I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time to return to the historical norm and that means to the strong man. People don't really like to rule themselves; they'd rather be ruled. It's far less trouble. But I still have hope that some how or other we'll get through this without becoming China or Russia, some tawdry banana republic. We're already Berlusconi's Italy.
Nevertheless, American democracy is just failing because it has become incapable of dealing with real-world problems. All people really get worked up about is red/blue identity politics--whether my team is winning or the other guy's is.
Inaction and gridlock are the preconditions for crises that will create increasing levels of civil unrest and chaos, and civil unrest and chaos are the preconditions for an authoritarian takeover, and once the authoritarians are in place, they have the technology to stay in place for a long, long time. Surveillance technology, as currently implemented (and exported from) in China, is the future and will be increasingly used to suppress any kind of dissent--from the Left or the Right. If you're a betting man, the odds are not that China will not become more like the U.S., but that the U.S will become more like China.
To think that supporting Trump is a way to push back is fanciful at best. This line of thinking assumes that because the Deep State is against Trump, then he must be against the Deep State. He's not against the Deep State in principle, only the Deep State that opposes him. Give him two terms, and he'll find a way of coopting the Deep State to support his interests.
Trump is an authoritarian personality, and it's only his ignorance and incompetence that has prevented him from being more effective--so far. The one thing he's good at is b.s.-ing or bullying his way out of trouble. We'll see if he can keep his grift going, and with a little help from oligarchs--domestic and abroad--who see him as a useful idiot, he just might. His first hires--the Bannons,etc.--were punching way over their weight class. The new hires, smooth operators like Wm. Barr, and others like him for whom Barr is paving the way, could very well save Trump's ass. We'll see.
At first I couldn't understand why the Republican establishment was embracing a clown like Trump. I thought they would support some way of easing him out of office and easing a less volatile tool like Pence in. It didn't make sense to me that these wily establishment Republicans would want to tie their collective fate to Turmp. I understand all about the base and the primary threats it poses, but I assure you, that if the power establishment wanted to get rid of Trump, they would have found a way. They'd find a way to get Fox News aligned with it, and Trump would be gone in a flash.
The only explanation that makes sense to me at this point is that there's a deep split in the conservative establishment. The first are principled conservative never Trumpers who actually care about preserving traditional norms of decency and the rule of law. The second are nihilist right-wing elites who are ruthlessly committed to entrench their oligarchic power. The latter appear to have adopted the Trump-as-useful-idiot strategy. It's not clear to me yet whether they are delusional or whether they understand things the rest of us do not.
The people in the second group are all about power, and they are fine with authoritarianism as long as their faction holds the power, and I think that's what's at stake for them in keeping Trump propped up. If they can find a way to get him into a second term, they will have all the time they need to consolidate their control. This is a hypothesis I'm just playing with now, but I'm becoming more convinced that more and more establishment types are willing to "ruin" their reputations by associating with Trump because they don't care about the old establishment anymore--they are trying to set up a new one.
They believe, correctly, that the winners write history, and they intend to win. This is their play, and it could succeed, especially if most Democrats continue to think that Trump is an aberration, and things will return to normal when we elect Uncle Joe. Who knows what these right-wing power elites talk about among themselves, and who knows what narrative they are reinforcing to justify this play among themselves. I'm sure there's no limit to their hubris, and with it their ability to justify whatever they do as in the best interests of the country.
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And so for this reason, President Chaos is not the harbinger of freedom from liberal technocracy, but the harbinger of a far more repressive right-wing oligarchy. When I discuss Trump with his supporters in my family or with others, I try to understand why they think that he, despite all his admitted flaws, is better than anybody the Democrats will put up. Most Trump supporters don't see him as a wannabe Putin. They would dismiss my hypothesis as unfair and motivated by alarmist sour grapes. They just see him as an anti-establishment renegade who is stirring things up--it's good to stir things up once in a while, right?.
I understand their discomfort with liberal technocracy and its secular, nothing-is-sacred-or-worthy-of-reverence cultural ethos, but let's face it, the Churches are as instrumental in destroying that ethos as any secular Liberals have been. From Jerry Falwell, Jr. to Bernard Law, they've been exposed for the frauds most of their clerical ilk have always been. They are, as a class, at best mediocre bureaucrats, careerists without a shred of moral or spiritual authority that exceeds that of an earnest middle manager at Wal-Mart.
That doesn't mean that there is no spiritual vitality in the culture, but only that it's not to be found in its institutions and its managerial class. I'm a practicing Catholic, but Voltaire was right--ecrasez l'Infame. Good riddance to all that ecclesial, faux-medieval claptrap. It's time to grow up. For me as a Catholic, the only thing necessary is that the Mass be continuously celebrated and that the real faithful remain faithful, and that there be a tradition of lively "midrasnhic" reflection on the central historical mystery we celebrate as Christians. That last part is not going to come out of most chanceries and seminaries, at least not for some time to come.
I'm not saying these are bad people--neither were the segregationist Christians in the South. I'm saying they are very ordinary, socially conforming people who have no special wisdom or moral authority. They just reflect conventional wisdom, and they haven't enough deep moral sense to know when the conventional wisdom is morally wrong. That's how most people are regardless of their avowed political or religious commitments. They are just going along to get along.
The people who are the most virulent defenders of conventional morality are not defending the Good; they are defending their particular culture's Oedipus Complex. The Good, as revealed through different cultures' great prophets and philosophers, has obviously played a role in shaping these cultures' norms and taboos. It's a good thing that human sacrifice is no longer culturally acceptable. And so, of course, we measure moral progress in cultures to the degree that they have proscribed the worst forms of savagery.
But the cultures that are most evolved are those in which the cognitive capacity of the heart, i.e., the individual conscience, to know the good as something that transcends one's acculturation. Christian cultures are not the only ones in which this capacity for moral cognition has been valued, but there's a reason why freedom and individuality emerged most precociously in the West. The problem with cultures that celebrate freedom and individuality lies in that they tend to be irreverent, and that's a good thing, when clearly there are sacred cows that deserve no reverence. But conscience bows before that which is worthy of reverence. It just patiently awaits until it appears, and refuses anything and anyone who presents itself as the form without the substance.
But the more difficult thing for these traditionalists to understand is that the real destroyer of traditional values and a sense of the sacred has been consumer capitalism. Liberalism and Capitalism are interdependent social systems and the only difference between secular Liberals and traditionalist conservatives lies in that the former accept the disruptive changes that capitalism has wrought and have adapted to it and seek to mitigate its most harmful effects, whereas traditionalist conservatives still think capitalism is great without guardrails and have no clue that ubridled capitalism has been the most powerful destroyer of the norms and traditions they cherish.
You can't disapprove of Liberalism without disapproving of Capitalism. While there are some principled conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen who get this, they don't get much air time on Fox News. Fox News propaganda wants its audience to believe that both capitalism and traditional values are compatible, and the only reason conservative traditions and norms have eroded is because there's a Liberal plot to exterminate everything they hold sacred. Read Deneen. He will quickly disabuse you of this mode of deluded thinking. Deneen understands that the market has commodified everything; it has become our fundamental, culture-wide metaphor for assessing value, and without a robust pushback from credible spiritual authorities, it takes the field unopposed. And without a credible spiritual foundation, a culture cannot be anything but secular, regardless of whatever ridiculous shade of lipstick religious conservatives want to gussie this pig up with.
Trump represents not the contradiction of secular Liberalism in this sense, but its apotheosis. That conservative Christians have embraced him betrays their own confusion, moral bankruptcy, and fundamental misunderstanding of the spirit of the Gospels. These are culture Christians, not genuine Christians. They are as much Christians as those church members In the bad old days who supported slavery and later segregation. The spirit of the gospels is always a challenge to culture and a call to transcend its limitations, especially the various ways it celebrates power and greed, and especially the way it makes enemies of the Other.
Tribal Christianity is an oxymoron. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--tribal about true Christianity--it is radically universalist. It is corrupted as soon as it becomes a justification of us against them, even when the 'them' are non-Christians. Tribal Christianity is a kind of mediocre social conformism that parodies Christianity. So it's not surprising that so-many people who think they're Christians are among Trump's staunchest supporters. And it's not surprising that so much of his support comes from Southerners who--good Christians though they have thought and continue think themselves to be--were ok with slavery and then later with Jim Crow. And the strongest indicator of the mediocrity of their moral sense is their allowing themselves to be conned by this buffoonish Yankee grifter.
So a vote for Trump started out a vote against Hillary, and a vote against Hillary was a vote against the hated Liberal establishment. I get it, but then it blossomed for many Christians into this bizarre logic that because we self-identify as God's people, and what makes us God's people is our opposition to secularizing Liberals, and secular Liberals hate Trump, then Trump must be God's instrument. Even if we are laying the foundations for a future autocratic plutocracy, at least it will be a Godly autocracy. It has to be if if it's what God's people have effected. If people really believe this kind of craziness, there's nothing that can be said to them. Reality itself will intervene at some point and give them a slap upside the head. The problem is that their delusional thinking is dragging the rest of them off the cliff with them.
But let's assume there's are still some Trump supporters who haven't gone completely off the deep end. I would ask them, what kind of alternative to liberal democracy would you embrace? They say they don't like Hillary and patronizing cosmopolitan liberals, but so what? You're going to burn the whole thing down because you haven't been able to adapt to the world that capitalism has created? You really believe that something better will emerge out of the chaos? You'd really be ok with the kind of Plutarchy that Koch brothers' style radical Libertarianism will bring us--has already brought us? That's what this embrace of conservative values with unbridled capitalism is turning us into.
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I think more than anything else it has to do with the broader crisis in meaning that has cast many Americans, particularly traditionalist conservatives, into a state of ontological dizziness. It's particularly important for certain personality types to take their cues from external cultural symbols and norms, and when those norms are fragilized by pluralistic complexity, their sense of meaning and identity are also fragilized. Most people are not independent thinkers; they need to be told what to think, and cultural norms and traditions have been the normal means to effect that through basic acculturation as children. When everything this kind of personality type has been taught as a child is true and good is brought into question, ontological dizziness sets in. The floor has disappeared beneath them. They are free floating, and will grasp anything that will give them a sense of stability and grounding. This makes such people extremely vulnerable to demagoguery and outlandish conspiracy theories. What makes sense is anything that resonates with their acculturation and explains why their symbolic world has lost its cultural hegemony.
So I don't think most Trump supporters are toxic racists or ignorant brutes. They're dizzy, and they just want to live in an America that feels stable and comfortable for them, and Fox News and right-wing talk radio gives them that, and so does Trump. They restore their sense of what's right because it resonates with what they were taught as children. They have not been able to adapt to a complex world in which people who have been acculturated into very different symbolic meaning systems must live cheek by jowl. They used to be ok with "different" folks so long as their traditional American Christian symbol system was dominant, but they cannot tolerate being only one among many with no cultural primacy. It's in this sense they see themselves as "real Americans" and why they see Trump as their champion. Making America great again means restoring their cultural hegemony. And this "restoration" is more important than any other economic or other mundane political consideration.
But, of course, this is a con. And as with almost every kind of hope these conservative elites cynically dangle in front of this dizzy population, it will disappoint them. Everything in Reality is pushing hard against whatever bubble they are trying to sustain to keep it out, and the only question is whether when this bubble bursts it will be too late not just for them but for the rest of us.