I thought I would revisit
an essay I wrote for
Commonweal
in July on the rise of Trump. I stand by what I wrote there. Of course,
like almost everyone else, I had assumed that Clinton would sail to
easy victory. Now that we’ve all been proven wrong, I thought it would
be good to assess where we stand. Clearly, the process of collective
reflection is only beginning. So let me add my voice by pointing the
finger in four directions—at the Democrats, at the Republicans, at
ideology, and at (American) Christianity.
Blame the Democrats
First things first: Clinton was undone by a platform based on
technocratic liberalism in economic policy combined with expressive
individualism in social policy. She opted for a re-run of John Kerry’s
sterile and dispassionate 2004 campaign. We all thought that it would be
enough to beat someone like Trump. But we were wrong.
The real problem, as many are now pointing out, is that the white
working class did not trust the Democrats because they were seen as
preferencing the interests of the global economic elite. We should not
think of this as malignant cronyism hatched in dark smoky rooms. Rather,
it represents an attachment to what Pope Francis calls the technocratic
paradigm rooted in cold utilitarian calculus – and to a groupthink
among people who inhabit the same social, economic, and educational
circles. Thus free trade is defended because we can demonstrate that its
benefits exceed its costs – and we can always “retrain” the losers.
Silicon Valley is defended because technocrats worship at the altar of
technology. Wall Street is defended because it is a mecca for the
smartest people (and “smart” is the highest form of praise in the
technocratic paradigm).
I don’t want to turn this into too much of a caricature – the
Democrats do indeed support many policies rooted in justice such as
universal healthcare, decent safety nets, environmental protection, and
financial regulation. And President Barack Obama in particular has some
laudable achievements under his belt. But even here, this is
inadequately rooted in a politics of the common good. It tends to be
sold under the banner of self-determination and individual empowerment
rather than civic responsibility and communal solidarity. And it is
processed through a technocratic paradigm that is simply allergic to
moral arguments (Bernie Sanders, unshackled by these norms, showed us
what is possible).
On the other side of the equation: while not heeding the
bread-and-butter concerns of the working class, Clinton went “all in” on
expressive individualism—with a campaign centered on the most extremist
abortion position in history, the unrestrained to freedom to love
whoever you like and define your own identity, all in the context of a
certain “illiberal liberalism” and a tone-deafness that came across as
smug and even contemptuous. Again, we shouldn’t go too far here either -
much of what we call “identity politics” coheres with the common good,
especially gender and racial justice. But the root is still in
individualism. And many of these issues, while deeply-held, are
nonetheless the issues of the elites.
This was certainly on display at the anti-Trump protest I joined a
few days ago. I stood at the sidelines of this protest, and not just
because of my age and dislike of crowds. Although I supported the
protestors, I couldn’t fully identify with them either. I joked that I
wanted to hold a banner saying “civic communitarianism trumps
libertarianism” – but the millennials, weaned on expressive
individualism, wouldn’t get this at all, would they?
The bottom line is that the Democrats used to be the party of the
worker and the underdog – of all races – and they must be so again.
Blame the Republicans
But let’s be clear. As I mentioned in my original essay, economic
issues are by no means the only – or even the primary – reason for the
election of Trump. Using the apt terminology of
Van Jones ,
the election of Trump represented a “whitelash” against the real and
perceived loss of economic, social, and cultural dominance. One of the
most interesting facts to emerge is that a majority of the poorest white
people – the ones facing the greatest economic strain – actually voted
for Clinton. Trump’s base was more middle-class. It was certainly more
pronounced among those without a college degree, but he won degree
holders too. Even more shockingly, he won white women and white
millennials. White. That is the operative word.
And let’s think about what drove that whitelash. This kind of thing
often happens when groups and identities feel under threat. We know this
from history. And it mirrors developments in Europe, especially in the
face of globalization and an influx of culturally-distinct immigrants.
But let’s be clear: this did not arise organically either. It
reflects decades of poison stemming from Fox News and talk radio, making
a whole generation of older white people angry, bitter, and hateful. It
reflects a tendency for Republican politicians to play with fire by
winking at racism – overtly in the case of people like Jesse Helms, more
covertly for Ronald Reagan and his fellow travelers. It reflects the
destructive nihilism that dominated the Republican Party from the days
of Newt Gingrich through the tea party and the frenzied attempt to
delegitimize the first black president.
In the legitimate desire to move ahead after such a bitter election,
let us not forget this. Let us not forget the despicable things Trump
said and did during this campaign, cheered on by his white base. Let us
not forget his elevation of the alt right and his winking at white
nationalism – including by appointing this movement’s leader as his
chief strategist as president. And let us not forget that, had a mere
107,000 votes swung the other way and tilted the presidency toward
Clinton, Trump and his base would today be undermining the legitimacy of
that outcome.
At the same time, it’s unfair to dismiss everyone who voted for Trump
as racist. Too many were, that’s for sure, and they seemed almost
gleeful that they could voice feelings long suppressed. But most
weren’t. Most simply felt ignored, excluded, and marginalized.
We still have a problem, though. They lashed out without thinking
about the consequences or caring about the consequences. Only a few days
after Trump’s victory, we were inundated with stories of physical and
verbal attacks on Latinos, Muslims, gays, and women. For sure, the vast
majority of Trump’s supporters were not implicated in this. But they
bear some moral responsibility. If you play with fire, you shouldn’t be
surprised when buildings start burning down. And if they were surprised
by the violence and the fear, then I would submit that the Democrats
aren’t the only ones living in a bubble. As
Leon Wieseltier once suggested, the downtrodden of white America deserve sympathy, but they must also be willing to give sympathy.
There’s a broader issue here, of course. Catholics are called upon to
identify with the poor, the excluded, the marginalized - and in the
United States, that means primarily low-income blacks and Latinos. The
truly disenfranchised people are minorities, who tend to live in cities
(and because of the quirks of an eighteenth century election system,
their votes count less). And yet we rarely hear calls for the Republican
Party to engage in soul-searching about why they have become an
exclusively white party and why they are utterly indifferent to the
concerns of minority communities. Just as with the drug war, the calls
for compassion and understanding only seem to come when white people are
captured in the net of exclusion. This must change. And as
Meghan Clark put it, any reconciliation must be predicated on justice and the protection of the vulnerable.
Blame ideology
There’s one question that not enough people are asking: why Trump
himself? The world is sadly full of right-wing strong men, xenophobic
nationalists, and mercenary populists. But they typically don’t look
like Donald Trump – an oligarch who encapsulates the worst vices of the
system he claims to oppose, and who exploits popular discontent to
benefit his own class.
As people are
now pointing out ,
if you voted for Trump because you think he’s anti-establishment,
you’ve been thoroughly conned. None of this should be a surprise – with
the exception of trade, Trump’s economic platform has always overlapped
with Republican orthodoxy. He supports massive tax cuts for the
wealthiest citizens, taking healthcare away from 22 million people,
gutting the Dodd-Frank financial regulation, and halting all efforts to
fight climate change. And today, his team is stacked with industry
lobbyists and think-tank libertarians. His chief economic advisor is
from Goldman Sachs. Wall Street traders are salivating over ways to make
money from a Trump presidency. Meet the new boss, same as the old
boss.
How did he pull this off? To properly answer that question, we need
to talk about ideology – specifically the ideology of libertarianism and
free market fundamentalism that rose to such prominence over the past
few decades. That ideology did two things – it created fertile
conditions for the backlash that forced voters into Trump’s arms, and it
also made somebody who looked like Trump more acceptable than they
would otherwise have been.
The first point is by now pellucid. We have indisputable evidence
that libertarian and supply-side policies did not work as promised. They
did not raise productivity or long-term economic growth. But they did
raise inequality and financial fragility, they did contribute to wage
stagnation, and they did lower trust and social capital. They
contributed to the exclusion, despair, and marginalization that led to
the rise of Trump.
But the ideology did more than that. It changed social norms in a way
that turned somebody with the values and record of Trump into a viable
candidate. It let him play tribune of the plebs while wallowing in
ostentatious wealth and never letting go of his neoliberal goody bag.
This is a somewhat subtle point. It is based on the idea that human
beings have tendencies that are both selfish and social, conflictual and
cooperative – and that these tendencies can be stoked or primed. As an
obvious example, we have a deeply-rooted instinct to preference
in-groups and marginalize out-groups. Trump, like so many demagogues
before him, managed to exploit this exceedingly well. But if Trump was
able to stoke changes in what constitutes acceptable behavior in this
domain so easily and so quickly, can you imagine the damage done to
social norms from decades of exposure to individualistic and libertarian
ideology? I’m talking about the incubation of anti-social values like
self-interest, greed, materialism, hedonism, and zero-sum competition.
The point is that this ideology not only gives rise to an economy of
exclusion, but it prompts us not to care about the excluded. Pope
Francis says similar things.
This degradation of virtue drives the rich to eschew any sense of social responsibility. And on cue, as
Mike Lofgren
noted a few years ago, the rich have almost seceded from America…as he
puts it, they “disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation
and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract
loot.” And they have proven remarkably successful at shifting the
narrative in their direction. Over the last few years, as documented by
Jane Mayer ,
a secretive cabal of financial and fossil fuel billionaires worked
behind the scenes to torpedo Obama’s policies – to protect their own
bottom line. They created the tea party, and they actually helped pave
the way for Trump.
Related to this, one of Adam Smith’s great insights into human
psychology was that we are driven to admire the rich, which harms moral
norms. In his words, this “disposition to admire, and almost to worship,
the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect
persons of poor and mean condition” is “the great and most universal
cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” This is because the
rich can gain social approval without having to act morally, and others
seek to emulate the unworthy rich, undermining moral norms all around.
It makes sense that this corruption is worsened by decades of exposure
to neoliberal ideology and rising inequality.
Is it any surprise, then, that - at least when they like the message
- millions can rally around a “successful businessman” who wallows in
his wealth, who brags about his greed, and who takes pleasure in
dominating people in his business and personal life? And indeed, the
analyses of the white working class
suggest that
not only have they been primed to blame government over market forces
for their woes, but that they actually continue to admire the rich while
despising the “professional” class.
This might help explain why Trump could tap into something that Mitt
Romney - another extremely rich man - could not. Romney was too
identified with the loathed managerial class. Trump, on the other hand,
disdains the traits of the managerial elite and enjoys the show of being
extravagantly and flamboyant wealthy. In this too, he benefits from the
modern obsession with fame and celebrity, with a narcissism divorced
from societal responsibility. And it goes without saying that he
benefits from the mainstreaming of pornography and sexual hedonism.
Putting this all together, Trump is the candidate for a culture of
self-centeredness and self-absorption. He is the candidate of
neoliberalism, oligarchy, and the throwaway culture. But he is also the
candidate of Kardashian culture, pornography culture, misogyny culture.
He is the candidate of cultural decline. And he won.
Blame (American) Christianity
As soon as the election was over, it became clear that it wasn’t just
white voters that elected Trump, but white voters who identified most
with Christianity. Certainly in American evangelicalism, with its roots
in Calvinism, there is a strong but perverted prosperity gospel
tradition, which sees wealth and worldly success as a sign of divine
blessing. It is no surprise that this tradition so easily embraced the
libertarian ideology that became Republican orthodoxy.
Catholics don’t have this excuse, of course, but a majority of white
Catholics still went for Trump. Some might even say they handed him his
victory. How did this happen? Part of it reflects cultural assimilation,
as (white) American Catholics look more and more like their evangelical
neighbors and less and less like their global Catholic brothers and
sisters. And over the past few decades, there has been a concerted
effort among influential Catholics, backed by deep-pocketed ideological
interests, to undermine traditional Catholic social teaching and make it
hospitable to libertarianism.
Of course, the main reason many Catholics gave for backing Trump was
abortion. But if Catholics were convinced through decades of habituation
and misinformation that libertarian values were consistent with
Catholicism, then it becomes easier to focus on this issue alone. And
let’s face it, Clinton’s extremist stance left a wide opening here. But
as passionate pro-lifers like
Charlie Camosy
have been pointing out, there’s something perverse and
counterproductive about aligning the pro-life movement with a man who
habitually divides the world into winners and losers, and whose
last-minute conversion to the pro-life cause seems hollow and cynical.
It seems obvious that the policies he espouses will increase the rate of
abortion. It seems obvious that he will make “pro-life” an even dirtier
word than it already is. More significantly, to defend Trump on
pro-life grounds is to misunderstand the connections that constitute the
throwaway culture—whereby the “choice” to have an abortion must be
understood in the context of a self-centered consumerist culture based
on individual freedom in which “choice” is considered a sacrament.
I would argue that Trump’s whole worldview is the very antithesis of
Christianity. He is a vulgar Nietzschean who sees Christianity through
his default lens of power and dominance. He has no use for mercy,
repentance, or forgiveness. He despises the very people that Christians
are called upon to prioritize. He has attacked both Pope Francis and
Pope Benedict. I would go so far as to say that, in his temperament and
in his stated positions, he might be the most unchristian candidate ever
to win the office of presidency.
Yet many American Catholic bishops and priests supported him, at
least tacitly by framing the issues extremely narrowly. In doing so,
they bear some of the blame for his victory. As they say in
Hamilton, there’s reckoning to be reckoned.
The worst example, unsurprisingly, was
Cardinal Raymond Burke
who was practically salivating at the thought of a Trump presidency (on
the very day that minorities around the country were feeling
terrified). The country’s premier culture war bishop,
Charles Chaput ,
while officially adopting a “plague on both their houses” position
nonetheless echoed the extreme right by suggesting that Clinton should
be under criminal indictment. He took the Russian-approved
wikileaks bait ,
attacking lay progressive Catholics simply for trying to do what lay
conservative Catholics have always done, but never criticizing the
latter for their association with libertarianism and climate change
denialism. In doing so, he fed the erroneous narrative that Clinton
operatives were explicitly motivated by anti-Catholicism. And swimming
downstream, many bishops and priests across the country adopted a
pro-Trump tone –
Michael O’Loughlin
has a good run down. Most of these used an argument based on a
selective set of non-negotiable values, an approach rejected explicitly
by Pope Francis.
Speaking of Pope Francis, who is he again? A year ago, he gave a
magnificent speech in Congress ,
in which he outlined his priorities for the United States – protect
immigrants and refugees, abolish the death penalty, defend the poor,
work for a better distribution of wealth, protect the environment, work
for peace between nations, avoid fundamentalisms, and end the arms
trade. How much of this featured in the political debate? How many
bishops emphasized these issues? How many lay Catholics framed their
political deliberation around them?
In that same speech, Pope Francis singled out four American role
models – Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Thomas
Merton. Did the American Catholic supporters of Trump – including
bishops and priests – internalize this? Because if they did, they would
be forced to admit that Trump’s values are the polar opposite of the
values of these exemplary men and women.
Let’s face it, I don’t see much concern among the Catholic Trump
supporters about plans to break up millions of families, destroy the
Paris agreement on climate change, or take healthcare away from
millions. Yet these are pro-life issues too. Developing country prelates
- less infected by ideology - understand this.
Cardinal Charles Bo
of Myanmar, for example, said that climate change was tantamount to
“criminal genocide” by the rich against the poor. Meanwhile, the man
tasked by Trump to lead his environmental policy is a climate change denier who attacked Pope Francis’s encyclical,
Laudato Si’,
dubbing it “scientifically ill-informed, economically illiterate,
intellectually incoherent, and morally obtuse.” He didn’t stop there –
it was also deemed to be “theologically suspect, and large parts of it
are leftist drivel, albeit couched in the vocabulary of Catholic social
teaching.” You can be sure that if a leftist criticized Church teaching
on sexuality in similar terms, that person would face an avalanche of
angry purple. But here? Nothing.
This is a fateful moment for the U.S. Catholic Church. We will need
to see what happens next. Let’s not forget the ruinous choices made
eight years ago. After barely uttering a word about Bush’s catastrophic
war and legitimization of torture, the U.S. bishops immediately declared
war on Obama. In doing so, they allied themselves, however unwittingly,
with the unsavory financial interests seeking to undermine his
presidency for their personal financial gain.
Will they make the same mistake this time? There are some encouraging
signs, at least around the protection of immigrants. But there is still
no real appreciation among the bishops for the importance of climate
change, or for the damage done to social cohesion from inequality and
libertarian ideology. My hope is that a Trump presidency will act as a
wake-up call. But I’m not optimistic. We have a long and hard road
ahead.
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