Rod Dreher's Blog, page 618
January 24, 2016
‘Why Not Trump?’
Two views of Trump and his supporters, from conservatives who hate Trumpism:
1. From Martin Cothran, the view that Trump and his followers are anti-intellectual morons who are destroying intellectually serious conservatism:
What can you say about a movement of people that stands and applauds the incoherent babbling of Sarah Palin in her endorsement of Donald Trump and then blindly dismisses the serious and reasoned arguments of twenty-two veteran conservative thinkers writing in the flagship conservative magazine without even addressing what they said?
What we are witnessing is a wholesale repudiation of conservatism by a substantial faction of this nation’s conservative political party. The late William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and long-time editor of National Review said in the early 1980s that “all the philosophical action is on the right.” He was right then. But he could not say that today, not in a national party that can’t seem to understand any political thought longer than 140 characters, and which thinks that the assertion “It’s going to be great” constitutes political eloquence.
2. From Peggy Noonan, the idea that this might be true, but there are good reasons why so many people prefer him to the standard-issue GOP politicians. Donald Trump may be a bad deal, but when compared to the same old same old from the Republican Party, he looks better. She says instead of bitching about how unserious Trumpism is, some mainstream GOP candidate ought to take the message its popularity sends seriously. Noonan poses questions that this unnamed GOP candidate ought to pose, and answer, in a speech. Excerpt:
If Mr. Trump is not a conservative, why is that bad? That is, what’s good about conservatism? Why is it pertinent and necessary? If the GOP base is a big, broad jumble that includes people reliant on entitlements who also see progressive social ambitions as destructive to the nation, how does conservatism speak to them?
What do you imagine a Trump presidency would look like? His supporters think he’ll go in there and clean out the stables. Would he? Could he? Can you?
What’s wrong with a little disorder? Does Trumpism enliven our political life with zest and unpredictability, or does it diminish our political life with unthinking emotionalism and shallowness?
Why is it important that a president have previous governmental experience? (Here I will add that I have seen longtime officeholders start out with fire and idealism, only in time to learn too well what isn’t possible. “We can’t get that through.” “We lost on that one last time.” They quietly give up; their sense of reality becomes a lethargic pessimism. Mr. Trump, new to political office, would not know what’s impossible. Leaders like that, if they also have talent, wisdom, popularity and organization, can occasionally make the impossible happen. Is it worth the chance?)
Most important, did Mr. Trump come from nowhere? Did the GOP establishment make any mistakes the past 15 years? [Emphasis mine — RD] If so, how can the damage be repaired? Was the Republican elite, like the Democratic one, essentially uninterested in the eroding power and position of the American working class? Were GOP leaders insensitive, cynical and selfish regarding public disapproval of and anxieties about illegal immigration?
What if both No. 1 and No. 2 are true to some extent? I think they are. Yes, Trumpism and its popularity are demolishing intellectually serious conservatism. And yes, the GOP and the conservative establishment made that job easier for them by the way they have governed.
As a reader of this blog e-mailed about Trump’s awfulness, “Compared to what?” He meant by that, Trump is a badly flawed messenger, but he’s all conservatives who are sick of the party line have. Another reader of this blog, a conservative who opposes Trump, e-mailed to say that he believes the GOP and the conservative establishment deserves to be demolished for their misrule, but that he can’t back Trump because the cost to the country would be too great.
Yet as reader Sam M. has pointed out, it is not clear what Trump supporters actually want, besides a wall between the US and Mexico, and what that represents about immigration. It doesn’t sound like they want smaller government, but rather a government that doesn’t work against them. Do they want a more isolationist US foreign policy? You might think so, given Trump’s criticism of the Iraq War, one that I certainly share (the GOP’s refusal to come to terms with the Iraq catastrophe is a good reason not to trust it). But beneath that “make America great again” bluster is some big-stick swagger. Well, which is it?
Far as I can tell, the main impetus behind the Trump phenomenon is the conviction that GOP establishment politicians are not for these voters and their interests. I think Cothran is right to say that far too many Trumpistas are settling for flim-flam. But I think Noonan is also right to say, indirectly, that flim-flam is no less flim-flam when it presents itself as the standard rhetoric and policy positions of the Republican Party elites.
If Mr. Trump is not a conservative, why is that bad? Put another way, “If Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and the rest are conservatives, why is conservatism good?” It is not clear that any of them have an answer to that question, or think that they have to answer it. Frankly, I think Trump is no kind of answer, but I cannot plausibly answer the “If Trump is not a conservative, why is that bad?” question, given what “conservative” means in the context of these presidential candidates.
It is unquestionably true that discourse on the Right, especially at the popular, talk-radio level, has long been characterized by incessant boundary policing and hard-core identity politicking (this is what the epithet “RINO” means). It really is anti-rational and anti-intellectual — but this is the kind of politics of emotion that the GOP establishment has been happy to encourage and exploit. Now comes Nemesis, in the form of a cocksure tycoon from Reality TV. Maybe the kind of people who rally around Trump see what passes under the label Conservatism™ and believe that if that’s what conservatism is, they would rather have something else — and it’s not the liberalism of the Democratic Party.
Noonan’s are the kinds of questions the mainstream Republican candidates should have been asking themselves — and answering — six months ago. But they, like many of us, thought Trump was going to go away once people got to know the real Donald. Well, guess what? Eight days away from the Iowa caucuses, and Trump is a slight favorite. He’s a heavy favorite in the next two contests, in New Hampshire and South Carolina. As my colleague Noah Millman has pointed out, believing that Trump can be stopped if he wins that trifecta is a form of magical thinking.
I would like to point out that back in August 2015, Noah was asking the questions that no Republican competitor of Trump’s was asking, when it might have done them some strategic good. Such as:
Or are we going to say we can’t elect him because he’s a jerk and a blowhard and has said awful things about women? Really? More awful than the things Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have said about gay people? More inflammatory than the things virtually every Republican candidate has said about Russia or Iran? (I’ll take a leader who believes “Persians are great negotiators” over “Iran is run by a messianic suicide-cult” any day.) Or because he’s a man with terrible taste? You don’t think Trump would actually build a classier ballroom than Washington’s got now? Have you been to Washington lately?
Yes, Trump is basically executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Is that supposed to make the civic-minded shudder? Does the Republican Party strike you as a particularly civic-minded organization? Is there any organization you can name more deeply deserving of being hostilely taken over in this manner?
No! More Millman:
Trump has articulated a vision of what the president’s job is, and that is to be the chief negotiator for the United States. If that’s the job, who, among his competition, looks like he or she would do it better? Who has provided any evidence that he or she would do it better?
And:
Donald Trump’s greatest weakness as a candidate has always been the utter ridiculousness of the proposition. Now that he is actually a plausible contender for the presidency, either as a Republican or as an Independent, it will take more than derision to beat him. It may take an actual reason why he would be a worse president than another contender — and a reason that resonates with the broad swath of Americans who are not wedded to the core ideological commitments of either of our major parties.
So? Why not Trump?
Note well: Millman was asking these questions five months ago.
The NR symposium attempts to answer, forcefully, the main question: Why not Trump? At this point, though, does anyone who doesn’t already agree with the answers really want to hear them?
Finally, here’s a NYT review of two new books about how conservatism ran itself into a ditch, one by the liberal commenter E.J. Dionne, the other by conservative commenter Matt K. Lewis. Excerpt:
Dionne and Lewis both conclude their books with suggestions on how to fix the right. Dionne argues that conservatives need to recapture the reformist spirit that Dwight Eisenhower embodied: They have to come to terms with the modern world in order to steer it in a more congenial direction. Lewis argues that conservatives must recover the enthusiasm for ideas they had in the Reagan era.
Neither recommendation is particularly convincing (indeed, Dionne almost acknowledges as much in his typically belt-and-braces conclusion). The right has powerful incentives to continue on the same path. The fact that the electorate is smaller and whiter in off-year elections means that the Republican Party has a strong grip on the House of Representatives, and the fact that even a wooden candidate like Mitt Romney came within a few points of winning the 2012 election means that it can justify doubling down on the same old strategy.
Moreover, the forces that are disfiguring the right are likely to spread in future years, consuming the Democrats in much the same way as they have consumed the Republicans. The stagnation of the living standards of average Americans is creating widespread angst. The culture wars are extending to new areas. The Internet-enabled news-cum-entertainment industry stokes political resentments even as it creates epistemic anarchy. Interest groups are finding ever more ingenious ways to pretzel the political process. Interesting times don’t remain confined to one part of the political spectrum for very long.
I agree with reviewer Adrian Wooldridge that neither remedy, as he characterizes them, sound plausible. Republicans in particular need to get over their captivity to Reaganism, which was a solution to problems America faced over 30 years ago, before deindustrialization and globalization, before China, before global terrorism and the anarchization of the Middle East, before mass immigration, before the Internet, before the collapse of the family became general. But it’s puzzling that the reviewer doesn’t account for Trump. “The right has powerful incentives to continue on the same path,” he writes. Except it is now being poleaxed by a disincentive that until the day before yesterday was unthinkable by the conservative establishment: Donald J. Trump.
UPDATE: A reader points to this blog post by Roger Simon. Excerpt:
Many of their arguments revolve around whether Trump is a “true conservative.” Instead of wading into the definitional weeds on that one — as they say on the Internet, YMMV — allow me to address the macro question of what the purpose of ideology actually is. For me, it is to provide a theoretical basis on which to act, a set of principles. But that’s all it is. It’s not a religion, although it can be mistaken for one (communism).
Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say. For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road. All we have is our theories. They are the road for us. If we’re lucky, we’re paid for them. In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.
Trump’s perspective was the reverse. The rubber was constantly meeting the road. In fact, it rarely did anything else. He always had to change and adjust. Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers.
When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action. The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action. It’s not hard to see why. The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people. It doesn’t go anywhere and hasn’t for years. I’m guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people — left and right — are drunk on ideology.
January 23, 2016
Trump & the Conservative Intelligentsia
There’s one thing this dispute symbolizes, aside from the ongoing (and long-running) battle for the soul of the modern Republican Party. And that is this: Many or even most of the people who make a living working in politics and political commentary—even those who think of themselves as outsiders, such as nonpartisan libertarians—inevitably begin to view their field as one dedicated primarily to ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth, and NOT to the emotional, ideologically unmoored cultural passions of a given (and perhaps fleeting) moment. Donald Trump—and more importantly, his supporters, who go all but unmentioned here (Ben Domenech is an exception)—illustrate that that gap is, well, yuuge.
Yes, Trump is nobody’s conservative, but it’s not at all clear that many voters really care about such things. His rise is a rebuke to the stories that political commentators have long told themselves, and to the mores they have long shared even while otherwise disagreeing ideologically with one another. You can despise Donald Trump (and oh Lord I do), and appreciate National Review’s efforts here, while simultaneously wondering whether his forcible removal of a certain journalistic mask might also have some benefit.
I think this is true. As someone who lived and worked in that NY-DC world for years, and who has been in its orbit for longer even than I lived there — for example, I exchange more e-mail with, say, Ross Douthat in a given week than words with my next-door neighbor — I know exactly what Welch means. When I worked at National Review in 2002, I took pride at being part of the team of conservative standard-bearers, and believed that we were articulating what American conservatives felt. This continued after I left NR, but kept up my work as a conservative opinion journalist.
But a funny thing kept happening. When I would go back to south Louisiana to visit my family, I often got into (friendly) arguments with people about conservative principles and policies. I noticed that we were at loggerheads over many things. It frustrated me to no end that reason was useless; “ideologically unmoored cultural passions” weren’t just something, they were the only thing. This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them. To be a conservative is to agree with Us; to disagree with us means you must be a liberal.
I remember getting into it with my dad once after I moved home. I was driving him to the VA clinic for a check-up. This was during the Obamacare debate, and he started complaining about welfare spongers who expected the government to pay for their medical care. I pointed out that he was an avid user of Medicare and of veterans’ medical benefits, and that if not for those government programs, he would have died a long time ago.
“That’s different,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
He just got mad, and changed the subject.
This kind of thing happened more than a few times. Moving back to Louisiana to live really did reveal to me the gap between the conservative punditocracy and those for whom they — for whom we — presume to speak. Ideas and reason matter far less to most people than they do to people like us (this is true of the left as well), not because most people are stupid, but because their mode of experiencing life is not nearly as abstract as ours.
I made fun of myself for this in my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, contrasting myself unfavorably with my late sister. If you had given us both an ice cream cone, I would have been standing there looking at it from all different angles, analyzing the flavors and the texture, while the thing melt down my hand. Ruthie would have just eaten it and gotten on with her business, and thought me a fool for making such a big to-do over ice cream. There’s a lot of value in that approach, but it also blinded my sister to some big-picture realities that had a lot to do with the shape of everyday life, but which were only apparent if you took the time to look more deeply into abstract principles, instead of just going with your gut.
The point I want to make is not that one way is better than the other way — though I do believe as a general matter it’s better to stand on reason and principle than on instinct — but that conservative theoreticians (like me) get so caught up in our ideas that we fail to see some important things, even as many of us tell ourselves, as we have for a generation now, that we are the spokesmen for “real” America.
It’s a narrative that is irresistible to intellectuals. The Left, of course, always loves to think of itself on the side of the People, never mind what actual people think. Trouble is, the Right is the same way. It’s hard to overestimate the power of this narrative. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Post interview with NR editor Rich Lowry, about the magazine’s anti-Trump issue:
FIX: So if Trump paints you as part of the establishment, you would resist that label?
LOWRY: We’re not the Republican establishment; we’re conservative. We’re coming at it from a perspective of conservatism. We’re not a business interest. We’re not a donor. We exist outside the system, in that sense, and always have and always will.
I have no doubt in my mind that Rich, who is a very good guy, is being completely sincere here. But come on. Of course National Review is part of the Republican establishment! I don’t say that as a criticism. The American Conservative is not part of that establishment, but I hope one day the ideas we stand for become so popular that they do find champions within the conservative Republican establishment. It’s how you get things done. It’s how you make change happen. If you want to know how the Republican and conservative establishments (a distinction without a lot of difference) think, you read National Review and the Weekly Standard. Again, I underline that this is not a criticism of those magazines, but rather a tribute to their influence in senior circles of the GOP and its constellation of conservative activists.
The problem with this is that you come to think of the interests of your own leadership class — lawmakers, lawyers, think-tankers, journalists, academics — as completely consonant with the interests of American conservatives at the grassroots. In historian Barbara Tuchman’s popular historical study The March of Folly, she writes that the Renaissance popes provoked the Reformation because they couldn’t see how alien they had become to Catholics on the ground:
Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.
Conservative elites — GOP leaders, donors, journalists and others — are in the heat of battle now. I certainly understand why they feel that they don’t have the luxury of going all introspective at this moment. But at some point very soon they (again, we) should all ask ourselves why none of us saw Trump coming, and what that says about how out of touch we are with the conservative-leaning people of this country.
Last summer, as my father lay dying, I sat by his hospital bed watching a Trump rally in Mobile with him and my mother. I listened to the things Trump was saying, and thought it was absurd, and surely the American people would wake up to the demagoguery. But my parents liked what he had to say. Trump’s words resonated with their own thoughts and experiences.
You know what? They might have been wrong in their political judgment. I believe they were. The point here is not that my parents were wrong and I was right. The point is that I could not grasp how anybody could believe what Trump was saying. Nobody I knew from my circle of intellectual conservatives could grasp it either. We assumed it would evaporate. And here we are, on the verge of the Iowa caucuses, with Trump poised to sweep to the nomination.
Trump voters may be blind, but so are we who did not see him coming, or foresee the political, economic, and cultural conditions that produced him.
This wouldn’t be the first time the GOP/conservative establishment, with its NY/DC focus, haughtily disdained a populist Republican for veering from orthodoxy. Remember what they did to Mike Huckabee in the ’08 cycle over taxes? Remember “Go Back To Dogpatch, You Stupid Hillbilly”? Again, it wasn’t that they were necessarily wrong about Huckabee, it was the attitude.
I’ll leave you with this memento of the last time National Review excommunicated folks on the Right for being disloyal to Conservatism™: David Frum’s infamous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” cover story for the magazine, published on the brink of the Iraq War in 2003. Excerpts:
From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.” These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.
More:
And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”
From the perspective of 2016, who was more correct, Frum or Buchanan?
The entire NR article was a slashing rebuke of the paleoconservatives, including those at this magazine. It ended like this:
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.
But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
You know, I re-read that piece this morning, and I agree with a lot of Frum’s criticism of the paleocons. But the paleos got one big thing right: the catastrophic foolishness of the Iraq War. It would be have been nice in the ensuing fallout to have observed some humility among the conservative elites, a sense that they may actually have no idea at all what’s going on, or what to do about it. It would be nice to see a realization that they (one more time: we, because I too favored the Iraq War) have lost a lot of credibility with ordinary people, whose intense resentment and unappeasable bitterness grows to no small degree from the soil fertilized by the bullsh*t of us conservative elites.
To be clear, I think NR is mostly right about Trump, but I question the prudence of its frontal attack. If I were Trump, I would go to rallies asking out loud just why the magisterial magazine that once dramatically excommunicated conservatives who opposed the Iraq War believes it has standing to excommunicate Donald Trump.
January 22, 2016
Did NR Shoot Itself In The Tax-Free Foot?
There’s a reason why none of us at TAC will endorse a candidate or tell you not to vote for a candidate, even though most of us have opinions about that. That reason is that we are a publication of a 501(c)3 non-profit institution, and we can’t do that without endangering our status. We can talk about candidates and causes, but we have to be careful about endorsing any of them, or appearing to do so.
In March of last year, Politico reported that National Review was becoming a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which would enable it to solicit tax-deductible donations: “Since its launch, the magazine has operated as a not-for-profit business, even as it came to rely on more and more donations in recent years. Starting next month, it will become a nonprofit organization, which will make it exempt from federal taxes. National Review also plans to merge with the nonprofit National Review Institute, its sister organization, according to a source with knowledge of the plans.”
Rich Lowry averred that the shift would be good for the magazine, which was fighting a costly lawsuit and had never been profitable anyway. “We’re a mission and a cause, not a profit-making business,” he told Politico. “The advantage of the move is that all the generous people who give us their support every year will now be able to give tax-deductible contributions, and that we will be able to do more fundraising, in keeping with our goal to keep growing in the years ahead.’”
This anti-Trump issue of National Review is, in effect, a campaign pamphlet directed against a political candidate—indeed, the cover proclaims “Against Trump”—and, as such, is in clear violation of IRS statutes regulating nonprofit organizations.
The regulations are quite explicit that nonprofit organizations must “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
He goes on in more detail. It’s worth reading. I presume NR had the issue lawyered before publishing it, and the magazine’s lawyers decided that the issue was an instance of commentary, not partisan advocacy, re: the tax laws. Are any of you readers of this blog tax attorneys specializing in non-profits? How risky a move was this by NR?
UPDATE: Well, this is a relief. Apparently Politico’s story was wrong. National Review‘s publisher says:
NRO is not 501c3. It is a for-profit corporation. https://t.co/lIhinZUfc8
— Jack Fowler (@jackfowler) January 23, 2016
UPDATE.2: In the comments, Justin Raimondo disputes Jack Fowler’s claim. Read on…
Norcia Benedictines Brewing For You
Now, this is great news showing up in my in-box: the Monks at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Norcia are now able to sell the beer they brew in their monastery here in the US! “Birra Nursia,” as it’s called, using the old Roman name for the mountain village, can be ordered in limited quantities by going here. Every penny made from the sale of the beer goes for the upkeep of the monastery. Or, as I like to think of it, every sip of Birra Nursia contributes to the persistence of Latin chant in St. Benedict’s hometown.
I’ve been into the brewery, which amounts to a couple of rooms in the monastery, and it’s a very small operation. The monks do all of it themselves — and the beer is quite tasty. Ideally you should make a pilgrimage to Norcia (Nursia) and taste it yourself, but the next best thing is to have it delivered to your door. This is a Benedict Option I think we can all agree is worth taking.
Here’s a link to the monks’ beer blog. They still have their priorities straight:
“If the prayer doesn’t come first, the beer is going to suffer,” said Father Benedict Nivakoff, director of the Birra Nursia brewery and subprior of the monastery.
Father Martin, in the brewery, October 2014
The Potemkin Village of Conservatism
Here’s a link to National Review‘s big “Standing Athwart Trump Yelling ‘Stop!'” symposium. Here are excerpts from the short pieces I found most effective. R.R. Reno writes:
The Republican party has become home to a growing number of Americans who want to burn down our political and economic systems and hang our cultural elites. They’re tired of being policed by political correctness, often with the complicity of supposed conservatives. They don’t like Republican candidates who denounce them as “takers” with no future in the global economy. And they suspect, rightly, that the Chamber of Commerce will sell them down the river if it adds to the bottom line.
All true, but it’s sad that this frustrated cohort now fixes on Trump as its savior.
That’s probably the perspective in the entire symposium with which I most identify. Reno appears to say that the Trump supporters have good reason for feeling as they do, but Trump is a fatally flawed tribune.
John Podhoretz says Trump’s shameless vulgarity is a sign of our degenerate times, when the American political id dominates:
In any integrated personality, the id is supposed to be balanced by an ego and a superego—by a sense of self that gravitates toward behaving in a mature and responsible way when it comes to serious matters, and, failing that, has a sense of shame about transgressing norms and common decencies. Trump is an unbalanced force. He is the politicized American id. Should his election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime.
This makes sense to me. As a cultural conservative, I believe Trump’s persona embodies some of the worst aspects of our common culture, which has really become an anti-culture, in the sense Philip Rieff meant. In Rieff’s view, a culture depends on principles and modes of restraint; an anti-culture lets it all hang out. Trump represents the triumph of anti-culture. He truly is a man of his time.
There are many more pieces in the symposium, some of them making better points than others. The overall all sense I have in reading them, though, is one of futility. If I were Trump, I would be reading this and gloating over my breakfast toast. To be attacked by elites in the conservative pundit class only makes him more powerful. I understand that a magazine like NR can’t stay silent on this matter, but it’s an indication of how weak the conservative Establishment is that even their protest against Trump redounds to Trump’s benefit.
Why do you suppose that is? What does it tell us about Conservatism™?
First, I think it reveals that whatever movement conservatism and the GOP establishment once was, it no longer is. People don’t care what those leaders have to say. What discredited them? Maybe it was the widespread, vigorous support for the Iraq War, from which far too few among the leadership class of the Right have repented. Maybe it was the uncritical cheering for the free market, even when it was shipping the wage class’s jobs overseas. Maybe its disgust with the way the business class controls the GOP, manipulating it for its own benefit (Wall Street over Main Street), and how very little opposition to this has come out of the conservative pundit class over the years.
I think it is irrational to support Trump, for reasons Rusty Reno says. And yet, I understand why so many people do. And I understand why so many of those people have no interest in listening to people like me tell them otherwise.
It feels like an apocalypse to lots of people right now. Not a big-A Apocalypse, but an apocalypse in the strictly etymological sense of the word, which means “an unveiling.” They feel that the country has turned, or is about to turn, a corner, and people like them are about to be screwed, or screwed even worse than the are being screwed now.
That’s how it feels for us small-o orthodox Christians. There’s a reason that I’ve been talking for a decade about the Benedict Option, but it never really took off until after the Indiana RFRA debacle revealed that Big Business was a powerful opponent of religious liberty, and that the Republican Party would not stand up to it. More broadly, it revealed the extent to which orthodox Christians had radically lost ground in American culture. Big business had stayed out of culture war issues because they wanted to make money. They wouldn’t have taken the stand they did if they had feared a backlash from consumers. There was no backlash. The Obergefell ruling only codified a cultural fait accompli. And now, Christians who aren’t in denial can see the future unveiled in the present. It’s not going to be good.
Again, a lot of people are feeling that way in America today, says David Brooks. All kinds of people. Most people, even. More:
The fact is, for all the problems we may have with Wall Street or Washington, our biggest problems are systemic — the disruptions caused by technological progress and globalization, mass migration, family breakdown and so on. There’s no all-controlling Wizard of Oz to slay.
John Podhoretz writes in Commentary:
Put simply, nobody in American elite life — not in politics, not in finance, not in the intellectual world — has been able to find a convincing explanation for the transformative negative changes that characterize our time. These changes are spiritually and possibly literally earth-shattering. The family is falling apart and being redefined at the same time. Incomes have stagnated. Small stateless actors with global reach due to the Internet threaten the disruption and destruction of everyday life in places major (Paris) and minor (San Bernardino). And for many the ethnic complexion of America is changing in ways it has never changed before.
More:
So along come Trump and Sanders, and what do they say? They both say the system doesn’t work. Trump says it’s because losers are in charge and that the goal needs to be “winning.” Sanders says the system is rigged, billionaires run everything and must be stripped of their power (and money), and bankers must be sent to jail by the dozens if not hundreds. Note that the key to understanding these appeals is that they are really not all that partisan. Trump doesn’t say Obama is to blame, though he says Obama is a “disaster” — but then, so was Bush in his estimation. Sanders doesn’t really say the problem is recalcitrant Republicans but rather the behavior of a superclass of people who stand above politics and manipulate it like puppeteers manipulate marionettes.
Their meta-message is this: The problems are bigger than the ideological choices of the guy in the White House or the sclerosis of the Senate. They are systemic — not politically systemic, but civilizationally systemic. Trump said in the last debate that he was content to be “a vessel for anger.” Sanders yells a lot in debate, thus signaling anger.
But this goes beyond anger. They are, in effect, saying, “We better do some extremely large things fast or this country is finished.” And finished fast. Like now. Like by 2020.
I think Brooks is right that our problems are systemic. And I think Podhoretz is right that people believe that the crisis is civilizational, and that our politics as usual aren’t up to dealing with these systemic and civilizational problems. And I think people who believe that are right.
But nobody knows what to do, and that’s what’s so scary. With the Republicans, the same old Reaganesque stance towards the free market and foreign policy is no longer plausible. The George W. Bush presidency blew that all to hell, and the Republicans have not recovered from that, not really. The Democrats don’t have a real clue either. Anybody who believes that Hillary Clinton is not a conventional hawk, and that the Democratic Party isn’t beholden to Wall Street, is dreaming.
Again: nobody knows what to do. But people want something to be done.
This is not a profound observation, obviously, but it’s hard to go much beyond that. Here’s an interesting post from the Archdruid that a couple of you have cited in the comments. The Archdruid says that the most important fact is that the past 40 years have seen the destruction of the “wage class” at the hands of the “salary class” and the “investment class.” He’s talking about both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans:
The destruction of the wage class was largely accomplished by way of two major shifts in American economic life. The first was the dismantling of the American industrial economy and its replacement by Third World sweatshops; the second was mass immigration from Third World countries. Both of these measures are ways of driving down wages—not, please note, salaries, returns on investment, or welfare payments—by slashing the number of wage-paying jobs, on the one hand, while boosting the number of people competing for them on the other. Both, in turn, were actively encouraged by government policies and, despite plenty of empty rhetoric on one or the other side of the Congressional aisle, both of them had, for all practical purposes, bipartisan support from the political establishment.
It’s probably going to be necessary to talk a bit about that last point. Both parties, despite occasional bursts of crocodile tears for American workers and their families, have backed the offshoring of jobs to the hilt. Immigration is a slightly more complex matter; the Democrats claim to be in favor of it, the Republicans now and then claim to oppose it, but what this means in practice is that legal immigration is difficult but illegal immigration is easy. The result was the creation of an immense work force of noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of employers over those of wage-earning employees.
More:
Attempts by people in the wage class to mount any kind of effective challenge to the changes that have gutted their economic prospects and consigned them to a third-rate future have done very little so far. To some extent, that’s a function of the GOP’s sustained effort to lure wage class voters into backing Republican candidates on religious and moral grounds. It’s the mirror image of the ruse that’s been used by the Democratic party on a galaxy of interests on the leftward end of things—granted, the Democrats aren’t doing a thing about the issues that matter most to you, but neither are the Republicans, so you vote for the party that offends you least. Right? Sure, if you want to guarantee that the interests that matter most to you never get addressed at all.
There’s a further barrier, though, and that’s the response of the salary class across the board—left, right, middle, you name it—to any attempt by the wage class to bring up the issues that matter to it. On the rare occasions when this happens in the public sphere, the spokespeople of the wage class get shouted down with a double helping of the sneering mockery I discussed toward the beginning of this post. The same thing happens on a different scale on those occasions when the same thing happens in private. If you doubt this—and you probably do, if you belong to the salary class—try this experiment: get a bunch of your salary class friends together in some casual context and get them talking about ordinary American working guys. What you’ll hear will range from crude caricatures and one-dimensional stereotypes right on up to bona fide hate speech. People in the wage class are aware of this; they’ve heard it all; they’ve been called stupid, ignorant, etc., ad nauseam for failing to agree with whatever bit of self-serving dogma some representative of the salary class tried to push on them.
And that, dear reader, is where Donald Trump comes in.
The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. He’s figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class. The man’s worth several billion dollars—do you really think he can’t afford to get the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable? Of course he can; he’s deliberately chosen otherwise, because he knows that every time some privileged buffoon in the media or on the internet trots out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to salary class ideas of fashion, another hundred thousand wage class voters recall the endless sneering putdowns they’ve experienced from the salary class and think, “Trump’s one of us.”
The identical logic governs his deliberate flouting of the current rules of acceptable political discourse. Have you noticed that every time Trump says something that sends the pundits into a swivet, and the media starts trying to convince itself and its listeners that this time he’s gone too far and his campaign will surely collapse in humiliation, his poll numbers go up? What he’s saying is exactly the sort of thing that you’ll hear people say in working class taverns and bowling alleys when subjects such as illegal immigration and Muslim jihadi terrorism come up for discussion. The shrieks of the media simply confirm, in the minds of the wage class voters to whom his appeal is aimed, that he’s one of them, an ordinary Joe with sensible ideas who’s being dissed by the suits.
The Republicans don’t really care about the economic suffering of the wage class. The Democrats don’t really care that much either, and they positively resent the social conservatism of many in that class. I’m not saying the wage class are total victims. But I am saying that deep skepticism of what the leaders in both parties, and the pundit class that gathers around them, has to say about all this is justified.
That doesn’t make Trump right. But it does make him understandable. And it makes the conservatism as defined by the political and pundit class harder to relate to. What, exactly, are they trying to conserve? Who are they trying to conserve?
As a religious and social conservative, I have no faith — none — that the Republicans are looking out for me, despite what they say. The thing most important to me at this point in history is religious liberty — that is, protecting our right to be left alone. We know that the Republicans aren’t going to do anything about that, because business doesn’t want them to. The only reason to vote Republican on that issue is that they almost certainly won’t be as bad as the Democrats. And other policies pursued by Republicans work to undermine the traditional family. This party is no friend of ours. The Democrats are in most cases enemies. That’s my view, anyway.
And so, Prof. MacIntyre:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
I don’t think Trump voters are Benedict Option people, heaven knows. But I do think they are awfully close to ceasing to identify maintaining the “imperium” — the status quo — with their own personal and tribal interests. It’s a dangerous place for the country to be in, and it’s hard for me to grasp what set of circumstances could lead us out of it and onto more solid ground. Maybe something will turn up. Trump’s certainly not going to do it, but why, exactly, should we have confidence that anybody else on offer has the answer? I’m not asking rhetorically.
Trump or no Trump, a lot of conservatives are going to vote Republican this fall with no expectation that it’s going to do a damn bit of good in terms of turning around the fragmentation and stagnation of the country. This is not simply because the GOP is mostly useless (as are the Democrats), but because the sources of our disorder are not really political, except insofar as they have to do with the limits of the liberal order, which the GOP and the Democrats both embody.
UPDATE: A libertarian reader writes of NR‘s attack on Trump:
Barring a meltdown they just handed it to him.
At the very least they needed to acknowledge the establishment’s failings and endorse NOW. We are against this, but FOR this.
It LOOKS like a desperate cabal. Because it is.
If Trump had paid for an ad in NR, no way it could have been this effective.
But this is good for me to know. It proves that the establishment can’t run sh*t.
UPDATE.2: Rob G. writes:
Erstwhile blogger Jeff Martin once wrote: “The left can protest all it wants that it desires cultural liberation along with economic solidarity, but the former subverts the latter. The right can protest all it wants that it desires economic liberty along with traditionalism, but the former subverts the latter. Period. End of story.”
If this is the case with the two “sides,” (and I believe it is) is it any wonder that politics continues to fail and no one gives a damn about the “middle”? We’ve got two irreconcilable versions of liberalism fighting each other; perhaps the problem’s within liberalism itself.
January 21, 2016
Derrick Todd Lee Is Dead
Serial killer Derrick Todd Lee has died in the hospital. Lee was from my town. In fact, in the 1990s, when he was on his murder spree, he lived a couple of miles from where I now live. Before his arrest for murder, he had a record for being a peeping tom around here, in our part of West Feliciana Parish. Fortunately for the women of West Feliciana, he did his killing in parishes south of our own.
My late sister Ruthie knew him. He was in her class when they were kids. She once told me that he was a nice guy, and if he had shown up at her door in the daylight, she would have let him in.
He did show up at her door late one night, or so my family believes. This was in the early 1990s, not long after my sister married. She was at home alone, living in a wooded area, while her husband was at the paper mill doing overnight shift work. Suddenly, very late, there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” she said, terrified. Nobody knocks on anybody else’s door around here that late.
The person kept knocking. She got out her pistol, and called my dad, who alerted the cops and jumped in his truck to head over.
She told the person on the other side of the door that she had a gun, and she knew how to use it. Which was true, and which, this being a rural area, Lee would have known may not have been an empty threat. He knocked one more time, but by the time my dad and the sheriff’s deputies got there, he — we assume it was a he — was gone. The deputies put the tracking dogs on his trail, but they never found him.
Years later, after Lee was arrested, it all came back to them. My family is convinced that Derrick Todd Lee, the serial killer and rapist believed to have killed at least seven women, was on the other side of the door that night. I believe they’re right. And I believe that if my sister had opened the door, or if Lee had kicked the door in and she had not had a gun, she would have been his first victim.
Leaders Without Followers
Good news for Team Rubio, says Team Rubio, citing a WORLD magazine article:
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., widened his lead in WORLD’s latest evangelical insiders survey, breaking 70 percent in combined support for the first time.
The findings are part of a monthly survey of 103 evangelical leaders and influencers, 82 of whom participated in January. The results are not scientific or representative of all evangelicals but offer a glimpse into how a group of influential evangelicals are leaning in the 2016 presidential race.
Rubio trails billionaire businessman Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in national polls, but he came out on top in WORLD’s survey for the seventh month in a row. His combined first- and second-choice support increased from 66 percent last month to 73 percent in January, including 40 out of 82 first-choice votes.
So say Evangelical leaders. What about Evangelical followers? The NYT says:
A New York Times/CBS News poll last week showed Mr. Trump, a Presbyterian, dominating the field with 42 percent of evangelical voters; Mr. Cruz was second with 25 percent.
In other words, they’re not following.
I think one of the most interesting meta-stories that we may be seeing is the growing gap between the Leadership Class and the Followership Class — not just in politics, but in religion and … where else?
Trump & The Dreamliner
David Frum says that anybody who wants to know why middle America no longer trusts the stewardship of US and global elites should read this Financial Times story about the decline of Boeing. In 1998, after a merger with McDonnell Douglas, the company that used to treat its employees like family turned into a typical American corporate shark focused on delivering shareholder benefits by any means necessary. The piece is based on a recently published book based on two decades of studying Boeing. The authors are academics Leon Grunberg and Sarah Moore. They contend that the Boeing story is representative of the hollowing-out of the US middle class and the rise in distrust of the elites. Excerpt:
His study, however, goes far beyond Boeing. It provides a view over two decades of the unwinding of the postwar social contract — where workers felt they could rely on decent pay and benefits in exchange for hard work. As an indication of the impact of these corporate changes, Mr Grunberg points to Pew Center analysis last month, which showed the US middle class had shrunk to just half the population for the first time in at least four decades. He notes that workers feel “more exposed, more vulnerable and anxious, and increasingly abandoned by the establishment” and that these factors may explain, for example, “the popularity of [Donald] Trump and populist rhetoric”.
The reality behind “right-wingin’, bitter-clingin’.” The Trump boom may be less a vote for Trump than a massive vote of NO CONFIDENCE in the American establishment.
‘Head For Higher Ground’
“Head for higher ground” is probably the best four-word encapsulation of the Benedict Option https://t.co/VdvLWA6iTh @roddreher
— J. Arthur Bloom (@j_arthur_bloom) January 21, 2016
Richard Fernandez writes that the willful ignorance of European leadership has set the continent up for looming disaster. He says the signs were all present, in the Arab Muslim world and in Europe, pointing to the emergence of male Muslim mobs molesting women. It’s called “taharrush” in Arabic. Nobody in Europe wanted to pay attention to the threat to women — Arab and European — from this mob. Fernandez:
The New Year’s Eve crimes in Cologne were therefore what Naseem Nicholas Taleb would call a White Swan — not the unforeseeable Black Swan that he was famous for describing — but the obvious thing heralded by banners and brass bands that should have been noticed by the authorities. Yet there are none so blind as those who will not see. The Swedish police are now being accused of covering up assaults going back as far back as 2014 at a music festival. Karl Ritter of the Washington Post reported that festival”organizers received reports already in 2014 of groups of young men and boys groping girls in a systematic manner. Efforts were put in place, including more security guards, to prevent a repeat in 2015 but instead the problem got worse”.
Stockholm police spokesman Varg Gyllander confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday there was “a large number” of sexual assaults during the five-day festival and that scores of suspects were detained.
He said police should have reported on the incidents at the time “given the nature of the crime.” He denied suggestions in the newspaper report that police kept quiet because the suspects were foreigners. …
Roger Ticoalu, who heads the city government’s events department, told the AP that a “large part” of those detained were from Afghanistan, many carrying temporary ID-cards issued to asylum-seekers.
The facts were clear and for that reason all the more buried. It was politically sensitive and still is. In Cologne, in ground zero for the story, politicians are putting ludicrous plans in place to forestall assaults at the coming carnival through the use of “pictograms and interpreters”.
More:
When the problem was largely confined to Middle Eastern women it is easy to understand why it was ignored. Now that taharrush has come to Europe it is easier still. Events are being covered up because it runs counter to the Narrative peddled by the Western left. The Narrative is the source of their moral authority, the justification for their special graft.
What makes the pathological denial so catastrophic is that a vast, almost unstoppable torrent of refugees is already on the way to Germany, the fragments of collapsing Islamic countries. Cologne is but a skirmish with the vanguard. The main host is still on its way.
Fernandez goes on to say that if Europeans are to survive with their culture intact, it will have to be thanks to “the providence of a God they no longer believe in; the stirrings of memory of a nation they have doomed to oblivion.”
What does this have to do with the Benedict Option? My former TAC colleague J. Arthur Bloom is right, except “higher ground” in this case is a metaphor, not a literal call to run to the hills.
I told this story the other day, but I’ll repeat it. A Christian friend of mine who was involved for years in Republican politics has recently begun working at a national level in the fight to protect religious liberty. As he tells it, he’s always been a standard-issue Main Street Republican: socially conservative and pro-business. Since he started working on the religious liberty issue, it has shocked him to see how Big Business is pressuring Republican legislators even at the state level to back away from any attempt to lock in religious liberty protections in law. What we saw happen last year in Indiana, with major corporations interceding to quash the RFRA, was a Rubicon moment, he said. The business class is actively working to pry social and religious conservatives away from the Republican Party, and sideline them.
And it’s working. I told you last year that multiple Republican sources on Capitol Hill told me that the chance that the GOP Congress will undertake to protect religious liberty is nil.
So, when they come after our institutions and our businesses, we will be increasingly on our own.
Similarly, last year, a prominent Christian physician who works for a major, internationally-known medical research institution, told me that the things coming down the pike in the next 10 years in terms of bioethics shock the conscience. These aren’t things in the far-off future, but rather issues we will be dealing with within a decade. And very few people in his professional world, even the few Christians he knows, have any sense of alarm about it. This grieves him. He told me he’s trying to wake them up, but everybody seems to have the belief that everything’s going to work out in the end.
Over and over again, whenever I interview Protestant and Catholic college professors, they tell me the same story about their Christian students: that they are really nice kids, but know next to nothing about the faith. Nada. Zip. Zilch. These professors aren’t dumping on the kids, but rather on the parents and the churches and the Christian schools that failed to form them. The coming generation of Christians (if they remain Christians) has been catechized not by the church, but by the culture. They don’t even know what they don’t know.
Now, aside from the personal tragedy that would result from these kids leaving the faith as adults, and all the future generations in their line who may never have the faith because the line was broken, consider the political effect of this mass apostasy. Who will stand up for the orthodox Christian institutions when the state comes after them? Who will employ those Christians who have to resign from their jobs rather than betray their faith? How will you teach your kids what it means to be a Christian when that’s going to cost them something serious? What does religious liberty mean to a people who have ceased to practice or even to understand religion?
These aren’t theoretical questions for some future dystopia. It’s coming. The signs are there for those with eyes to see. If you aren’t going to head for higher ground, whatever that might mean, then you and your Christian neighbors had better start building an ark.
Don’t panic. Prepare.
Seeing Things Sacramentally
Photo by Rod Dreher
Researching the Benedict Option book, I’m up to my eyeballs in reading about medieval philosophy, nominalism, univocity, and all the rest. A reader interested in the Benedict Option writes to ask:
I’m invested in the nominalism+voluntarism-destroyed-everything narrative, but I find its easier to explain what went wrong 700 years ago than it is to make a constructive argument for the Reality of the Transcendentals today. You should of course pay attention to that. How can we be (say) Aristotelian, Thomist, NeoPlatonic in the 21st century?
That’s a great question, and one that I hope to answer by talking to ordinary people who are living intentionally sacramental lives. My broad answer comes from how I’ve done it, to the extent that I have: through practices that cultivate a sacramental consciousness — what Hans Boersma calls the “Platonic-Christian synthesis of the Great Tradition” that characterized Christian theology for its first 1,000 years. For me, that has meant regular attendance at the liturgy, of course, but also regular prayer — especially hesychastic prayer — and fasting. Praying with icons and reading Dante has been training my eye to see all things as icons: windows into the reality of God.
This is not something that happens overnight, not at all, and it’s not something that happens simply because you read something convincing and decide that sacramentalism makes sense. Our entire way of seeing and moving through the modern world has been conditioned by nominalism — and the more you go into the sacramental worldview, the more obvious this becomes.
I would like to put the question to the room, in a slightly different form than my correspondent: How can we live truly and fully sacramental lives in the 21st century? What practices lead us to see God everywhere present and filling all things, and to live according to that fact? This is a practical question, not one having to do with theory. Doing this in some form, I will argue in the book, necessary to the Benedict Option, because it gives us the best chance of anchoring ourselves against the disintegrating currents of modern culture.
(I only want people who offer real answers to comment. If you want to argue with the premise of the question, or to take potshots, don’t waste your time, because I’m not going to approve your remarks. I want this to be a conversation among readers who already accept that we need to live more sacramentally.)
Rod Dreher's Blog
- Rod Dreher's profile
- 503 followers
