Trump's Disinhibition, the Virtue of Tolerance & Independence of Thought
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, October 26–November 2, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
What’s Wrong With Donald Trump? by Ezra Klein at The New York Times (podcast):
The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him. Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.
But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time.
Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.
And when I say that, I am describing both what is wrong with Donald Trump and what is right with him.
A Religious Freedom Voting Guide by Bettina Krause in Liberty:
Today, on both the political left and right, “emotionally potent oversimplifications” are endemic when it comes to questions of religious liberty within American politics, law, and culture.
Bonus points for quoting Moral Man and Immoral Society!
This Single Rule Underpins All Of Physics by Casper Mebius and Derek Muller on Veritasium (video essay):
If you want to slide a mass from point A to point B, what shape of ramp will get it there the fastest? This is known as the problem of fastest descent. Common sense might suggest taking the shortest path, a straight line from A to B. However, if you bend the ramp down a bit at the beginning, the mass accelerates to a higher speed earlier. So, even though it travels slightly farther, it travels faster and beats the straight ramp. The question is, what shape provides the perfect balance of acceleration and path length to minimize travel time?
Where Cotton's King and Men are Chattel by Maia Mindel in Some Unpleasant Arithmetic:
Slavery was harmful to economic, political, and cultural institutions, and while it did contribute to Western development, it does not seem to be a determining factor.
Chinese Student to Face Criminal Charges for Voting in Michigan. Ballot Will Apparently Count by Craig Mauger and Kim Kozlowski in The Detroit News:
The UM student voter contacted the local clerk's office, asking if he could somehow get his ballot back, according to Benson's office.
The 19-year-old from China was legally present in the United States but not a citizen, which meant he couldn't legally cast a ballot, according to information from the Michigan Secretary of State's office.
Two Years In, Elon Musk’s X Is a Fascinating Failure by Oliver Bateman in UnHerd:
It’s too culturally significant to die, yet too toxic to thrive financially. For the foreseeable future, expect X to continue its precarious and provocative existence as the internet’s last and perhaps only genuine public square.
X stands as social media’s most fascinating ongoing failure — a platform that succeeded in becoming exactly what its owner envisioned while haemorrhaging money in the process.
Is Tolerance Still a Virtue? by Jake Meador in Plough:
To reject tolerance is to accept the lie that our common life with our neighbors is really only about politics and not about the host of other good things we share.
On the Pursuit of Status by Alastair Roberts in Theopolis:
If you attain to the top of the hierarchy, it is highly likely that, in the pursuit, you will have narrowed yourself to the point that you have lost any deep sense you might formerly have had of a higher end that your status could serve.
Why Individualism Fails to Create Individuals by Matthew B. Crawford in The Hedgehog Review:
Real independence of mind can be won only by a sustained process of submission to authority. There is a related paradox: A democratic society, precisely because it requires such independence of thought if it is to be something other than mob rule, requires education conducted with an aristocratic ethos.
Essay
“Judgments of God?” in the 2024 United States Presidential Elections
Early in 2020, I published a 2017 paper in the Brazilian theological journal Kerygma arguing that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was a divine judgment that exposed the hypocrisy of the right, center, and left of American politics. I found that this judgment was not a national catastrophe but rather one that had sifted Americans by how we responded to the immorality that had resulted in our preferred factions acting as if God does not intervene in human history.
Then, four years ago to the day of this writing, I published an article in the now sadly defunct Compass Magazine assessing how well my providential interpretation had held up over the intervening years. I found that only the center seemed chastened, while the right and left had plunged even further into their hypocritical immorality.
In the sketch that follows, I will bring my thesis up to date without going into detail and without rehearsing arguments I made in my previous publications. So I suggest that you familiarize yourself with them if you've not done so already.
The Left
Musa Al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke came out this year, and he nails down my thesis about the hypocrisy of the left better than I ever could. I recommend this review in Front Porch Republic. It is also possible that we have passed so-called "peak woke," but all this means is that the left's agenda has become institutionalized to the extent that it is no longer noteworthy or cutting-edge.
The Center
The hypocrisy of the center was exposed in the first presidential debate when it became obvious that the faction of competence was attempting to foist a manifestly incompetent incumbent on the nation. At least the centrists in the press did not let the centrists in the Democratic White House get away with Jill Biden's turn as Edith Wilson. Then, the champions of democracy did not allow an open primary to select Joe Biden's replacement, selected by Mr. Biden himself, not for her competence, much less her character, but for her identity. The Hillary Clinton-esque ideological makeover Democratic party operatives have given Kamala Harris, leaves no doubt that the center is not so chastened after all.
The Right
The surprising events of January 6 came close to turning this sifting judgment into a national catastrophe, but America retained its form of government under constitutional procedure despite Donald Trump breaking with the US tradition of peaceful transfer of presidential power begun by George Washington. With prominent Republican figures endorsing his opponent and his former chief of staff calling him, in broad terms, "a fascist," the putative defenders of freedom continue to stand condemned of hypocrisy by their own side's admission.
Providence
Despite all his legal woes, including a felony conviction, and several attempts on his life, including a grazed ear, Mr. Trump is neck and neck in the polls with Mrs. Harris. Even unbelievers are astonished at how many close calls he has avoided. This surprise is consistent with the divine judgment thesis because God does not allow his judgments to be preempted by human efforts.
The Stakes
As I see it, regardless of who is elected, we will have a president who governs as if God doesn't intervene in human history and, therefore, our immoral hypocrisy is justified because it's all up to us. Mrs. Harris will continue to offer symbolic victories to minority groups while ensuring that the elites are secure in their positions of power regardless of the indignities that this requires everyone else to suffer, and she will be open to whatever pragmatic compromises are necessary to get her a second term. Under a Harris presidency, the sifting will likely continue. On the other hand, a second Trump term is unlikely to be like his first because the plans are in place to remove those who restrained his unconstitutional impulses. If he is elected, we may experience the national catastrophe of having our democratic republic replaced by the majoritarian White, Christian nationalism that many warned about eight years ago.
Conclusion
The purpose of a divine sifting judgment is not to cause us to pursue our preferred outcomes in the world but to test our characters to see whether our interpretation of our situation aligns with loyalty to God or has been compromised by other loyalties. How you choose to vote (or abstain from voting) will show whether your hope is in a political faction that represents your identity attaining worldly power for you and yours or whether your hope is the God who intervenes in human history and will eventually return to destroy America for its sins and set up his eternal kingdom.
Music
‘Cause we fly, we fly, to the mountain top
We climb, we climb, to the skies above
We sail, we sail, to the stars and up
But we can't get high, high enough
I will sing for the meek
For those who pray with their very lives for peace
Though they're in chains for a higher call
Their mourning will change into laughter when the nations fall
Fragment
On US Politics and the Final Crisis in Adventist Perspective
I don't think the greater danger in the final crisis comes from left or right but from their union. They are both seeking to centralize power which will destroy religious liberty (image to the beast). I believe that in the final crisis they will realize they have more to gain by working together and look for another enemy to unite them (the remnant). Bettina Krause's latest article made me realize that the right is down with dictatorship and the left is down totalitarianism, and those two go together with each other better than they do with democracy.
It seems to me that there is a reverse symmetry, a mirror image, if you will, between the illiberal right and the left where the right has to deceive people about the egalitarian nature of God's kingdom in order to impose the exclusive claims of God on society, and the left has to deceive people about the exclusive claims of God in order to impose the egalitarian nature of God's kingdom on society. Or, as one commentator put it, the one wants the King without the Kingdom, and the other wants the Kingdom without the King. I would only add that both have to do away with religious liberty in the dissenting Protestant tradition to get what they want.
Regarding Ellen White's comments about the church leading out in the final crisis, I think most everyone, including those most closely involved, fails to appreciate that contemporary progressive American civil society is the the left wing of the American Protestantism, the most apostate of all, if you will, and the final form of the ecumenical Protestant churches. Their radically egalitarian vision for society is historically, socially, and morally dependent on Christianity for its existence. I'm heavily influenced by David Hollinger (After Cloven Tongues of Fire) and Tom Holland (Dominion) in this assessment of the profoundly Christian nature of contemporary left-wing politics that present as godless (Rene Girard made similar observations). Only a minority of those involved are actually atheist, and most retain versions of prayer, devotion, worship, and regard for Jesus. It looks different there than it does in traditional churches, but so do Protestant and Catholic worship. The American left may be post-Christian, but they are still Christian even if their radical egalitarianism means they have to deceive themselves (and, thereby, also others) about that fact.
There are left and right wing versions of spiritualism/paganism/witchcraft, Protestantism, and Catholicism in America right now. They are of roughly equal power and are aligned against each other. I believe a crisis of sufficient magnitude will inspire them all to unite against another perceived threat in order to bring about the end times. But I do believe that in the current election, those three spiritual forces—spiritualism, Protestantism, and Catholicism—are remarkably syncretized in the religious influences working on Donald Trump.
Sermon
Depression of Spirit (Mental Health Series: Depression)