Donald Trump & The Emperor's Clothes

At the end of his most recent post, Aaron dismisses the commentators on both sides of the party divide hyperventilating about this year's presidential election as an "extraordinary crisis." But, while Aaron certainly has a valid point about the ubiquitous hyperbole in our political discourse, I think he actually missed a good opportunity to examine why Donald Trump is such a polarizing figure and really may represent a turning point in our politics, especially for the relationship between conservative Christians and the Republican party.

Donald Trump, in his blunt, outspoken (not to mention "vulgar") way, has been able to expose the problem of political correctness in a way no other politician has done in the last 25 years. Before this year it was practically verboten to speak about certain topics, much less advocate for certain positions. The most obvious issues all have to do with Trump's "America First" platform: mass immigration, unfavorable trade agreements, and endless foreign wars. (Another key issue would be his opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.)

On each of these issues Trump is smashing idols of both the left and the right, as we generally conceive them in America. This is the more substantive reason why--and not just because of his objectionable style--that the GOP establishment fought so fiercely and for so long to prevent his nomination. Trump chose for the ground to fight on issues where there was a broad consensus between the Republican and Democratic parties that was opposed by a large proportion of the country. For instance, on immigration, he has shown that much of the country is deeply dissatisfied with current immigration policy (which is basically just "let them all stay here if they manage to get in"). The Democratic Party favors changing the composition of the electorate in order to dilute the European Christian heritage of the United States; but the Chamber of Commerce wing of the Republican Party favors importing cheap labor for its constituency. This means that both parties are supporting a policy that artificially suppresses wages for workers born and raised in America. On the issue of foreign policy, Trump is the first and most prominent Republican (that I can think off of the top of my head, at any rate) to question all the wars we have been fighting since September 11, 2001; most mainstream Republicans were in thrall to the neoconservatives' push for regime change across the globe, just like the Democrats' presidential nominee is.

What confuses and frightens so many conservative Republicans about this election is that it took such a thoroughly disagreeable man as Donald Trump to attack the bipartisan consensus on so many important issues and actually restate positions that are more conservative than those of the GOP's establishment. He has discredited the party's current economic policy, which seems to be an unintelligent re-hashing of Manchester Liberalism's insistence on laissez faire, with a few concessions to special interests mixed in to spice things up. On foreign policy, Trump, though far from perfect himself, at least recognizes that most of what the U.S. has done in the past 20 years has been counterproductive and the result of a hubristic, Wilsonian desire to transform the Middle East one country at a time with an invasion and a few years of occupation, willfully blind to millennia of internecine slaughter there.

I could continue in this vein and analyze all the separate issues that have emerged in this election--and they are important. But here at the Guild Review we have another concern, which is just as, if not more, pressing than all those issues: What effect will this election have on the life of Christians (particularly conservative Christians) in the United States? Will he usher in a revival of Christian morality in our country, or will he at least stem the onslaught of the liberal, anti-Christian forces gaining strength in America?

Donald Trump, it must be said, has actually done conservative Christians a great service. He has exposed us as "losers," to use one of his favorite insults. We had no idea, but we really were losers!

In the last couple decades conservative Christians have pinned their hopes for at least a modest Christian renewal in this country on the Republican Party but have nothing to show for it except a few fruitless wars in the Middle East, more mass immigration from parts of the world that are culturally very different from the U.S., and more suffocating political correctness (especially on sexual issues). And now we are being asked to support for president a man who does not care at all about social conservatism! This is a man who has enjoyed flaunting in the New York tabloids his various girlfriends and wives (including his most recent wife who did nude lesbian shoots before she met The Donald). In the past few months he has had to work very hard just to pretend that he cares about abortion. And on the specific issue of Christianity, he admitted to the nation that he could not even fake being a Christian, and one of the most prominent speakers on the last night of the Convention, Peter Thiel, told the Party not to get "distracted" by culture wars.

The best we could hope for from Trump, then, is a general policy of laissez faire or maybe him throwing us a bone to keep us from whining too much. This means that the real challenge for conservative Christians from this point forward is twofold. First, we must admit that we supported many Republican positions that really may not have been that conservative or that Christian, and that Trump is right in some important ways. Second, we will have to find new way to fight for conservative Christian social issues now that it is clear that the Republicans are not really willing to make them a priority and that liberals appear to have gained the upper hand for the foreseeable time to come.

I wish I could offer a solution here, but these are all issues that I still need to ponder, and which don't have any simple solutions. Most importantly, though, these issues require us to honestly ask whether we have been duped, and what we plan to do about it.

Finally, as a bonus for readers who made it all the way to the end and who are wondering how I could think this way, I am providing two links to pieces by writers who have a generally similar outlook but can express some of these concerns better than I can: R.R. Reno's "Why I'm Anti-Anti-Trump" and Rod Dreher's "Trump & The God Vote."

Against Rejectionism

OR

"This Is [Still] the Best School That Is"

It seems to be vogue to reject one's past: "Oh, I use to do/believe X, but now I do/believe Y."  John Maynard Keynes is reported to have said that when the facts change he changed his mind.  Certainly there is nothing wrong with one's views changing as one grows in wisdom.  But it seems the zeitgeist now presumes a rejection of past views.

One manifestation of this general trend is the rejection of past institutions, particularly educational institutions, most especially those with unique characteristics.  I think I speak for many, perhaps most, of the University of Dallas' graduates when I say that some of my views have changed since attending that school.  But on the whole I am struck by the solidity of the values I imbibed there.  In answer to the broad trend of rejectionism, let me offer a specific defense, a defense of my own alma mater.

Should I reject UD's politics?  I came to the school as a self-consciously conservative Republican.  I attended the 2000 Republican National Convention and was on the floor when George W. Bush was nominated for the presidency.  Did UD embrace and foster the political views I brought?  The Princeton Review ranks UD the 6th most conservative school in America.  (Though UD did not appear on recent lists from the Young America's Foundation or The Daily Beast.)

In my four years there I would not say I became more or less conservative, but more smartly conservative.  It was at UD that I was introduced to the writings of Russell Kirk and first attended a meeting of the Philadelphia Society.  I became less interested in the views of the Republican Party.  In the years since graduation I have come to shed the language of left/right, liberal/conservative almost entirely.  I would now describe myself as an integral Christian humanist and I try to take my cues from the Church's social teaching, including Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus, works I first read at UD.  Have I rejected UD's politics?  Not exactly.  My views have evolved, based largely on UD's own education.

Should I reject UD's theology?  Some might describe UD's theology as conservative.  I think orthodox - that is, in accordance with the teaching of the magisterium, the pope and the bishops in communion with him - is a more accurate description.  But let us investigate this notion of conservative theology for a minute.  If one uses the term "conservative" in the literal sense of preserving something from the past, this is an accurate description: UD teaches the Bible as well as dead theologians like Augustine and Aquinas.  Even more recent figures studied look back to such historic thinkers. (I recently re-read Joseph Ratzinger's Theology of History in St. Bonaveture, a book assigned to me my senior year.  The title theologian died in 1274.)

One sometimes hears today that Christianity is not necessarily conservative or even that it ought not be.  If by this one means that Christianity ought not be identified with the Republican party, a party supportive of the death penalty and often ambivalent about aiding the poor and migrants, I would agree.  (Though it would be naive to make such a criticism and overlook the Republicans' defense of unborn children, support for traditional marriage, and pro-growth policies aimed at creating jobs, yes, even for the poor.  Likewise, the opposite observations could be made of the Democrats.)

If, however, one means that Christianity ought not be attached to the idea of conserving things from the past, this is a more dubious claim.  If one rejects the ancient scriptures of the faith and the historic teaching of the Church's bishops, one does not cease to be conservative; one ceases to be a Christian all together.  (If one rejects only the authority of the bishops, while retaining the Bible, one becomes Protestant.  There is, of course, great overlap between the two bodies of teaching.  In 325 the Council of Nicaea affirmed the Incarnation, the notion that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  Any Protestant would accept this doctrine not because he accepts the authority of the bishops gathered in council, but because the prologue to John's gospel says as much.)  While there is a progressive quality to Christianity - just look at the unfolding of God's grace and revelation in the Old Testament - a Christian cannot be so anti-conservative as to throw out stuffy old doctrines like the Incarnation and the Trinity, such historic practices as fasting and observance of weekly communal worship, and such hierarchic notions as leadership.

Should I reject UD's spirituality?  Spirituality is not exactly the same thing as theology; the latter is a system of beliefs; the former is the personal practice of those beliefs.  My spiritual life has followed an interesting trajectory: toward traditionalism while at UD, away from traditionalism afterward.  I might be tempted to dismiss the Gregorian chant, polyphony, monastic vocational discernment, and the rest as a passing fad, something beyond which I have now moved, except that, as my wife and I settle into family life together, those things from UD have taken on new meaning.  We recently changed parishes, for example, for a more traditional liturgy and Thomistic teaching.  Time appears to be proving the resonance of the spirituality I acquired as an undergraduate.

Should I reject UD's demographics?  Without a doubt the University of Dallas is a white upper-middle class school.  Having subsequently lived alongside Salvadorians and African-Americans in some of Greater Washington's less affluent neighborhoods, the narrowness of UD's demographics has become more obvious to me.  A greater diversity of races and classes at UD would not be a bad thing.  However, I am now struck by two things.  First, UD was - and, by all accounts, still is - an extremely diverse place.  Some of my closest friends had parents with MDs, JDs, and PhDs.  Their incomes were often similarly elevated.  But I also spent a spring break in Arkansas with a friend whose family lived in a mobile home heated by a wood stove.  Second, having spent four years at a large public university, I have seen the lack of diversity which programs aimed at producing it create.  The statistics for race and class may look better on paper, but intellectual diversity or vitality does not necessarily follow.  In contrast, Princeton Review writes, "What truly sets [UD's] curriculum apart... is not the challenge, but rather the scope and diversity of it. As one student enthused, 'I never thought I'd have so many different takes on all the subjects I've studied.'"

One of the simplest measures of diversity which affirmative action and its watered-down variants ignore is geography.  I grew up in Arizona with parents from the Great Plains; I instinctively believed that New York was some distant den of iniquity and pollution which no one would ever want to visit.  That view changed when I became friends with a New Yorker at UD.  Likewise, my classmates came from public, private, and home schooling in roughly equal measure, a diversity unlikely to be matched by most schools professing to promote diversity.  I do not believe in placing people in racial boxes; whenever I can, I skip the race section on forms.  UD's admission form did not even ask about my race.  That seems to resonate with a world in which people are not "judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Should I reject UD's social worldview?  The phrase "social worldview" may not be the best, but I could not think of another to address the broad charge of closed-mindedness.  Let me consider two particular issues which may elucidate this vague criteria.

I came to UD in 2002, in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers.  Iraq was invaded in my second semester.  There were many discussions about Islam and the threat from Islamic terrorism.  I regret that not all of those discussions were as well informed as they might have been.  In the last few years I have learned a great deal more about Islam and developed considerable respect for its adherents.  I would, however, add two qualifiers to my regrets about some misdirected notions of Islam that may have circulated.  First, there is a kind of apologia for all things non-Western which can be every bit as blinded as pro-Western jingoism.  There are real shortcomings in the Islamic world, like the widespread prevalence of pederasty in Afghanistan and Central Asia.  A frank discussion of Islam and Christianity should recognize the virtues and shortcomings of each.  One is at least as likely to find that at UD as anywhere else.  Second, UD equipped me with the tools - historical, philosophical, spiritual - to come to a greater appreciation of Islam.  Although that development did not happen while I was there, the connection is quite clear in my mind.

Princeton Review recently placed UD on its list of schools least friendly to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons.  As I have written before, the Catholic Church teaches that homosexuals "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided."  If this fails to occur at UD, I regret that, deeply.  However, the Church also teaches that, "basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."  I suspect that those answering the Princeton Review's queries likely assumed that such a condemnation is unfriendly.  Certainly it must be proclaimed with sensitivity.  But if the Church is correct in its teaching, sharing this truth, however painful it may be to many, is an act of charity; to hide the truth and proclaim falsehood is no act of kindness.  That UD hosts the Courage program is little known, but proof that the school supports both teaching and practice.


"This is the best school that is."  With these immortal words Dr. John R. Sommerfeldt endorsed the University of Dallas.  (Why make an ordinary statement when you can make it existential, right?)  I have attended several schools, visited several more, and met students from a variety of others.  I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about higher education.  And the longer I am away from UD, the more convinced I am of the truth of this endorsement.

Is There a Conservative Tradition in America?

Is there a conservative tradition in America?

That provocative question is the title of a recent article by Patrick Deneen, and for many readers his answer will be even more provocative: No, American conservatives are at best conservative liberals.

What could he mean by that? Aren't conservatives and liberals polar opposites? As Deneen explains, though, most of the central tenets of contemporary American conservatism, which he summarizes fairly and accurately in a five-point list, can be traced back to the principles of the liberal philosophical tradition, the tradition associated with the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke. Between these two thinkers, Locke has been the more influential in American political thought--the Declaration of Independence even borrows some of his language--and it is his ideas which formed the basis of what is often called classical liberalism (to avoid confusion with progressive liberalism). Classical liberalism in the course of the 19th century developed into utilitarianism, and in the 20th century morphed into libertarianism. Classical liberalism certainly has not been as radical as progressive liberalism, and is therefore more conservative, but--and this is Deneen's main point--it has always remained a form of liberalism, and for that reason is not truly conservative.

Deneen has performed a great service by identifying the true origin of mainstream American conservatism. Unfortunately, Deneen is only able to outline the conflict between, on the one hand, liberalism and utilitarianism, and, on the other hand, a more traditional or "reactionary" conservatism that found its greatest modern exponent in the English-speaking world in the likes of Edmund Burke, but whose origins can be found in the natural law theories of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. (Deneen's outline approach is probably due to the fact that he wrote the article in the form of a talk he gave at an ISI event in Washington, DC, called "conservatism on tap"; I suspect he expanded on some of his points in greater detail in response to questions.)

There is much more to Deneen's article than this simple summary contains, especially his critique of the Straussians and of Glenn Beck's reading of American history--so read the whole article!--but it does have one flaw--though it should be made clear that this is a relatively minor (and perhaps unintentional) flaw in what is otherwise an excellent article, and is probably just a quibble over terminology.

This flaw is Deneen's use of the term "collectivism" to describe his own conservatism. A better word would be "communitarianism." Collectivism is usually used to describe 20th-century ideologies like Communism, Nazism, and fascism. Collectivism, given the right historical circumstances, is the end development of individualism, the final deconstruction of society from a local, hierarchic, and estate-based structure into a mere collection of atomized individuals. Collectivism takes atomized individuals and unifies them, but in a great mass that actually deprives them of their individuality. Collectivism, then, is the form of politics corresponding to mass society in its worst possible form. Collectivism, therefore, is rightfully rejected by conservatives of all stripes.

Where Deneen parts company with mainstream conservatives, though, is with his insistence that individualism is not the answer to America's problems.

Communitarianism, on the other hand, is the golden mean between individualism and collectivism. What distinguishes communitarianism is that it recognizes that the bonds that tie individuals together--religion, family, and local commitments--are good. People need limits, such as hierarchical structures and authority, in order to flourish as individuals, not lifestyle freedom.

Those readers interested in reading more about the internecine feuds among American conservatives, though hopefully in a more irenic tone than is normally heard in such arguments, might want to look at these two earlier posts on conservatives and libertarians.

Conservatives & Libertarians (Part II)

As a short addendum to my earlier post on conservatives and libertarians, I just wanted to post a link to an article by Friedrich Hayek entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." This article, then, could serve as the libertarian counterpart to Russell Kirk's essay on conservatism's superiority to libertarianism.

One of the essential differences between conservatives and libertarians, according to Hayek, is the conservatives' "fondness for authority." This fondness for authority is based on its "fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces" and its "lack of understanding of economic forces." All of this is "difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty." Fighting words?

For those of you not familiar with Hayek, he was a famous economist (Nobel Prize laureate in 1974), and one of the key figures in the Austrian school of economics. In other words, he was a libertarian or a classical liberal. His most famous book, at least among the general public, is the now classic Road to Serfdom in which he attacked the creeping socialism of every major political system in the world at the time--Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, the New Deal in America, and similar programs in the other Western democracies.

Conservatives & Libertarians

One of the questions of political theory bugging me a lot lately is the compatibility (or incompatibility) of conservatism and libertarianism. This is of particular interest to me because I consider myself a conservative, but conservatives and libertarians generally get lumped together in America as "the right" or "the Republican party." This classification isn't completely inaccurate, of course. For example I belong to a student group that advertises itself as "conservative/libertarian." However, this classification does tend to obscure some fundamental differences between the two groups.

So, what are these differences? Well, that's one of those big questions that gets very complicated very fast. Nevertheless, Hunter Baker, writing at First Things, has managed to put together a relatively concise, and I think quite accurate, summary of the main differences between conservatives and libertarians. In other words, follow that link and read the article for yourself!

But, if you want to cheat and get a very quick summary from me, here it is. The main difference between conservatism and libertarianism, according to Baker, is that libertarians believe that the state should exist for the limited purposes of keeping the peace and creating a legal environment in which commerce is allowed to do its thing. Conservatives, on the other hand, are essentially Aristotelian and believe that the state should enact laws that promote human flourishing in more ways than just securing peace and encouraging the economy; conservatives believe that politics has something to do with a transcendent order. This difference explains, for instance, why many (probably most) libertarians support gay "marriage": Gay "marriage" isn't a threat to peace and isn't a threat to prosperity, so why should the state forbid it? Conservatives, on the other hand, see gay "marriage" as fundamentally at odds with a broader notion of human flourishing rooted in a transcendent order, and thus can be regulated by the state.

The example of gay "marriage" also raises the question that libertarians will always ask conservatives when it comes to moral regulations: What's to stop the state from becoming a busybody poking its nose into everybody's life? Is there any line we can draw to prevent the state from becoming a moralistic tyrant? Baker doesn't raise this question, but it's worth considering for a minute.

The key distinction to make here is that the state can encourage moral behavior, but it will never be able to redeem us from sin. Any time the state crosses the line from encouraging moral behavior to attempting to redeem us from sin, it has gone beyond anything conservatives would countenance. It may not always be a clear distinction, but then again these things never are perfectly clear. The important point is that conservatives acknowledge the transcendent order, unlike libertarians, but also recognize that the transcendent order cannot be realized perfectly, unlike utopians. Or, in the immortal terminology of Eric Voegelin: Don't immanentize the eschaton!

(Finally, this essay by Russell Kirk just came to my attention. Kirk, recently discussed by Aaron, compares a coalition of conservatives and libertarians to "a union of fire and ice," and gives at least six reasons for that conclusion. Warning: Libertarians won't like it.)