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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.
While ostensibly designed to persuade wavering conservatives to get on board, Conor Friedersdorf noted, the essay “doubles as a barely disguised rejection of conservatism itself, stoking panic in hopes that conservatives embrace what is essentially right-leaning authoritarianism.”
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.
The more educated a society is, Hayek says, the more diverse their tastes and values will be, “and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.”
The “man of action,” Hayek wrote, “will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.” Slogans should be simple and relentless.
Falwell responded to the online mockery by tweeting out a comparison of himself … to Jesus: Honored for same hypocrites who accused Jesus of being a friend of publicans and sinners to be targeting me over a decades old mag cover! TY5
Comparing Trump to David was beyond absurd, because Trump felt no need to repent or seek forgiveness.
There were powerful voices from within the church opposing Trump, including the magazine Christianity Today, which published a scathing editorial comparing support for Trump to “idolatry.”
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.17
Indeed, only 9 percent of white evangelicals said they had heard their clergy speak about Trump and only 6 percent heard them discuss Clinton.
To test that proposition, evangelicals were read portions of editorials that raised questions about Trump’s character and compassion. One suggested that Trump’s appeal is “dangerously close to Satan’s offer to Jesus in Luke 4:9: ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’” The study found that after being exposed to that argument, white evangelical voter support for Trump dropped sharply.
Of course, not all Christian leaders followed suit. Throughout the campaign Trump would often lash out at them in very personal terms. After Bob Vander Plaats, the CEO of The Family Leader and a prominent conservative in Iowa, endorsed Senator Ted Cruz, Trump attacked him on Twitter, calling him a “phony” and “a bad guy.”*
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!”19
Russell Moore staked out an increasingly lonely position. “I have watched,” he wrote in February 2016, “as some of these who gave stem-winding speeches about ‘character’ in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.”20
For years, he wrote, critics on the secular Left had accused the evangelical Right of being more concerned with power rather than religious conviction. “They have implied that the goal of the Religious Right is to cynically use the ‘moral’ to get to the ‘majority,’ not the other way around,” he wrote. “This year, a group of high-profile evangelicals has proven these critics right.”
That suggested to Moore a much deeper crisis in the religious Right. “To be clear, the 2016 campaign did not provoke this crisis,” he said. “This was a pre-existing condition. The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about.”
The essential error of the Christian Right was to give politics primacy over faith.
That meant that they must be prepared to choose between the Gospel and winning elections. If they surrendered their values in order to achieve short-term political successes, he said, they would end up with neither values nor political success.
“Religious liberty is a means to an end,” he reminded his listeners, “and the end is not political.” Christianity could not allow itself to be bent and warped to win elections, even important ones.
“When Christianity is seen as a political project in search of a gospel useful enough to advance its worldly agenda, it will end up pleasing those who make politics primary, while losing those who believe the Gospel,” said Moore.
But—and this has to be said—one of the most formidable challenges facing independent conservatives will be the culture of bullying, threats, and intimidation that has become a feature of the Trumpist Right and its binary politics.
“He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt—so long as it’s on his side.”
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.
It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.3
They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries.
For years, Rush Limbaugh has gibed about what he calls the “state-controlled media”—the liberal news outlets that Limbaugh has long decried for their lack of critical coverage of President Barack Obama—but we may be about to see what one actually looks like. Since so many in the Right media are too deeply invested to be outraged at any failures or reversals from Trump World, they will inevitably be focused on attacking the Left and launching purges of the saboteurs and dissenters on the Right.
When the Daily Beast was preparing a story about Trump, one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, threatened the writer with legal action, telling him: “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
Someone pulled Wilson’s credit report, and online trolls, some of whom were “apparently active on an online forum associated with white supremacists” began posting “photoshopped sexual images of his college-age daughter, claimed she’d had a child with an African American, threatened gang-rape, and claimed Wilson’s teenage son was a pimp.”
But those were other people. He spread vile gossip about women. But those were other people. He mocked the disabled, and lied with impunity. But until Trump’s thugs turned their sights on him, Mark Levin saw none of this as disqualifying the man from the Oval Office. In that respect, he was like so many other conservatives who decided that what was happening to their movement was somebody else’s problem.
There is a lesson here for both sides of the political spectrum. Our politics have become too toxic and scary, in large part because our government is too large and consequential.
*Be worthy of the movement but make sure the movement is worthy of you. The conservative movement is (or ought to be) about ideas. When the movement ceases to be about those things, question your allegiances.
There is a fundamental difference between movements based on ideas and cults of personalities. Princes will inevitably let you down. This is not a glitch, it’s a feature.
The loudest voice in the room is not always the one you want to listen to; the most extreme opinion is not always the most honest and cogent.
*Opposing bad ideas is absolutely essential, but being opposed to bad ideas is not the same thing as having good ideas.
*Don’t become what we despise. If the other side abandons all pretense of ethics and values, that is not an excuse for us to do the same. Otherwise we become indistinguishable from what we fight against.
But I mean something more: be prepared to lose friends—on our side. Be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, even among your friends. Stand up for what you believe and decide whether what you believe is worth the price you sometimes have to pay.
Any movement that tells you to ignore your conscience is a movement that should be met with skepticism.
*Be willing to take the long view. In the end it will be far more important that you preserve your personal integrity, and fight for what you believe, than that you win this or that specific election.
Every used car salesman, every fund-raising pitch tries to convince you that you have to make the deal right now; politicians insist that the apocalypse is upon on us. Be willing to step back.
There is nothing dishonorable about losing, but there is something shameful about abandoning your principles. After all, what profits it a man to win the whole world, if he loses his soul? But for an election? Any election?
