999.

The pope’s embrace of one of the major figures of liberation theology in Mexico follows his eyebrow-raising acceptance of Marxist symbols mixed with the figure of Christ in July 2015, when President Evo Morales of Bolivia gave the pope an image of Christ crucified on a hammer and sickle, the traditional symbol of communism embraced by the former Soviet Union. The pope, who brought the image back with him to the Holy See, explicitly acknowledged in a press conference during the trip that the image was the creation of the neo-Marxist Fr. Luis Espinal, who had embraced a form of liberation theology in the 1980s that was later condemned. Although Francis seemed to distance himself from the Marxist intentions of the symbol, his acceptance of the gift was the cause of much consternation in Latin America.

Me, I think being called “not a Christian” by this Pope, however conditionally, can only help Trump. Chances are that American Catholics of the political right who are inclined to support Trump will see his denunciation by Francis as a sign that he (Trump) is on the right path.

UPDATE: This is true:

The Pope is right about Trump for the wrong reasons. Let’s move on, now.

— Michael B Dougherty (@michaelbd) February 18, 2016

It is interesting to consider that Francis is all “who am I to judge?” when it comes to gays and lesbians, but is willing to read people out of Christianity for opposing open borders to immigration.

A Social Conservative Case Against Trump

Yesterday I laid out a rationale for social conservatives voting for Trump. Today I will do the same for social conservatives to vote against Trump (and therefore for one of the other GOP candidates). I’m going to start with the premise that you, the social conservative, are alienated from the Republican Party and tempted to vote for Trump to send a message, to blow up the system, or some related reason. Here is a case for not doing that — and remember, like yesterday’s post, this is a thought experiment. Don’t assume that you know what I plan to do based on yesterday’s post or this one.

Assume: You have decided that voting for one of the non-Trump Republicans is a vote for the same old same old. You believe that they are all in the pockets of Big Business. You think that they pay lip service to social conservative causes, and are tired of voting Republican because they aren’t as bad as the Democrats on the things you care about the most. You believe that little meaningful progress is possible on abortion at the federal level, and that gay marriage (alas!) is a settled issue because of Obergefell. You believe that whatever they say, the Republican Party in Washington is going to be soft on defending religious liberty, because of Big Business and donors, and they will also do nothing meaningful on immigration because of same. So why not take a chance with Trump?

1. Because he is a man of low character. He’s a bully. He’s unashamedly prideful, has no sense of decorum, and is proud of his spitefulness towards enemies. We have elected men like him before, but Trump is a new thing: a bad guy who wears his low character as a badge of honor. To put a man like that in the White House would desecrate the office and lower the morals of the nation. Didn’t we learn anything from Bill Clinton, who at least had the decency to pay tribute to virtue by playing the hypocrite? Granted, we are electing a chief executive, not a pastor, but character matters, because character is destiny. Do we want to lash the fate of the nation to such a character? How could a social conservative say yes? His poor character means that…

2. He speaks to what is worst in us. Trump has done the Republican Party a favor by forcing its leadership to come to terms with issues it has tried to avoid for a long time. Good for him. But he really does energize our hatreds and resentments, and thrives on that dark energy. A Trump presidency may release some demons that we will come to regret, and this will completely obviate any positive change that might have come out of electing him. And therefore…

3. A President Trump would find it impossible to govern. He is not a man of the system, and that’s what people love about him. But the American president is not a king. He can’t simply order people around. He has to work with them. President Trump is a pragmatist, it’s true, and would probably be more ideologically flexible than, say, Ted Cruz. But he is an extremely polarizing figure. Every Democrat in Washington would hate his guts, and most Republicans would too. That might not be the worst thing if he had the backing of the American people, like an old-fashioned sovereign against the aristocracy. But he doesn’t, and he won’t. He is far, far too abrasive for that. Washington under Trump would mean constant chaos. Is that what social conservatism wants, that kind of radical instability? And because of this…

4. When he can’t deliver on his empty promises, what happens next? Let’s say Trump wins. He’s not going to build a wall with Mexico, and he’s not going to get the Mexicans to pay for it. Most of these things he’s bragging that he’s going to do, he can’t do. Having raised expectations so high, and then having failed to deliver, what will he tell his followers? What will they believe? What will they do? Most important: who will they blame, which is to say, scapegoat?

5. He’s unpredictable. There is no reason to believe that he really does believe what he says, because his past is so erratic. Second, he is deeply undisciplined. When the president of the United States shoots off his mouth, trying to be a tough guy, wars start. Social conservatives ought to know in their bones how destructive people like that can be.

6. Administrative staffing. Overnight, a reader who is a law professor wrote to say:

It is important to remember — and many conservative commentators I read seem not to — the role that the President plays in staffing the executive branch and the administrative apparatus.  There can be no doubt that Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz would fill the mid-level but crucial positions in, say, HHS or the DOJ or the DOL or . . . with people who are far more likely to give some effect to conservative concerns than either Hillary or Trump.  I’d urge you, when “talking” with your readers about the various considerations that weigh in the balance, to go beyond the judicial-nominations issue (which is also, in my view, crucial and an area where, again, the GOP is clearly far better) and remember (i) executive orders; (ii) staffing; and (iii) rule-making.

7. He’s from New York City. Another reader, a native New Yorker, wrote overnight to say:

I think you’re really, really wrong that Trump might do as much to protect religious liberty as any of the other candidates. Now, of course, I hate Trump. But I’m just saying this as a New Yorker. Even what passes for a “conservative” in most of Manhattan has zero support for religious liberty. None. Moreover, they really can’t fathom why you would want it. As long as you get to say whatever prayers you want at church on Sunday, you have no right to complain. And really, they probably wouldn’t get too exercised if the government started policing sermons, either–only for really important things like racism and homophobia, of course, and are you really saying that the right to liberty includes the right to be homophobic while enjoying a tax exemption? Are you nuts? They wouldn’t infringe your right to believe those things, just for a pastor to say them in a tax exempt institution. The only people on the East Coast who are going to sign onto a religious liberty fight are Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

As president, or for that matter, as a general election candidate, Donald Trump is going to do nothing to advance religious liberty.  In fact, it’s one of the first issues that I’d expect him to hurl overboard as he goes hunting for a bigger coalition. Trump is interested in policies that poll majorities but the elite of both parties is refusing to touch–what you might call the Gilens policies. Immigration and trade are on that list. Religious liberty is not. He will not act to protect religious liberty, he will not look for judges who will do so, and he won’t really understand why anyone would expect him to just because he said he would earlier in the campaign.

8. A Trump nomination would mean a Hillary Clinton win. Your heart tells you that you want Trump, but you had better think about this harder. He has consistently shown that he has a ceiling in the polls. He is a long shot candidate, even as the Republican nominee. A vote for Trump in the GOP primary almost certainly means a win in November for Hillary Clinton, which would mean disaster for abortion and religious liberty concerns. A reader writes:

I’d also point out that on abortion, your post suggests that it’s a binary between the status quo, and legalizing more abortion restrictions. You’ve left out what is now going to happen with the court if liberals appoint another justice, which is that the court will sweep away all the restrictions we have. Maybe that doesn’t matter–maybe the abortion rate will stay the same. But cold economic logic suggests that if you make something easier to get, you get more of it.

9. He’s a classic demagogue who will set a very dangerous precedent. A Trump figure can thrill us by saying what’s on his mind, but there is nothing in the man respectful of democracy and democratic ways, which includes respect for the rule of law, and one’s opponents. A social conservative should fear a man of his temperament in the presidency, if only for how it would weaken our democracy.

CONCLUSION: Trump is right about some important things. The Republican Party really is a mess, and has brought this calamity onto itself. That said, social conservatives would be better off with the devil they know, who is at least predictable, than the devil they do not. Trump has no discernible moral compass, Trump often speaks to the devils of our nature, Trump won’t be able to govern, Trump has no instinctive feel for the things that drive religious and social conservatives, Trump may well throw us overboard when we become inconvenient to him, and a Trump nomination would almost certainly mean a Hillary Clinton victory in the fall. It’s too risky to go with Trump. We don’t live in a perfect world, and he’s the worst of all the possible choices.

That’s a social conservative case against Trump for social conservatives who are sick and tired of the Republican Party. Again, as with yesterday’s post, don’t assume that you know which one I personally believe. This is just for discussion purposes.

A Social Conservative Case for Trump

Why would a social conservative vote for Donald Trump, who is the least socially conservative of all the Republican candidates? I can think of a few reasons:

1. The big issues for social conservatives are abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty (religious liberty being threatened as a consequence of gay marriage and civil rights laws).

2. On abortion, unless the Supreme Court were to revisit Roe v. Wade — something nobody foresees happening — the right to legal abortion is here to stay. Even if the Court overturned Roe, all that would mean is that the right to regulate abortion would return to the states. Most states would unhesitatingly protect abortion rights. Some would impose restrictions. In no state would it likely be banned outright. The possibility of there being an end to abortion achieved through judicial and legislative means is remote. That does not mean that having a pro-life president is unimportant, but it does mean that its importance has to be judged relative to other factors.

3. Anybody who thinks Obergefell is going to be overturned is dreaming. It won’t happen. Roe was less popular in 1973 than Obergefell is today, and we all know by now that the generation most opposed to same-sex marriage is passing away. Gay marriage is here to stay. Our side lost that battle, and we waste time and resources trying to re-fight it. The candidates who say they’re going to work to overturn Obergefell are either pandering or deluded. And socially conservative voters who are in touch with reality know that what’s done is done. Fighting same-sex marriage in the courts is the most lost of lost causes.

4. Religious liberty is where the real fight is, specifically the degree to which religious institutions and individuals will have the freedom to practice their beliefs without running afoul of civil liberties for gay men and women. This is where having a friendly administration matters most to religious and social conservatives. And this is an area where religious and social conservatives are in the most danger of being bamboozled by the GOP Establishment.

Why? Every single one of the GOP candidates will say the right thing (from a social conservative point of view) on religious liberty. But will they deliver? Don’t you believe it. The Indiana RFRA fight was the Waterloo of social conservatives. Big Business has come down decisively on the side of gay rights, and forced Gov. Mike Pence and the state GOP lawmakers to back down. They forced Gov. Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas to back down. As I cannot repeat often enough, I was told last fall by multiple sources in a position to know that the Congressional Republicans have no intention of making religious liberty an issue going forward. For one thing, they don’t want to be called bigots, and for another, the donor class is against it. I don’t doubt that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (at least) would like to protect religious liberty, but I am convinced that they are too beholden to the donor class to do anything more than make speeches.

5. That brings us to Donald Trump. He has said publicly that he will make protecting religious liberty a priority. Does he mean it? I have no idea, and you don’t either. He is no religious conservative. But he is a populist who doesn’t care what the donor class thinks, because he is not indebted to them. It is reasonable to think that religious liberty stands a better chance with Trump in the White House than any other Republican. Mind you, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, but that just goes to show you how weak the position of us religious and social conservatives has become within the Republican Party.

6. There are, of course, ramifications for social conservatism from the way the economy is run, for open-borders policies, and from the GOP-Democratic establishment’s hawkishness. “Invade the world, invite the world” ought to matter to social conservatives, as should economic policies that hollow out American industries and cities. FiveThirtyEight writes that GOP-leaning cities are under greater threat of losing jobs to automation.  Job loss has tremendous impact on the social fabric. “Creative destruction” doesn’t sound so nice when it’s your job and your community being destroyed. Trump speaks to that reality in ways the other Republicans do not. Is he selling snake oil? He may well be. But he’s talking about it compellingly.

That’s a case for social and religious conservatives voting for Donald Trump. I’m not saying it’s a persuasive case; most conservative Christians I know are against Trump, for reasons strongly rooted in their faith convictions. And I’m not saying it’s what I personally believe. But I am saying here that it is by no means unreasonable for social and religious conservatives, facing down the unhappy realities of this field, to cast their lot with the much-married, amoral, pride-filled casino mogul. We live in interesting times.

UPDATE: A number of people seem to be under the impression that I’m supporting Trump. Not necessarily true. For one thing, you will remember last week that I called him a “hooligan” and a “threat to democracy.” For another, in all honesty I do not like any of the candidates, and have not settled on one, but when I do, I will not be saying who it is, because TAC is a 501(c)(3) entity, and that means we who write for it are not allowed to endorse candidates or political causes. Nothing I write in this space should be taken as an endorsement of any particular candidate. I was simply thinking earlier today, “How could a social conservative justify voting for Trump?”, and followed that thought.

As I’ve said before on many occasions — including in the post in which I called Trump a hooligan, mostly because he embraced torture! — I think he’s doing Republican politics a service, and I think the Republican Party, and Conservatism, Inc., has brought Trump on themselves. But that does not mean he should be president. I also think Bernie Sanders is doing a similar service for the Democrats, but that does not mean I want to see a socialist in the White House.

Like many people in my line of work, it took me a long, long time to understand why anybody would take Trump seriously, much less vote for him other than malign reasons. I think he’s a man of low morals and bad character. But I think George W. Bush is a true-believing Christian and generally an honorable man — Trump is neither — who led America into disaster. This is a disaster none of the Republicans other than Trump even recognize (publicly) as a disaster. (And by the way, George W. Bush also supported torture.) I think there are many reasons for social conservatives not to back Trump, and we see these reasons talked about every day on the Right. If you’re a social conservative who votes against Trump, that’s fine, you have reason, and maybe more reason than the social conservative who votes for him. But just be clear that on the political issues that have mattered most to social conservatives — abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty — it is by no means obvious that the non-Trump Republicans are going to be any better, and they may be worse.

UPDATE.2: Daniel Larison, responding to my post about Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of the GOP field, said:

What struck me about Ruffini’s comments was the absolute contempt he had for both Trump and for his supporters. In a matter of minutes, Ruffini referred to Trump’s supporters as a “cancer” that had to be contained, and said that it “wouldn’t be a stretch” to compare Trump’s tactics to those of jihadists. If you think that at least a third of your own party represents a “cancer” that needs to be kept in check, you won’t have the first clue how to respond to it. Trump serves as the vehicle to return the contempt that party elites and strategists have had for his supporters for decades. So naturally the “answer” that one these same clever strategists has is to heap more contempt on them.

Similarly, if it is impossible to understand why social conservatives may believe Trump, for all his sins and failings, is a better risk for them as social conservatives than the Republican Party regulars, the GOP is in more trouble than we thought.

Here’s an example. I think Trump’s language for talking about illegal immigrants is repulsive. On the other hand, in Texas, where I used to live, business conservatives routinely advocated for immigration “reform,” on economic grounds and grounds of compassion. I do not believe these folks were, or are, insincere. Hell, a lot of my friends were like this, and they are good, well-meaning, big-hearted people! But I think they genuinely do not see, and do not care, about the effect of mass immigration on their fellow Americans farther down the social hierarchy.

For people in our socioeconomic demographic, greater immigration meant more and better restaurants, and better lawn and garden care. Our kids weren’t having their schools overrun by children who couldn’t speak the language; they went to private school, or to public schools in parts of town immigrants couldn’t afford. We weren’t having the hospitals we used overrun by illegal immigrants needing care; we didn’t have to use the public hospital. Our neighborhoods weren’t changing in front of our eyes. And so on. The immigration issue was a chance for us to show our compassion — sometimes our explicitly Christian compassion — without it costing us anything tangible. The kind of white people my class looked down on and thought of as racist rabble were the kind of white people who had to bear a lot of the brunt of our politics and what we called compassion.

And you know what? A lot of those people are racist, and shame on them for it. Some of them are rabble. But they are not wrong to judge that many in our class looks down on them, and doesn’t share their interests. The kinds of social things they might like to conserve don’t really matter to people of my class. We can’t see it, we never could see it, and some of us are still bound and determined not to see it, until they make us see it.

UPDATE.3: Check this blog in the morning for “A Social Conservative Case Against Trump (For Social Conservatives Alienated From the GOP)”.

Accepting The Donald

Yesterday the GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini sent out 19 successive tweets sharing his assessment of the Republican race so far. I hope someone will Storify them so you can all easily read them, but until then, follow the link above. His basic argument is that the GOP race is settling into a pattern. Trump has a hard core of supporters nationally, but he can’t seem to grow beyond it. They are, however, unshakable in their support of him:

11/ As we move to a three man race, Trump will have 40, Cruz will have 30, establishment candidate will have 30 *nationally*

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 17, 2016

12/ This puts Trump in pole position. Winnowing to 3 won’t be enough. Field will need to winnow to 2 to defeat Trump under current dynamic — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 17, 2016

13/ It seems like we have a 50/50 shot if the field winnows to two, with very little margin for error

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 17, 2016

“We,” of course, refers to the GOP Establishment. Ruffini emphasizes that there is likely no way to peel Trump voters away from their man. Therefore:

18/ Strategy is now one of containment. Of keeping the cancer from reaching 45%, or God forbid, 50% — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 17, 2016

19/ And that means immunizing/inoculating any reasonable people who still may be left out there.

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 17, 2016

Which, I suppose, means a brokered Republican convention. Mayhem. If Trump is denied the nomination, it’s hard to see his people accepting that. It’s hard to see him accepting it. I would put money on a third-party run, and that probably means a Hillary Clinton presidency … unless Trump rallies enough voters to give him a winning plurality. People forget that Bill Clinton won his first term without a majority, but because he was the top vote-getter in a three-man field (Bush, Clinton, and Perot, whose 19 percent denied either opponent an outright win in the popular vote). Hard to see how Trump would pull that off, but if he could win over enough disaffected working-class Democrats, he might. Here’s something interesting about Ruffini’s analysis. Two years ago, he tweeted a similar series of posts talking about how, in his view, conservative institutions are broken. Toward the end, he says:

Also, changing things will require electing someone who doesn’t give a f— about existing stakeholders and goes their own direction.

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 4, 2014

Donald Trump is not the change agent Republicans like Ruffini wanted, but he’s the change agent they’ve got.

UPDATE: Trip Gabriel of the NYT writes that Trump’s violation of Republican orthodoxies doesn’t bother his fans:

Mark Jebens, a veteran of 22 years in the Marine Corps, found no fault with Donald J. Trump’s scathing criticism that President George W. Bush “lied” about weapons of mass destruction while leading the United States into war in Iraq.

“At the end of the day, a lot of good Marines and sailors and airmen died over something that wasn’t there,” said Mr. Jebens, who served three combat tours in Iraq. “So you’ve got to ask tough critical questions. In the military we called it a debrief or a hot wash.”

Mr. Trump’s hot wash of Mr. Bush in a debate on Saturday, including a suggestion that he did not heed intelligence warnings before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, convinced many Republicans that Mr. Trump had finally gone too far, tarring a former president who is popular in military-friendly South Carolina, and uttering charges that Rush Limbaugh, for one, called “liberal Democrat lingo.”

But numerous military veterans interviewed at Trump rallies in South Carolina this week, including Mr. Jebens, said they had no problem with Mr. Trump’s comments, even if they did not entirely agree with him.

Indeed. I felt exactly the same way when watching Trump lay into Jeb Bush and the others about George W. Bush’s failures on 9/11 and in the Iraq War. Though I did not think Trump was fair to Bush (I don’t know that anyone could have truly foreseen 9/11 coming), it was terrific to hear somebody contending for the Republican Party presidential nomination call bulls*it on the GOP Iraq War denial. The party has not yet contended with the Iraq defeat, and what it means for the nation going forward, because it cannot for some reason admit that it was disastrously wrong, and wrong in ways that this nation — especially its veterans — will be paying for for a long time. It’s easier for the Republican Establishment to tell itself these lies than to confront the messy truth. The Establishment candidates look weak when, in the face of Trump’s blunt criticism of G.W. Bush and the Iraq War, they fall back on pieties like Poor Jeb™ whining about Trump saying mean things about his family, or this from Rubio:

RUBIO: I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.

And you can — I think you can look back in hindsight and say a couple of things, but he kept us safe. And not only did he keep us safe, but no matter what you want to say about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. resolutions, in open violation, and the world wouldn’t do anything about it, and George W. Bush enforced what the international community refused to do.

A trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, millions of refugees and a region sliding towards a war of all against all — and that’s “keeping us safe”? Rubio is going to praise Bush for destroying all these lives and the peace for the sake of defending the United Nations?!

And there are actual smart Republicans inside the Beltway who can’t imagine why Trump is doing well. He says mean things about Jeb!’s brother! He says the Iraq War was a failure! He’s history’s greatest monster!



Idiots.

The Democrats Are Republicans

A conservative friend e-mailed yesterday, about Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s The Matter With Kansas?:

When that book came out, without reading it, I pooh-poohed the idea that Kansans should sign on to the Democrats’ agenda, with its identity politics, disregard for traditional morality, etc., just because it might be better for their wallets to be on the receiving end of a redistributionist system. I said to myself that Kansans (broadly speaking, small-k kansans) don’t want to soak the rich because they hope and expect to be rich. And they don’t want to vote for economic liberals because that would mean accepting abortion and all the other baggage that comes with Democratic Party.

But lately, with Trump and Sanders ascendant, and with Kansans not getting rich or even holding their ground, I’m wondering if the writer wasn’t pretty much on target on the economics.

Related: I saw Bernie Sanders on Colbert a few days ago. Colbert asked a softball question about how weird it is that a reality-TV goon like Trump is so popular. I assumed Sanders would piñata Trump, but his response was fascinating – he recognized the legitimate grievances that were animating Trump voters, without insulting Trump and without saying his name. Sanders isn’t just campaigning for Hillary’s voters, he’s campaigning for Trump’s.

Well, my friend, thanks to one of this blog’s commenters, here’s a fairly devastating Guardian column by Thomas Frank saying that the problem Hillary Clinton faces is that the Democratic Party today is the one her husband made, and it’s pretty much the GOP with a socially liberal face. Excerpts:

What Democrats had to turn away from, reformers of all stripes said in those days, was the supposedly obsolete legacy of the New Deal, with its fixation on working-class people. What had to be embraced, the party’s reformers agreed, was the emerging post-industrial economy and in particular the winners of this new order: the highly educated professionals who populated its clean and innovative knowledge industries.

The figure that brought triumphant closure to that last internecine war was President Bill Clinton, who installed a new kind of Democratic administration in Washington. Rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton passed trade deals that defied and even injured the labor movement, once his party’s leading constituency; he signed off on a measure that basically ended the federal welfare program; and he performed singular favors for the financial industry, the New Deal’s great nemesis.

More:

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

And:

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity.

Read the whole thing. I do not believe that either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump will be the next president (though I am far less confident about Trump’s fate). But I believe that both men will have done their parties and their country a great service by poleaxing the political establishment. The really interesting story is going to be the upstart candidates who rush through the holes in the wall that both Sanders and Trump have blasted.

Antonin Scalia, Christian

What a terrific comment from reader William Dalton:

More on the topic of profound Christianity of Antonin Scalia. It really was remarkable for a man of such prominence in secular America today.

A friend of mine preached at the funeral of Justice Lewis Powell in Richmond in 1998. In attendance were all the members of the Supreme Court, as well as many other dignitaries. Today he posted a letter he received after conducting that service. It was from Justice Scalia. This is it:

Supreme Court of the United States

Washington, D. C. 20543

CHAMBERS OF

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA

September 1, 1998

Dr. James C. Goodloe

Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church

1627 Monument Avenue

Richmond, Virginia 23220-2925

Dear Dr. Goodloe:

I looked for you unsuccessfully at the luncheon following the funeral yesterday. I wanted to tell you how reverent and inspiring I found the service that you conducted.

In my aging years, I have attended so many funerals of prominent people that I consider myself a connoisseur of the genre. When the deceased and his family are nonbelievers, of course, there is not much to be said except praise for the departed who is no more. But even in Christian services conducted for deceased Christians , I am surprised at how often eulogy is the centerpiece of the service, rather than (as it was in your church) the Resurrection of Christ, and the eternal life which follows from that. I am told that, in Roman Catholic canon law, encomiums at funeral Masses are not permitted—though if that is the rule, I have never seen it observed except in the breach. I have always thought there is much to be said for such a prohibition, not only because it spares from embarrassment or dissembling those of us about whom little good can truthfully be said, but also because, even when the deceased was an admirable person—indeed, especially when the deceased was an admirable person—praise for his virtues can cause us to forget that we are praying for, and giving thanks for, God’s inexplicable mercy to a sinner. (My goodness, that seems more like a Presbyterian thought than a Catholic one!)

Perhaps the clergymen who conduct relatively secular services are moved by a desire not to offend the nonbelievers in attendance—whose numbers tend to increase in proportion to the prominence of the deceased. What a great mistake. Weddings and funerals (but especially funerals) are the principal occasions left in modern America when you can preach the Good News not just to the faithful, but to those who have never really heard it.

Many thanks, Dr. Goodloe, for a service that did honor to Lewis and homage to God. It was a privilege to sit with your congregation. Best regards.

Sincerely,

Antonin Scalia

What a man. What a man.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the Facebook page on which the letter first appeared.