“Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensees
Because the nature of Donald Trump is hyperbole, whatever we say of the Trumpery going on these days it is an automatic litotes. Therefore, it is best to look at him as an exaggeration and not as a person or campaign in his own right. Whenever we focus on Donald J. Trump, we get a man who is nothing like a successful candidate, and whenever we focus on any speech of Trump’s, we come away with a handful of hair and empty clothes. If we just say, “Demagogue!” we underestimate the threats of demagoguery, which always lie in the ground that produces it, and if we say, “People are stupid,” we misunderstand the particular way that they are stupid.
One thing is clear: either because Trump is leading, or, more likely, because Trump is parroting and garbling as he follows, what Trump says and does is merely a funhouse mirror version of what Ted Cruz says. What Ted Cruz says is close to what Michele Bachmann said. It is what Rick Santorum said as he ran a close second in the Republican primaries in 2012. However, Trump has added a spice. He has insisted that everything that proves him wrong is “political correctness,” whether that is human morality (“taking out” the families of “these terrorists”), Christian piety (the above, plus protesters who “deserved to be roughed up”), the U.S. constitution (a religious test on people entering the country), the separation of powers (his purported power as president to order treaties abridged), or physics (the 100’ tall border wall).
Let’s save the substance of his words for another time. It’s obvious that Trump doesn’t mean political correctness when he uses the words “political correctness” any more than the rest of the Republican candidates do. Instead, I’d like to point out the function of the concept for Trump. It exonerates all proposals by being a thing against which he can react. It is an invisible, invulnerable, omnipresent bully whose destruction validates all acts.
The Republican Party has spent eight years convincing itself that it is the minority party. It has spent those eight years invoking a genuinely religious faith that it must vote against any proposal made by the current executive, may not cooperate with any member of the other party, and must destroy every piece of legislation or regulation ever authored by any member of that party. It has, in short, invoked jihad. The content of the other party’s membership, and the policies proposed, has been irrelevant.
To be brief, the GOP has defined itself as a reactionary party. It has almost said that its goals are solely to react to the Democratic Party and those who support it in open warfare. Its ideology — ostensibly “conservatism” — was never well defined, but it is now entirely without definition.
To digress with an analogy, the same devil has been at work in the substratum of political “conservatism”: the “religious right.” I began with Blaise Pascal. Let me go on with Jonathan Swift, from the same century.
It was highly worth observing the singular effects of that aversion or antipathy which Jack and his brother Peter seemed, even to affectation, to bear towards each other. Yet, after all this, it was their perpetual fortune to meet, the reason of which is easy enough to apprehend, for the frenzy and the spleen of both having the same foundation, we may look upon them as two pair of compasses equally extended, and the fixed foot of each remaining in the same centre, which, though moving contrary ways at first, will be sure to encounter somewhere or other in the circumference. Besides, it was among the great misfortunes of Jack to bear a huge personal resemblance with his brother Peter. Their humour and dispositions were not only the same, but there was a close analogy in their shape, their size, and their mien. . . . — Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub XI
In the allegory of Jonathan Swift’s 1696/1703 A Tale of a Tub, Jack, who represents the dissenters (Puritans and all other Calvinists), begins to resemble Peter, who represents Roman Catholics, because his fervor to be “pure” makes him every bit as authoritarian and doctrinaire as any of the popes he despised.
As both Izaak Walton and Richard Hooker had observed earlier, the various Calvinist churches in England were competing with one another to be less Catholic. They all agreed that the pope was either anti-Christ or a servant of Satan, and they agreed that the Roman church was the Whore of Babylon from Revelation, and they agreed that each congregation had autonomy from the others. That was all that they agreed upon, except that they were all aggrieved, all persecuted, and all right. They became, in other words, reactive. They had defined their faith as an opposition.
I mention this because recently Southern Baptist colleges have been up to some strange doings. Carson-Newman, in Tennessee, sued to be able to receive federal funds and yet be free from the anti-discrimination regulations of Title IX. They won.
The prize quote is from the University president. He said that his university had no intention of discriminating against anyone — gay, trans, or anything else — but,
Dr. O'Brien responded, "Yeah I understood our legal council said it would further make us a Christian school."
Why on earth, you might ask, would discrimination make a place “further” Christian? Didn’t Jesus hang out with extortionists (tax collectors), and forgive women caught in the act of adultery? Didn’t he tell a story where the good guy was the heathen (the good Samaritan)? Well, you have to understand:
"This is who we are our religious principles and in a changing world we want to reaffirm who we are and intend to be."
Now, I have to say “stet” to that, first. I don’t think the web account is accurate. In fact, I believe the university president on both counts. I believe he is sincere and does not intend to discriminate. Carson Newman is not Bob Jones. At the same time, I also believe him when he says he “was told” that he needed to sue and that it would “further” his school’s standing, though not as a Christian institution as much as a “Christian-college.”
Currently, Southern Baptist health insurance organizations are co-litigants or friends to the Supreme Court case over whether, post-Hobby Lobby, having to check a box to indicate that one is a “closely held company” or that one’s “deeply held religious beliefs” forbid coverage of certain contraceptives is an undue burden. Indeed, the health insurer felt that it had to join the lawsuit to be “Christian.” I know of at least one institution that would like to negotiate its insurance carrier but cannot, because switching away from the litigant would make the college look “less Christian.”
The legal argument, so far as I understand it, is that the venerable Religious Freedom Restoration Act is the question of the case. Note that this act is not one of the new nutburger bills. It is old and laudable, but it is being extended out of all proportion to argue that it is an “undue burden” and religious targeting for The Government, in the form of the ACA, to “force” institutions to check a box when denying insurance coverage for birth control. On our campuses, though, even lawyers do not know that this is what the case is about. They only know that it’s about “stopping them from making us support abortions.”
Now, the argument mounted against triphasic contraceptives is bizarre to me. I do not understand how anyone can conceive of them as being “abortifacient,” but that may be because I’m a protestant. I gather that it has to do with not allowing an egg to implant, when it might be fertilized (even though it kind of can’t have gotten that way), and that being tantamount, if you ignore the implanting thing, to “the morning after pill.” The reasoning ultimately hinges upon an argument in potentis.
The in potentis argument is that a potential human is denied the life that would otherwise have occurred, and therefore a half murder is committed. It doesn’t actually apply — again, these aren’t Plan B we’re talking about — but this means that Jack is now Peter. These Southern Baptist colleges, and the various “fundamentalist” protestant churches supporting Holly Lobby’s friends, are endorsing the Roman Catholic Church’s arguments from the 1960’s. Indeed, they’re now going to war behind banners that they formerly charged.
The rationale given — the popular cause, to keep my military language — has been that the insurer is suing to “stop abortions and the morning after pill that Obamacare says the college has to pay for.” Most of the students and trustees think that’s an accurate summary. They also believe that schools suing to be free from Title IX are doing so to protect their women’s bathrooms, because The World is going to force us into ungodly and unsafe practices.
For “conservative Christian” causes, reaction is the operative ideology, and it is a justification for all acts. Why did evangelical Christians endorse Mitt Romney, a Mormon, even as some of them said that Mormonism is “a cult?” They did it to “protect against” the legislative force that “Obama and the Democrats” would use to make Christianity illegal, the UN declarations on the rights of the child that would “put home schoolers in jail,” and, of course, the government that would “force” each church to perform gay weddings or face jail time.
“Conservative” is supposed to mean either a belief that the status quo is superior to all proposed changes or that there is a lost glory to be retrieved from the past. “Liberal” is supposed to mean either that all should be free or that changes must take place to achieve a greater freedom. When we listen to “paleo-”conservatives like Ted Cruz, we don’t hear anything conservative. We hear some mixture of libertarianism with militarism. When we listen to the rest, we get versions of the same.
The difference is Trump: he speaks only in reactions. His first principle is “Everything is broken!” and then that “everything” has to change. He is reactionary against anything and everything — the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, taxes, criminal law, and anything else — and he appeals to a party that has no ideology at all with which to contrast him. No one can say he isn’t a “conservative” or a “Republican,” because those terms don’t mean anything more than tantrums, terrorizing, and extremist reactions.
It’s not too shocking that Donald Trump — a man who won’t ask God’s forgiveness, who has been divorced three times — is leading among evangelical voters.