Dear Reader,
It’s been awhile and I hope you’ll forgive me. I'll unpack all that at the end here. Let's just say it’s been a heckuva month.
Meanwhile, we had a midterm election last week, and it was a doozy. I (like many others) boldly predicted a Red Tsunami — not because I was cheering for one but because I thought the issue set favored republicans. I (like many others) was wildly wrong. There was no Red Tsunami, no Red Wave. Maybe a Red Trickle, though as of this morning, even that is up for grabs.
How did we all get it wrong? There are many reasonable answers to that question. For one thing, not *everyone* got it wrong. If you look at the New York Times polls the week before the election, they’re not far off. There’s also the whole margin of error thing.
In any case, the rejection of most of the Trumpiest candidates is telling. Republicans with populist leanings and without Trump’s baggage — like Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Florida’s Ron DeSantis — won decisive victories, and one would think a pragmatic party would acknowledge that it’s time to move on from him. To that end, the opinion pages of the Sunday papers were full of “Trump is finished” and “the fever is breaking” storylines.
But while all this talk about political reality is true, it’s also irrelevant.
(they) can’t quit him
Don't get me wrong. Trump has lost support, and will likely lose more in the coming days. The question is whether MAGA can truly quit him. If the animating spirit of his base were about policy or party loyalty, they almost surely could. But it isn't. It's much more visceral — a matter more rooted in culture- and class-based grievance than governance.
Some of this is well-trod territory. The financial crisis of 2007-2008; condescension towards white, working-class, and socially conservative families who "clung to God and guns;" lawsuits against bakers, florists, Nuns, and Hobby Lobby all created an atmosphere of grievance and persecution.
Then along came Trump, and conventional wisdom says his supporters gathered around him out of a desire to win back cultural territory they'd lost. I don't think that's quite right, though.
In his speech at the Hannah Arendt Conference a few weeks ago, Roger Berkowitz said, "Faced with despair, enraged revolutionaries tend to shift their aim from alleviating suffering to glorifying suffering as a guarantee of virtue. It became a mark of virtue to suffer... Many today would rather embrace their suffering as a mark of their purity than sully themselves through morally ambiguous political compromises that might actually improve their lot."
In other words, the well-worn cliche that with Trump and his supporters, "the cruelty is the point" has it precisely backwards. It's not the cruelty that animates his supporters, it's the victimhood. Social conservatives are hypocrites when they support a thrice-married man who told Billy Bush he could get away with grabbing women by the p***y and who slept with a porn star four months after his third wife gave birth to their child. But they justify it by pointing to the hypocrisy and oppression of elites who — as Roger Berkowitz describes — "integrate public schools while sending their own children to elite private schools, defund the police while hiring private security guards for their homes and communities, and welcome undocumented workers and hire them to work in their homes without paying a fair wage or health care benefits.... What enrages [Trump] voters is the sanctimony of elites who preach white fragility as they jet around the world in moneyed cocoons of like-thinking cosmopolitans listening to podcasts about social justice."
the virtues of hypocrisy
Social conservatives’ hypocrisy is a vice that pays compliment to their virtues. They embrace an unvirtuous strongman in the name of the virtues they believe are under assault. But while they do all sorts of logical gymnastics to justify that support, Trump is indifferent to the charge of hypocrisy altogether. As Berkowitz puts it, "Because Trump has no shame and embraces his hypocrisy, attacking him as a hypocrite has no power."
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote, "Hypocrisy is not good. But it’s preferable to many alternatives. ...I’d like to think there are some porn stars who do not want their kids to follow in their footsteps. If you’re going to be a porn star, better to be a hypocritical one."
The very idea of hypocrisy requires an inner world and an inner compass — one that is in conflict with the outer world of actions and appearances. Indifference to it is only reasonable when belief in that inner world has eroded, thinning to the point of insignificance or absence altogether. As Berkowitz describes it (building on Hannah Arendt and her analysis of Machiavelli), "That I am untrue to myself matters not at all because there is no true self to which I might be true."
So long as grievance and victimhood reign supreme, the specter of a revival of Trump support remains, to my mind, more likely than not.
the deeper crisis
All of this is reflective of a deeper cultural crisis. Victimhood gets indulged within MAGA for the same reason it gets indulged on the progressive left: we lack the spiritual and cultural resources to contextualize suffering in a way that provides meaning and turns us towards resilience. Victimhood is real. An intolerant left and an intolerant right can ruin someone's life, and often does. But victimhood apart from larger stories that give it meaning — religious, familial, or civic — is a moral and spiritual dead end. The loss of these larger stories also explains the erosion of our cultural institutions: they've lost touch with the virtues they were meant to uphold and defend. Without a positive vision of the good, the only solution that makes sense is to punch back at our opposition.
President Biden seems to intuit this problem when he talks about saving the "soul of America," but his focus on top-down technocratic solutions is also destined to fail. For one thing, his solutions demand conformity from communities that will never embrace his progressive values. Moreover, the needed restoration of story-making and value-preserving institutions — homes, churches, neighborhoods, communities — cannot be built or preserved through technocratic means.
The one clear message in the outcome of the midterms is that the electorate is unimpressed by both parties; it awarded neither with a mandate. Watching the Democrats this week reminds me of watching Jennings County High School’s football team play my alma mater when I was a teenager. The team from a neighboring county hadn't won a game in more than a decade. Because of this, they'd celebrate like they won the Super Bowl if they were able to end the game with any score higher than "0." Taking a victory lap because you avoided an electoral shellacking feels similar.
Clearly, voters want something better than what's on offer. I'm not sure how they'll get it in a climate where polarized news and social media outlets incentivize politicians' worst impulses. That's why I imagine that when Trump returns to the stage this week, he'll replay the hits, revive the spirit of grievance in his loyal base, and movement conservatism's weekend of "I told you sos" will have once again been premature.
In the absence of a positive, constructive vision of the good, perpetuating a spirit of meaningless suffering and contempt remains the path of least resistance on the road to power. So long as Christians lack a framework for understanding suffering and opposition within the story of redemption, they'll have only their sense of grievance and victimhood to guide them. And so long as Christian leaders indulge that spirit of victimhood, so long as they resist telling a better story out of fear of their most reactive church members, they'll be complicit in the erosion of the moral and spiritual imagination not only of their churches, but in the broader culture as well.
varia
Well, I interviewed Bono. I can hardly describe what the experience was like. Few artists have had such a deep and profound impact on my life and spirituality. In a particularly dark season of my life, I would take long runs and listen to the same playlist every time. The first song on the playlist was a live version of "Where the Streets Have No Name."
I also spoke at the aforementioned Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference, offering a brief talk and sharing a panel with Thomas Chatterton Williams, an iconoclastic thinker whose resistance to contemporary ideologies around race and politics makes him well worth following, and Allison Stanger, author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump. It was an interesting discussion and I mostly deferred to Stanger’s much deeper competence. I’m personally not a fan of repealing Section 230 (a law that’s had governing influence on social media) but Stanger’s arguments about the unique influence of social media (including both its sociological and physiological impact) is compelling.
I also finished The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill with an Epilogue, featuring audio from a trip to Seattle and a tour of former Mars sites with Tim Smith.
Lastly, I launched The Bulletin — a new CT podcast featuring roundtable discussions about the events, issues, and people shaping our world.
I can't resist commenting on The Colts this week. After firing Frank Reich, Jim Irsay made the wild decision to hire Jeff Saturday as the interim head coach. Irsay is a kind of wonderfully weird guy — a creative with an incredible collection of famous guitars and the owner of the original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. While much of the coaching world found the decision rash and even contemptible (I thought Bill Cowher's comments were way over the top), it seems fitting with Irsay's character to zig where everyone else might have zagged. It's not only been a crappy season, it's been a crappy three or four years. The worst that could happen is the season tanks and they get a good draft position. The best? They start winning.
I for one welcomed the idea. Saturday made bold moves, unexpectedly swapping out Sam Ehlinger for the veteran Matt Ryan and slashing the playbook way down to a more manageable set of options. The Colts looked focused and disciplined on Sunday and won. So take that, Bill Cowher, you and the chin you rode in on.
See you next week. For reals.