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After the Future

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This Moment is Different

I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But…

I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

Polarization and political tribalism are not new to America; fear and hatred for our fellow citizens have been increasing for decades. We’ve had plenty of presidents who have failed us, in ways large and small. But this moment is different because Donald Trump is different, and because Donald Trump is president. His relentless assault on truth and the institutions of democracy—his provocations and abuse of power, his psychological instability and his emotional volatility, his delusions and his incompetence—are unlike anything we’ve seen before. He needs to be stopped. And his supporters can’t say, as they did in 2016, that they just didn’t know. Now we know. It’s not too late—it’s never too late—to do the right thing.

Peter Wehner, The Atlantic

I think the questions I would ask a Trump supporter at this point is "What is it that you feel is such a threat to your lives that you can justify supporting this demagogue? Do you really believe that this incompetent, amoral, deeply foolish man represents a better future for America? Do you really believe that the Democrats, for all their fecklessness and cluelessness, are really out to destroy everything you love?

I can assure you that for the most part Liberals don't care about what you love enough to want to destroy it. They don't care what you believe or love, but they are willing to tolerate it. You see malice where really there is only indifference. The one thing that Liberals cannot tolerate is intolerance. I can understand why you think there are some things that cannot be tolerated, and you shouldn't tolerate them in your personal lives, and in the public square you should do what you can to persuade others to share your beliefs and practices. But you cannot force them to. It's better, much better, to live in a liberal, tolerant society than in an illiberal one that is not. 

To destroy the whole system whose core value is tolerance because you think that indifferent, clueless, liberal elites don't give you the respect you think you deserve is to cut off your nose to spite your face. It's rooted in paranoia. The basic thing about paranoia is that it tends to create self-fulfilling prophecies. The people you fear to be your enemies, even though they're not, become your enemies when you treat them as such. Acting out such paranoia quickly devolves into a death spiral. Another four years of Trump will bring down on yourselves much greater woe than whatever you think is troubling you now. The country will devolve into chaos and become the violent hell-scape that you fear. 

In the same way that Republicans have worked so assiduously to make government dysfunctional so that they can then argue that government is dysfunctional, so is Trump creating chaos to make you fear chaos. Too many conservative Americans have been seduced into thinking that they will get better government by electing the people who want to destroy any possibility of it, and now the same illogic leads them to believe that they will restore order by electing the greatest elected agent of chaos this country has ever seen. 

I can understand why you voted for him in '16. I can understand why you wanted to send a message. I can understand why you wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God into complacent elite thinking. Message received. Now there's no plausible justification for voting for him unless you really think that living in a deeply corrupt, illiberal, intolerant South American or Eastern European-style autocracy is better than what we have now. Surely you can see that we can be better than that. Right?

Comments

17 responses

  1. Boris Avatar
    Boris

    We want blood, Jack. The blood of sacrifice must flow, and we have to literally see it with our eyes. Only then will resentment be quenched and peace can return. And Trump promises is a wave of red.
    You elites aren’t just so alienated from the necessity of sacrificial violence at the heart of human nature that you just can’t see it.

    Reply
  2. Tabris Avatar
    Tabris

    What sacrifice? Why sacrifice? Why this need for “sacrificial violence”, and why do it for Trump? Trump, of all causes?

    Reply
  3. Jack W Avatar
    Jack W

    Yes, let’s all descend into barbarism. That’s a solution that has to turn out well.
    I don’t know whether there’s a veiled reference to Rene Girard in there somewhere, but the whole point of Chrisitianity was to provide a path out of that violent dead end.

    Reply
  4. Boris Avatar
    Boris

    First, Christianity ultimately only saves the individual from that cycle, not society. Christianity is a path to individual salvation, not the re-engineering of secular society. Also, btw, Christianity’s path to salvation from that cycle isn’t through stopping it; it’s merely through participating in it AS the victim (ie, a martyr) instead of as the persecutor, not through somehow interrupting a process intrinsic to human nature.
    Second, society jettisoned Christianity so…stop acting all surprise-pikachu-faced that the barbaric calls for the visible blood of sacrifice then return. It’s a matter of course! You people want the sexual revolution and pluralistic secularism? Fine. Then “There Will Be Blood” just as Hollywood predicted.
    The blood of the victim, literally seen flowing as literal liquid red from the literal dead or dying body of the victim (literal means: this is not a metaphor, but a concrete sensory experience required to satiate resentment in the human lizard brain) restores the law, restores the father, restores the boundaries of the community in a society that increasingly wants to have no boundaries, no borders, no otherness.
    As Trump says, “without borders, you don’t have a country,” Amen, amen I say to you: without borders, you can’t have Meaning at all, because semantics depends on the boundaries hard-won over millennia through the ritual shedding of so much blood. But now you want men to be women and women to be boys and so you’ve invoked the need to reestablish boundaries through blood.

    Reply
  5. Boris Avatar
    Boris

    I mean, you just don’t get it, do you??
    “Message received”??? Obviously not.
    This whole post is still the leftist elite scolding the Right and telling us we’re the problem and the ones who need to act differently.
    No! You want to stop the coming crisis? Repent! The Left has to repent! Get on your knees and renounce your support for perversion, renounce your support for lawlessness, renounce your rejection of natural hierarchies, renounce your dialectic materialism.
    When the Left is willing to say “we’re sorry, we went too far in our hedonistic excesses and godless utopian libertinism and egalitarianism” and really shows some sign of actual repentance…then it will stop. But so far it’s all been the lip-service of “we understand you’re angry and should listen to middle America more.”
    We don’t want listening, we want conversion and repentance. Start admitting that at least some of your cultural projects were wrong and abominable in their root presumptions.

    Reply
  6. NormW Avatar
    NormW

    I was gonna say that it takes a lack of imagination to believe the 4 more years of Trump MAY not be the worst thing that could happen, but then I got sidetracked by Boris’ well reasoned and humane comments.

    Reply
  7. Jack W Avatar
    Jack W

    Boris, read my “The Meaning of History in 25 Theses.” The link is in the “Don’t Miss” section in the left column above.
    Tell me where you agree and disagree. That will help me to better understand how to frame the theological reasons regarding why I think you are so dangerously wrong.
    But it comes down to the shift that took place from the Old Testament to the New. Your Jeremiad above is right out of the Old Testament. That had its place then and there, but things have shifted in a critical way since Good Friday. Morality can longer be an outside-in affair; the law is no longer written on tablets of stone that require our extrinsic cultural conformity; it is, or should be, written on an awakened heart. Our living lawfully must come from an individual awakening to the interior way the law–the Logos–works on us in the deepest recesses of our heart, not by demanding the kind cultural conformity typical of theocracies, for which you apparently suffer a deep nostalgie.
    Yes repentance is critical–it’s the choice made in the moment of awakening–but it’s because it happens on an idndividaul level not on a cultural or transcultural level, people have to be free to be either as bad or as good as they choose to be. They have to make mistakes and they have to learn from them.
    We are all wandering in the Wilderness, which is the place where we meet God in a state of culturally unencumbered freedom. In the old days, the monks left society to go out into the desert. Now the desert has come to us, and it’s ok if you see in it an opportunity for spiritual growth in a postmodern key.
    The price we pay for that freedom is a culturally ambiguous moral code. When I hear conservatives lamenting our cultural decadence, I hear somebody who wants to return to the womb, to the safe place where the priest or the rabbi tells you what is right and wrong rather than you figuring it out for yourself. This is spiritual childishness, and it’s about time people who call themselves Christians outgrow it,
    It’s time to embrace the secular world as it is, and seek by your example to awaken in the people you encounter the possibility for a deeper kind of life that the secular world does not afford them. Subvert it from inside out. Stop scolding Liberals and coming off as a moralistic prig. Doing so might make you feel morally superior, but it persuades nobody except those already inclined to buy your Old Testament point of view.
    Norm–I hope I’ve explained why you shouldn’t get too sidetracked. The theological justification for four more years of Trump is tortured to say the least. The best I can say for his argument is that it is out of season.

    Reply
  8. Tabris Avatar
    Tabris

    What is well-reasoned or humane about “sacrificial violence”?

    Reply
  9. Boris Avatar
    Boris

    All I’m hearing, Jack, is “I’m a smug leftist who thinks the Right are spiritual children and will not give up my snobbish refined academic ideas (that really all exist just as an elaborate “glass bead game” justification for not disturbing the current order, which is comfortable to me) even if it tears the country apart. You deplorable people are the ones who need to change!”
    Well, fine. Then don’t be surprised when there is blood. Don’t be surprised when your “get with the elite leftist cultural program or go die” attitude is met with people who resist with a violent resentment of that.
    At least have the decency to admit that “message received” was a disingenuous mendacious thing to say. At least just come out and admit “I think I know better than you, and refuse to be rocked at all in my fundamental tenets by these events of the past few years.”

    Reply
  10. Boris Avatar
    Boris

    Oh, someone like the ex-presidents, in white robes each marked with a big bold word like “Liberty” or “Desire” or “Other”, hanged from the front of the Lincoln Memorial and then we get to watch Trump slit the corpses and watch the robes turn red and the blood pool underneath.
    That would be the only heaven there could be on earth.
    But the real sacrifice is unlikely to be so literal. It will probably much more of a “fog of war” sort of bloodshed. Fine, as long as the news is filled with video of battlefields littered with corpses.

    Reply
  11. C.A. Avatar
    C.A.

    The perpetual preening Christian whine “We want this, we want that, do this, do that.”
    LOL.
    Get over yourself. We all know you’re hungering for and you think you deserve to have everyone on their knees in repentance begging you for forgiveness. But honestly? No one cares what you want.

    Reply
  12. C.A. Avatar
    C.A.

    I believe that was sarcasm. Such hungering for violence to subjugate your perceived enemies and rule over them is the most Christian thing I’ve read in a long time.

    Reply
  13. C.A. Avatar
    C.A.

    All I’m hearing Boris is you whining that your obvious inferiors aren’t giving you the respect you feel you’re owed. The only 2 outcomes you will tolerate is our complete capitulation to you, or bloodshed.
    Your entire sad little world seems to be framed by what the left thinks of you. Why is it such a big deal to you? We really couldn’t care less what you think of us.

    Reply
  14. C.A. Avatar
    C.A.

    Boris, your bloodlust is so deeply engrained in you, and the visions of your enemies slaughter swimming so clearly before your eyes, you didn’t even answer the poster’s question.
    Here’s a hint, it wasn’t “how”.
    You can’t manage to answer a simple question, yet demand sacrifice and vengeance to your obvious superiority? You can’t see me of course, but rest assured my eyes are rolling.

    Reply
  15. C.A. Avatar
    C.A.

    “Second, society jettisoned Christianity so…stop acting all surprise-pikachu-faced that the barbaric calls for the visible blood of sacrifice then return.“
    Forcing people into following a religion via threats of violence …. now where have I heard that before….
    It’s so hilarious, every time a conservative whines about how tortuous they find living in the US is, when they threaten to leave the countries they always choose are the least religious and have universal healthcare. Then they wonder they aren’t receiving the respect they’re demanding.

    Reply
  16. Jack W Avatar
    Jack W

    Boris–hopefully you will find a way of dealing with the intensity of your resentment and anger before you actually hurt someone. Then you will have some serious repenting to do.
    Humility and forebearance seem to be extraordinarily difficult for angry conservatives.
    Norm–sorry I missed the sarcasm, if that’s what it was. I don’t know you, so not sure.

    Reply
  17. Tabris Avatar
    Tabris

    Cool. Totally cool and normal.
    But however you get to that bloodsoaked battlefield that is your mind, tell me: how do you and people like you benefit from that mass bloodletting? (I’d say people in general, but I’m guessing people unlike you will be among the sacrifices, their throats slit to propitiate whoever. Maybe even Trump.)
    At the end of the day, whichever way you dispose of those beneath you in your hierarchy of bloodcurdling vengeance, you’ll still have Trump and everything he represents and enables.

    Reply

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