How does a Conservative differ from a Moderate? – Part 1

What does it mean to be more conservative? The most common meaning would appear to be one who advocates some variation of the political Right—the Republican party platform, allegiance to Trump, deep suspicion of ethnic minorities—ferociously and with the least amount of tolerance for dissenting views.

We might say then that someone who supports building a border wall that’s fifteen-feet high is conservative but someone who demands it be twenty-feet high, paid for by Mexico, and include armed sentries, searchlights, trip wires, and high voltage along the perimeter to be even more conservative. More conservative and very conservative have come to mean those who hold some ill-defined political ideology on the Right with extreme vigor and ferociousness. It’s less about what they actually believe than how ruthlessly they demand what they want.

As a CPA who’s audited governments for over a decade I have seen firsthand how those who shout the loudest how we need to drain the swamps! are nowhere to be found when it comes time to meticulously examine the actual complexities involved in attempting to reduce government inefficiencies and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. For far too many, being more conservative isn’t about finding solutions; it’s about self-righteous reveling in denouncing woefully over-simplified problems.

Enter the Moderate

These days it’s easy to forget conservatives are not radicals. But the traditional understanding of conservatism was quite different from its common usage today. As the word implies, it meant someone who is not given to radical measures; someone who literally takes a conservative approach. There is another worldview that advocates a more measured approach: the political moderate (or centrist) isn’t given to extremism on the Left or the Right. Recognizing the dangers inherent in extremism, they advocate a middle-approach.

Both a conservative or centrist approach can be understood to mean the same thing in that they both repudiate radicalism and extremism. But an approach is only an aspect of one’s worldview, not the entirety of one’s worldview. Defining any political worldview is a challenging task as it encompasses an entire belief system. But the worldview of a moderate/centrist is even harder to define because it can only be understood by comparing it to other competing worldviews.

Just as it would be difficult—perhaps impossible—to comprehend silence if we had never heard sound, we can’t very well say what a moderate believes apart from the political culture they dwell in. A moderate in a society where the majority of the population believe all their problems can be blamed on the Jews and the biggest disagreement centers on whether the Jews should be exterminated or simply fined is not the same as a moderate in a society such as ours. The middle approach in each of these situations is radically different.

To complicate matters further, a moderate can simply mean one who is distrustful of the other political parties or ideologies around them and—perhaps—apathetic or disdainful of the politics in general and, therefore, believes that claiming to be a moderate absolves them of political labels they detest. But this tells us nothing about what a person actually believes. For our purposes here, we’re interested in how a conservative worldview might differ from a centrist worldview; not how people who claim to hold a political worldview differ from those who claim they don’t.

The Synergy of Centrism

Some simply define centrism as the sum-total of all non-extremist viewpoints. If it can be assumed that all non-extremist viewpoints have an element of truth and value to them, then a centrist may hedge their bets by declaring all viewpoints equally valid and, therefore, settle for whatever approach lands them smack dab in the center of it all.

This concept may be visualized on the notorious Five-Dimensional Political Compass:

The internet is replete with political quizzes that attempt to tell you where you’d land on the Five-Dimensional Political Compass. Those whose answers are a composite of authoritarian, libertarian, liberal, and conservative points of view will land somewhere in the middle and be declared to be a moderate.

This is sheer nonsense.

This approach labels both those with multiple extremist views and those with multiple non-extremist views moderates. A person who believes in both white supremacy (radical nationalism) and that the government should abolish private property (communism) is not a centrist, even if those extreme Right and Left political viewpoints net to zero. This explains, in part, why groups such as national populists seemingly sprung out of nowhere to form Trump’s base. Where did these people come from? They had always been there but were wrongly identified as moderates due to their support of both issues on the Right (such as tighter immigration control) and the Left (protectionism).

What’s more, political worldviews can’t be boiled down to a checklist of political policy questions. There isn’t a spot on the graph for people who are uncomfortable with dogma that doesn’t take nuance or trade-offs into account. For example, this quiz asks whether our laws should be based on our religious beliefs and values like the 10 commandments. But it doesn’t express what that means. Does it mean we’d derive our value system from a religious heritage to understand complex relationships such as the nature of humanity and natural rights? Or does it mean we’d attempt to impose a theocratic rule on society taken directly from Scripture? Those are radically different ideas that can’t simply be addressed with a yes, no, or maybe.

In our effort to wrap our head around abstract concepts such as political worldviews, we naturally tend to oversimply things. It’s understandable why we do this—in order to make sense of the competing worldviews we have to hold some image in our mind of a concept. We do this with God all the time—envisioning some bearded, old man in a blindingly white robe sitting upon a golden throne. And the results are equally problematic, silly, and unhelpful.

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

Political philosophy should never be reduced to a sliding scale of Left vs Right, or absolute anarchy vs absolute tyranny. It is true many of our political ideas may exist in this spectrum, but it doesn’t follow that they exist only on this spectrum. We wouldn’t say that because people could be thought of as either more introverted or extroverted we would know all there is to know about someone if we could simply determine where they existed on the introvert/extrovert spectrum. We can’t reduce people to sliding scales or five-dimensional graphs any more than we can worldviews. The information is helpful, but significantly incomplete.

How then is a conservative different than a moderate? The difference has less to do with which political policies they advocate or how strongly they hold their convictions, but in their understanding of the nature of humanity and the role and necessity of institutions. The moderate has much in common with the conservative (which we will explore in Part 2) and a few important differences (which will close with in Part 3).

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Conservatives are Losers – A Rebuttal

It has been awhile since I’ve written a play-by-play rebuttal or rejoinder to someone else’s blog post. A friend sent me this article—Conservatives are Losers—by Roosh V, the other day and asked what I thought of it. He suggested a lot of Millennials may share V’s views in that they are averse to conservatism on the basis it’s a “losing team”. I suspect he’s right.

Roosh V is an author and blogger who frequently writes tips for men on “picking up girls and getting laid”. Though V’s blog is not explicitly political, his macho/masculinity ideological system—which he calls neomasculinity—tends to butt up against political discussions as it offers a competing worldview.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, V’s neomasculinity might be said to be “conservative” to the extent it opposes socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism because they aim to destroy the family unit, decrease fertility rates, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements. However, neomasculinity’s ideological system is opposed to traditional conservatism for reasons that will hopefully become clear in this rebuttal. I have included V’s words in red and my responses in black:

Conservatives are Losers

For the world to get to how it is today, with the nearly complete elimination of tradition in favor of a globohomo world where diddling little children is becoming normalized, conservatives have had to lose every meaningful cultural war in the history of man. When someone declares themselves a conservative, they’re in fact stating that they are a loser, someone who is meant to take the fall when the left comes attacking.

While I agree the conservative movement has suffered heavy losses in the war for the American soul, I don’t think it’s fair to attribute all—or even the majority—of those losses to attacks from the Left. As I wrote here, much of the breakdown of the institutions of church, family, state, and other traditional structures can be attributed to the loss of function in our daily lives, and not the direct result of well-orchestrated plots by Leftists to destroy Western institutions. In other words, much of that loss would have happened whether or not conservatives actively fought back against the Left in a manner that was satisfactory to V.

Conservatives have lost on every battlefront: free speech, the military, the universities, marriage, nuclear family, child education, the media, the government, Boy Scouts, business, law and justice, Christianity, patriarchy, immigration, the welfare state, and capitalism. The right to bear arms is the only battle they’re not losing in a rout, but I’m confident they will lose that too within a decade’s time. Conservative institutions are being infiltrated and subverted, or have disappeared off the face of the earth, and there is no sign of them ever coming back.

I think it’s important to distinguish between policy and cultural losses. Arguably, Trump’s administration is the most “conservative” government we’ve had since Ronald Reagan. And—while I’ve frequently written about the multitude of ways in which this should not be perceived as conservatism “winning” in an ultimate sense—it isn’t exactly accurate to conclude we’ve lost the political fight either. On the cultural side, the notion that conservatives are “losing” hangs entirely on where we choose to draw our timeline. As I argue here, cultural norms ebb and flow, and—while it is true that all civilizations eventually succumb to cultural entropy—it simply isn’t true that conservatism had its “high point” at the birth of our nation and has been slowly descending ever since. In fact, conservatism as a political phenomenon only emerged in the 1950s, largely due to the efforts of Russell Kirk.

Why are conservatives such losers? Because they desire to merely hold the line while their enemy rushes at them full speed. They don’t want to conquer new lands, kill their enemy, or inflict real harm. They want to maintain the status quo while the left froths at the mouth to win, energized with momentum and passion. The left is so dissatisfied at the state of the world because of their deep-seated inner dysfunction that they put their entire being into trying to make it better. They don’t know how to enjoy their lives so they have to attack the lives of others.

I’d venture to guess V isn’t naturally predisposed to conservatism because his writing suggestions he’s uncomfortable with nuance and trade-offs. Conservatism is a worldview that dares to explore what words and concepts actually mean beyond their momentary emotional appeal. For instance, a conservative is less interested in advancing “liberty” as some vague, abstract concept than understanding what liberties can reasonably be preserved alongside a people’s culture and history. V seems to have a needlessly monolithic view of conservatism as those who simply hold the line.

On the one hand he’s correct: conservatism is the defense of traditional values and institutions, so it makes sense that they merely hold the line. But holding the line and fighting for a return to some lost value system or the rebuilding of a faltering institution aren’t inherently in conflict with one another. If V’s contention is that some conservatives aren’t adequately concerned about the state of Western civilization, then he has no quarrel with me. But I take issue with the notion efforts at conservation is inherently bent towards losing.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have no momentum or passion. They just want to be left alone, which makes them easy pickings for a collective that is hellbent on achieving their nightmare utopia. In the end, conservatives are the Spartans in 300 who have trained their entire lives to lose the battle, even if they are pound-for-pound stronger than their enemy.

Again, this is an oversimplification of the conservative worldview and—likely—is a better description of libertarianism. I don’t disagree that the deck is often stacked against conservatism in that the conservative worldview doesn’t immediately capture the momentum or passion of the average person the way utopian ideologies can. But that is like objecting to eating vegetables on the basis most people find sweets more pleasurable. The question isn’t which worldview is the most enticing (and, therefore, most likely to “win”), but which worldview is correct (and, therefore, worth fighting for).

Conservatives have also shown to be comically susceptible to leftist ideas when it’s presented as “human rights.” Two decades ago, the vast majority of conservatives would have stood against gay marriage, but a few years of cheesy “love is love” commercials was all it took for them to change their mind. Their motto of “live and let live” is only reasonable to hold if their enemy believed the same. They give the crying baby its bottle and from that milk it gets fat and strong and decides to kill the entire family. Conservatives don’t understand that giving an inch to the left eventually results in absolute defeat. They have to psychotically refuse to give any ground, even if practical logic or fairness is staring them in the face, but we know they won’t do that.

I believe V is half right here. Conservatives have conceded a great deal to the culture wars in recent generations. And certainly more could have been done. More can always be done. In some ultimate sense, conservatism is destined to “fail” if it’s viewed through the narrow lens—as V appears to prefer to view things—of measuring success by the ability to hold cultural norms and values identical from one generation to the next. In actuality, conservatives distinguish between deferring to cultural norms and customs and treating those norms and customs as if they are religiously sacred. Conservatism isn’t about holding everything at the status quo, but about recognizing the natural tension between the status quo and progression and preferring the former to the latter. As Russell Kirk so eloquently put it:

“The statesman should not struggle vainly to dam the whole stream of alteration, because then he would be opposing Providence; instead, his duty is to reconcile innovation and prescriptive truth, to lead the waters of novelty into the canals of custom. This accomplished, even though he may seem to himself to have failed, the conservative has executed his destined work in the great mysterious incorporation of the human race; and if he has not preserved intact the old ways he loved, still he has modified greatly the ugly aspect of the new ways.”

Another problem conservatives face is technology, which is not agnostic but rather liberating. It allows man to rely less on traditions, family, social bonds, and religion, all things that the left hates. The more technology you have, the more you can be an atomized unit in a little urbanized box, reliant only on your service job and digital device to keep you alive and somewhat sane while using Uber and Lyft to travel in and out of your self-imposed quarantine zone. Because of technology, the conservatism of today is merely the liberalism of twenty years ago. I challenge you to find a single attractive “conservative” girl who hasn’t tried Tinder or engaged in abundant pre-marital sex. Look at the life of any self-professed conservative and odds are you’ll find a rather cosmopolitan existence that is far removed from nature and rural living.

This is a fair point. And conservatives have long recognized that technological and scientific advancements have the potential to radically shift cultural norms and traditions. It may be that contraceptives have done more to devastate conservative institutions than all the efforts of the Left combined. But it doesn’t follow that all technology is destructive to conservative ends. A society can advance in technology while still maintaining institutions, and the challenge of each generation of conservatives has always been how to balance things of permanent value with the progression of history and the tools at our disposal.

To say that the conservatism of today is merely the liberalism of twenty years ago is ludicrous. But it’s hardly worth me rebutting his claim until he provides an actual argument, or at least defines what he means by “conservative” and “liberal” in this sense. Similarly, I don’t quite know how to answer his charge that attractive “conservative” girls are all promiscuously cosmopolitan. If his point is that conservative values don’t do as well in urban centers, then I agree. But if his point is that attractive females who call themselves conservative aren’t actually conservative, I fail to see what that has to do with conservatism?

The biggest reason why conservatives will continue to lose is that they’re still not ready to kill the left even though the left is ready to kill them. Liberals have been getting conservatives fired on a daily basis while suing their businesses out of existence while the conservative loser merely whines about it on Twitter. You may hate the left, but if you wouldn’t dare even punching them in the face because you fear losing your life of comfort, you will lose. If you’re not prepared to kill your enemy while your enemy is busy killing you, you will lose. It’s that simple. Some think that conservatives have to feel a sense of hopelessness to fight back, but by then there will be nothing left worth fighting for.

Since V appears to prefer the broadest definitions possible for nuanced worldviews, I have to ask—what the heck is he talking about? Every populist movement on the Right from the Tea Party to the alt right to the Trump phenomenon has levelled this exact charge at conservatism while still claiming to be “conservative”. Traditional conservatives such as myself—who recognize the entire worldview was built upon Edmund Burk’s objections to abstract political philosophies and radicalism—object to the notion we have to treat the Left as some kind of existential threat to be destroyed instead of persuaded, but I am well aware of the fact I am in the minority there.

V sounds like the very “conservative” groups he’s arguing against—and I seriously wonder whether he’s bothered to even listen to what they’ve been saying quite loudly and quite ferociously for quite a long time: that the only way to “win” is to punch back as hard or harder than the Left punches you. And, my criticisms of those groups are identical to my criticism of V’s stance here: what exactly are you advocating? The idea that conservatives aren’t doing enough is always presented as a moving target. Do we need to lie? Burn buildings? Threaten warfare?

You don’t have to be a historian to know that conservatives will continue to lose. Simple take a look back 50, 100, or 500 years to see how much ground they’ve lost, and amplify that by a factor of ten thanks to technology if you want to imagine how much ground they will lose in the next 50, 100, or 500 years. They are such losers that if you see any sort of organized conservative “uprising” in the years to come, it will surely be a carefully managed scheme by the elites to usher in yet another monumental conservative defeat, just like we saw in the last few years with the alt right’s astonishing rise and then disastrous defeat in Charlottesville at the hands of their more capable enemies.

You don’t have to be a historian to know how absurd V’s statement is either. But knowing history would help. The conservative movement—as we know it today—began in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1980s. Conservative impulses of various shapes and sizes have waxed and waned throughout Western civilization since the time of the ancient Greeks and the Roman Republic. A lot of V’s argument depends on how broadly he’s defining conservatism and how narrowly he’s viewing history.

I’m also uncertain how the rise and fall of the alt right in recent years signals a moratorium on the conservative movement? Does V mean that the alt right represents a sort of ultra-conservatism and that its demise indicates a sort of domino-effect for the political Right? Happily, the fall of the alt right is a victory for conservatism as the term “alt right” literally means an alternative to conservatism. That’s like saying the defeat of Nazis Germany signaled the end of the conservative era.

Since I know conservatives will not win, I do not identify as one, because I don’t see myself as a loser. I will stay under the radar and live with no label, and let the communists on the left defeat the losers on the right like they have been doing for centuries.

It isn’t necessary to reduce reality into the populist lens of winners and losers. Were the Christian martyrs killed by Romans in the colosseum losers? Were the Jews who died fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising losers? History is replete with cases of those who fought knowing the most likely outcome was defeat or even death. Were they all losers?

If V is demanding some assurance, there are no sure bets in this life. And sometimes the “winning side” can very much appear the loser in this present moment. Christianity is alive and well, unlike the Roman Empire that persecuted Christians. And though six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, the Jewish people are disproportionately successful today, while their murderers and those who support them are a pathetic group of stragglers unable to gain any political clout.

The question isn’t who’s “winning”, but what is right, honorable, and worth fighting for. The real losers are those who demand some calculated assurance before deciding what’s worth living or even dying for.

In Conclusion

To the extent V is channeling the spirit of the age and rightly criticizing the cultural setbacks that have taken place, I think there is some value in what he has to say. I don’t want to dismiss his arguments but engage them. Conservatives have good reason to be discouraged. But discouragement is not a good reason for abandoning one’s worldview.

Aside from the concerns I’ve addressed above, I’m not entirely certain what V is advocating? He doesn’t seem to be saying the things conservatives are defending aren’t worth defending. He seems to be taking issue with the fact they are presumably losing the fight. Very well then, what of it? If he’s saying the fight isn’t worth it, then what difference does it make if we win or lose? If he’s saying the tactics conservatives use are inadequate, then what tactics does he recommend? What would he do differently aside from refusing to adopt a label for fear it would brand him as a loser?

It is true that many today would rightly reject conservatism on the basis it doesn’t appeal to their natural desire to “win”. Authentic conservatism isn’t natural. It calls us beyond our natural biological appetites to a higher order. Neomasculinity is appealing in that it seeks to indulge in our natural appetites, but that is not the same as bypassing Loserville. Conservatism isn’t a worldview for losers. It’s a worldview for those with the maturity and bravery to fight for the things that matter most.

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Episode 13 - Can America Survive without Christianity? - Part 2

America’s Judeo-Christian heritage plays a vital role in the survival of American’s form of government. This is because a Judeo-Christian worldview is unique in that it is a belief system that is compatible with liberal democracy that respects individual liberties while potentially impacting both the people and their leaders in a way that other belief systems—secular libertarianism, stoicism, utilitarianism—cannot.

But it doesn’t follow that all who hold a Judeo-Christian worldview contribute to the American republic in a positive or productive way. What happens when those who profess a Christian faith fail to recognize the role of the believer in a free society and instead seek to use government to subvert a free society?

Continuing on with their discussion on the role of Christianity in America's form of government, Bob and Josh turn their attention to the state of the American church. If John Adams was right—if only a moral and religious people are fit for the American Constitution—and if Americans are increasingly less Christian, where do we go from here? Is it possible to find an alternative to the Judeo-Christian model that existed at the time of the founding? And, if not, is it possible to revitalize the model of the past?

If religion is to play some role in our society, in what ways should it be separate from the church and the state? Should Christians seek to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to this earth, using government as a tool to do so? Or does Christianity and Christian beliefs have no place in the public square? Would we be better off with a monument to the Ten Commandments on every government building? Or do many of our fights over the separation of the church and state represent a distraction from the things that matter most?

LISTEN HERE

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Stop “Supporting” Trump – Part 4 (Hosanna to the Chief!)

There are few things more swallow or fleeting to pledge one’s allegiance to than a political figure.

I ended Part 3 arguing that both the Christian faith and the conservative worldview demand we order our loves. That is, we must assign our support, allegiance, devotion, submission, or even worship on the basis that some things are higher than others and, therefore, require more of us; so that the duty we owe our spouse is greater than the duty we owe our pet, but less than what we owe our God. What’s more, ordering our loves means that we recognize what level of support is inappropriate at each level. It would be wrong to only support our God, just as it would be wrong to worship our pet.

It’s not about Trump, it’s about identity

While the title of this series—Stop “Supporting” Trump—would appear to have the president as its object, this series isn’t really about Trump at all. It’s about identity. Your identity. It’s about those who’ve confused support for the things a politician is doing with a desire to belong to some group that identifies itself as Trump supporters. It’s bad enough when we rest our identity in our ethnicity, culture, or sexual orientation. One’s identity should never rest in support for a politician.

Taken far enough, this can be an act of worship in that it is the act of giving away the most precious thing we have to offer: ourselves. When we order our loves, our identity belongs only to the highest levels. And politics and political leaders simply don’t make the cut. Identity politics is, fundamentally, anti-identity, for it doesn’t recognize the individual for who he or she is as an individual, but for what sub-group he or she supposedly belongs to.

In the Christian and Jewish faiths the first commandment—"Thou shalt have no other gods before me”—prohibits this giving up of one’s self to anything other than the Creator. I must stress that support for Trump may be complex and highly nuanced, and that we should not assume those who identify as a “Trump support” are in violation of this command. However, to the Christian—whose religion prohibits such adulation—or to the conservative—whose worldview calls for allegiance to ideas over mere humans—it is imperative we are mindful of when support for something as trite as a political leader could venture into the territory of worship.

Dating Donald

One of the more bizarre manifestations of this phenomenon is the introduction of dating websites that cater to those whose identity rests in supporting Trump. Websites like Trump.dating or Trumpsingles.com offer members a place to make dating great again! As Trump.dating put it:

"When Political Foundation Is The Same, The Sky Is The Limit"

"We believe that by matching patriotic and political viewpoints as a base foundation of the relationship, it will allow one to focus on what really matters—conversation, commonalities, and if all goes well, courting. Being with someone who shares the same core standards is absolutely essential if you're truly searching for a real, life-changing relationship."

Look, I agree that a compatible political philosophy is helpful—though certainly not essential—to a healthy relationship. Though I don’t know that support for a specific politician signifies political compatibility, but I digress. What’s absolutely disturbing here is the belief that support for Trump somehow constitutes one’s “political viewpoints” and “core standards”. That’s like basing one’s religious beliefs on a flamboyant televangelist’s teachings. In the hierarchy of loves, a political figure is hardly the best place to define one’s “political viewpoints,” let alone one’s “core standards”.

Worshiping Trump

Jon McNaughton knows what it means to identify as a Trump supporter. His biography states he is “an established artist from Utah” whose “experiences and faith are the inspiration for his work”. His “You Are Not Forgotten” painting must have been inspired by his “faith”:

Notice the serpent crushed beneath Trump’s heel. McNaughton writes, “When I decided to paint this picture, I wondered if this was taking it too far. But, sometimes you have to speak forcefully, like the brushstrokes of my painting…I want a president that will crush the enemies of liberty, justice, and American prosperity. They may have the power to bruise his heel, but he will have the power to crush their head!”

For those unfamiliar with the prophecy, this symbolism comes directly from the Bible. Genesis 3:15 reads, “And I will put enmity between [the serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Traditionally, the Jewish and Christian faiths held that this is the earliest reference in scripture to the promised Messiah. This painting is, shall we say, depicting Trump as a wee bit more than a savvy politician.

Examples of this sort of buffoonery abound online and would take considerable time and space to explore them in-depth. I found this composite image below of some of the more on-the-nose drawings. But I’ll not belabor the point any more by providing example after example of those whose political views and affinity towards the president has crept bizarrely and disturbingly into their religious convictions.

Worship doesn’t have to mean we bow down and pray to an effigy of Trump. Worship occurs whenever we assign far more devotion to something or someone than it is due. Trump worship is replacement for real worship—though many would be appalled to hear such an accusation. It means looking to a political messiah to provide for us or to solve our problems. It means a loss of community and transcendent hope that leaves only a hollow, political identity. It means sacrificing truth on the altar of alternative facts. It means believing paying hush money to the porn star you had an affair with while you third wife was pregnant with your child doesn’t in any way disqualify you from being the messiah with the “power to crush their head”.

It means placing your identity in being a Trump supporter.

Enemies Everywhere!

Look, I know what it means to support a candidate when they’re running for office. But it means something entirely different to support them if they’ve already won. That seems to imply the race is somehow not entirely over. And, in today’s context, it would seem to imply that Trump needs the support of “his” people to advance his agenda; it means he needs their allegiance, their fealty, their loyalty, even their protection. He is at once the most powerful man in the world and the most vulnerable. He is our savior who happens to be so encamped by the Forces of Eeeeevil that we must all pull together to thwart their efforts.

A “good” Trump supporter responds to the president’s call for support as if the president is in terrible, terrible danger. The Forces of Eeeeevil are everywhere, surrounding the man, attacking, looking for chinks in the armor, looking for anything that can be exploited to “take him down.” And sometimes I wonder just how literal “take him down” must mean in their minds. This isn’t the language of those who agree with what the man is doing and wish to see him succeed. Oh, that idea may be present among them; but what’s far more present—what takes centerstage—is the idea that this man, this messiah, is our man. He’s our leader. He’s the one who’s going to make things right. No one else has accomplished as much as he has, or as much as he will.

Since support has come to mean recognizing Trump as the voice and will of the people who count, anyone standing in his way doesn’t count. Support leaves no room for compromise, nuanced arguments, or disagreements. Support means you’re either with the “good guys” or the “bad guys”. In fact, a perpetual cavalcade of enemies is necessary to make sense of this needlessly oversimplified view. For without enemies, this kind of support becomes meaningless. Enemies are the fuel that power Trump’s populist movement.

And, if Trump’s supporters aren’t vigilant, if they’re not careful, if they’re not sufficiently united, the forces of the Deep State, the Establishment, RINO’s, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Hollywood in general, CNN, ABC, NBC, the MSM, Megyn Kelly, George Will, National Review, the Remnant, Bill Kristol, Fake News, Islamists, our past three presidents, Mexicans, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, feminists, NATO, NAFTA, European allies, Canada, the FBI, the DOJ, the NSA, the NFL, the NYT, the DNC, Mr. Khan, Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Hillary, NeverTrumpers, the Resistance, Romney, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Jeb!, Ryan, McConnel, McCain, Flake, Corker, Comey, Boehner, McCabe, Mueller, Rocket Man, and the devil himself will prevail.

Sigh…or maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to lose sight of what it means to support a president.

Why you should stop supporting Trump

Historically, the Left has been more accustomed to playing the identity politics game, which defines who you are by the various interest groups or cultural subdivisions you represent. In his constant calls to divide the world between supporters and opponents, Trump has effectively carved out an identities politics on the Right—those whose identity is found in their allegiance to Trump.

From time to time, when Trump makes some appointment, executive order, or signs a bill into law that’s—shall we say—agreeable to a policy wish list of your average conservative, I’ve been asked whether I can finally get around to supporting him. And I have always struggled with answering the question; not because I don’t want to admit some mistake on my part, but because the question always seems loaded with a lot of ill-defined presuppositions.

Far too often, the question—in effect—is an invitation for me to identify myself. Do I identify with the tribe who supports the president or the tribe who opposes him? Did I love him or hate him? Am I with the right people who count or the wrong people who don’t? THAT is the question I’ve never quite known how to answer, because I reject its implied premise: that the world must be divided into those artificially polarizing extremes.

Do I support Trump? No. But it’s not because I oppose him. It’s because I reject the premise on which the question is based. The question only makes sense if you accept the populist/tribalist worldview of identity politics. It’s not Trump I’m being asked to support, it’s a worldview that’s antithetical to my conservative values.

And that is why you too should stop supporting Trump too.

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Stop “Supporting” Trump – Part 3 (how should we support our country, faith, and president?)

Do you consider yourself to be a great American who’s willing to fight for their country, loves their God, and supports their president? How do you show your devotion for the things you believe are worthy of your time, talents, and allegiance? Surely loving your country means something different than loving your God; and it would be blasphemy to worship your president as your god. But how should your devotion be distinguishable from the things you support? What is appropriate and what isn’t?

In this series we’re exploring why you shouldn’t support president Trump—whether or not you approve of his policies or even his demeanor and tweets. In Part 1 I attempted to show how support for the president may have further implications than first meets the eyes, and in Part 2 I reflected on whether or not a NeverTrumper (such as myself) can finally get around to admitting I should have voted for Trump in 2016.

But today I want to shed some light on how we might lend our support towards our country, faith, and political leaders, in a further effort to unravel why the word support is problematic. As a conservative American Christian myself, I can say that I support my country, my Christian faith, and certain political candidates; but it’s easy enough to see that I mean very different things in each case. Even where the definition of support may be similar, its application is quite different.

What does it mean to support my Country?

Supporting my country may mean I hold allegiance to our national heritage, shared history, or cultural values and perform my civic duties. It may even mean that I would willingly die for my country if necessary. While those who hold anti-American or pacifist sentiments think otherwise, most of us would find it honorable to die fighting for one’s country. We celebrate the lives of those brave men and women who’ve fought to defend the liberties we enjoy and encourage future generations of Americans to be equally self-sacrificing.

The call to defend the United States is couched in terms of defending liberty or equality or justice. The presumption is that a good citizen will zealously defend their nation because they are defending not only their homeland, but the values of the homeland. But surely we can understand that such support is not limitless. If the army were deployed for the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish race, or if the national guard were ordered to reinstate Jim Crow in the American South, many would understandably reject such a call to this warped patriotism.

Yet a good solider doesn’t calculate the sins of his country before charging into battle. The patriotic vigor that a soldier holds in his heart doesn’t mean he thinks his country incapable of doing wrong. He doesn’t have to justify the slave trade, the Japanese internment camps, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The question isn’t a matter of does the good outweigh the bad but a matter of patriotism, pride, and love of country. The soldier loves his country in spite of the evils or even atrocities his country may have committed. He dies willingly not for the goodness of his country, but for the love of his country.

We fight because we are hard-wired to defend our sense of home and because we are taught to believe the values that embody our national character are worthy of being defended. This support—this patriotism—is powerful but limited. It is limited to the degree to which we believe the homeland to be engaged in warfare that is both justifiable and necessary for the common welfare or national security. In fact, a strong part of the American mythos is that we have defeated the enemies of justice and liberty everywhere from tyrannical monarchies to fascism to Nazism to communism. We’re the good guys—or so we’d like to believe.

What does it mean to support my faith?

But for the religiously pious, faith demands an even higher calling. A soldier may be called to sacrifice their life while fighting; a religious convert may be called to a life of piety that ends in martyrdom. And, what’s more, the faithful are called to place their faith in the notion that what they believe to be religiously true is, in fact, the essence of what is morally right.

Here the word support comes off a bit clunky and inadequate. For who among us would worship a deity who is so feeble as to need our support? It is not uncommon for certain churches or religious faiths to encourage their converts to vote for certain political candidates or support certain political movements as a sort of support for the global mission of their faith. Some of my Christian brothers and sisters forewarned me that—should Hillary Clinton become president—it would likely usher in an age of persecution against the church and, therefore, the best way to support the church was to vote for Donald Trump.

But support in this sense for one’s faith is hardly worth defending. For what faith demands that certain actions be taken solely on the basis they may lead to the avoidance of pain and suffering? Our faith commands our love and our submission, not our allegiance. We owe our allegiance to our country. But if we are asked to fight for our country we may rightly consider whether the fight is just. If our faith informs us that the war is not just—that our country is engaged in the killing of innocent lives for the sake of conquest or the extermination of some hated foreign race—then our faith demands that we abstain from fighting. When the allegiance we owe our country conflicts with the submission we owe our faith, our faith must win out or it was no faith at all. Our faith is the measuring stick by which we understand right from wrong.

What is 100% support?

As a young man I remember the events of 9/11 being all the more sobering as someone who was of the right age to be called to service. Volunteer or not, the possibility of me going to war seemed eerily plausible and—in the first few days that followed the attack—likely. I had—as they say—my whole life ahead of me and I was plagued by the thought I might literally die for my country having accomplished little else than earn a high school diploma. Whether or not I should die for my country wasn’t the question; the question was whether or not I had the courage to do so if duty called; for who could know if they’re capable of such a thing unless the awful opportunity actually presents itself?

I was raised in a church that believed quite literally we were living in the End Times—that persecution was likely to occur in our lifetimes, including the possibility of imprisonment, torture, and even death. Joel Olsteen’s message of feel-goodery would have been baffling to the congregation. There again I contemplated death in my youth. I believed in God, in the Bible, in Jesus—at least as best as understood those things. But did I have what it takes to die for my beliefs?

To me, that’s what 100% support ultimately means: could I die for my country? could I die for my faith? Those aren’t questions every young man contemplates, but they are at least in the realm of reasonable questions to ponder. But this isn’t so for our leaders—we don’t worry ourselves over whether or not we’d ever be asked to give our lives up for the president or the governor or the district attorney.

I suppose in some outlandish series of unfortunate events—if we and the president were held captive by terrorists who oddly gave us the choice—your life, or the president’s life?!—then it might be fitting to say that it would be honorable and right to die for our leader for the sake of national stability. But entertaining such thoughts makes about as much sense as exploring the moral dilemmas involved in what to do if you suddenly became irresistible to supermodels.

What then does it mean to support my political leaders?

If our nation deserves our support in the form of allegiance and respect, and our God deserves our support in the form of obedience and worship, what support is due our leaders? We might divide our duty into two categories: support for those whom we did not choose as our leaders and support for those we did.

One of the more disturbing trends over the past couple of presidential administrations is the degree to which so many Americans willingly participate in a mass delusion that somehow the president is not your president if you didn’t vote for them. After the tumultuous and ludicrously close election of 2000, the far Left began referring to president Bush as the Commander and Thief, implying the election was stolen from Al Gore. Not to be outdone, far too many Republicans made it known that Obama was not their president. Some took it so far as to insist quite literally that he was an illegitimate president—that he either wasn’t a natural born citizen or that he was only elected through some dubious chicanery likely involving illegal immigrants and, therefore, we shouldn’t behave as if he were actually the president.

The lunacy continues even today as legions of Democrats ostentatiously express that Trump is not their president. Either Trump is somehow so terrible that they won’t recognize his authority, or they have readily bought into a narrative—with no conclusive evidence at hand—that the 2016 elections were rigged in some grand conspiratorial fashion by the Trump team and a cohort of Russian agents.

Whether or not you love, like, voted for, or approve of an elected official, they are still your elected official. And what’s true for the president is true on down to the town dogcatcher: we should respect both the office and the authority of our elected officials and we afford them the benefit of the doubt when social media crackpots claim some election was illegitimate. We may speak out and work towards removing from power those who we feel do not deserve to enjoy the power that’s been entrusted to them, but when we treat the opposition as if they’re only capable of winning elections when some measure of fraud is involved, we’re as delusional as the Hugh Mungus Lady.

And what of those leaders we chose? I actually think our support here is fairly simple and has only been complicated in recent years by the goofy and profane way in which we are being asked for support. Support for our leaders means simply that we vote for them on election day and express approval of the policies they are pursuing—providing we actually approve of their policies. Of course, voting for a candidate can expand into contributing to their campaign, encouraging friends and family to do the same, making phone calls, walking neighborhoods, etc. And expressing approval of the policies they are pursuing may lead to writing letters to the editor, posting your views on social media, defending their position in a group conversation, or numerous other public engagements. But notice here that support does not mean that you pledge your life to someone, that you are willing to lie for someone, that you allow truth itself to be shaped by someone. That is far above and beyond what it means to support the leaders you vote for, and it even runs contrary to your allegiance due your country and your submission due your faith.

Faith demands that we order our loves

Now let us turn back to the president. What do we mean—what do we really mean—when we say we support the president? Do we mean we support what he is doing because they are the sort of things we’d hope any president would do? Or do we mean we support what he is doing regardless of whether or not they are the sorts of things we would want any president to do? Do we mean we support his policies but abhor his immoral behavior? Or does it mean that we willingly redefine what it means to be moral to accommodate his antics?

Faith demands that we order our loves. We may owe a duty to our God, our marriage, our children, our country, our employer, ourselves, our political leaders, and even our pets. But we must have some hierarchy for discerning who wins out when there’s a conflict between them. Some conflicts emerge when our duty for one thing conflicts with another. Some conflicts emerge when we give undue subordination to someone or something that is prohibited by some higher calling.

The conservative worldview holds that in the competition between ideas and individuals, the former must win out when there is a conflict. Ronald Reagan may rightly be called a conservative president. But that does not mean he perfectly embodied conservatism, but that he followed conservative principles more faithfully then other presidents of the modern era. Had he strayed from those principles, it would not make it right to continue to call it conservatism.

Adhering to real conservatism—or any political worldview, for that matter—requires first that you support the values and ideas of the political worldview, not some brash messiah. This level of fealty and submission is reserved for God alone and has no place in a democratic republic such as ours. Ignoring the hierarchy of loves that the Christian faith and the conservative worldview demands leads to catastrophe. How so? That is where we’ll turn in the 4th and final post in this series.

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Episode 12 - Can America Survive without Christianity? - Part 1

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” wrote America's 2nd president, John Adams. What exactly does it mean to be a moral and religious people? Was Adams referring to Christian virtues or just those who are civic minded? And was he right? Can our country operate properly, if at all, if we cease to be the sort of people he had in mind?

Lockean liberalism--the belief that humans have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--is a secular enterprise. Since all humans have spiritual yearnings, a purely liberal worldview is incomplete. Therefore, those who live in a liberal society will always seek out some transcendental belief system, ideology, religion, or greater purpose. For centuries the West has turned to the Judeo-Christian faith as the only belief system that doesn’t ultimately undermine society. Yet today that the Judeo-Christian heritage is quickly becoming nothing more than a footnote in our history books.

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined again by Bob Burch to discuss what it means for the prospects of American democracy to continue into a post-Christian age. In full disclosure, Josh and Bob are both professing protestant Christians whose views are biased but fair. But whether you're a Christian or not, this series is an important discussion for anyone interested in liberal democracy and the long-term viability of our constitutional republic and the American experiment.

LISTEN HERE

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Stop “Supporting” Trump – Part 2 (were NeverTrumpers wrong?)

It happened first with Neil Gorsuch. And now, in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, NeverTrumpers have been asked again whether they can finally admit they were wrong and join their brothers and sisters on the Right who support the president.

As I hope I’ve shown in Part 1, there’s an awful lot that can hang on that word support. And answering whether or not those who don’t support Trump as a matter of conservative principle were mistaken depends entirely on what question is actually being asked. Charlie Cooke, the editor of nationalreview.com, recently addressed why this question is a little off:

“I can see why it made sense when the question was filtered through a choice…there was a choice in the primary. But now, he’s the president…and yet there is this odd call all the time—are you going to support him? Do you support him?—that is divorced from any sort of choice; and I never know what it means to support him…so when people say will you support him now? Do you think you were wrong? It reminds me of this sort of odd medieval view of one’s relationship to someone in power. Essentially, they are asking, will you pledge fealty to him? Will you pledge your life? And, I’m not quite sure what that means in practice—I mean, certainly I’m not going to die for him. But also, I’m not going to lie for him; and I’m not going to lie against him. If being opposed to Trump means I have to pretend he’s wrong when I think he’s right, I’m not doing it. And if supporting Trump means I have to pretend he’s right when I think he’s wrong, I’m not doing it either.”

The focus of this series is primarily exploring the dangers in morphing support for president Trump into the sort of fealty Charlie Cooke describes above. But let’s take a brief digression to answer the question another way around: does are you going to support Trump now? mean do you believe you made a mistake in not voting for Trump back then?

I chose to abstain from voting for president in 2016 because I felt the Republican and Democratic nominees were uniquely and almost equally unqualified and unfit for that office. In that sense you might say I was a NeverTrumper. But I want to be clear that I in no way believe I speak for the NeverTrump movement. The movement was comprised of so many varied groups and interests it wouldn’t be practical to speak on their behalf and—since the election—Trumplicans have largely succeeded in mischaracterizing the movement as exclusively RINO Republicans who secretly wanted Hillary Clinton to win all along.

But I can speak for myself. So, since hindsight is 20/20, in what ways was I wrong about Trump? And if I could do it all over, would I vote for (“support”) him?

How was I wrong about Trump?

One of the advantages of blogging is that I have a permanent record of my thoughts. In returning to some posts I had written in the runup to the 2016 elections, I can see that I had many concerns about Trump that did not—or at least have not yet—panned out. Here are three that stood out:

First – I was wrong about Trump’s motives for running

Attempting to discern someone’s motives for running for office is problematic from the outset, but Trump was such an unusual candidate that the political pundits were eager to speculate on what he was actually up to. Guesses ranged from this is all a big joke to he truly believes he’s the right guy for the job on down to he wants to be an American Mussolini. My concern in 2016 was that it was more the latter—that Trump had an authoritarian itch.

Unlike many on the Left or the so-called Resistance, I in no way thought Trump was Hitler-lite. I didn’t compare Trump with the likes of a Hitler or a Mussolini, or even a more benevolent dictator such as Francisco Franco. He simply didn’t have a history of ruthlessly seeking political power and seemed too much a buffoon to take seriously as a potential tyrant. Nevertheless, his insistence that our leaders are losers and morons and that he alone can Make America Great Again!, his complete disregard for constitutional restraints, his slandering of vulnerable ethnic groups, his calls for jailing, lawsuits, and physical violence on dissenters, his utopian promises of a bright tomorrow, and his admiration of dictatorships all pointed to the underpinnings of authoritarian ideas, even if a well-organized ideology or detailed agenda is lacking.

What I feared was someone seeking to be president out of an ambitious thirst for power. Trump may have no appreciation for constitutional limits, but he also appears to have no sinister plans for undermining the Constitution. The speed with which he successfully grafted in much of the Republican party’s platform seems evident that he’s more motivated by praise than power. He’s less interested in the steak than he is the sizzle. That’s hardly ideal in a leader, but it’s also not nearly as dangerous as electing an actual demagogue who seeks power for the sake of power.

Second – I was absolutely off base thinking he’d renege on his promise to appoint solid justices

With Trump’s penchant for changing his mind and breaking his word, I never expected him to appoint solid justices to the Supreme Court or lower courts. During the debates he’d openly boasted that his sister, who ruled in favor of giving constitutional protection to partial-birth abortion, would make a phenomenal Supreme Court justice.

It would appear Trump has been well pleased with the chorus of resounding praise from his base and the howls and shrieks of outrage from his opponents whenever he selects another name from the list of prescribed judges provided by the Heritage Foundation. I do not believe Trump is carefully selecting justices that best reflect his strong penchant for judicial restraint and constitutional originalism; but I do believe he’s willing to outsource that work to a think tank that does prefer that type of justice. Again, not ideal, but not as disastrous as I’d feared.

Third – I thought Trump would revert to courting liberals and pursuing liberal policies once elected

Having misjudged his motives and tendency to renege on the right-of-center policies he’d newly adopted during the campaign, I suspected him to be a liberal in sheep clothing and his radicalized populism on the right to be a ruse. I don’t mean that I supposed him to have had some grand scheme in which he wooed the hearts of the Republican base to get elected only to work hand in hand with the Democrats, but that, when push came to shove, he’d revert back to the sort of liberalism he’d happily contributed to in the past.

Generally speaking, none of that came true for most of the policies advanced by the president. The Trump administration is, arguably, the most “conservative” administration we’ve had since Ronald Reagan—at least from a policy perspective. And, while much of Trump’s rhetoric remains questionable, inconsistent, infuriating, or anti-conservative, much of his governing has been—happily—quite the opposite.

So…did I make a mistake in not voting for Trump?

Broadly speaking, I had four fears about a Trump presidency:

He would be an authoritarian who did irreparable harm to our civic institutionsHe would advance a mostly liberal agendaHe would redefine conservatism into something it was not (trade wars/abandoning NATO)He would further divide the nation as Obama had done and poison the national conversation

In retrospect, I was very wrong about his potential authoritarian motives, though I do believe he’s inadvertently inflicted damage to the health and respect of our civic institutions (#1) and I was mostly wrong about #2. However, my fears that he’s redefined what conservatism means in the minds of most Americans and that he’d further poison the national conversation and widen our political divide have mostly come to fruition. So as not to needlessly lengthen this post, I’ll just direct the reader to prior blog posts here and here, should you want to learn more about what I mean by that.

Whether a NeverTrumper now believes they should have voted for Trump probably depends on whether they shared my concerns above, and—if so—how they’d rank those concerns. Certainly, there are those who have been pleasantly surprised with how conservative-friendly the administration has been and now say they would vote for Trump if given the opportunity again. If your chief concern was the Trump would revert to his liberal past, then you’d certainly be justified in seeing clearly to vote for him now.

But that was never my chief concern, and I would not change my vote now if given the chance. Not out of spite, but because some of my fears—fears that prevented me from being able to support Trump in the first place, even if that meant Hillary Clinton might win—have come to pass. In the next two parts to this series I will delve a little deeper into what I mean. In Part 3 we’ll be looking at what support means for different things—our country, our faith, our leaders—and how important it is not to confuse one with the other. And then in Part 4 we’ll conclude the series with a look at how repulsive things can become when we do confuse one with the other. I hope that, whether or not you fully sympathize with my thinking, by the end of this series you will at least be able to see why you should never support Trump.

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