The Tacit Shadow Regime

My old friend Eric Metaxas is taking his Trump devotion to the limits. Here he uses a photo of Egyptian Christians on the verge of beheading by ISIS because they refused to deny Christ, and deploying them in context of people like himself, who are standing by Donald J. Trump, God’s anointed.

This is beyond offensive, but more than that, it’s … profoundly weird. It’s a sign of just how far gone in Trump martyrdom some people are. Eric has said in the past, on the air, that he would be willing to die to protect Trump’s presidency.

One of the things I do not remotely understand about these folks is why they believe that having Trump in the White House is going to stop the bad things from happening. I was on the phone this morning talking to a Christian journalist friend of mine, and he mentioned the Christian thinker Jacques Ellul’s concept of the “political illusion”: the idea that all things in life are essentially political, and therefore require political solutions. This perfectly describes the orientation so many conservatives have towards Donald Trump. It’s as if they have forgotten everything conservatives — especially religious conservatives — are supposed to know about the complexity of society, and the roots of our various crises.

It is an anti-political illusion to think that politics have nothing to do with our overall well being, and can, or should be, ignored entirely. But the political illusion says that politics is the only thing that matters, or the thing that matters most of all. It’s so obviously false that it’s a wonder why anybody who doesn’t make his or her living in politics believes it. But here you have so many conservative Christians who believe that the fate of America stands or falls on the basis of whether or not Donald Trump, largely a failed president on his own terms, retains office. This is not only idolatry, it’s also stupid and self-defeating.

The regime in Washington, whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, does not on its own determine the future of America. I recall a conversation I had in the mid-1990s with a financial journalist friend, who got her start covering politics, but moved over to finance. She said it was a red-pill event for her. She had been under the illusion that politics drove the world, but studying the currency markets, and seeing how the movements there decided the fates of nations, dispelled that illusion.

In a more down to earth way, consider that for all his bluster, and all the media attention given to him these past four or five years, Donald Trump has done nothing effective to turn back wokeness and its pomps and works. Perhaps he could have done some things better had he been more disciplined, but the truth is, so much of what is ruining America is happening outside the realm of politics.

I had a conversation this morning with a reader of this blog who teaches at a conservative Christian school. The teacher explained that the culture among the students is militantly pro-LGBT, to the point where the students do not tolerate anyone who doesn’t endorse the latest iterations of LGBT ideology. The fascinating thing to this reader is that the students got none of this from their teachers, or from anything in the official culture of the school. It’s all coming to them tacitly — as simply something that’s understood to be part of teenage culture today. The reader explained to me that the thing so many Christians fail to understand is the defining power of this tacit regime: the values and taboos instantiated and advanced through the unofficial culture.

In The Benedict Option, I quoted from the work of Judith Rich Harris, on the power of peer culture:

Peer pressure really begins to happen in middle childhood. Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris, in her classic book The Nurture Assumption, says that kids at that age model their own behavior around their peer group’s. Writes Harris, “The new behaviors become habitual—internalized, if you will—and eventually become part of the public personality. The public personality is the one that a child adopts when he or she is not at home. It is the one that will develop into the adult personality.”

Harris points to the example of immigrants and their children. Study after study shows that no matter how strong the home culture, first-generation offspring almost always conform to the values of the broader culture. “The old culture is lost in a single generation,” she writes. “Cultures are not passed on from parents to children; the children of immigrant parents adopt the culture of their peers.”

On the other hand, says Harris, is that in most cases, it’s not too late for kids who have been exposed to bad influences. Researchers find that damage to a child’s moral core can be repaired if he is taken away from a bad peer group. What’s more, determined parents who run a disciplined home, and who immerse their children in a good peer group, can lay a good foundation, no matter how lax they have been until now.

The bad news about the fragility of culture is also good news, according to Harris: “Cultures can be changed, or formed from scratch, in a single generation.”

And yet, there are Christians who believe that the person who sits in the White House determines whether or not their kids’ peer culture succumbs to this or that ideology. Look, I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter at all; Obama, recall, ordered that public schools open up their locker rooms to transgenders. I’m saying rather that politics are far less influential than people think.

Here’s an example from Twitter today about how institutional capture by the far left is revolutionizing culture:

The president of @Portland_State wrote this in an email, “My highest priority is sustaining and amplifying our commitment to racial justice.” pic.twitter.com/04HqNkmJ12

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) January 5, 2021

Boghossian goes on:

Of course the PSU president will get away with this nonsense, and the quality of the university will decline as identity-politics ideology consumes the institution. Students will learn that what really matters in the professional world is what you think about “racial justice.” Real-world problems will not be attended to, because everybody will rearrange reality to suit the ideology. I’ve written in this space about how this kind of thing has a foothold at my own alma mater, Louisiana State, where a group of professors, with administration support, are trying to push to require all undergraduates to take a course in “antiracist” ideology as a condition of graduation. It is an outrageous attempt to propagandize undergraduates at the state’s flagship public university — this, in a ruby-red state. How many of the Republican voters in this state who are fighting mad over the Trump election are willing to lift a finger to fight the ideological left’s bold move at institutional capture right here in their own backyard?

Another example: news today from the world of elite media:

The Cut, the New York Magazine style and culture website with a devoted following, named Lindsay Peoples Wagner as its new editor in chief on Monday.

Ms. Peoples Wagner, 30, will rejoin the publication after a two-year stint as the top editor of Teen Vogue, where she was the youngest editor in chief of a Condé Nast magazine and one of the few Black journalists to have led one of the company’s publications. She was previously a fashion market editor for The Cut, which started out as a fashion blog on the New York Magazine website and became a stand-alone site in 2012.

In the past two years, Teen Vogue has published a guide to anal sex, a guide to the best vibrators, and praise for Karl Marx and Communism. You might think, “Who reads Teen Vogue, anyway?” or “Who reads The Cut, anyway?” The trendsetters do. Cultural change usually happens when radical ideas are taken up by elites and elite networks. You might never know who these people are, but your teenagers’ exposure to these ideas, and their normalization, is changing them, and the culture.

What could Donald Trump, or any president, do to stop that? I would certainly be open to potential political solutions, but nobody is talking about them, because it would be hard to get past the First Amendment. My point is, the sense of alarm that all of us conservatives feel about the direction of our culture is based on something real, but we are lying to ourselves if we believe that electing the right politicians is the answer. It can be part of the answer, but it is simply beyond crazy to think that Donald Trump is the solution to the decay and dissolution of our culture.

I believe many Christians have gone all-in on Trump as a way to avoid responsibility for changing the things they can change.

Though I strongly believe politics can’t solve these problems on their own, I do believe that they have a role to play in creating the environments within which they can be solved. But the ongoing Trump drama is making it harder for politicians who live in the real world (as opposed to this unreal social-media world of Trump) to analyze and come up with potential solutions. It’s one big distraction. Meanwhile, the tacit culture, dominated by identity politics and left-wing cultural ideology, marches on through the institutions and communities unopposed.

Saying you would be willing to die for Donald Trump is nothing but vanity and theater. People say they would die for Trump, but they aren’t willing to commit to living in countercultural ways that might stand a chance of building communities of resistance to the atheistic materialistic ideology that is routing our culture. “But he fights!” they say. OK, but he doesn’t win. Similarly, you might think that you’re fighting by joining yourself to his quixotic battle to hold on to the presidency, but it’s an empty gesture. You don’t stand to win anything. Every day and every dollar we put into defending this guy is time, money, and effort not directed towards building a meaningful opposition. And the tacit regime conquers…

UPDATE: An Irish reader writes:

Your latest blog about the Right ‘s tendency to see politics as the solution to everything that ails the USA reminds me of my own country and its history. I grew up in 1980’s Ireland. Political violence was a daily occurrence in the North. Thankfully most of that is now in the past and although politicians did a lot of work to bring about peace my own feeling is that Ireland had simply moved on culturally. We were no longer as different from the U.K. as we once believed we were. Consumer culture and the media had changed the whole political and cultural landscape. This saddens me in one way. We have achieved peace but at the cost of what made us different and distinctive. Our Catholic faith and culture.

I never really understood why those who claimed to be Irish patriots didn’t put more effort into preserving our culture rather than fighting the British. What good is independence if you have lost what is of most value. Of course most of the Irish revolutionaries of recent times were leftists and Marxists, a fact that a lot of Irish Americans were not aware of. They wanted and still want , a united , socialist Ireland. They have made progress towards this goal purely by accident as their goals align with broader population trends. Ironically it is the dwindling die-hard Protestants in the North who oppose abortion , gay ” marriage” and EU tyranny. Politics follows culture not the other way around.

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