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In a binary political world, voters are told they must not merely surrender their principles, but must also accept bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity, and cruelty. The other side is always worse; the stakes require everything to be sacrificed or subsumed in the service of the greater cause.
Perhaps the most startling reversal was former education secretary and drug czar Bill Bennett, who had once written that it is “our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies,” but now derided concerns about Trump’s character as a sign of “vanity.”6
In his chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his classic work The Road to Serfdom, Hayek diagnosed the populist impulse that would lead to the demand for ceding power to a “man of action.”* This is “the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime.”16
It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal.…” Hayek knew that it was the nature of free societies for people to become dissatisfied “with the ineffectiveness of parliamentary majorities,” so they turn to “somebody with such solid support as to inspire confidence that he can carry out whatever he wants.” Hayek then lays out the preconditions for the rise of a demagogic dictator: a dumbed-down populace, a gullible electorate, and a common enemy or group or scapegoats upon which to focus public enmity and anger.
Slogans should be simple and relentless. “It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party,” Hayek predicted.
THE REMARKABLE THING ABOUT the Christian Right in 2016 was not its support of Donald Trump in the general election; it was the genuinely stunning transformation of its value system, and even its core standards of personal conduct. For decades, a bedrock principle of the Christian Right was that character mattered and that personal morality and ethics were essential requirements of political leadership. Evangelical leaders were especially insistent on this point during the presidency of Bill Clinton, when they argued vigorously that Clinton’s conduct and perjury disqualified him from the
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As recently as 2011, only 30 percent of white evangelicals agreed that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public life and professional life.” But in the era of Trump, evangelical attitudes underwent a stunning, head-snapping transformation. A poll released in October 2016 found that fully 76 percent of white evangelicals had decided that a candidate’s morals were no longer that important. While other groups had also become more tolerant of personal immorality, no other group had moved so
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Falwell explained his support for Trump by saying, “Look at the fruits of his life and … people he’s provided jobs … that’s the true test of somebody’s Christianity.”
What makes Van Maren’s article notable is that he concedes every conceivable negative about Trump; he admits that Trump had been pro-abortion until “a very short time ago, and was so unfamiliar with the basic positions held by the pro-life movement that he suggested women be punished for having abortions.”
This is a poor, dishonest argument. It was in the context of law.
He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.
Trump also singled out Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, calling him “truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!”
As important as the political issues were to Christians, Moore wrote, they were confusing means with ends and allowing ideology to overshadow the essential Christian message. “The damage to the movement was not merely political,” he later wrote. “What’s most at stake here is the integrity of our gospel witness and our moral credibility.”
In the 1990s, Gloria Steinem said that feminists should put up with a little bit of womanizing from Bill Clinton because he would keep abortion legal. Religious conservatives rightly said that this showed the moral hypocrisy of a feminist movement that inveighed against sexual harassment and office power dynamics—until it became politically inconvenient. Now, a conservative commentator [Ann Coulter] says that she doesn’t mind if the Republican nominee performs abortions in the Oval Office as long as he maintains a hard line against immigrants.23
“Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of Rome’s collapse, and he did not repurpose the Gospel to prop up a failing regime.”
will be the culture of bullying, threats, and intimidation that has become a feature of the Trumpist Right and its binary politics.
Trump’s attacks on the media, Stephens argued, were not simply critiques of liberal bias, which would be fair criticism. “His objection is to objectivity itself,” Stephens said. “He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt—so long as it’s on his side.”2
The campaign, Stephens told his audience, saw the rise of a pundit class he called the “TrumpXplainers,” who would offer to translate the candidate’s incoherent word salads into something that sounded cogent. “For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble,” Stephens said. “But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to
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Breitbart and its former CEO Bannon have openly relished the image of street fighters who take no quarter. “If a guy comes after our audience—starts calling working-class people vulgarians and brownshirts and Nazis and post-literate—we’re going to leave a mark,” he explained. “We’re not shy about it at all. We’ve got some lads that like to mix it up.”14
Contrarian conservatives will answer as follows: We’re conservatives who believe in things like liberty, free markets, limited government, personal responsibility, constitutionalism, growth and opportunity, the defense of American ideas and institutions at home and abroad, modesty, prudence, aspiration, and inclusion. We are conservatives in the great tradition that stretches back to Burke, Tocqueville, Buckley, and Reagan. But that means that we are not part of what the conservative movement or the GOP has become.
We should draw inspiration from Frederick Douglass, who observed, “One and God make a majority.”
This may, in fact, be a teachable moment for conservatives in exile: We simply should not care about politics as much as we do, because it should not be as important as it has become.
The English political theorist Michael Oakeshott said that the role of government is “not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.”1
He recognized the potential problem of demanding that we all be “in touch” with majority sentiment. “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America,” Tocqueville wrote.
Return to first principles and revive classical liberalism as an alternative to progressivism on the Left and authoritarian nationalism on the Right.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote. “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Because I’ve cautioned my fellow conservatives, you embrace Donald Trump, you embrace it all. You embrace every slur, every insult, every outrage, every falsehood.
