Very interesting interview.
Showing posts with label Christian Nationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Nationalism. Show all posts
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Sunday, September 28, 2025
A Protestant Dominionist Dictatorship brought to you by Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation or the End of the Reformation?
When Trump was elected President, people, for the second time in a row, thought "oh he won't be so bad".
He's been as bad as expected, and worse.
A large segment of the politically aware American demographic is wondering, nearly every day, "what on Earth is going on here" as the Trump administration does something odd day after day.1 A second group, his core MAGA adherents, ignore the oddities and assume that a lot of the nonsense about lurking Marxist must be true, and assume that Trump is doing what needs to be done to save the Republic.
Well, Trump is demented, which explains a lot. But there's something else going on. And that something else is Christian Nationalism with a strong Protestant Dominionist focus.
Round Head flag, English Civil War. Takinginterest01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. There were several varieties of this standard, as there was no standardized Parliamentarian flag.
Trump himself isn't really a sharp enough tool in the shed to do what's occurring. quite frankly, and at any point in his life, he probably wouldn't be interested enough to care anyway, as long has people are praising him and he seems to be getting what he wants.. To the extent he has any deep thoughts at all, and he likely doesn't, many of his real thoughts and desire run contrary to much of what's occurring. Trump, after all, is nothing much more than a wealthy playboy. He likes money, women, and has bad taste. M'eh.
But Trump was savvy enough to know he needed muscle and backing to get into office and moreover back into office. The intellectual muscle has been provided by far right populist, Protestant Evangelicals and their fellow travelers, the latter of which will live to regret ever being associated with the movement. Trump supporting Catholics are going to come to particularly regret traveling on this bus.
We've often said here that the United States is a Protestant country, culturally. It's so Protestant that people who aren't Protestant often are, culturally. Right now we have a really good example of that in the form of Stephen Wright, who is Jewish by heritage and perhaps by practice, but who in views is a raging Calvinist. It's pretty easy to find run of the mill, and even some non run of the mill, Catholics in the Trump fold who likewise culturally looked not to Rome, and not even to Luther, but to John Calvin.
The very first religiously significant group of English colonist in North America were religious dissenters, something very much worth remembering. The Puritans were Calvinists, not members of the dominant and official religion of England, the Church of England. Their landing in 1620 came in the context of an ongoing struggle in England over what England was to be, in terms of its faith. The Anglicans were in control at the time the Puritans left for North American shores and they were also suppressed for their religious radicalism in their native land. England was now solidly Protestant, sort of, with latent Catholicism seemingly having been beaten down with the peasants losing the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, but whether England would be radically Calvinist or sort of looking back at its Catholicism with the Church of England had not been determined. That question would provide much of the background to the English Civil War in which the parliament sought to depose an Anglican king, while being lead by a Calvinist who would be declared the Lord Protector. Ultimately, Calvinism didn't sit well with the English, and while parliament won the war, the crown would be restored and playboy king seated on the throne, who would convert to Catholicism sometimes prior to his death.
Calvinist would flee to North America upon the crown being restored.
The early English colonies in North America were frequently religiously intolerant. They were commonly sectarian and aggressively enforced the religion of their founders. The Puritans did not come to North America for religious freedom in the manner in which so often portrayed in grade school when I was a kid, but rather to avoid suppression under the crown and enforce their version of Christianity where they lived. People living in Puritan colonies had mandatory worship requirements at the local Calvinist church. It's not as if, if you lived in one, you could sit that out, or for that matter declare that you were a Catholic and would worship elsewhere.
Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was executed in Massachusetts for preaching her variant of Protestantism in that colony.
Christian Dominionist look back to the Puritans and the 1600s for their concept of what the state should be like. Not to the 1770s to 1790s. They may not all do so consciously, but they do. When they say that the United States is a Protestant nation, they mean its a Puritan one.
We all know, of course, that 1st Amendment protects the freedom of worship. That text states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
When that law, and that's what it is, was added to the Constitution in 1791 the infant United States was much different that the loose group of sectarian colonies of the 1600s. Indeed, the mother country itself was much different than the one that had fought the English Civil War. Having endured that experience, and with its own history of sectarianism, what the drafters of the Bill of Rights wanted was to avoid there being a Church of the United States, which if it had been created, would have been a branch of the Anglican Church. The amendment protected the right of various people to worship as they saw fit, or not at all. Modern conservatives have decried the Courts for decades about this amendment being misinterpreted, but it isn't. The Bill of Rights inserted religious tolerance ito the law.
Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the country remained a Christian nation. Other religions made an early appearance, setting aside native religions, very early on, but they were a distinct minority. A Jewish house of worship existed in New York, for example, as early as 1654. But overall, non Christian religions were practiced to a very small degree. And early patterns of settlement meant that the sectarian nature of the colonies continued to reflect itself into the early 1800s, and even into the mid 19th Century, although patterns if immigration began to heavily impact that, particularly the immigration of Catholics, who were largely detested by everybody else for a very long time. Be that as it may, American culture reflected Protestant Christianity well into the 20th Century and still does today.
This began to break down, as so much in our modern culture has, in the 1960s with the Baby Boom generation. Baby Boomers, or at least many of them, outright rejected many of the basic tenants of Christianity and brought in the really loose cultural Christianity, although with a leftward tilt, that we see today. One religion was a good as another, Christianity was basically "be nice". The warnings that St. Paul had given in his letters were ignored.
Things decayed.
On this site we've tracked some of that decay. While not meaning to spark a mass debate, we've noted the erosion of hetrosexual religious standards starting in the late 1940s and which were in full bloom before the Baby Boom generation with the massive success of Playboy magazine, and the concept of the loose moral big boob dimwit and sterile "girl next store", who was always ready to have sex. By the 1960s the erosion was becoming generational. By the 1970s it was becoming part of the culture and homosexuality began to openly emerge. Marriage started taking a big hit by the 1980s, with divorce becoming increasingly common by the late 1970s A culture in which divorce had been hard to obtain had evolved into one where marriage wasn't necessary at all, and ultimately into one where same sex couples could marry, the original meaning of marriage having been pretty much lost.
Enter (Evangelical) Christian Dominionism.
In 1975 Evangelicals Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright had a meeting in which they claimed to receive a divine message related to the culture. They were shortly thereafter joined in their infant movement by Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer.. They claimed a mandate from the Devine to invade and achieve dominion over the "seven spheres" of society identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. The New Apostolic Reformation is informed by this movement. And this is the Evangelical wing that is active in the Trump Administration and which have heavily influenced Christian Nationalist.
Dominionist, no matter what they may say, are not democratic. They are part of the Illiberal Democracy movement, and in the United States, they are the very core of it. Believing that the culture has been hopelessly corrupted in the seven spheres, they do not seek to convert by example, but to seize control of the culture, force a reformation of it, and bring about a Puritan nation on the model, sort of, of the original Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Puritan flag of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This heavily aligns with the concept of Illiberal Democracy. You can have a democracy, the Dominionist and Illiberal Democrats hold, as long as it fully accepts the predominant cultural world outlook. No countering that is allowed.
Now, something careful observers will note is that this movement is now all over the European world. And some of the early Christian Nationalist are most definitely not Evangelical Christians. R. R. Reno is a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church. Patrick Dineen is a Catholic, although he's notably moved away from the Republican Party and is now openly part of the American Solidarity Party. Rod Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and then converted to Orthodoxy. He's also now moved on from the Republican Party to the American Solidarity Party. The head of the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025, is Kevin Roberts, who is Catholic. And of course, J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert.
How do we make sense of this?
Well, one way in which we can makes sense of this, although not in the case of Dineen, Reno or Dreher, is to admit that a large segment of Catholics are heavily Protestantized, although this notably excludes younger Catholics and recent converts who most definitely are not. Gen. Jones Catholics and Gen. X Catholics were often very poorly catechized and therefore you can find quite a few who have gravitated to the far political right and who will state very Evangelical views of things which they have picked up from it, sometimes theological views that Catholics don't hold at all. Boomer Catholics went through the entire Spirit of Vatican Two era and are sometimes pretty beat up by it, and the younger ones experienced the Kennedy betrayal of religious adherence which caused many Catholics to follow suit. Some Boomer Catholics were on the very liberal Church end as well to the irritation of nearly everyone else in the Catholic sphere, who are glad to see their waning influence, but who contributed to the atmosphere the same way that poorly catechized late Boomer/Jones/Gen X Catholics were, but with a certain added massive whineyness on some occasions.
Anyhow, while it happened later than the birth of the Dominionist movement, intellectual and younger Catholics have moved towards an increased conservatism for quite some time, and it is now really visible in the Church. Overall it's a very good development, because it's so Catholic, and it reflects the view expressed in the letter to Diognetus more than any Seven Mountain tract. But the decay in the culture, which is particularly evident from the much more informed Catholic perspective, has caused some intellectuals, notably Dineen, Reno and Dreher, to despair of the culture and, in the case of of all three, to openly maintain that liberal democracy is an experiment that has failed.2
Integralism argues that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible. It formed out of the chaos of the late 19th Century in Europe and was strong in traditionally Catholic Romance language speaking countries. It never supported the concept of a state religion, but rather subordinating the state to the moral principles of Catholicism, rejecting morality from the state, and, in its European form, favoured Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the state
Integralism really fell away from Catholic thinking as a discussed topic after World War Two for a variety of reasons, one being that modern liberal democracies quite being hostile to religion, which frankly most had been before the Second World War. Indeed, over time, the Church increasingly disapproved of clerics being in politics, and ultimately banned it. But in 2014, with an essay by Dinneen, it started to reappear. It's adherents claim that its the official position of the Church, but fail to acknowledge that on many things the church's "official" position can be pretty nuanced. Even prior to the Second World War it had always been the case that integralist took the view that imposing a Catholic view of things on a population couldn't be done on a non Catholic culture. In more recent years the Church has really emphasized that there's a civic duty to participate in elections, which while not rejecting integralism, does demonstrate a view accepting democracies and requiring Catholics to participate in their democracies.
The revival of integralism came about the same time, however, that dominionism started to gain steam, and for same, but not identical, reasons. Dineen's essay came out in 2014, but the following year the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and just as we predicted here, thing have really gone off the rails. Justice Kennedy's decision lead directly the populist outrage and right on to Donald Trump.
Obergefell was just a bridge too far for many Americans, but the drift towards societal libertinism it expressed had been going on for a long time. As we've noted, you can trace it back at least to 1953 and the release of Playboy, but savvy students of culture would point out that perhaps the signs were there as early as the very first movies, which took a run at pornography right from the onset until being reigned back in. Mass communications of all types, including mass media, had a big role in this no matter how much society attempted to restrain it. The moral shock of the First World War lead to the Roaring Twenties which foreshadowed the 1960s, interrupted only by the economic deprivation of the 1930s and the Second World War. At any rate, the decay had set in pretty deep even by the early 1970s.
Anyhow, Integralism and Dominionism are not the same thing. Pope Francis, noting a rising connection between Integralism and Christian Nationalist, approved a publication criticizing the drift in this direction. Catholics getting tied up in the far right Evangelical movement's goals are going to be in for a surprise when they learn that many in that community would not even regard Catholics as Christians. The re-Puritanization of the country would not be a good thing for Catholics, who after all hold a very broad view of Christianity rather than a nationalistic view of it, and who don't share the same millennialist views of things at all.
Dominionist, for their part, would be shocked to learn that Integralist hold a lot of things that Dominionist frankly accept as abhorrent. They may be united on abortion being evil and transgenderism being contrary to the moral law, but modern American Evangelical Christians would be surprised that the mass of the Catholic Church holds divorce to be a great moral wrong and condemns easy remarriage. They'd also be surprised to learn that Catholics condemn sex outside of marriage, including all sexual acts outside of the unitive type, to be grave moral wrongs, and that's the Catholic concern with homosexuality.
Rod Dreher, who seems to have joined the Christian Nationalist movement, or who had joined it (I'm not sure about his current position, given that he's a member of the American Solidarity Party), early on advocated a sort of walled in approach to societal moral decay in his book The Benedict Option. I criticized that approach here, and he seems to have retreated from what he seemed to indicate that book espoused. Anyhow, looking at the situation overall, this is a really dangerous moment in American history, but also one from which Western societies might emerge into something new, and better.
Much of this comes in the context of the collapse of the Reformation, and it stands to accelerate it. At the end of the day, holding Donald Trump as any sort of "Godly Man" is absurd. The direct attack on American democracy, which is occurring as we write, is highly dangerous, but probably won't succeed. Forces on the other side have taken forever to react, but are finally starting to, including a reassessment of the really radical and downright goofball positions the left has advocated for some time. The New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionist movement carrying the flag is causing "Christianity" to be condemned, but among thinking Christians is causing a reassessment of the Reformation churches and a massive movement away from them back into the Apostolic fold, as the theology of the Reformation churches simply can't be defended.
Roman society was reformed by Christianity, but not by operation of law, but by operation of the faithful members of the "one Catholic, Holy and Apostolic Church". We're in the death throws of the Reformation, of which this is all part. If that's right, it'll be a blessing in the end.
Footnotes:
1. In fairness, a lot of the odd things that Trump does is because he very obviously has dementia, which nobody is doing anything about. He's really not mentally stable enough to occupy the office he's in.
2. Evangelicals of the far right are particularly focused on transgenderism and homosexulaity, but just completely ignore almost all of the remaining actual Christian tenants on sex. Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals have really adopted, is a serial polygamist. White House "faith advisor" is on her third husband. Evangelical churches have pews fill up on Sundays with people who are living in what St. Paul very clearly condemned as states of mortal sin.
Related threads:
A Protestant Country. It's history, and what it means.
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Sunday, September 21, 2025
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. Missing the obvious demographic aspect of the story . . ."Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death"
The Cowboy State Daily claims:
Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death
What's the real story?
Do it yourself and Evangelical Churches saw a boost in attendance, and it will be temporary, as in probably over by today.
Protestant "mainline" churches, of which Kirk had been a member, saw nothing going on. The same is true of the Catholic churches, which have been increasingly packed in a way that can't be ignored, and which Kirk was clearly evolving towards.
Does this tell us that the far right Evangelical Churches are particularly tapped into the American mindset? Not really. But it does tell us that far right Evangelical Protestantism is particularly, and indeed oddly, aligned with MAGA.
Long term, this will mean for it, what being aligned with the Confederacy in the South meant for the Episcopal Church in the South, but even more dramatically.
Evangelical Protestantism, in its far right wing form, is dragging Evangelicalism into what theologically and politically untenable position. Trump isn't Charles Martel, holding back the Saracen hoards. This will pass and people's head will begin to clear up. When they do, the close association of right wing Evangelicalism with Trump, including the downright goofy occasional statements by some of its leaders about Trump being Divinely appointed, will have the effect of damaging Evangelicalism as a whole.
The far right Evangelical Churches, which make up only a portion of Evangelical Churches, are telling people what they want to hear. That works only as long as people aren't being hurt by what they hear. The truth of tends to hurt.
One thing most Evangelicals won't be hearing are today's readings in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, which are:
Reading 1
Amos 8:4-7
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy
and destroy the poor of the land!
"When will the new moon be over," you ask,
"that we may sell our grain,
and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat?
We will diminish the ephah,
add to the shekel,
and fix our scales for cheating!
We will buy the lowly for silver,
and the poor for a pair of sandals;
even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!"
The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
Never will I forget a thing they have done!
Reading 2
1 Timothy 2:1-8
Beloved:
First of all, I ask that supplications, prayers,
petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone,
for kings and for all in authority,
that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life
in all devotion and dignity.
This is good and pleasing to God our savior,
who wills everyone to be saved
and to come to knowledge of the truth.
For there is one God.
There is also one mediator between God and men,
the man Christ Jesus,
who gave himself as ransom for all.
This was the testimony at the proper time.
For this I was appointed preacher and apostle
— I am speaking the truth, I am not lying —,
teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
It is my wish, then, that in every place the men should pray,
lifting up holy hands, without anger or argument.
Gospel
Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to his disciples,
"A rich man had a steward
who was reported to him for squandering his property.
He summoned him and said,
'What is this I hear about you?
Prepare a full account of your stewardship,
because you can no longer be my steward.'
The steward said to himself, 'What shall I do,
now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me?
I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg.
I know what I shall do so that,
when I am removed from the stewardship,
they may welcome me into their homes.'
He called in his master's debtors one by one.
To the first he said,
'How much do you owe my master?'
He replied, 'One hundred measures of olive oil.'
He said to him, 'Here is your promissory note.
Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.'
Then to another the steward said, 'And you, how much do you owe?'
He replied, 'One hundred kors of wheat.'
The steward said to him, 'Here is your promissory note;
write one for eighty.'
And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.
"For the children of this world
are more prudent in dealing with their own generation
than are the children of light.
I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth,
so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters
is also trustworthy in great ones;
and the person who is dishonest in very small matters
is also dishonest in great ones.
If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth,
who will trust you with true wealth?
If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another,
who will give you what is yours?
No servant can serve two masters.
He will either hate one and love the other,
or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and mammon."
No health and wealth gospel there.
Last edition:
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. The tragic co-opting of death and politics.
I posted this the other day:
Lex Anteinternet: What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the...: This is not intended, I'd note, to be a hagiography of any kind for Charlie Kirk. The populist far right is already trying to do that, ...
I'll note that I'm already tired of commenting on Charlie Kirk and his murder. I guess I'm like a lot of Americans that way. But I will note some things here, which I hope will be my last commentary on this event, although it probably will not be.
The first one is that I still really don't know anything about Kirk.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to. The populist right's latching on to the story, not the man, has created a full blown set of hagiography. Kirk was a wonderful family man, and a man of God, we're told. Those not buying into this propaganda, which is now what it's become, have pointed out that he said some really horrific things. I saw a short clip of an African American pastor lambasting the late Kirk from the pulpit in one effort to address the record.
Where does this leave us with Kirk's character. . . the real one?
Well, there were things to admire about him, and things to detest, but where he seems to come out is on the end of populism that creeps up on being fascist in some ways. He's not the only one on the far right who hold those views.
Indeed, National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist come really close in some instances to holding these views, and they have Trump's ear, or more accurately, perhaps, his inattention.
Those who do hold those views appear to be making a dedicated effort not only to form the record, but to suppress anything counter to it. It's amazing. We've never been closer to an outright crackdown on dissent in the US than right now.
I'm also amazed by how people are intermixing religion in this.
As readers here know, I"m a Catholic and Mrs. Kirk is as well. Charlie Kirk was headed in that direction. It'd have been interesting to see what would have happened had he become a Catholic. I've never been in a Catholic parish that wasn't multiracial. Catholics have been reminded from time to time that while they are citizens of many nations, they're just passing through.
I support the Second Amendment, I'd note, but one other thing that I'm just baffled with is how some people seemingly must mix things that are political with their religion in odd ways. One example is the flood of Twitter commentators who are appalled that their pastors didn't mention Kirk last Sunday. If that's not odd enough, there's this:
This morning I walked into a church I’d never heard of, let alone stepped foot in. I prayed with strangers. I cried with people I’ve never met before. I held hands with them and sang about God.The Pastor openly talked about how important our gun rights are. How you cannot legislate against evil. How we cannot be afraid to speak out for fear of consequences from the HR department (this is an actual quote!!). He honored and spoke genuinely about the life and impact of Charlie Kirk for *the entire* service. It was absolutely amazing.If I told y’all how improbable it was that of all the churches I could have chosen to attend for the first time in many many many years that it would be this one…and that it would be so perfect…you’d believe me when I say that God absolutely led me there….He led me back home.
The pastor preached on gun right? He preached on Kirk for the entire service?
This is a very Catholic thing for me to say, but it's bizarre to me in the first instance that Protestants of some denominations will listen for an hour or more to some pastor talk. This isn't the way Apostolic Faiths work at all. And frankly, only an audience that is fully convinced of what you are saying will listen to that sort of address. Effective deliveries often tend to be short, and conclude suddenly, leaving the listener with a "oh crud" feeling.
Here's the reading that Catholics, and some others who follow the Latin lectionary, heard last Sunday.
Numbers 21:4b-9With their patience worn out by the journey,the people complained against God and Moses,"Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert,where there is no food or water?We are disgusted with this wretched food!"In punishment the LORD sent among the people saraph serpents,which bit the people so that many of them died.Then the people came to Moses and said,"We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you.Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us."So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses,"Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live."Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole,and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpentlooked at the bronze serpent, he lived.
Philippians 2:6-11Brothers and sisters:Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.Rather, he emptied himself,taking the form of a slave,coming in human likeness;and found human in appearance,he humbled himself,becoming obedient to death,even death on a cross.Because of this, God greatly exalted himand bestowed on him the namethat is above every name,that at the name of Jesusevery knee should bend,of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,and every tongue confess thatJesus Christ is Lord,to the glory of God the Father.
John 3:13-17Jesus said to Nicodemus:"No one has gone up to heavenexcept the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,so must the Son of Man be lifted up,so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,so that everyone who believes in him might not perishbut might have eternal life.For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,but that the world might be saved through him.
As already noted here, it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Most pastors of the Apostolic Faiths preached on that.
People have a strong tendency to want the Church to reflect their political views. That's a lot easier for people who are members of Protestant Evangelical churches which are often sort of do it yourself type of faiths. That doesn't challenge people in the pews at all. Here locally there's a massive Evangelical congregation which, I know, contains unmarried couples living in sin, people who have multiple marriages, and the like. They go to hear the Good News, and they should be hearing the Good News. But part of that news is a person needs to confess and repent.
We're not hearing much of that out there on the net.
Last edition:
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Friday, August 29, 2025
A Big-Picture Look at the Threat to Voting Coming From the Trump Adminis...
I suspect it's not so much MAGA, but the NatCons. They know that they need more time to remake the country in the Christian Nationalist image they want it to have.
Sunday, August 10, 2025
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 100th edition. Downfall, Despair, and hoping for DeGaulle.
100 is a big round number, and as a culture that uses a base ten system for math, we like big round numbers. So I should use the 100th anniversary of our "Cliffnotes" series, which we're now correcting to what it should have been, CliffsNotes, for something profound.
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And, profound or not, I know what I want to post on this, but it's one of those things where its so broad, or difficult to define, that I don't really know how to do it.
So I'll start with this.
The US is in phenomenally stupid times, with our stupidity actually amazingly reduced in various ways to the person claiming to be President, and who most have accepted as the same.1 That would be, of course, the profoundly self centered, weird, demented, and dumb, Donald Trump.
The Trump regum is profoundly altering everything to such an extent that he's not only harming the US, but the entire world. When he leaves office the world is going to be profoundly different, and the US might quite frankly never recover from the vandalism of his administration. He's given rise to the worse instincts in our culture, and revived ways of thinking and acting that haven't been acceptable in our society for decades.
Worse yet, perhaps, the antiscientifisim of his followers is going to kill people and is harming the planet.
All of which, ironically, would get me branded by some of his acolytes as a "radical lefty", such as those like Chuck Gray look under their beds at night as the monster of their childhood dreams.
One thing that I've had a hard time explaining, but I can do here now, is that in fact I'm an actual conservative.
I've always been opposed to abortion, which would place me in the social conservative camp in and of itself. I'm not keen on gun control either, although I'm not in machinegun in every closet camp. I don't believe transgenderism is anything other than a mental illness. I believe that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, and beyond that I don't think divorce should be recognized, or at least easily. I feel that a man who helps bring a child about should be responsible for that child's upbringing and if he's not married to the mother at the time of the child's birth, a common law marriage and all that entails should be legally imposed. I'd revive the "heart balm" statutes. I'm extremely leery of the government taking over what I regard as parental and familial obligations, such as the feeding of children simply because they are at school.
All of which should place me in the populist camp, right?
Not hardly.
Well what about the NatCon or Christian Nationalist camp then?
Definitely not.
How so?
Well, that's where I've had a hard time smithing my words to fit my thoughts, but I'll give it a try here.
I think you can, as a conservative, conserve the structure of societal norm, but I don't think you can force your beliefs on anyone. Indeed, the liberal attempt to do just that with gender norms caused, at the end of the day, the rise of one profoundly immoral man, Donald Trump.
And beyond that, I think that people who waive the bloody banner of the culture wars have to go right to the source in order to argue for their cause, and that's something most can't do. The American Civil Religion, in which you can have six wives, as long as it isn't more than one at a time, and a girlfriend on the side, and still go to Jim Bob's Do It Yourself Evangelical Church doesn't comport with that, or frankly Christianity.
I also frankly am horrified by the anti scientific nature of the populists and the NatCons. Yes, transgenderism is a horror, but because its an anti scientific movement that doesn't comport with science. By the same token, denying Global Warming is being caused by humans is also an anti scientific horror. Admitting poth of those need not be political in any fashion, nor need they be based on religion in any fashion, but if religion motivates and informs your beliefs ti would demand that you oppose them both and accept the science both.
And yet we're denying reality in spades. If populists get that transgenderism is a fib, on climate change and medicine they're full bore into fiction. The fact that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a health role in the government, or that Dr. Oz does, would be comical if it was not so horrific.
Nor does being a real conservative mean that every expenditure of the government on medicine and foreign aid can morally be cut off. Lethal sins of omission are not conservative, they're gravely evil.
Which in turn gets us to the topic of expenditures themselves.
Every since the The Great Depression conservatives of some stripes have lamented what occured in the New Deal and have detested Franklin Roosevelt. But here's the thing. Government expenditures in and of themselves are not wrong, let alone morally wrong, simply because they are.
Rational people would apply principals of subsidiarity to this and look to see what necessary or beneficial expenditure are best undertaken by the government, and at what level. The simple claim "the government spends to much" means utterly nothing whatsoever. It is clear that the government is wrongfully not collecting enough in revenue to cover what it spend, but the mere assumption that it spends too much is simply nonsense without something to back it up. The real question, which hasn't even been asked, is what should it be spending money on? Many of the things that were cut were things the American public clearly supports or needs. Conversely, ontoing spending on Trump golf weekends or airplanes for Trump go on, when clearly these are expenditures which do not pass muster.
That leads us, of course, to the fact that Americans are undertaxed. They hate to admit it, but they simply are. Rich Americans are particularly undertaxed. Indeed, whether a society should even tolerate the uberwealthy is a question that should be asked, but isn't. It's clear that vast wealth has not been a good thing, by and large, for many who have it, or society as a whole. Trump, Bezos, Epstein, and Musk are all good examples of this. Greed isn't good.
So here we find ourselves, due to reasons we've discussed before, not where so many on the right claim, but at an enshrinement of a certain sort of trash culture. The trailer park come to rule.
Are we doomed?
We may in fact very well be. It might be the case that the United States as a great nation has run its course, and we're going to take our place with nations like Russia that have lapsed into right wing squalor But maybe not.
There may be some reasons for hope.
One of those reasons might be the National Conservatives themselves. When it first got rolling National Conservatism in the form imagined by Patrick Dineen, Rod Dreher or R. R. Reno was a product of despair. They looked at the state of the country under late liberals, such as President Obama, and felt that the cultural rot had set in so deep there was no recovery from it. That brought about views like Dreher's The Byzantine Option which, while Dreher now denies it, basically advocated for holing up for generations until sanity returned at some future time. Not everyone felt that way, and NatCons took over the Heritage Society, where they may have always been in strong numbers anyhow.
The Success of the Federalist Society in the first Trump administration may have been a bit of a roadmap for them, but more than that, the Heritage Society relied upon Trump's laziness which allowed them to insert themselves into his campaign. They even managed to get a major fellow traveler, J. D. Vance, in as Vice President.
The reason that this might offer some hope is this. NatCons may be thick in the Trump administration, but frankly they almost certainly regard some members of his administration as de facto thick. It's unlikely that the NatCons think much of Kennedy, Noem or Oz, for example. But they also know that they never could have been influential on their own. They may be gambling, and it is a gamble, that Trump will burn everything down, and then, when they push him out, which they will do, they'll seem so much more reasonable in comparison.
There is historical precedence for things like that. Many nations have gone through terrible cataclysms, including social cataclysms, to be relieved by some sort of normality which didn't fully match what had come before. The Reformation through England into turmoil to the point where it ulti9mately came unglued, resulting in the English Civil War. The restored monarchy was a welcome relief from the forces of Calvinism and it ultimately set England towards the path which lead to the modern parliamentary democracy.
Another example might be provided by our own Civil War, which saw forces very much like those in the Republican Party today, including some real fire breathing nuts, try to take half the country out on its own to form a white racist republic. It's failure resulted in a return to normalcy which has only now unraveled.
There's a real risk to this strategy, however, which frankly is the only strategy that NatCons have or are going to have. Their shotgun marriage to Trump not only hitched them to somebody loathsome, and whom some of them no doubt loath, but he was the only suitor in town. It was, that is, a marriage of convenience for both of them.
The risk is that like somebody married to a bad person, it becomes hard for that taint to wash off. The longer the marriage lasts, moreover, the more that's the case. The NatCons can't openly dump Trump as the populists will turn on them. They need to allow him to reign long enough, moreover, that he wreck what they want wrecked, but not so long that they're permanently associated with the wreckage. And right now, the first really bitter fruits of Trumpism are beginning to be felt. If they wait too long, they'll had the House of Representatives, then the Senate, and the the Oval Office, back to the Democrats.
That's the second real possibility.
Right now the Democrats do not have their act anywhere near together. The party is still controlled by the Clueless Old who just don't know what to do, other than, like Robert Reich, insist that they hold on to the policy positions that tanked them. That'd be a stupid strategy. It might work, however, if the NatComs fail to abandon Ship Trump by replacing him too late.
If that occurs, everything that the populists brought about will evaporate overnight. Newt Gingrich like, most populists believe that they're burning things down so that they can't be rebuilt. They can be. Like Trump's stupid plaza replacing the rose garden, a legislative Kubota can come in and tear it out, and the roses, like them or not, be back in place overnight.
The thing is, however, that this would also be a massive change. The very things that caused the populist revolt would triumph. There's a very real chance of that.
But that's not the only possibility. A third one, even if the NatCons come into power, and even if the Democrats do, but not strongly, is also possible. That example might be provided by mid 20th Century France.
The 3d Republic was in terrible shape with politics ripping it apart before World War Two. The republic technically endured into the Second World War when forces very much like the NatCons took control of it while it was under the Third Reich's heel. There was serious Allied thought to actually continuing the 3d Republic and even retaining Marshall Petain but the forces that had sided with the Allies clearly did not want to do that. That gave rise to the 4th Republic, and then in 1958, the 5th, under DeGaulle, a right wing Catholic monarchist who restored the country to one in which all sides could seriously work and cooperate.
That latter example may offer the best hope. The NatCons, like the French right wing, cooperated in the Trumpist nightmare and may very well find themselves discredited by it. People like Vance may find themselves in the dustbin. In may take some time, but this might, perhaps, be a watershed moment from which the country emerges a sane new country, not the one that tore itself apart like the 3d Republic, and not one that reflected its late totalitarian stage under a Petain, or in our case, a clown like Trump.
We can only hope so.
Footnotes
1. Donald Trump does not legally occupy the Oval Office and there's a good argument that everything he is doing might end up simply being voided as null as a result.
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Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th Edition appendix. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes. So does Beyonce Knowles. And stuff.
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