My job required me to spend a considerable amount of time working with many congressional staff members on a wide variety of issues throughout my career.  I had the opportunity of observing hundreds of our national leaders as they dealt with both the minutia and the weighty matters of government. As a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe the Constitution is a divinely inspired document and I felt privileged to be part of the inner workings of our national government under that Constitution. In that capacity, I had opportunities to work with Mr. Biden’s staff on official business and would occasionally be in a meeting or a hearing where Mr. Biden was present and functioning in his official capacity.  

My impression of Mr. Biden has always been a positive one. One of the things I like best about him is that he is a man of faith. He has had some significant challenges in his life that would challenge anyone’s faith but he has remained steadfast in his Roman Catholic beliefs.  

As I am sure most people are aware, Mr. Biden lost his first wife Neilia and his Daughter Naomi (“Amy”) in a car accident in December of 1972 while they were out Christmas shopping.  (His two other sons were also in the car and were injured, but their injuries were not life-threatening.) Also, in 2015 his son Joseph Biden Jr. (Beau) died of brain cancer.  These experiences obviously had a huge impact on Mr. Biden.  After his wife’s car accident, he was planning to resign from the Senate to be able to be closer to his children, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield convinced him to stay.  He stayed, but only on the condition that he could commute 90 minutes each way by train back and forth to his home in Delaware every day to be able to be with his children. He did this for 36 years.

I remember times when we would be in a meeting or even in a hearing and Mr. Biden would get up and leave because he wanted to be at home every night to tuck in his children.  It always impressed me that he would put his family ahead of everything else, including himself.  It also impressed me that in spite of these tragedies he continued in his faith in God.   

As I observed Mr. Biden interact with others he always behaved respectfully; with empathy, caring, and concern.  I also saw occasions when he would try to calm contention and be a peacemaker.  In addition, when we had to report facts that were not helpful to his political agenda, he welcomed them, thanked us, and was very gracious about the work that was done.  I always found him to be honest, of high integrity, and interested in the truth unvarnished.  He seemed to be genuinely more concerned about the people he represented than he was about himself.  As my job required me to interact with many politicians, I found Mr. Biden’s character quite refreshing.      

Knowing something of the forces that come to bear in national politics, I am all the more motivated to accept President Ballard’s plea in the recent October General Conference, “No matter how you pray or to whom you pray, please exercise your faith—whatever your faith may be—and pray for your country and for your national leaders.” Continuing he said, “This is not about politics or policy. This is about peace and the healing that can come to individual souls as well as to the soul of countries …” 

Regardless of our political leanings, I believe we should all pray that President Biden will be inspired and motivated to lead this country in the righteousness of traditional moral values.  

The post What A Latter-day Saint Learned about Mr. Joe Biden Through Decades of Working on Capitol Hill appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

It’s that time again where candidates are trying to get your support to vote their way. Rallies, stump speeches, texts, emails, mailers, billboards, and so much more are bombarding you daily, especially in this final week. This article is from the perspective of a Libertarian and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My experience and thoughts are my own, and though I reference the gospel, nothing I say should be taken “as gospel.” While I will use my own doctrinal understanding to give an LDS case for supporting Jo Jorgensen, it is clearly not to be taken as an official church stance.

First, we must look at the Libertarian Party at its most basic principles. As Libertarians, we seek a world of peace and liberty. Further, we advocate for personal responsibility. Liberty and responsibility always go hand in hand. While we absolutely believe in agency and free will, the individual is responsible for the consequences that result from every choice. This also means that your rights end where another person’s begin. All this falls under what we call the non-aggression principle, which states that the only legitimate use of force is in the defense of self, family, and those unable to defend themselves. 

Now that we have established the base principles, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Jo Jorgensen, our nominee for President of the United States. I will discuss her platform and how it aligns with the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ.

First, it should be noted that Dr. Jorgensen holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology as well as an MBA. Using this education, she built a successful consulting business from the ground up. She was also the Vice Presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 1996 and has continually held positions in other campaigns for public office that her platform supports. Her qualifications speak for themselves. She’s principled, able, and consistent.

Moving on to her platform, she definitely has a theme: agency. More choices, open markets, less government to dictate how to live.

Pandemic response  

One thing on everyone’s mind lately has been what we do to address COVID-19 and future pandemics that may arise. Dr. Jorgensen believes…

1. Testing.  Government agencies should not put in place hurdles and red tape for getting tested. One of the biggest failures was the CDC and FDA not approving testing quickly enough to be able to trace where problems existed. It took a doctor breaking the law to discover community spread in Washington, where the first cases sprung up. 
2. Shut-downs. We shouldn’t have shut down the economy. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what is essential, because all jobs are essential to putting food on the table. Further, lockdowns caused increases in depression, suicide, and medical problems because many medical services were deemed nonessential. 

It was Elder Dallin Oaks who said in 2010, “Latter-day Saints believe in applying the best available scientific knowledge and techniques. We use nutrition, exercise, and other practices to preserve health, and we enlist the help of healing practitioners, such as physicians and surgeons, to restore health.” 

Unfortunately, we did not apply the best scientific knowledge and medical guidance in reference to locking down. The “cure” ended up worse than the disease. 

3. Dr. Jorgensen believes in the right to try, where you and your doctor decide the best course of treatment. When President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19, he was given access to non-approved FDA treatments not available to the general public. These hurdles should not exist between the doctor and patient. Everyone should be able to access treatment, especially with life-threatening illnesses. 

Criminal justice reform 

Another big issue is the need for criminal justice reform, as we have seen due to many incidents that arose during 2020 and go back decades. Dr. Jorgensen is the only candidate with a plan to address needed reform that goes beyond lip service.

1. Ending qualified immunity.  Unfortunately, when a prison guard or police officer crosses the line, the individual officer is protected from liability because of qualified immunity. In many cases, officers are not held accountable because no specific law exists applying to law enforcement, even if a law exists for everyone else. So they are given a pass even though life, liberty, and/or property were destroyed or threatened by the officer, in many cases without justifiable cause. 

In one of our sacred books of scripture, it reads 

We believe that the commission of a crime should be punished according to the nature of the offense; that murder, treason, robbery, theft, and the breach of the general peace, in all respects, should be punished according to their criminality and their tendency to evil among men, by the laws of that government in which the offense is committed; and for the public peace and tranquility all men should step forward and use their ability in bringing offenders against good laws to punishment.

2. Ending the war on drugs: Dr. Jorgensen believes that the criminal penalties associated with possession and personal use of illicit substances should cease. In the majority of cases, these individuals have not caused harm to anyone nor their property. When a person has not harmed someone else, they should not be sent to prison. Only when they aggress against another person are they guilty of a crime.

While doctrinally, we as church members follow the Word of Wisdom, we cannot justify the violation of another person’s agency if no life, liberty, or property was harmed. All of us were given free will. Our job as members is to preach the Gospel, not enforce the Gospel through laws.

3. Ending mandatory minimum sentences. Jo Jorgensen’s policy is to end mandatory minimums at the federal level while advocating states follow suit. These mandatory sentences bind a judge’s hands, making it impossible for them to weigh circumstances and facts surrounding the case. Is there no difference between stealing a luxury car and stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child? Judges should have more discretion to determine whether punishment or restitution would be warranted. 

As the prophet Alma teaches his son, “See that you are merciful unto your brethren; deal justly, judge righteously, and do good continually.”

Debt and spending 

Government debt and spending, as well as the economy, are probably among the biggest issues on everyone’s mind when measuring a candidate. There is far too much to cover in a quick article, so we’ll focus on a few points.

1. Deficit spending. Year after year, the federal government spends far more than it brings in revenue. We have seen the debt rise to over $27 trillion as a result, most of it in the last 15 years. Dr. Jorgensen will veto spending above revenue. It means we will have to look at real cuts to the way we spend. She will provide a balanced budget to Congress. 

In the Old Testament, the Psalmist writes, “The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth.”

We have been counseled by our Prophets to ensure we don’t incur debt, and when we must (like for a home mortgage), it is modest and reasonable. Why do we hold government to a different standard than we would our own family?

2. Jobs. The easiest way to have a massive amount of job creation is to get the government out of the way. While some common-sense regulations exist like not dumping chemicals into the water supply, there are a great many that keep new entrepreneurs from entering the market because they cannot afford lawyers to navigate every little regulation that exists, most lobbied for by big businesses to keep out competition. 

Dr. Jorgensen is the one who will work to cut needless barriers so we can all reach greater prosperity. We believe in self-sufficiency, and removing many hurdles will help us more easily get there.

While there are certainly more issues available to discuss, we could write an entire book to cover them all. I encourage you, the reader, to check out Dr. Jo Jorgensen at www.jo20.com. As a Libertarian, I also recommend looking into down-ballot races too. Be sure you perform your due diligence.

The post Unhappy with Your Options? Vote Libertarian appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Many people of faith are supporting Trump and many others are supporting Biden.  Trump supporters criticize Biden and Biden’s supporters criticize Trump.  They are both correct to do so. 

But the real issue is not whether Biden is bipartisan and Trump is divisive.  The issue is which is best for our country; which will defend our individual freedoms; and consequently which is deserving of our vote.

The clear answer is that neither is deserving of your vote.  The reason neither is deserving is that we cannot sustain our country and our moral God-given rights by choosing the least bad of the two major party candidates each election.  Americans have elected either a Republican or a Democrat for one hundred and seventy years.   It is time we stopped electing Republicans who have given our prosperity to other countries and Democrats who have abandoned our moral principles. 

Bipartisanship is defined as the cooperation of two political parties.  But the major two parties, i.e. Republican and Democrat, will not stop the continuing deterioration of America, either morally or otherwise.  The reason is that neither of these parties represents the best interest of Americans nor the moral fiber that made our country great.   Their party platforms are instead at odds with what made America the envy of the world.

America became great because our Founders unleashed individuals from the chains of government control and interference.  The Founders defined and limited what the government would be empowered to do.  The Constitution was the document they drafted to keep Americans free of government abuse and to limit government power.

Our Founders were not just right; they were proven right as relying on the strength of this document America became the greatest country on earth.   Americans became the most prosperous, most free, most educated, and most envied human beings on the planet.

We can choose between Biden and Trump and continue down the path we have followed for decades.  We can continue to kill nearly a million unborn people each year.   We can continue to police the world.   We can continue down the path towards bankruptcy. We can ignore what is evident to us all, which is that America is failing.  Or we can return to the Constitution and to the morals that made America great.

People of faith should carefully consider voting for and on the basis of their higher principles.   Neither Biden nor Trump represents those principles.  There is only one political party that has a platform that has proven it is the right platform and that lives up to the principles of Judeo-Christian faith. It is the Constitution Party. 

I would encourage members of your church to vote for me, Don Blankenship.  As such, I will strive to follow the Constitution as my guide for decision making.   It is that simple.  Politics should have no role in government decisions.   It is time to choose right over wrong and the interests of our country over the interests of a political party.

The post Unhappy with Your Options? Vote Constitution Party appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

To understand my concern, we need to talk about something that Givens does not discuss in detail in his article, namely the administrative state and its impact on the rule of law. 

When I use the term liberalism, I am using it as Givens defines it here:

So liberalism, then, is both a set of ideals to which we aspire and a set of institutions and norms intended to implement, at least partially, those ideals. The ideals are pluralism and tolerance, the dream that different people can live together in peace despite their differences. The institutions and norms to instantiate this dream (even imperfectly) include an emphasis on rule of law (especially Constitutional law) that privileges process over outcomes, along with specific civil liberties that are enshrined in both law and custom, and finally an accompanying culture that regards peaceful disagreement and voluntary rule-following as civic virtues.

Givens describes several very important facets of liberalism: 

1. Pluralism and tolerance 
2. The rule of law and process over outcomes
3. The protection of civil liberties 
4. A culture of peaceful disagreement and voluntary rule-following 

Givens gives attention to the first, third, and fourth of these items, but gives far less attention to the rule of law and the importance of impartial procedure as the protector of the liberal order. 

In a liberal constitutional democracy, there is a central core of protected rights and liberties. These are held inviolable and can only be infringed upon for compelling reasons. Outside of that core, there are a variety of rights and interests that are subject to ordinary lawmaking and regulation.  This is the arena and realm of politics. 

We all instinctively understand that the protection of rights and liberties is vital to the maintenance of the liberal order. If rights and liberties are subject to the whims of politics, then the liberal order quickly decays because neither side is willing to place core rights for consideration at the ballot box.

But it is perhaps less clearly understood how the rule of law and fair procedure is necessary for the perpetuation of the liberal order. In order to maintain the liberal order, it is vital that the deck is not stacked systematically in favor of either the left or the right, such that either side could expect its positions to actually be enacted into law if backed by sufficient popular will. In other words, it is vital that elections actually have consequences. One of the greatest forces pushing towards illiberalism is a feeling that the ordinary political process is futile or utterly pointless.

We are all aware of the logjam in the political process in the United States which has meant that the legislature has been completely incapable of actually legislating. Congress has shifted hands with increasing regularity in recent years, with very little legislative consequence. 

So what happens in the absence of an effective legislative branch? What fills in the gaps when the legislature is unwilling or unable to act? 

My argument is that through the rise of the administrative state the left has seized control of the levers of power in a largely illiberal fashion. It has taken advantage of the logjam in the legislative branch to push through a dramatic and very difficult to reverse expansion of the realm of government power and control. And unfortunately, this illiberal tendency is likely to only expand under a Biden administration. 

Note that I am not talking about some kind of sinister or subversive deep state. I am merely talking about the ordinary workings of administrative agencies. 

To give a few examples, during the Obama administration the executive branch through rulemaking or through even more informal policies attempted to 1) Impose a mandate that religious institutions such as the Little Sisters of the Poor provide contraception; 2) Protect DREAMERS and their families from deportation even though Congress refused to act; 3) Eliminate due process protections for students accused of sexual assault through a dear colleague letter; 4) Impose anti-Discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ individuals through an expansive reading of Title VII; 5) dramatically expand the Clean Water Act to extend federal jurisdiction over even puddles or small streams found on private property. This is a small sample and I could come up with many other examples. 

Some of these policies are illiberal because they infringe upon civil liberties. But all are fundamentally illiberal because the fundamental policy decisions were made by unelected bureaucrats rather than representative bodies. 

By and large, the right has either not been able or willing to wield the formal levers of the administrative state quite as effectively. Indeed, most of the Trump administration’s administrative actions have been largely defensive. The administration has tried, with middling success, to undo these previous actions. For instance, the administration effectively eliminated the contraceptive mandate for religious institutions but was forced to fight all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Modest rollbacks of the Clean Water Act are ensnared in legal battles and will be for probably another couple of years. Thus far at least, the Trump administration’s administrative efforts have been rather meek and modest.

For someone concerned about growing illiberalism in the administrative state this election presents a unique dilemma. As Givens’ post explains, Trump has a fundamentally illiberal disposition regarding these rule of law issues. He frequently attempts to announce dramatic policy shifts via tweets. Recently, for instance, a controversy erupted over whether Trump’s tweets had the result of declassifying information. Even more alarmingly, he has attempted to weaponize the DOJ and even the foreign policy establishment for political ends—both of which are dangerous and illiberal violations of the rule of law. 

And yet at the same time, there are many individuals in the Trump administration who are committed to rolling back the illiberal powers of the administrative state. Mick Mulvaney as head of OMB, in particular, has been quite aggressive in pushing agencies to 1) Propose the elimination of rules at the same rate as they propose new rules; 2) Stop relying on informal documents such as guidance letters; 3) Abstain from making aggressive claims of deference; 4) Closely follow the Congressional Review and send rules to Congress for review or approval. This rollback is fundamentally liberal in that it helps to ensure that only those laws that are enacted through an accountable process are enforced publicly.  Some of these changes may be largely symbolic. But they are meaningful, especially if given another 4 years.

One additional wrinkle. It is entirely possible that this more liberal administrative approach might change in a second Trump term if he is emboldened by reelection. There are some areas where the Trump administration has been aggressively illiberal in its policymaking approach. In particular, in the realm of immigration law, the Trump administration has adopted quite radical shifts of immigration policy through the levers of the administrative state—from the family separation policy to changing the public charge rule to make it more difficult for those who might need to rely on public assistance to qualify for residency or citizenship. This illiberalism might spread to other federal agencies in a second term.

But my concern over such a shift is lessened by the fact that these same policies will be evaluated by Trump’s judicial nominees who are fundamentally committed to the rule of law and to the liberal procedural order. As Givens points out, Trump picks tend to be skeptical of executive overreach and willing to enforce the procedural safeguards that protect the rule of law from illiberal policymaking. 

Joe Biden and his potential administration are mirror opposites of Trump and his administration. Biden himself is temperamentally more liberal or restrained on these issues. On the campaign trail, he has on occasion responded to questions by explaining that certain actions could not be done by executive action. Biden as President seems unlikely to try to make policy via tweet. He is unlikely to try to direct the DOJ to go after his rivals. By and large, he is likely to be more conservative and restrained than his predecessors in his own personal use of executive prerogatives. 

On the other hand, his administration is likely to continue or even further the trends of the Obama administration. Many of the policy agenda items that Biden has proposed lend themselves to aggressive administrative action. For instance, Biden proposes requiring that religious adoption agencies conduct home studies for and place children with LGBTQ+ couples. This could be done by regulation or through more informal means such as executive order or guidance letter. A Biden administration may attempt to take dramatic action on a whole host of topics from gun control to civil rights. This illiberalism of process is one of my biggest concerns with a Biden administration. His selection of Senator Kamala Harris who was during the 2020 primary season one of the biggest proponents of unilateral executive action only amplified my concern. And Biden’s judicial nominees are far less likely to be concerned about the procedural protections which safeguard the liberal order.  

This is the dilemma that this #nevertrump and #alwaysliberalism voter faces with this upcoming election. Do I vote for the reelection of the least “liberal” President of our lifetime who has incidentally had one of the more “liberal” administrations from the perspective of procedural safeguards and the rule of law, or do I vote for the President who is temperamentally far more “liberal” but likely to preside over a deeply “illiberal” administration? I don’t know what the right choice is, but either outcome seems tragic.

***

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the views of his or her employer, Public Square Magazine, or its sponsors.

The post An Agonizing Choice for Lovers of Liberalism appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

As fate would have it, one of our editors, Jacob, a conservative Latter-day Saint man, has “fallen in” with two self-identified Marxists—who he considers dear friends. These are men Jacob respects and deeply cares about, even if their disagreements are still serious and substantial.  

Given the extent to which fears of alleged “Marxist” advancements on the left play a role in this consequential election, we wanted to inquire directly into how this looks from the perspective of those who in some way actually identify as Marxists.  In what follows, we ask direct questions of Arthur and Phil about a range of pressing areas, from Joe Biden to Black Lives Matters—as well as the extent of overlap between Latter-day Saint communitarian teachings and Marx’s own vision. As you will see, Phil and Arthur don’t always agree on everything, thus revealing that there are important ideological disagreements among leftists, just as there are among conservatives. 

Would you agree that the Democratic party has swung much closer to leftist, Marxist aspirations in recent years?  

Arthur:  Yes and No.  First, I’d like to say that I think the Democratic Party is designed to be a place where genuine leftist ideas go to die or be co-opted (just as I think the Republican Party is designed to be a place where genuinely libertarian ideas go to die or be co-opted).  So, even ideas that lean “left” are distorted by the Democratic Party so as to keep the crony capitalist “center” in power.  But, yes, the Democratic Party is certainly swinging in the direction of what one might call “statist socialism.”  But what is almost never recognized in our American conversation is how much they depart from Marx’s vision of socialism or “economic democracy” (i.e. democratic principles extended beyond the political sphere out into the economic sphere of life) which actually aims at a condition of society in which the State has “withered away.” This robust and essentially State-less civil society is what Marx called “communism”—a society in which people have gradually learned to live more cooperatively and (please hear this, my conservative friends) more responsibly, thereby having less (or even no) need for a “State,” as such.  The Democrats do not seem to have on their agenda (or even on their radar!) this central Marxist goal of eventually obviating (or at least lessening) the need for a State in which top-down, centralized “coercion” plays a role.  They seem, rather, to have “more (and bigger) government” on their agenda, which I think any Marxist (and conservative alike) should find alarming.  Marxism without the Marxist goal (however unrealizable that goal may or may not be) of the withering away of the State (with its inevitable powers of coercion) is, in my view, dangerous.  The question asked of every socialist policy should be:  how does this advance the self-emancipation of the working class;  (and again, please hear this, my conservative friends) how does this advance the mature taking of responsibility for ownership of the means of life?

I know how sad it makes many religious people when they are misquoted and misinterpreted, when it comes to what the Bible means, etc.  What I’m suggesting is that the same kind of distortion and misapplication of original principles is happening here.  For instance, people may be surprised to hear what Marx said about using government to impose some sort of “order” from above:  

“We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality.  We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership… [Let us put] our hands to work in order to establish a democratic state wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas …“

Phil: To me, the idea that the Democratic party is “leftist” is preposterous. I find even more preposterous the idea that it’s Marxist. The fact that so many people think these things is an indicator of the success Republican politicians have had in their efforts to brand their political opponents as in favor of things that they are not in favor of and to brand them as “unAmerican.” This success is also shown in the fact that many Americans think that “leftist” means “in favor of violence,” wishing to overthrow the government, etc. These ideas are false, plain and simple. Alas, this is a time when facts matter little; instead what matters is what feels good and/or feels righteous. What matters also is what sells and what gets one a following. Thus: much of what people believe, and then share with each other as true, is simply made-up. 

 This is ironic, in that, while many conservatives believe (as I believe) that truth is real and important, they’re nonetheless unfortunately caught up in the same media environment and the associated relativism of prioritizing what feels good and feels right. Like all of us, they’re tempted by the desire to feel that they are part of a righteous group. By believing that violent evil-doers are on the march, they get to be in a war of righteousness against them. By deciding that all that is good is under attack by evil-doers, they get to be proud of their perseverance against them. If any facts arise that seem to contradict these beliefs (e.g. the observation that President Obama consistently pursued moderate, middle-of-the-road economic policies that did not challenge big companies), that problem can be solved by deciding that those “facts” were planted by the “leftist media”; thus there is no need to investigate.  

Dear conservatives: I am a leftist, and I believe in truth, family, love, commitment, and personal responsibility. I do not believe in violence. I oppose relativism. I oppose a government take-over of private enterprise. And I do not hate rich people, or conservatives, or the police. Granted, my idea of family is not conservative when it comes to family structure (e.g. who gets married to whom). Also granted, my idea about personal responsibility includes the idea that being a good person in one’s own private life is not enough to solve our larger social problems, to take care of each other, or to create and maintain justice. We also need to act together through government in a variety of ways, both by means of rules and regulations and by means of support for economic structures that allow the economy to work for everybody. Nonetheless, we have much in common. We would discover that if we actually talked to each other, in good faith and at length, about family, truth, love, commitment, or responsibility.  

One of the considerable fears of people who might otherwise vote for Biden over President Trump is that—quite despite his center-left leanings—he would end up being a “puppet” for a very different set of priorities.  To what extent is it fair to see former Vice President Biden as a “Trojan Horse” for a more radical leftist agenda? 

Phil: Why not base what you think about a person on what they’ve said and done throughout their lives? Using that method, one can only conclude that Biden is not a leftist. In fact, it’s not even close (unfortunately). Granted, there’s much that I admire about Biden. I think he’s a decent, good-hearted person. Also, I agree with some of his policy commitments and what I see in his policy history. Nonetheless, to me, his political stance and record put him squarely in the American political center. Sure, he’ll probably pursue some policies that will make the economy a bit fairer. Thus I’ll feel fine when I vote for him. There is, however, no reason to believe that he’ll pursue the policies that I believe are needed to make the economy truly fair.  

Anyway, why frame the conversation in this way? What not ask instead: How come the conservatives who decry the left agenda don’t take the time to specify what is in it? And why don’t they then offer evidence to support those claims? I think it’s because those conservatives (and others) are more concerned with believing that there’s a demon menace afoot: a violent, immoral, unAmerican group of evil-doers. Why? I think it’s because that belief provides a way to make sense of the feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty they’re plagued with and provides a thing to rally against. Specifically, I think it offers a feeling of power, power that one has because one knows something that not everyone knows (as in “I’m not helpless; I know the real truth! They can’t fool me!”). And let’s face it, most people have little power over many aspects of their lives (please know that when I say “most people” I’m referring to both white people and people of color). 

In light of all this, the idea of a “Trojan Horse” can be seen as a clever way to sidestep questions about whether or not the Democratic Party even has a “leftist agenda” because it suggests that the answers are so secret that they can’t be discovered! 

Arthur: Unlike Phil, I certainly do not plan on voting for Biden (we Marxists are anything but a monolithic voting block!).  I won’t be voting for Trump, either. From (what I would call) the actual left, Biden is seen as anything but a Trojan Horse for leftist politics.  He is seen, rather, more as a Wall Street shill…a sellout…a traitor to leftist ideals.  He is a centrist (and that is not a good thing to be, in my view).  It is precisely in the center where the danger lies, in my opinion.  In the center is where the kind of crony capitalist compromises are made which feed into the hands of both big business and big government (primarily the interests of the “military-industrial complex”).  Generally, the farther left you are, the more you are in favor of decentralized political power (more “people power”) and a widening of the ownership of the means of life (the means of production), which, interestingly enough, President Reagan himself also saw as a key to securing more liberty for more people.  And the farther left you go, the more you are against militaristic imperialism (which is where some libertarians share common ground with us Marxists).  So, I wish that Biden (Mr. Iraq War) were a Trojan Horse for a more radical left agenda!  To me, he is a “no-good imperialist” and nothing but the ever-so-slightly left(ish) wing of the crony capitalist Extreme Center (as was Obama).  

It has often been claimed in recent months that Black Lives Matters reflects Marxist aspirations—particularly in the rationalization of property destruction and violence.  To what extent would you say this is true and fair—versus not?  

Arthur:   Property destruction and violence are not Marxist aspirations.  Period.
The Marxist aspiration is to democratize and widen the ownership of property. Not destroy it.

I heard an interview in which one of the founders of BLM says that she is a “trained Marxist.” I don’t really know what being a “trained Marxist” means to her.  In context (see here for the clip and here for the complete interview and a transcript), it sounds to me like she, in a very self-reflective and thoughtful tone, was seeking to address what the interviewer called a “loving critique from an elder of the struggle” that perhaps the BLM movement might “fizzle out” due to a potential “lack of ideological direction.”  So it appears she is trying to defend herself from people who think she may not be sufficiently “ideological”!  She doesn’t strike me as an ideological fanatic, but, rather, a serious activist, with sound ideological “training” (and not just in Marxism).   

The interaction between Marxism (which itself can be understood differently by different people, and by different generations—a point she herself makes) and “identity politics” is a complex (and often fraught) one.  So there is no simple answer to what her being a “trained Marxist” means to her, and how that shows up in her activism. I think it’s worth hearing her in her own words, so please listen to the interview, but at least read the “Marxist” portion (in context!), which I have copied here:

BALL: … how do you respond to that particular critique? Again, a loving critique from an elder of the struggle….that a more clear ideological structuring might be of some value here. ….
CULLORS: I think that the criticism is helpful…..I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. …. What I do think, though, is folks–especially folks who have been trained in a particular way want to hear certain things from us, that we’re not sort of framing it in the same ways that maybe another generation….has. But I think it’s important that people know that the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t just live online, although there’s many people who utilize it online. We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame. But I argue that it’s not. 

I would also urge my conservative friends who, almost without exception, revere our own American Revolution, to remember that that revolution involved the destruction of private property (the Boston Tea Party), the confiscation of loyalist property,  violent protests against State violence (the Boston Massacre), and violent personal attacks on people who defended the status quo (tarring & feathering).   Social change is, as a matter of simple historical fact, rarely peaceful.  It never fails to astound me just how often people who most vocally condemn so-called “leftist” violence tend to overlook, whitewash or even praise violence committed by so-called “patriots” and by the American imperialist empire itself.

Phil: I honestly believe, Jacob, that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is not a Marxist movement. Certainly, some people in the movement are Marxists in one way or another, but I have yet to see (admittedly, I do not see everything!) any signs being held up at BLM rallies saying “we demand worker-owned businesses!”, or “we demand an end to private property!” Neither have I found anything on the BLM website calling for radical reductions in economic inequality or for laws that would significantly reduce corporate power.

Also, please realize that, as far as I can tell, the BLM movement is not a centrally controlled organization that is run by some small group of people so much as it is an idea and a rallying cry that resonated with many and that then took off. 

That idea is, to my light, simple: “Black Lives Matter” means—guess what—that black lives matter! It does not mean that police lives don’t matter. Also, those words— “Black Lives Matter”—speak to, and come from, the hearts of people whose experiences (as well as the experiences of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.) have persuaded them that many of those who “protect” their communities don’t think that black lives matter, and instead automatically react to a black man with a worry that that man is angry and dangerous. To those who believe that that’s not true, I say this: fair enough. I suggest having conversations with those who think it is true.

I know you believe Jordan Peterson has misrepresented Marxism in important ways. But I have to admit finding his argument persuasive when he suggests that we’re seeing on the political left an expansion of basic Marxist class analysis that sees the poor in fundamental conflict with the rich (with wider prosperity for all dependent on fundamental revisions to the deep economic system).  When many of us hear the ceaseless talk in American society placing men in fundamental opposition to women, black in fundamental opposition to whites, gay folks in fundamental opposition to straight (and religious conservatives)—each embodying demands for fundamental, “systemic” change to make things right—it does start to feel similar in its rhetoric and tone of how we’ve interpreted Marxist aspirations in the past:  setting up a war of Us vs. Them. Is it fair to make this connection—and to attribute some of the Us vs. Them narrative specifically to Marxist ideology itself? 

Phil: What does the issue of gay vs. straight have to with the economy? It certainly has nothing to do with Marxism, which, right or wrong, is not a creeping “ideology” and instead a theory about the economy based on a study of history. Also, if you put aside Marx’s hyperbole that he used on occasion to try to motivate people to change the world, you will see that he offers an alternative to Us vs. Them. He instead blames the economic structure of private property for the divide between the classes. In other words, he does not say that owners are bad people. He instead says that most owners must, to stay in the position of owners, exploit the workers. And thus argues for the end of the class system. In other words, the revolution is to be a system revolution, not the abolition of any persons.

As for American oppositional narratives, they go way back. Many got started at moments in history when people of wealth and power thought they would lose their social position unless they divided low-paid people from each other, so they told some of them terrible things about the others. Thus in the 1600s, when the supply of indentured servants began to dwindle, rich landowners began enslaving Africans as an alternative, while also telling the exploited white sharecroppers that all their problems were caused by the supposedly “dangerous” blacks. Later, when slavery ended, a few rich white landowners fought off reconstruction in much the same way, this time through the vehicle of the Ku Klux Klan, which was their invention. 

 Arthur:  I would indeed assert, in the strongest possible terms, that Jordan Peterson does in fact profoundly misrepresent Marxist ideas.  I would urge you to examine what I have said about that elsewhere (see:  Jordan Peterson & Karl Marx). 

An “expansion of Marxist analysis”, perhaps…but stretched very far past the breaking point. One may take any principle and “abstract” and “expand” it past its original context, thereby distorting it beyond recognition.  Also, I would point out that many religious viewpoints ALSO set up an “us” vs. “them,” sometimes resulting in violence on a vast scale (the Inquisition, the Crusades, Protestant vs. Catholic wars in many European countries, the forced Christianization of New World peoples, etc.);  so seeing the world as in some way consisting of different groups with different interests is hardly unique to Marxism!

As for Marx’s class analysis, I would ask you to simply ask one question:  Is it true?  Is it true what Marx says about the division of society into a small minority who own the means of life and a large majority of those who do not?  To what degree is it true that those who own the world sometimes (perhaps even often) use violence and oppression, and means both “legal” and illegal, to maintain their position of ownership of and power over other people and their labor?  I would argue that Marx is observing a truth about the world:  ruling classes tend to use oppressive and violent means to maintain their power over other people.  There is an “us” and there is a “them” (though it never should be assumed which side any particular individual person is on;  there may be wealthy capitalists—like Engels!—genuinely desiring a more democratic ownership of the world, and there may be working-class individuals wanting nothing but personal advantage). 

For Marxists, the goal is to unite the vast majority of people in opposition to this destructive and alienating elite rule—NOT to divide the majority of people among themselves.  Those who try to divide the population are probably trying to conquer it, rather than help people liberate themselves.  That would be the antithesis of anything Marx was aiming for.  In practice, most Marxists, as well as progressives and liberals, find themselves trying to make connections and strategic alliances among oppressed classes of people…not divide them or pit them against each other.

But the sort of ‘identity politics’ we see playing out today is, in some ways, antithetical to the Marxist view of how to unite society.  Many, perhaps most, Marxists (myself included) see an over-emphasis on sexuality, gender, race, etc. as endangering what should be the focus, as Gar Alperovitz would put it in his “Pluralist Commonwealth” model, namely, changing who owns the world, and moving towards a more cooperative ownership of the means of life.  If more people owned the means of life (more small businesses, more cooperatively owned business, more local economic independence, etc.), then social power itself would be more widely spread out among people, and the social issue questions would decrease in importance.  After all, if you are not dependent on a capitalist to make a living, or on a government for an income, then you are freer to live as you would wish, and to let others live as they would wish.

Marxists are sometimes attacked by the more ‘identity politics’ sorts of folks for not being “politically correct” enough.  Nevertheless, we recognize that people have experienced powerlessness and oppression for reasons other than being “working class.”  Women, gays, blacks…these “classes” of people have, in fact, experienced centuries of discrimination and disenfranchisement (to put it mildly) because of their identities as women, gays, and blacks.  So “identity politics” is important.  But, again, as a Marxist, I think it is a mistake to over-emphasize those identities and to thereby under-emphasize what to us seems the more underlying and ultimately more important class distinction, namely, that of “capitalist owner” and “working-class employee.” 

You recently sent me an article you thought made some important points, Arthur, that advocated, among other things, that “the US empire is the single most destructive force on this planet and is corrupt from root to flower” and “the US-centralized oligarchic empire is corrupt beyond redemption and should be completely dismantled.” Do you both really believe that? (If so, you must understand how threatening an argument it is to many religious conservatives—so if you could speak to that in your answer, it would be helpful.) 

Arthur:  Why in heaven’s name would opposition to an “oligarchic empire” be threatening to a religious person?  Rome wasn’t exactly the friend of the early Christians, and EVERY empire is created and maintained by breaking at least two of the 10 commandments:  thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not murder. In my view, many Christians are infected with a kind of heresy which makes their religion at least partly a kind of nationalism rather than true Christianity, so that any challenge to anything American (including American imperialism!?!) is felt as a threat to their identity.  Some Christians strike me as believing more in “Americanism” (and the ideology of American Exceptionalism) than in Christianity.  The oligarchic empire which I truly hate and want to see destroyed is the empire which (for just one example among many)  trains dictators and terrorists at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and sends them back to their (mostly Latin American) countries to maim, torture, kill, destroy, and terrorize men, women, and children. 

I agree with Martin Luther King:  the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”—not because this country is somehow “essentially evil,” or inherently “worse” than other countries (it’s not);  but simply because it is, at this point in history, the biggest worldly power. And if you believe that Satan has been given a kind of dominion over this world (and, as a Christian myself, I do believe that), then it shouldn’t be too surprising that he would find a way to use the greatest worldly power for his purposes.  

But that doesn’t mean that I want America to be destroyed. I want the American empire to be destroyed.  If you can’t distinguish between being opposed to American imperialism (which I am) and being opposed to America itself (which I am not), then I would say you need to do some more thinking.  You also might want to read up on what some of the founding fathers had to say about the danger of empire and foreign entanglements. The United States was created by a revolution against the greatest world empire of its time.  The fact that it has in turn become a world empire only speaks to the tragedy of human history.

True, I want fundamental change here at home, too.  I want to end what I would call the “rule of capital,” in much the same spirit as Abraham Lincoln expressed it when he voiced his concerns about the liberty-imperiling “effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.”  I would say that capital has already established a kind of tyrannous control over the government.  But you can read more about my views on that here:  The Two Souls of Socialism: A Fork in the Road.

The kind of “patriotism” I ascribe to is perhaps best modeled by Howard Zinn.  And one of the best articles I have found about the dangers of American Exceptionalism can be read here:  American Exceptionalism is a Dangerous Myth.

Phil: Arthur has spoken well, so I’ll try to speak to a different aspect of what I see going on here.  Jacob, you talk a lot, both here and elsewhere, about how conservatives feel. Specifically, you ask non-conservatives to understand that conservatives feel under attack, and you suggest that leftist claims might be a major cause of these feelings. Let me ask: aren’t conservatives believers in personal responsibility? And don’t you believe that truth exists? In the name of those values, I ask that you assess Arthur’s claims about empire based on their truthfulness, not how they make you feel, I also ask that you take personal responsibility for your feelings. Many religious writings about how to live one’s life assert something also asserted both by non-religious Buddhist philosophy and by Stoicism: one’s feelings are in one’s own control. 

Fair enough, Phil.  More than taking personal responsibility for feelings, Christians are called on to turn the other cheek when attacked.  Thanks, both of you for your answers—and even for being willing to push-back on what feels unfair on the right.  Because I want to understand even more the true differences between us, let me say a little more.  Latter-day Saints believe—like many other Christians—that America is a “choice” and promised land.  Speaking of America, the prophet Lehi anciently taught that “the Lord hath covenanted this land unto…all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord” and that “that there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord.”  He also went on to warn, however, that it shall be “a land of liberty” only unto those who serve God—and that “if iniquity shall abound cursed shall be the land for their sakes.” While those who “keep his commandments” here, according to Lehi, “shall be blessed [and “shall prosper”] “upon the face of this land,” the inhabitants are warned that if they reject God and “dwindle in unbelief,” they will lose God’s support and be “scattered and smitten.”

At a time when the Saints were being driven and persecuted in the United States itself, Joseph Smith was taught in a text we believe to be inspired that “the laws and constitution of the people [in America]…I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles” The Lord elaborates on why America was established: “That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment. Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.”

I suspect some of this may sound nonsense to you both—but I quote these two sources extensively for a reason.  Because it’s deeply what many of us believe—and why some of the condemnations of America feel so threatening to us right now.  It’s also central to the message of the Book of Mormon, and its narrative of two previous civilizations in American being destroyed. I’d like to hear whether any of this feels truthful to either of you—especially (a) whether you see anything precious, or inspired about America’s foundations? And (b) whether you think America’s struggles might reflect a departure from its ideals and promise? 

Phil:  In my view, the ideas of a chosen land and a chosen people are dangerous, wherever they arise, and regardless of which group of people, nation, or land is said to be chosen. Also, it seems to be hubris. Is that it? Is it pride that makes you see criticism of America as an attack on “American civilization”? Why not see such open critique as a healthy aspect of America?

Maybe this will reassure you. In my view, much of today’s criticism of the U.S. is based on American ideals. Also, in my view, some of the ideals and ideas that were at the heart of the American revolution are great ideas that deserve to be defended. One of those ideals is rule of law. Rule of laws means—and only exists if—no person is above the law and accountability to the law is protected because it’s institutionalized, e.g., via the existence of a wall of separation between the criminal justice system and the political system, by the existence of independent courts that make decisions based on precedent and on written, publicly available laws, and by the use by those courts of written opinions that refer to the law and earlier decisions as their justification.  

Arthur:  Of COURSE I ascribe to the ideals upon which this country was founded.  To. Its. Ideals.  NOT to its actual historical actions (slavery, the conquest of North America, imperialist subversion of Latin American democracy, endless war, arms dealer to the world, etc.).  

And, for what’s it’s worth, Marx and Engels also admired much about America:

“…self-government on the American model, and this is what we too must have. How self-government is to be organized and how we can manage, without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by America….”

And there is Marx’s letter of congratulations for Abraham Lincoln to consider (a snippet of which I share here):

Sir:  We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

……

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

I don’t ascribe to any God-given uniqueness of America, however.  I (as an Orthodox-leaning Christian) consider American Exceptionalism to be an American Protestant heresy.  But, yes, I do consider the “American experiment” to represent a quantum leap in the long arc of the establishment of more democratic forms of self-rule.  However, because the America of 1776 was also a class dictatorship (only the class of white male property owners could vote), and because it did nothing to “check and balance” the economic power of that class, it has largely failed to deliver on its promises to “we the people.”  That is why I am a socialist:  I believe the next “quantum leap” has to be that of “checking and balancing” economic power, and of widening (democratizing) the ownership of productive property (which is what Marx called “the means of life”).

I think America’s “struggles” generally reflect not a deviation from the founding ideals but rather progress towards a more universal realization of the rights of citizenship which were originally restricted to the ruling class of 1776. Since that time, the ruling class has stubbornly resisted every single movement towards the democratization of power. It has been a long battle—sometimes a bloody one (the civil war being the most obviously bloody of them all, but the Labor Wars of the early 1900s, and the later civil rights struggles were also pretty darn bloody)—and each step has been “co-opted” to some extent by the powers-that-be. But, still, I see it, generally, as “progress.”  The America of 1776 is no place I would ever want to live. It was a brutal tyranny for the vast majority of the inhabitants of the land.  But, it was still a step in the right direction.

You’ve quipped over the years, Arthur, that Latter-day Saints are “secretly Marxist” given our communitarian history and future aspirations, along with teachings like this in our scripture that “it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.”

The usual response you hear among Latter-day Saints is that God’s ways prioritize agency and freedom in moving society forward—whereas some of the more secular, perhaps Marxist-oriented approaches seem to involve more coercion and force—even violently so (see “Socialism Says Must; Christianity Says Should”). 

But you’ve complicated that argument, Arthur—by arguing that Marx himself (if not all of his later self-proclaimed comrades) valued freedom and democratic deliberation while pointing out that Christian eschatology anticipates a day when Christ Himself will use violent force to fundamentally revise human society (even to the point of many people dying).  As you put it, “the main difference between us and you is that you believe Jesus will do the dirty work.”  

I find this all fascinating—and want to hear your reflections on the overlap between a Latter-day Saint view like I hold—and the views each of you hold.  

Arthur:  Well, I am both Christian and Marxist, and given the nature of these two “world views,” the former must hold a deeper and more ultimate claim on me.  After all, Marxism is nothing more than one entirely human way of understanding  (and seeking to change) certain aspects of the world, whereas traditional Christianity claims to be the entering into the world of the Creator God Himself to redeem and save it with His own (Trinitarian) Self. 

Granted, Christ’s most revolutionary command—to “love your enemies and pray for them”—is not very Marxist!  I personally think Marxist goals can be best achieved by loving one’s enemies, but I don’t know many Marxists who make that a priority.  On that score, I’d say that Christianity parts ways with Marxism…and with most human ideologies for that matter (just as it parts ways with the natural bent of virtually every single human ego on the planet!).  I don’t see the world as something to “win,” as many Marxists would.  I see changing the ownership of the world as a means of creating a more loving, cooperative world—but “losing one’s soul” to achieve that would never be worth it.  If it requires the initiation of “violent force” against any non-aggressor, then, to me, that would endanger one’s soul. Marx and his group of communists, however, claimed that they were prepared only to use violence in self-defense…not in an aggressive way;  and I think history bears out the Marxist claim that most violence has been initiated by the “reactionaries” i.e. those who want to maintain ruling class power over other people.  It should probably also be noted in this context that Marx wrote that “there are countries— such as America, England…– where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.”  

But Marx’s goal of “communism” IS very Christian. That is, to aim for a society where the organizing principle is “from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs”—”an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”—sounds pretty darn compatible with Christianity to me.

And as for “liberty,” let me reiterate that it is Marx who distinguished himself from what would later become the Stalinist sort of “communist,” saying, “we are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse… We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality.” 

And, elsewhere Marx criticizes what he calls “crude communism” (in contrast to the sort of communism he was aiming for).  This “crude communism” (he writes) “aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone.” And “wishes to eliminate talent, etc., by force.”   Marx continues:

Immediate physical possession seems to [this crude communism] the unique goal of life and existence….The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men….[W]omen become communal and common property…..Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which reestablishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are…directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level….. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum…..[It is a] regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it.  The [crude communist] community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist.

In what we have just quoted above, we see Marx excoriating a kind of “communism” which he detests—confronting the same kind of communism which his right-wing critics detest (without knowing he has beaten them to the critique they are making of the Stalinist sort of communism).

Given all this, Jacob, I would say that, at least in socio-economic terms, and even in some more spiritual aspirations, Zion is Communism, and Communism is Zion. They are not the same, obviously, but they, as you say, “overlap” in some ways.

How to get there…?  Well, I believe the power of persuasion, personal integrity, and cooperative efforts are the way forward, and that all steps in that direction should be as voluntary as possible.  However, if what I think your religion calls the “secret combinations” choose to resist, and if they use force and violence to keep their power, then I grudgingly acknowledge that Marx was right:  force (self-defensive force) is probably going to have to be used against them (e.g. putting some “banksters” in jail, as Iceland has done).  As you, I think, admit in your eschatology, it is Jesus who does the dirty work.  As a Christian, I, too, am content to leave it to Him, and believe my own fallen nature is not up to the task of the sort of righteous judgment required for any truly righteous “putting things right.”  As a Marxist, however, I acknowledge that it may be up to us to fight (literally fight) for the kind of world we truly want.  And I have yet to fully reconcile those two sides of myself…..

Phil: I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to the Latter-day Saint theology, and thus won’t presume to speak of how much overlap exists between Mormonism and Marxism. I do, however, know that there is overlap. After all, Christianity, more generally speaking, has a great deal in common with the ideals that are attributed to Jesus: the celebration of love for others and charity, the idea that all humans are of equal value and worth, that all humans are equal in their essential nature (are “made in the image of God”), and that the possession of riches by some, when others have almost nothing, is a moral problem. Thus it is not surprising that one version of Christian theology calls itself liberation theology. As I understand it, liberation theology, which has many adherents in Latin America, argues that Jesus was in a sense a socialist visionary. 

This might interest you: I reject—and consider deeply dangerous—one aspect of Marx’s theory (as I understand that theory), and in my view that aspect has much in common with some versions of Christianity. I’m happy to say that this aspect of Marxism (which some Marxists do not even see in Marx, much less endorse) can be rejected without harm to what I see as the valuable parts of Marxism, reflected in its analysis of the structural elements of capitalism, confronting the injustices that capitalism imposes on rich and poor alike, and advancing the possibility of workers being owners and self-employers. What I am unhappy to say, however, is that this dangerous part of Marx’s theory was emphasized by many who followed Marx and who helped turn Marx’s theory into “Marxism” (of which there are many versions). I’m referring to the idea that history will (through human efforts, at the right times) bring a permanent end to the contradictions and injustices of human existence, put an end to the gap between “existence and essence,” and bring a time when there will be no need to struggle for justice or live with fundamental tradeoffs. Isn’t that a secular version of the story of the second coming of Christ? Maybe. In my view, this is an idea that has led to the slaughter of millions and the “re-education” and/or imprisonment of millions of others—as people in power have pursued their visions of a better society with heartbreaking cruelty and force. 

As a final question, I’d like to ask you to share anything else you wish the people in the United States would consider more right now at this critical juncture.  If you had a soapbox, and all of America was listening, what would you say?  

Phil: I ask this of myself and recommend it to all:  When trying to understand the world, other people, and where you stand, start with the assumption that every person in the world cares for and believes in family, commitment to others, personal responsibility, and basic fairness for all.

Assume as well that the differences between political stances stem from the possession of different worldviews, not from any lack of humanity on anyone’s part. By “worldview” I mean one’s ideas about what has happened in history, about what counts as a “family,” about the sources and types of injustice that are now afoot, about the systems and/or actions that are needed to create more fairness, and about what systems are needed to enable people to successfully exercise personal responsibility.  

With these assumptions in mind: listen to others and seek to understand your opponents.

When sharing your views: make it clear to those to whom you speak that you do not question their basic humanity.

Then, see what happens!

Arthur:  Seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Together.

The post What Do Marxists Think of Joe Biden and America Right Now? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

More and more, thoughtful (mainly young) Christians say to me, “I’m pro-life, I believe in religious freedom and free speech, I think we should welcome immigrants and refugees, and I desperately want racial reconciliation. Where do I fit in?” The answer is clear. Nowhere.

French cites Tim Keller’s rejection of “package deal ethics”

For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.

Which in turn reminds us of the lessons of this most recent General Conference in the Church of Jesus Christ. First, all world cultures must be subordinated to the culture of Christ (The Culture of Christ, Elder Jackson). In America, this particularly applies to political cultures, which are the most dominant and divisive cultures today. Second, all political alliances and affiliations other than the culture of Christ must be lightly held, temporary, and disposable. This explains why President Oaks quoted Henry John Temple in his talk, Love Your Enemies: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and these interests it is our duty to follow.”

As President Oaks explained:

That is a good secular reason for following “eternal and perpetual” interests in political matters. In addition, the doctrine of the Lord’s Church teaches us another eternal interest to guide us: the teachings of our Savior, who inspired the Constitution of the United States and the basic laws of many of our countries. Loyalty to established law instead of temporary “allies” is the best way to love our adversaries and our enemies as we seek unity in diversity.

Terry’s post was not a voting guide. It was a defense of the “eternal and perpetual” interest to defend innocent human lives. Nathaniel’s post was not a voting guide. It was a defense of the “eternal and perpetual” interest to “seek unity in diversity” through adherence to the “inspired… Constitution of the United States” and the fundamental tenets of liberalism.

But who should we vote for? But what exactly should our policy on abortion be? How precisely can we weigh the competing risks and dangers of left-wing and right-wing assaults on liberalism? These are good questions, but they are also secondary questions. First and foremost we have to align ourselves with the eternal principles. If we do that, it is possible for different perspectives on the difficult, practical questions to be discussed in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation. If we do not do that, nothing will spare us from the spirit of contention sweeping through the nation. 

We can think of no clearer picture for the fate that awaits us than the one contained in the Book of Mormon, especially as elucidated by Hugh Nibley in his article, “The Prophetic Book of Mormon.” He describes a “polarizing syndrome [that] is a habit of thought and action that operates at all levels, from family feuds like Lehi’s to the battle of galaxies.”

What else is going on in the United States today, if not a “polarizing syndrome”?

The essential thing to note about this polarity, Nibley instructs us, is that the superficial polarity—the one that seems most obvious—is fake. “Like poles repel each other,” Nibley says, referring to the fact that at the end the Nephites and Lamanites who saw each other as polar opposites were, for all practical purposes, identical. The same motivations, the same hatreds, the same rationalization of escalating atrocities. Nibley saw the same danger in the Cold War, as the United States was tempted away from its idealistic position by the lure of the argument that it must respond to Soviet threats with identical methods in order to prevail. 

There is a true polarity, but it is not the one at the surface. Nibley cites Mormon:

A man being a servant of the devil cannot follow Christ; and if he follow Christ he cannot be a servant of the devil. Wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God; and that which is evil cometh of the devil; for the devil is an enemy to God, and fighteth against him continually, and inviteth and enticeth to sin, and to do that which is evil continually. But behold, that which is of God inviteth to do good continually; wherefore every good thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.

It seems simple enough, but when Nephi prophesies and says “there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil” he is referring to the same spiritual reality as Mormon and not the temporal reality that meets our eyes. There are not just two denominations, there are hundreds, just within Christianity, to say nothing of other major faith traditions. Do you think we are meant to sort them into categories? Identify the Good Guys and the Bad Guys by their outward appearances and affiliations? God forbid! 

The “two churches” Nephi saw do not correspond to temporal institutions, but to spiritual ones. There are members of the “church of the Lamb of God” in every denomination of Christianity and every major religion and atheism, too. (This in no way obviates the necessity of baptism through the proper authority into the Church of Christ.) And there are also members of “the church of the devil” in every denomination, including within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Sometimes the counsel of General Authorities can seem frustratingly vague or disconnected from the reality that confronts our eyes in social media and the news. That is because they, too, are referring to deeper spiritual truths. They call us—never more clearly than they are calling us now—to forsake the superficial polarities of the world and align ourselves to the spiritual poles.

Should you vote for Trump or Biden in this election? President Nelson did not say, and anyone who pretends that he did is in serious spiritual danger. What President Nelson did teach us was the importance of becoming of the House of Israel by living out the messages, “let God prevail” and “let God be the most important influence in [our] lives.”

We need to be clear on this and fully honest with ourselves in choosing which paradigm we’re operating within. Nibley contrasted “the ancient doctrine of the Two Ways” with the clever imitation “of the Two Parties,” where:

The former specified that there lies before every mortal, at every moment of his life, a choice between the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness; but the latter doctrine taught that righteousness consisted in belonging to one party (ours), and wickedness in belonging to the other (theirs).

We both tried to illuminate two of the fundamental principles on which we should be aligned and were disappointed when so much of the speculation became about which party we were supporting. Which tribe we belonged to. There is only one faction worth joining: it is the faction of Christ and it does not correspond perfectly to any earthly institution. This includes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the sense that not everyone who is a member of this Church is automatically a good guy and many who are not within the Church are. This kind of ecumenicism is what Elder Anderson had in mind when he said: “If the world is going to speak less of Him, who is going to speak more of Him? We are! Along with other devoted Christians!” (emphasis added).

Terryl emphasized the essential duty to speak for the defenseless, and surely the Democratic Party’s support of elective abortions even late in abortion is wholly and totally incompatible with this value. But how can we pretend that the Republican Party, with their policy of separating children from their parents—many never to be reunited—as a deliberate cruelty to deter immigration is in some conceivable way aligned with this principle? It is not.

Nathaniel emphasized the essential duty to work for liberalism as the only way to have a truly diverse and tolerant society. We have a President who seems to have little apprehension for or regard for the Constitution and who has energized a base that seeks to overthrow the Constitution’s implementation of liberalism and replace it with an ethnocentric one. Clearly, the current Republican Party is incompatible with liberalism. But how can we pretend that the Democratic Party, with its progressive elites declaring open war on our liberal heritage, is in some conceivable way aligned with this principle? It is not. 

If you are a Christian, you are homeless. This has always been true. Now it is obvious.

So how should you vote? We don’t know. We care about the outcome, but there is no obviously correct choice and we have no loyalty to any political party. We will do our best—with research and prayerful consideration—to cast our votes. All we can ask is for each of you to do the same. We will lament anyone who votes for Trump or Biden or anyone else as an expression of tribalism and condemn no one who votes for Trump or Biden or anyone else as their best effort to try and find a way to honor the culture of Christ.

This is how it begins to end: more of us will rationalize picking “sides” because we think that we need to band together to seek worldly power to win. That the ends justify the means. That tribalism is right and good or, at worst, a necessary evil. Some of those will join the illiberal left. Others will join the illiberal right. Lamanites and Nephites. A mutually antagonizing, co-dependent death-spiral of rationalization.

Others will recognize that we cannot map the “two churches” onto worldly parties or groups or institutions, and will therefore choose the culture of Christ as our fundamental, primary identity. From that point, we will be able to engage and disengage with the various worldly groups according to the dictates of our consciences and our best judgment to try and effect the greatest good. 

If you choose the first—if you invest in “sides”—you will lose before you start. You will believe that those on the wrong side are bad, and in this way, the spirit of contention will worm its way into you, maybe slowly at first or perhaps all at once, and ultimately will be lost to partisanship. Those who choose this path will be swept into the vortex of violence, just as so many have been before.

If you choose the second—if you foreground your primary affiliation as that of the culture of Christ—then you will find that even when you disagree with someone on a temporary political decision there will be no cause for rancor. You will find that tolerance and cooperation with people who share the same fundamental values but have interpreted them differently in a given situation are not your enemies. Those who choose this path will find refuge from the tribal storms, seeking out and finding true companionship in Christ and all who seek to follow His example (which will include anyone of good conscience who seeks for virtue, from any tradition or denomination or persuasion). 

We can hardly fulfill our mandate to be a light to the world, modeling the world-transforming power of Christ’s love, if we allow ourselves to be subsumed in the vitriol and factionalism of this disciple-defining moment. 

The post This Is How It Begins to End appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

There is a disconnect between the coalition of Trump supporters—including everyone from his most ardent fans to the least-enthusiastic, “lesser-of-two-evils” cynics—and the #NeverTrump conservative opposition. The disconnect stems from fundamentally different ways of thinking about the election. For the most part, Trump supporters apply conventional policy analysis. In this regard, Trump is actually in a slightly better position in 2020 than he was in 2016. His political philosophy may be as hard to pin down as ever, but now he has a track record, and in at least a few crucial ways (e.g. Supreme Court nominations) that track record is as good as any conservative could hope for from a President. 

While the #NeverTrump opposition certainly has a list of policy disagreements, any debate on those terms is doomed to acrimonious failure because over on the #NeverTrump side the policy analysis is secondary. Even their (I should say: our) complaints about Trump’s fitness for office—while sincere and important—do not get to the heart of the matter. As a #NeverTrumper myself, I have wasted a lot of my time and everyone else’s because I haven’t fully realized just how true this is. My interests in policy and character are sincere and deeply held, but ultimately the core of #NeverTrump opposition isn’t about either of those things. It’s about something more important and more abstract. It’s about the nature of the United States as a liberal nation.

What is Liberalism?

Before we go any farther, it’s essential to provide a working definition for “liberalism.” For many people, “liberalism” is associated with the Democratic Party and the American left more broadly, but the sense I have in mind is much older and less partisan. Scott Alexander, writing for his influential blog Slate Star Codex in 2017, provides a good example of the definition I am using:

People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell—the horrors of the endless seventeenth-century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable—until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.

By “making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully,” what Alexander means is that liberalism relies on a suite of formal and informal institutions (like laws and cultural assumptions that work together to support free speech in practice) that are constantly under threat from either the left or the right. In the case of free speech (just as one example), we constantly have to remind ourselves—and both sides—that the point of free speech is to enable speech we disagree with, and resist the temptation to try and suppress what our opponents want to say. This requires constant negotiation and renegotiation of both formal laws, policies, and regulations and informal social norms. Liberalism is an unstable equilibrium. It’s not self-perpetuating. Without constant support and adjustment, it will invariably give way to older forms of human government, all of which are predicated on coercive conformity and incompatible with peaceable diversity.

The most striking thing to me about Alexander’s definition is that while it seems a little irreverent and comes from an amateur, anonymous blogger it aligns quite squarely with Francis Fukuyama‘s definition in a piece for American Purpose just a couple of weeks ago: 

Classical liberalism can best be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity. Or to put it in slightly different terms, it is a system for peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. It arose in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries in response to the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation, wars that lasted for 150 years and killed major portions of the populations of continental Europe.

From an American perspective, liberalism found its purest expression in the founding of our nation. Writing for The Atlantic in 2018, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld expressed this view:

For all its flaws, the United States is uniquely equipped to unite a diverse and divided society . . . America is not an ethnic nation. Its citizens don’t have to choose between a national identity and multiculturalism. Americans can have both. But the key is constitutional patriotism. We have to remain united by and through the Constitution, regardless of our ideological disagreements.

That is to say, the Constitution of the United States is a deliberate and explicit attempt to instantiate the hard-won ideas of liberalism in the operating system of our country at the deepest possible level. America is, in this conception, a monument to liberalism. And “constitutional patriotism” may as well be read: loyalty to liberalism.

I was astonished to see just how forcefully this view of liberalism and its connection to America was promulgated in the most recent General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Reverence for the Constitution goes back to the days of Joseph Smith and is a well-known distinction of the Latter-day Saint faith, so there wasn’t anything groundbreaking in Elder Quentin L. Cook’s reaffirmation that “In our doctrine, we believe that in the host country for the Restoration, the United States, the U.S. Constitution and related documents, written by imperfect men, were inspired by God to bless all people.”

What made this General Conference different, however, was that for the first time the leaders of my church went farther and tied reverence for the Constitution to the liberal principles of tolerance and diversity. A lot of this was implicit in the frequent and consistent discussion of diversity and culture, but President Dallin H. Oaks made it explicit in his talk, Love Your Enemies.

The United States was founded by immigrants of different nationalities and different ethnicities. Its unifying purpose was not to establish a particular religion or to perpetuate any of the diverse cultures or tribal loyalties of the old countries. Our founding generation sought to be unified by a new constitution and laws.

Then he cited the exact same passage from Chua’s and Rubenfeld’s Atlantic piece that I did just a few paragraphs earlier. 

In decades past, conservative Christians (including Latter-day Saints) could depend on a close correlation between their values and those of the Republican Party. The inertia of this cooperation cannot blind us to the very real divergence we are witnessing. Conservative Latter-day Saints in particular must not dismiss as meaningless, rhetorical concessions of convenience the frequent references to diversity and multiculturalism in the most recent General Conference. Elders Cook and Oaks and others mean what they say. 

Although I was surprised by the directness of the defense of liberalism, perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Liberalism is the child of Christianity. Its central tenets—universal human dignity and tolerance —derive from Christian theology and tradition. Elder William Jackson taught this in The Culture of Christ, referencing the definitive conflict between Gentile and Jewish cultures in the first generation of Christians. Out of Paul’s inspired resolution to that conflict, we learned: 

We can, indeed, all cherish the best of our individual earthly cultures and still be full participants in the oldest culture of them all—the original, the ultimate, the eternal culture that comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is the heritage of all Christians, as David French (who is an evangelical Christian) exemplified in a recent essay: “Your commitment to Christ is permanent, eternal. Your commitment to a party or a politician is transient, ephemeral.”

I wish to be clear about the limits of what I am claiming. Based on the history and theology of Christianity along with the specific teachings of LDS leaders, we should acknowledge that liberalism (as defined here) is divinely inspired.

But that doesn’t tell us how to vote.

Liberalism is not the only sacred value in play, here. Another even more important value (to name just one) is the sanctity of human life. With the nomination of Amy Coney Barret, President Trump may very well be instrumental in bringing about the end of the Roe-v-Wade and allowing the American people a chance to enact laws that respect the sanctity of human life.

How do we balance these competing values? We have to not only weigh their relative importance, but also make a whole host of practical inferences, guesses, and assumptions. All of these fall outside the clear implications of Christian faith. Having made the case that liberalism is inspired, from here on out I am going it alone and do not claim to have Christianity in general or LDS General Authorities in particular on my side. The rest of the case is mine to get right or wrong.

So liberalism, then, is both a set of ideals to which we aspire and a set of institutions and norms intended to implement, at least partially, those ideals. The ideals are pluralism and tolerance, the dream that different people can live together in peace despite their differences. The institutions and norms to instantiate this dream (even imperfectly) include an emphasis on rule of law (especially Constitutional law) that privileges process over outcomes, along with specific civil liberties that are enshrined in both law and custom, and finally an accompanying culture that regards peaceful disagreement and voluntary rule-following as civic virtues.

For the most part, this project has been wildly successful and viewed as incontestably worthwhile, but that is no longer universally the case. Liberalism, like any good compromise, fully satisfies no one. Both the left and the right have their reasons to be skeptical of liberalism and, in recent years, that skepticism had grown to outright hostility, especially from the progressive left. 

The most prominent recent example is the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project. As covered by Daily Kos in 2019, 

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. [emphasis added]

(I linked to Daily Kos because the NYT, under fire for historical inaccuracies, has been trying to retroactively fix the 1619 Project, up to and including a denial of the whole Project’s raison d’etre: to repudiate America’s liberal foundations and recast the country as originally, unquestionably, and irredeemably racist.)

Illiberalism is on the rise on the right as well, as we will see later in this piece.

Secularism and the Progressive Left

According to Fukuyama, the left is historically dissatisfied with the way that liberalism’s necessary defense of private property (see above, re civil liberties) has led to an exaggerated and unnecessary fervor for deregulation that, in turn, drives spiraling economic inequality.

The right’s historic dissatisfaction, by contrast, is that liberalism’s primary mechanism for allowing peaceful pluralism is “to lower the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table and moving them into the sphere of private life.” What this means is that questions of ultimate meaning—like the correct idea of human nature or the proper definition of a good life—are excised from the political institutions that have universal authority and removed to voluntary religious institutions (or no institution at all). 

The alternative, to leave the question of final ends in the hands of the state, makes pluralism impossible because whichever religious or political persuasion dominates the state has the chance to co-opt the state’s coercive power on behalf of their ideology, kicking off an existential struggle to control the state. The only long-term solution in this scenario is endless balkanization into ever smaller and more homogeneous sub-states or some variant of ethnic cleansing. (Note, these two concepts are exactly the specters that most concern watchers of American politics today: secession and civil war.)

Stripping the government of its power to dictate “final ends” short-circuited this process. It enabled Catholics and Protestants to start coexisting peacefully in the 17th and 18th centuries and it continues to allow religious, ethnic, and political diversity in modern liberal states. However, as Fukuyama notes, it leaves dissatisfied those religious individuals who yearn to see their beliefs and values reflected back at the highest levels of society.

Thus, according to Fukuyama’s analysis, we would expect left-originating attacks on liberalism to have a distinctly economic concern. But that’s not what we’re seeing today. Instead, contemporary social justice is based on identity (race, gender, and sexual orientation). 

This is not to say that the progressive left accepts capitalism (an inseparable partner of liberalism due to liberalism’s guarantee of private property as one of the core civil liberties). On paper, at least, they find capitalism just as loathsome as ever, and income inequality is also often cited as an outrage. However, both capitalism and income inequality are increasingly seen as secondary symptoms of the true evil: white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia.

Thus, citing Fukuyama again:

Many progressives on the left have shown themselves willing to abandon liberal values in pursuit of social justice objectives. There has been a sustained intellectual attack on liberal principles over the past three decades coming out of academic pursuits like gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, that deny the universalistic premises underlying modern liberalism. 

In other words, liberalism raises universalistic premises that are not always met in the messiness of real life—especially historically—and that gap continues to lead to impatience with liberalism itself. There’s certainly truth to that, but what the analysis misses is the fundamentally religious nature of the progressive left’s illiberalism. 

John McWhorter has been one of the most trenchant observers of this strange phenomenon, although it’s widely known enough that the entire progressive left’s anti-racist ideology has been nicknamed “the Great Awokening” as a parody of the historical American religious revivals known as Great Awakenings. 

Here is McWhorter for the Daily Beast in 2017 defending his assertion that anti-racism is a religion: 

Of course, most consider antiracism a position, or evidence of morality. However, in 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.

He reaffirmed the position for The Atlantic in 2018, stating that “antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology,” and then providing an extended analysis of that claim:

The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus….When someone attests to his white privilege with his hand up in the air, palm outward—which I have observed more than once—the resemblance to testifying in church need not surprise. Here, the agnostic or atheist American who sees fundamentalists and Mormons as quaint reveals himself as, of all things, a parishioner.

In reality, the most deeply religious individuals are the least likely to feel personally affected by the relocation of “final ends” from the public to the private sphere precisely because their membership in a rich religious community means that they have a robust fall-back to satisfy the human need for communally-affirmed meaning. 

The situation is much direr among the areligious, however. Although many atheist humanists have tried in the past to replicate the communal aspects of organized religion, these artificial attempts to recreate organic social institutions have been about as successful as Esperanto. 

It is secular individuals, bereft of the bolstering backstop of religious communities, who have far less recourse for anchoring their values. For this reason, I would argue, the seemingly areligious must have their “final ends” in the political sphere or they cannot experience them communally at all.

McWhorter’s analysis of anti-racism as religion deserves to be taken seriously and at face value. We’re witnessing the rise of a new religion in all but name to fill the void experienced by the growing population of Nones. According to Wikipedia, 

The term “nones” is sometimes used in the U.S. to refer to those who are unaffiliated with any organized religion. This use derives from surveys of religious affiliation, in which “None” (or “None of the above”) is typically the last choice. Since this status refers to lack of organizational affiliation rather than lack of personal belief, it is a more specific concept than irreligion. A 2015 Gallup poll concluded that in the U.S. “nones” were the only “religious” group that was growing as a percentage of the population.

Unlike Protestantism and Catholicism, this new religion has no institutional memory of the painful lessons of religious wars. It therefore has no appreciation for the necessity of abiding by the terms of liberalism and keeping its own values rooted in the private sphere. 

Even more importantly, the adherents of this new religion don’t see it as a religion. Without this awareness, adherents believe they are exempt from the old liberal compromises, like the separation of church and state. Their values are considered objectively true, as opposed to the subjective claims of other religions, and therefore they see no reason to accommodate themselves to the private/public compartmentalization as other religions do (grudgingly, at times). Unchecked by the constraints of liberalism and ignorant of their own nature as a religion, they have stumbled unintentionally into religious supremacy.

In short: the progressive left’s secularism led it to become acutely illiberal in a way not true of prior liberal malcontents from the left or the right.

Liberalism’s Escape Hatch

Although the secular progressive left started out on a collision course with liberalism, it still arose out of a liberal context, and that has unfortunately accelerated its animus towards liberalism. 

To see why this is so, consider that all human tribes demonize their perceived enemies and do so in a way that reflects their own highest values. For a liberal society, the highest values are rationality and tolerance. Tolerance is obviously a vital value because that’s what liberalism is for. The necessity of rationality might not be as immediately obvious, but it is just as indispensable. Rationality posits truth as an objective, independently existing reality that is accessible universally (to the extent that it is accessible at all). This enables persuasion to work as a replacement for coercion. As long as both parties believe that the truth is out there, and that logic and evidence can reveal it, they both have reason to engage in dialogue with each other and with unpersuaded third parties. Take away rationality, and there is no longer any point to attempting persuasion; only coercion remains a viable strategy for contesting your opponents.

This is another reason for the illiberal turn of the progressive left, by the way. The ideological framework derives from postmodernism, which is itself inimical to liberalism because it rejects the rationality on which liberalism relies for civil discourse and non-violent political contests. Without recourse to the idea of objective truth (even if it is not fully accessible), persuasion is never more than a pretext. Thus the primary strategies of the progressive left are soft coercion and then outright physical violence. For soft coercion, see Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s description of how victim status is deployed as a method of “social control” in The Rise of Victimhood Culture. For outright violence, see articles like Is it OK to punch a Nazi? Which is just one example in an entire genre of progressive left opinion on the topic. The bottom line is that any ideology arising from postmodern assumptions will come to see coercion as the first and only resort.

Returning to our prior subject, the progressive left enacted the age-old, instinctual practice of demonizing their opponents by framing them as violators of the core liberal ideals of rationality and tolerance. Thus, in their eyes, anyone who disagrees is a “science denier” and a “bigot.” From this perspective, it is not possible that someone opposed to elective abortion is acting from a reasoned, principled commitment to an ideal of human equality; they just hate women. And it’s not possible that someone opposed to same-sex marriage operates from a logically-consistent, sincere idea of conjugal unions; they just hate gay people. 

The tragedy of this inevitable step was that those two defects—irrationality and intolerance—are the exception clause of liberalism. Here’s Scott Alexander from Against Murderism again: 

Using violence to enforce conformity to social norms has always been the historical response [when confronting irrational, intolerant opponents]. We invented liberalism to try to avoid having to do that, but you can’t [engage in liberalism] with people who refuse reason and are motivated by hatred. If you give the franchise to green pointy-fanged monsters, they’re just going to vote for the “Barbecue And Eat All Humans” party. If such people existed and made up a substantial portion of the population, liberalism becomes impossible, and we should go back to just using violence to enforce our will on the people who disagree with us. [emphasis added]

And so, precisely because the progressive left arose out of a highly liberal milieu, it chose to demonize its opponents in exactly the way that would ultimately undermine liberalism itself. 

Enemies of Liberalism on the Right

The rise of illiberalism on the progressive left has been both obvious and alarming to many conservatives. I published the most widely-read piece my blog has seen, When Social Justice Isn’t About Justice, in November 2015 after over a year of research and interviewing and writing. My point here is the timing: like many other conservatives who went on to enlist in #NeverTrump, I was engaged in opposing illiberalism from the left before the 2016 primary season began and Trump threw his hat into the ring. 

Two things happened with the rise of Trump, and possibly because of it. The first is that a degree of latent right illiberalism that had always been there was unmasked. In their Atlantic piece, Chua and Rubenfeld noted that:

Since the 2004 publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We?—which argued that America’s “Anglo-Protestant” identity and culture are threatened by large-scale Hispanic immigration—there have been calls on the mainstream right to define America’s national identity in racial, ethnic, or religious terms, whether as white, European, or Judeo-Christian. According to a 2016 survey commissioned by the bipartisan Democracy Fund, 30 percent of Trump voters think European ancestry is “important” to “being American”; 56 percent of Republicans and a full 63 percent of Trump supporters said the same of being Christian. This trend runs counter to the Constitution’s foundational ideal: an America where citizens are citizens, regardless of race or religion; an America whose national identity belongs to no one tribe.

I probably should have recognized the danger of the illiberal right, but prior to the rise of Trump, I never took it seriously. I didn’t see any polls like this when I was busily fortifying against illiberalism from the left. I was blind to the illiberalism on my own side. 

Although I’m certainly culpable for that mistake, I think it’s worth a few paragraphs to explain how the right’s illiberalism flew under the radars of many conservatives. 

The key realization is that illiberalism is a feature not just of the left generally, but specifically the elite left. Postmodernism and its progressive scion Critical Race Theory are not blue-collar preoccupations. Although it has trickled down substantially, the origin of the left’s illiberalism has always been the Ivory Tower. From that starting point, the progressive left has managed to seize control of basically all of the socially-relevant strategic high points. Identity politics dominate not only academia, but also journalism, entertainment, and Big Tech, as one particularly vivid illustration from Business Insider reveals:

Illiberalism had made essentially no inroads among the elites of the American right prior to Trump. College-educated Republicans are less tied to their home regions, less suspicious of immigration and free trade, and more open to the benefits of globalization. They also suffer far less from the deleterious impacts of these policies, since white-collar work is less susceptible to outsourcing.

This explains why many conservatives, myself included, viewed illiberalism as an exclusively left-wing problem. Because the progressive left dominated culture (and still does), their influence was pervasive and obvious (and still is). Because the illiberal right was largely poorer, less educated, and more dispersed, I failed to take them seriously. 

I also didn’t fully appreciate that, as frighteningly dominant as the progressive left had become socially, that threat never really translated into political power. As numerous polls show (here’s one from Cato), Americans today are more afraid than ever to voice their sincere opinions on controversial topics because the progressive left has the means and the motive to silence anyone who steps out of line. Cancel culture, as I’ve written, is real. 

Yet despite this, the progressive left failed to make even modest headway with their policy agenda at the national level—even when they held greater political power. Forget reparations or overthrowing capitalism, the progressive left didn’t even manage to significantly move the needle on immigration policy when Democrats held the White House and the Senate and the House (2009 – 2011). It’s possible that the progressive left doesn’t even have serious policy objectives, at least not as a primary consideration. As an (unwitting) religious movement, their preoccupations seem more symbolic and philosophical than policy-oriented.

Liberalism is under threat, but the threat to liberalism from the left is a threat first and foremost to our informal institutions and cultural norms. They cancel speakers and strong-arm entire genres into compliance with “right-think,” but they have little influence among the police or armed forces.

When Trump declared his candidacy, I thought it was a joke. I was completely unprepared for him to be a viable candidate and utterly shocked when he started winning primaries. What’s more, he did it by explicitly appealing to the illiberal right. What was his number one issue? Immigration. Whether or not he was overtly racist, he was tapping into the kind of ethnocentrism Chua and Rubenfeld alluded to. If the right comes to see itself and the nation in ethnic or tribal terms, then the battle to defend liberalism is already lost. Although it won’t start right away, if the illiberal right comes to dominate conservatism as the illiberal left is dominating progressivism, all that remains is the long, downward slide into bloodletting.

Trump did more than just reveal a problem that had always been there. He galvanized the illiberal right and led them to greater heights, especially once he took office. At that point it was impossible to dismiss the illiberal right as impotent and decentralized; they were dominating the party that held the White House and Senate. 

The backlash of the illiberal right is understandable. Because of the way the illiberal left dominates culture (through academia, journalism, and entertainment), the right was acutely aware of the extent to which progressives had effectively declared war on traditional cultures. We talk about the “culture wars” and a lot of the same issues—feminism, abortion, etc.—were involved, but cancel culture of the 2010s was virulent and aggressive in a way that political correctness of the 1990s never was, primarily because its unknowingly religious nature led it to disregard liberal safeguards (as discussed above). 

It’s common to mock Christians in America for having a persecution complex, and there is truth to that. After all, the right has continued to retain (and even increase) influence over the formal institutions of power. However, the persecution complex is not a paranoid invention. It’s a reflection of the fact that conservatives in America live and breathe in a cultural context that is implacably hostile to their values. This is why conservatives are so much better at articulating progressive talking points than vice versa. (Nicholas Kristof summarized early research from Jonathan Haidt on this for the New York Times back in 2008, and Haidt went on to expand these themes in his book The Righteous Mind.) In terms of political power, conservatives are secure. In terms of cultural power, their perception as a besieged minority is real.

So this besieged minority looked at their attackers, and they did the natural thing: they emulated them. 

Progressive activists are successful in large part because of their wanton disregard for liberal norms. “Canceling” is the most overt example of this. If you say the wrong thing, they will hound you out of your job and out of the public sphere entirely. Any debate about the technical, legal limits of the First Amendment misses the point here. Like all aspects of liberalism, free speech has both a formal and informal aspect, and both are necessary. We need the legal protections of free speech, but we also need an attitude that tolerates differing views. The less latitude Americans give each other to disagree without attempting to punish each other, the less free speech we have regardless of the formal status of the First Amendment. 

As the progressive activists threw such informal constraints aside, they cut a swathe through popular culture, with controversies in the sci-fi community (2013), video game community (2014), comic book community (2016), and romance community (2019). In every case, their scorched-earth policies were successful, with conservatives and libertarians hounded to the margins, another formerly neutral space becoming thoroughly politicized and rigorously policed, and history (in Wikipedia and news outlets) being written so that the victors were also the righteous victims.

The success of these ventures greatly exploited the close relationships between the progressive left activists engaged in the conflict and the progressive left activists working as journalists to cover the “story.” I watched some of these controversies from a distance, but for both the sci-fi battleground and the video-game battleground I had front-row seats, including conducting interviews with lots of the participants (on both sides). 

The discrepancy between the official line and the actual events was often breathtaking. Reading the Wikipedia entries for these issues and comparing them with my real-time experiences is head-spinning. The sci-fi controversy was known as “Sad Puppies” (it’s a long story) and the entry currently begins: “Sad Puppies was an unsuccessful right-wing anti-diversity voting campaign . . .” It was unsuccessful, but it was neither right-wing nor anti-diversity. The video game controversy was called GamerGate and the entry begins: “The Gamergate controversy concerned an online harassment campaign . . .” A lot of harassment did take place, but only one half of the harassment was covered in the press. 

All of this means that by late 2015, there was intense simmering resentment on the American right. Some of the responses to this resentment were liberal and productive, like the launch of Quillette in that year. But a lot of the responses took a different pattern: taking the illiberal tactics that had been used against them and turning them on their enemies. 

Back to Trump

It is clear in Fukuyama’s piece that he is more concerned about the illiberal right than the illiberal left. As he says:

Democracy itself is being challenged by authoritarian states like Russia and China that manipulate or dispense with free and fair elections. But the more insidious threat arises from populists within existing liberal democracies who are using the legitimacy they gain through their electoral mandates to challenge or undermine liberal institutions. Leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump in the United States have tried to undermine judicial independence by packing courts with political supporters, have openly broken laws, or have sought to delegitimize the press by labeling mainstream media as “enemies of the people.” They have tried to dismantle professional bureaucracies and to turn them into partisan instruments. It is no accident that Orbán puts himself forward as a proponent of “illiberal democracy.”

I know it’s been a long road, but all the pieces are now in place to explain why I, and other #NeverTrumpers, agree with Fukuyama’s assessment that the illiberal right—including Donald Trump—is the greater threat.

The only saving grace of the monstrous, illiberal progressive left so far has been its inability to seize control of government. It is bad enough to have “cancel culture” when a mob of private citizens cruelly hounds another private citizen out of a job, out of public life, or maybe into suicide. How much would it be for a similar mob to have the backing of the police, the federal bureaucracy, and the courts?

This is what everyone on the liberal right asked themselves when they saw Donald Trump leading chants of “Lock her up!” in 2016. There is nothing more antithetical to liberalism than the idea of using formal state power to punish political opponents. Obviously, this has occurred before in the past, but not openly and to great applause. We were shocked and horrified by the way so many Republican voters ate up fear-mongering, anti-immigrant rhetoric that repudiated the liberal legacy and aspirations of our country by conceiving “Americanness” in ethnic rather than philosophical terms. After years of gearing up to fight a seemingly losing battle against the illiberal left, we woke up one day to find out that the enemy was already within the gates. 

We foresaw the worst excesses of the illiberal progressive left replicated by the illiberal reactionary right which actually would have control of our government. Smug, hypocritical Hollywood scolds are nauseating, but their real power is limited. The prospect of Steve Bannon leading an illiberal policy apparatus from the White House constituted a far, far greater long-term threat.

What does this mean in concrete terms?

Well, I have to admit that Trump’s first presidency is not as bad as I and many #NeverTrump conservatives feared. He is not an ideologically committed illiberal as those on the left are. This is because he has no discernible ideology whatsoever. His illiberal tendencies are the result of a bottomless thirst for popularity wedded with a total disregard for the norms and rules of government that is born of ignorant recklessness rather than philosophical opposition. 

Left to his own devices, Trump would long since have trampled every liberal norm into the dirt and the Constitution along with it, but he hasn’t been left to his own devices. He has been stymied again and again by adults in the room who prevent him from doing most of the outrageous and frequently illegal things he has tried to do. (As I write this, rumors abound that he is about to fire yet more Justice Department officials for being insufficiently willing to manipulate the levers of the executive branch to Trump’s personal political ends.)

In addition to these considerations, it must be admitted by any honest conservative that Trump has implemented many important conservative policies, especially in his appointments to the Supreme Court. The case against Trump, from a liberal standpoint, is neither trivial nor open-and-shut.

The real danger I see is not from Trump himself but from the failure to repudiate his actions. Trump is no political mastermind or committed ideologue. What happens if, a presidency or two from now, we get someone who is?

In a world where Trump’s disregard for rule of law and norms of liberal civility has been left to stand without correction, it would be far too easy for a real authoritarian—from the right or from the left—to use these bad precedents and the public’s cynical disregard as a runway for a much more competent, focused attack on American liberalism. That’s how precedent works. Trump has vastly expanded the range of options for all of his successors, and therein lies the long-term danger.

In 2016, Michael Anton wrote a piece in the Claremont Review of Books depicting the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the “Flight 93 election,” referring to the doomed United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 when the passengers attempted to retake it from the hijackers. In it, he excoriated conservatives who were reluctant to vote for Trump, insisting Trump was necessary to combat the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” and calling for “no more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures.” He later turned the essay into a book in which, according to Wikipedia, he argued that Trump provided “the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation.” 

So, according to Anton, defending the Constitution means defending America from the wrong ethnicities. This is the opposite of what the Constitution, as an embodiment of liberalism, stands for. This is how Trump and his supporters constitute a battle for the soul of the American right. If Trumpism wins, America will cease to have a partisan defender of her real, essential nature as the world’s first and greatest liberal project.

I do not wish to replicate Anton and replace one flight 93 election with another one. It is not the case that, should Trump win in 2020 again, our liberal order must necessarily collapse. Far from it, I do not believe Trump has the capacity to bring that end. But there is a struggle going on for the soul of America, and it’s not clear how much more strain our society can take before we pass some point of no return where liberalism begins to give way to fracturing (secession) and violence (civil war). 

Moreover, this election is the one, last chance Americans have to repudiate Trump’s bad precedents. To try and pick a different path. That’s why the #NeverTrump conservatives have such an important role to play, even though our numbers are small. It’s important not only for Trump to be defeated but for his defeat to represent a rejection of his disregard for our liberal heritage.

Even though this election is not the all-or-nothing decision point, America really does face two possible futures. In one, an illiberal left and an illiberal right engage in an endlessly escalating confrontation that no one can possibly win. Whoever winds up on top of the heap will no longer govern a country worth having, because it will not be the United States of America founded in the liberal proposition that “all men are created equal” and consecrated to the ideals of liberty, diversity, and tolerance through limited government and rule of law. 

In the other, a liberal center coalition of Republicans and Democrats beat their respective fringes back into submission and resume conflict within the confines of liberalism. I sure hope the right wins this contest more than it loses it, but even when my side is the losing side, at least at the end of the day I’ll still live in a country that aspires to be a city on a hill.

Which brings me back to where I started: this is deeper than policy. I would rather live in a liberal nation with policies I hate than an illiberal one where an authoritarian strongman imposes policies I happen to agree with.

Trump is not as bad as many have painted him to be. His ideological aimlessness and fear of unpopularity disqualify him as a proto-dictator. He is callous and opportunistic in his ethnocentric appeals, but not an overt racist. Many of his policies and decisions have been good. But a lot of them have been awful, like separating families at the border. And he is a bad person: dishonest, disloyal, and intemperate. But beyond and beneath this all is the fact that Trump rose as the figurehead of the illiberal right. He was the one that the illiberal right turned to when they decided to use the illiberal left’s tactics against it. He is the avatar of right illiberalism, and to save our liberal heritage he must be repudiated.

I understand the temptation of Christians who see that we seem to be losing a cultural battle against a new, insurgent religion that discards the constraints and legacy of liberalism, but we cannot afford to retaliate in kind. Doing so would cost us our soul. For Latter-day Saints in particular the reasons not to give in to the temptation to hit back are strong. Not only do we have a scriptural commitment to the Constitution and the guidance of leaders who connect that to liberalism, but we also have a theological commitment to eschew coercion as we seek to build Zion. Liberalism is not Zion, but the tolerance and non-coercive regime it protects is an essential incubator in which we can, through persuasion and volunteerism, build that perfect community.

The post #NeverTrump; #AlwaysLiberalism appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

This is particularly true in a world where the flaws of each candidate are magnified, sometimes fairly but often not, by a media that applies shifting standards depending on the issue, the party, the candidate, or the cultural moment. Politics is a cruel business, and candidates are often brutalized by the process. It is also true that those with a big ego, a great deal of ambition, and an outsized personality are drawn to the process, and, perhaps, most able to survive its rigors. Furthermore, successful politicians have enormous influence over the distribution of wealth and power, and the temptations large and small, to take advantage of that influence to benefit themselves, their families and their friends are substantial, sometimes in ways that are criminal, but often in ways that while not illegal, are dishonorable.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that many voters view all the candidates with a jaundiced eye and feel obliged to choose who between significantly flawed candidates they believe to be the “lesser of two evils.” In the current U.S. presidential election, the two candidates are often summed up by the critics by their shortcomings: Trump, the playboy and bully, blunt, unconventional and boastful; Biden, the serial plagiarist, rudely overfamiliar with women, with 47 years in government and questionable achievements to show for it, and possibly in cognitive decline.  But given the difficulties of making a full and fair judgment about character and competence, this choice is no easy task. 

But there is a simpler and better way to choose between candidates in this election.  In our complex world, I would argue what is most critical is the philosophical approach the candidates take and the people and ideas that they rely on to implement that approach. 

The Growth of Government into a Sprawling Bureaucracy Has Remade the Leadership Role

These different philosophical perspectives are due to the evolution of our government from a small, predominantly state and local regime, to a vast national enterprise that touches our lives on a daily basis: taxes, health care, education, commerce, social security, welfare, and on and on. And as the pandemic has shown, in some situations, the government is ready, willing, and able to regulate every aspect of our lives and curtail even our most basic freedoms.

These changes have also impacted the roles of our elected leaders. The President, as Chief Executive of a vast federal bureaucracy, will often have his greatest influence by appointments to head the various government agencies and the courts, who, in turn, bring with them thousands of people to actually develop, implement—or sometimes impede, delay and even thwart—the laws intended to govern the country. Senators will rely on their small army, often as many as 60 staffers, to read proposed legislation, develop policy positions, respond to constituents, and do their work (giving them briefs and summaries) and thus wielding considerable influence, and it is not much different among Representatives with large, but comparatively smaller, staffs. Meanwhile, countless decisions deeply affecting our lives are made by people we don’t know and certainly don’t elect—e.g., whether we are deemed eligible for veterans benefits; calculating our tax liability if we are audited; setting the safety standards for our business.

These thousands of appointees tend to be the most committed members of their parties. They have worked on the campaigns, made a huge personal investment in the candidates, and are the most invested in the positions that their parties have taken. They tend to be the purest representatives of what their patrons stand for.

In addition, the Democrat party largely staffs the federal bureaucracy. It is estimated that 90 percent of career civil servants are Democrats. It is not necessary to postulate a “deep state” to conclude the outlook and approach of this unelected, but influential body, is much more in keeping with a Democrat rather than a Republican Administration. Furthermore, every bureaucratic institution tends to seek to increase its own power and influence; that reflects human nature even more than partisanship.

As a result of the changes in government over the years, the implications of our election decisions are dramatic, because the two parties come from very different philosophical perspectives in dealing with the new reality of governance. These perspectives are shaped by the backgrounds and life experiences of both the leadership of each party and the people who reflect their core supporters: the center of gravity of each party.

The Path of the Democrat Party and Where it Leads

Generally speaking, it’s fair to say the philosophical leadership of the Democrats comes from academia and education, the media and entertainment, lifetime members of government, unions, and the corporate managerial elite. Even those party members who speak as representatives of the poor and less educated members of the Democratic coalition are themselves usually university-educated activists and government officials. Although the party seems largely secular in orientation and skeptical of, and even hostile to, many traditional religious views, both its many progressive religious members and its agnostics and atheists are very moralistic.

Using their definitions of equality, equity, and inclusion, they frame almost every issue, be it immigration, taxation, policing, reparations, as well as race, gender, marriage, and abortion, as fundamental moral issues, where the Democrat party holds the moral high ground. Joe Biden, who forcefully identifies as Catholic but rejects Catholic teaching on abortion, gender, and marriage, has repeatedly stated that the focus of his campaign is to “reclaim the soul of America.” When moral claims are made by Republicans, they are disparaged by Democrats as a violation of the separation of church and state. But secular progressives fail to realize that much of their platform is essentially religious—reflecting a dogmatic moral worldview defining right and wrong, but without the traditional belief in God.  Professor Elizabeth Drescher, author of “Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones,” notes that many who “identify as non-religious” find in “social justice work” an alternative “social structure to express community cohesion and shared values and…shared meaning” along with a chance to be “part of something that is transcending, that is bigger than oneself.”  These secular moralists are thus happy to make common cause with religious progressives, who assert that their views are fully in alignment with the moral teachings of their denomination.

The universities and, increasingly, public education at all levels, show us where the Democratic Party’s path will lead. In developing its moral compass, the Democratic Party has adopted as dogma the central areas of focus of most of our universities: relativism, an emphasis on race and gender, the centrality of climate change, and the belief that everything is political. As at many universities, the Party believes in curtailing speech by defining as “hate” viewpoints that challenge its moral positions, again, a position shared by those religious denominations who support abortion and the panoply of LGBT positions. Once you are convinced that your political views are morally correct, it is easy to make the leap that your opponent’s views are not merely wrong, but evil (and that which is evil must be eradicated).  

Democrats self-identify as the tolerant party due to their embrace of the LGBT community and historic minority support. But as has been taught in the universities for 50 years now, they increasingly believe “pure tolerance”—the classic, liberal idea of allowing a wide range of diverse viewpoints—is outmoded, and that has drastically narrowed the window of what is acceptable.  This reformed idea of tolerance does not allow for “hate speech” or even seemingly pragmatic positions, such as the necessity of enforcing immigration law, to be permitted, because it is said to be based on morally unacceptable assumptions.  On the other hand, many positions that would seem to be subject to factual argument, from climate change to the belief that America is an inherently racist nation, have become articles of faith that are no longer open to debate. 

“Fighting for the soul of the nation” seems to imply that unwillingness to accept these articles of faith is a profound moral failure, not just a misjudgment. The moral dimension of these claims is reinforced by a growing presumption of the intellectual superiority of Democrat leadership. With the support of the universities, high culture, the educational establishment, the wizards of the technology industry, and many corporate leaders, it’s common to hear insinuations that the political left embodies “the best and the brightest.” Democrat leadership also has the most affinity for similarly situated people in Western Europe—reinforcing their own confidence as a global elite that transcends national borders. If you believe you are both morally superior and smarter than your political opponents, it makes it easy to discount contrary points of view. This arguably contributes to conservative speakers being “de-platformed” at college campuses and the few faculty who take even a mildly contrary view to the prevailing orthodoxy find themselves “canceled”—disciplined, shunned, and losing their jobs.

The Democrat leadership group is well-credentialed, highly confident in its intellectual abilities, facile in the use of language, and accordingly believes that it is naturally suited to provide political leadership. President Barack Obama was such a unifying figure for the Democratic Party because he represented the fusion of an Ivy League-educated minority, who moved from community activist to law professor, best-selling author, state government representative, and ultimately U.S. Senator and President. Joe Biden derives much of his credibility with Democrats for his association with President Obama; otherwise, he represents for many the ultimate lifetime member of government, with 47 years in office plus his years campaigning.

Because of the overall views of Democratic leadership, a vote for a member of the Democratic party is a choice for the path of substantially more governmental regulation and control based upon the prevailing wisdom in academia and the credentialed. This means more top-down control of health care, more nationalized rules, and an ever-greater reliance on legions of experts all-too-ready to provide dictates for society. The Democratic party sees abstractions and symbols as the keys to the policies that ought to drive the country, which is only natural given their orientation in education, academia, government, and large corporate management.

While Biden and the Democrats have been extremely critical of the Trump pandemic response, given the orientation of the party, the likelihood is that the Democrat approach would have been (and will be in the event of electoral victory) reliant on the traditional government bureaucracy, such as the CDC and NIH, as “listening to the scientists” seems to equate with following the government scientists. Yet it appears that these groups were not well prepared and sluggish in their response to Covid 19. As exemplified by states controlled by Democrats, and echoed by Biden’s national mask mandate concept, it is a top-down, tight lockdown approach that Democrats favor. 

Unfortunately, results in the state controlled by the highest-profile Democrat governor, Andrew Cumo, are far and away the worst in their death rate per 100 million population. It increasingly appears based on both scientific evidence and the unintended negative consequences, that continuing lockdowns have been a mistake, with the World Health Organization special envoy on COVID-19 recently issuing an “appeal to all world leaders” based on the rippling effects for world poverty to “Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it.” To this point, however, based on the behavior of almost all Democrat governors, Democrats seem to remain committed to them.

While it is not unreasonable to say that there is a socialist element to much of the Democrat agenda, since that it is the inevitable result of government takeover or extreme regulation, it may be more clarifying to look at this path through a different lens. The ratio of the public sector share of the economy to the private sector is likely to increase under Biden/Harris to over 50% public to private. 

Whether the private sector can carry so heavy a burden is unknown, but substantial increases in taxation will need to be implemented to pay for many of these policies.  While Democrats staunchly contend that more of the tax burden will be made to fall on the wealthy, most of the money will need to come from those who define themselves as middle class. To quote an old gag, this is for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: That is where the money is. The only alternative to increased taxation across the board is more deficit spending, already a potential problem. Such spending is likely to cause inflation, which is essentially a hidden tax that falls most heavily on the least wealthy.

Given its zeal for the moral necessity for change, assuming it achieves power, the Party wants to reduce the system of checks and balances, such as the Senate filibuster, the electoral college, and possibly the 9-member Supreme Court, that frustrate the changes it believes are needed. Multiple changes to our system of government at one time would be risky. The Democrats have repeatedly and properly said that the norms of our system of government should be followed; this would be completely contrary to that sound position.

The election of Joe Biden will bring a vast number of new governmental regulations, just as was the case during the Obama administration. If there is a Democrat House and Senate, there will be a momentous additional amount of legislation that will revamp the health care system, housing, energy policy, education, and individual liberty.  Because the center of gravity of the party, and the ideas that it seeks to implement, come from the academic establishment, what you see in the universities will further permeate the country as a whole. The enforced conformity of opinion in the academy and cultural establishment to the country as to climate change, gender identity, the primacy of racial identity, and ideas of critical race theory will be implemented into law.  

For example, because climate change is deemed an existential threat, there will be a vast expenditure of money to prove that we are doing all we can to deal with it, with limited concern about any cost-benefit analysis. Because equity and inclusion are seen as fundamental moral imperatives, traditional religious views about marriage and gender will be restricted and institutions run by religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and adoption agencies, will either conform or be fined or regulated into compliance or closure (as is already happening in Democratic-controlled states). The Little Sisters of the Poor will be back in court. Since abortion at any and all times is deemed a primary right that cannot be abridged in any way, all restrictions against it will be swept aside and taxpayer support for abortion as health care to which all women are entitled will be ensured.

In foreign policy, the Democrat Party seems to remain committed to the Obama-Biden approach. Despite the success of the dramatic change of course made by the Trump administration in the Middle East, there is an insistence on a return to the Iran nuclear deal. Other initiatives, such as the Paris Climate Treaty, from which Trump withdrew on the grounds that it was burdensome and costly to the US, benefitted China, and was ignored in practice by Europeans who lauded it the most, would be brought back. If nothing else, the Trump administration arguably shifted the world consensus on China, showing it to be a highly aggressive, duplicitous, and dangerous world power; it is unclear how much a Biden administration is prepared to do to deal with this new understanding if indeed, it even agrees with it.

Several states, such as California, offer us a preview of the Democrat agenda in action. Effectively a one-party state, California has already enacted a vast variety of laws and regulations that would be replicated on a national scale. However well-intentioned, the result in terms of the treatment of the homeless, environmental impact, crime, and deteriorating education is genuinely concerning.  Elimination of cash bail in some Democrat states and cities seems to be benefitting the criminal class, not the unfortunate innocent that it was supposed to help, leading to an increase in crime and public disorder.

The changes enacted by the Democrats would likely be enforced with enthusiasm, just as they are on college campuses. A similar set of people will be responsible for carrying them out. Those thousands who come to Washington with a Biden administration and as Democrat Senators and members of Congress, will be among the most committed, “woke” and enthusiastic supporters of these policies. Believing in the wisdom of what they have learned at university, heard in the media, and had amplified by cultural institutions, they will bring a missionary zeal to the implementation and enforcement of the new laws. The existing heavily Democrat bureaucracy will be reinforced and become even more powerful. Laws and rules will be ever more broadly interpreted to achieve progressive ends.

Perhaps most troublesome of all, because of the certainty of their moral position, the more extreme allies of the Democrats continue to believe that their policies need to be brought about “by any means necessary.” (I say allies because they are more radical than the Democrat party and even ridicule it, but they have a strong preference for Democrat policies over Republican, and the Democrat party views them with sympathy and takes pains not to denounce them to win their votes.) This includes adherents to ANTIFA and the Black Lives Matter organization (as opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole). These extreme elements have led to serious violence in many cities; while the Democrats have denounced violence, they seem unwilling to take the necessary steps to bring it to a rapid conclusion. The hope that a Biden administration would bring this to an end is a false one; it happened under the Obama administration, and most places where it occurs are almost wholly run by Democrats, and increasingly, self-proclaimed socialists as in Portland and Seattle. These groups will continue their tactics as long as they believe them effective, and the Democrat party is too sympathetic to them to bring them to heel.

Where the Republican Path leads

While it is also the case that much of the Republican leadership has come from lifetime members of government, the center of gravity of the Republican party has shifted from big business and “country club Republicans” (of which there are still many) towards small and medium-sized family business owners, the less college-educated working class, those who are committed to traditional religious beliefs, and the university-educated who are disaffected from the current climate in their schools. It generally respects traditional religious views, rejects relativism in favor of more old fashioned views of right and wrong, is highly skeptical of the race and gender theories that have come from the academy, and views the political as having a less critical role in their daily lives. Donald Trump is both reflective of this new Republican center of gravity and a cause of it; family businessman par excellence, and non-politician until four years ago, yet Ivy League-educated and a media celebrity; a billionaire who cemented the Republican party’s appeal to the working class begun under Ronald Regan and someone who has made an appeal to minority groups.

The Republican approach involves reversing the trend of governmental regulation, emphasizing individual autonomy and reliance on non-governmental institutions, pointing to disappointment and even outright failure of progressive social welfare policies and the incremental loss of freedom that increased reliance on government necessarily entails. Republicans point out that large government programs become self-perpetuating, unaccountable for results, and ever more costly, and it seeks to bring more private sector concepts like competition and cost-benefit analysis into play. It argues for preserving existing checks and balances, seeks reforms based on experience with existing governmental activity rather than academic models, and proposes retention of the classically liberal definitions of equality and tolerance.

A vote for President Trump and a member of the Republican party is a choice for another type of change occurring in the last three-plus years: a strong economic focus based upon returning manufacturing and “making things” to the United States, based upon revised trade deals, lower taxes, and additional deregulation, albeit with targeted regulatory initiatives in some areas. There will continue to be efforts to restrain what Republicans see as the excesses of the Democratic party from the Obama era, most of which are the things to which a Democrat administration promises to return and accelerate. It is also a repudiation of the “free trade” orientation of the big business faction of both parties, including rewriting trade policies such as was done with NAFTA, that formerly enjoyed strong Republican support. The Republican party, especially due to the approach of President Trump, is to prioritize economic solutions to problems, both in domestic and foreign policy.

In contrast to Democrats, who see more expansive education and training based on ideas such as critical race theory and systemic racism as a major part of the solution to problems of race, Republicans see economic levers as the way to improve the life of minority groups that are disproportionately poor and underserved.  Entrepreneurship, good-paying jobs in a resuscitated manufacturing sector, and rising wages through a booming job market are seen as a major part of the solution. 

In addition, Republicans are beginning to coalesce around school choice as the way to improve the disastrous educational system for most poor and minority groups. The teacher and school employee unions have a strong bias against non-unionized competition in K-12 education, whether charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. Because those unions are part of the Democrat coalition, the Republican party is willing to take them on, while the Democrats are not.

In keeping with its small and medium-sized business orientation, the Republican party emphasizes competitiveness and private sector solutions located in the United States. It has become evident that big business, which has moved from Republican to Democrat in orientation, is better able to flourish in a highly regulated marketplace because it has the capital and scale to hire the lawyers and lobbyists such a system demands, while upstart competitors are at a significant disadvantage in these areas. Thus, for a large enterprise, support for more government regulation can actually align with the goal of maintaining market position. In addition, big business is global and seeks low-cost labor worldwide; the Republican push under Trump to push policies that foster America’s interest in producing things in the United States is a hindrance to that aim. However, the benefit of such policies is that they help reverse the problems revealed by the pandemic, namely a reliance on other countries, some of whom have conflicting or even hostile interests, for critical needs, such as medicine, medical equipment, commodities, and even high tech parts and equipment. The Democrats are now imitating some of the Trump approaches with a “buy American” campaign promise, but for its entire term, the Trump administration has been pushing for not just buying American, but making more in America to buy, and is “all in” on it.

Trump’s pandemic response showed the Republican tendency to pivot toward the private sector and decentralized solutions. The inadequate response of the CDC and other bureaucracies to the initial stages of the pandemic led to a successful push to mobilize more private sector resources; ultimately there were no shortages of resources such as hospital beds and PPE and multiple vaccines are already in human trials. Republican preference for state and local flexibility and adherence to the principles of federalism meant leaving most decision making at the state and local level. Given the vast differences among the states and the corresponding differences in results in terms of Covid 19 hospitalizations and deaths, the Trump approach of national guidelines but state decision-making seems more sensible than the Biden idea of national mandates. Overall, it is too soon to fairly judge the overall Trump Administration response to Covid 19, as the pandemic continues to run its course. Most of the Western world is suffering as much or more than the US; as the case of Sweden shows, the lesson is not likely to be “trust the scientists” but rather “which scientists should be trusted”.

Immigration was a central issue in 2016 and remains an important point of difference between the parties.  Republicans maintain the need to enforce existing immigration laws and deplore “sanctuary cities” where state and local governments refuse to cooperate with federal officials in enforcing immigration laws.  For Republicans, there are two simple aspects to the issue and one complex one. First, the immigration laws were duly enacted; Democrats think they ought to be changed but haven’t succeeded in doing so via the democratic process. Accordingly, the law ought to be enforced. Second, illegal immigration creates a pool of low-paid labor, operating outside the law, and hurting employment, especially of lower-skilled workers, while imposing large costs on local schools, hospitals, and social service providers. The third, complex issue, is twofold: how to deal with the immigrants who have lived in the United States for years, despite having come illegally, and how to deal compassionately with the many people who are desperate to escape their current homelands to achieve a better life for themselves and their children. Most Republicans, Trump included, are of the view that once you enforce existing law and staunch the flow of new immigrants who come illegally, it will be possible to integrate long-term immigrants and come to some compromise agreement on how many new immigrants the country should admit.

Despite Democrat claims that Trump and the Republicans cannot be trusted to follow the law, it is hard to understand how an insistence on halting rioting and looting is problematic. The notion of “mostly peaceful” protests is a clever public relations concept, but the fact that injuries to over 150 law enforcement personnel, many deaths, and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, makes clear that there has been a serious problem. Republicans point to the fact that the elimination of cash bail, and the failure to prosecute supposedly lower-level crimes, seems to correlate with increasing criminality in the cities and states where these policies are in effect. Republicans believe that “broken windows” policing that rescued New York in the 1980s was a success and that the new Democrat approach is merely a return to previous failures.

The Trump foreign policy mirrors its domestic emphasis in economics, and it has been remarkably successful. Economic growth in the energy sector due to fracking and less regulation has eliminated dependence on foreign oil, which gives the United States far more options in the Middle East. Trump correctly saw that the Obama tilt toward Iran and the Palestinians was a major strategic mistake, empowering those with the least interest in peace. He renewed the US embrace of Israel, refused to be cowed by out of date concerns about moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, and brokered the developing relationships between Israel and Arab States, for which he has rightly been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has angered NATO allies for embarrassing them about their long-standing failure to meet their financial commitments to a common defense, but he has gotten results. Trump has broken the cycle of entering into agreements with allies that provide public relations benefits but no one expects to be followed and has refused to accept a status quo in trade based upon circumstances that were true in the 20th century but not the 21st.

In Summary…

If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are elected, and especially if there is a Democrat House and Senate, there will be a transformation of the United States that will result in much more government control of every aspect of our lives, serious limitations on religious freedom, and the implementation of policies that, in the name of tolerance and equality, make the country less tolerant and less equal in the ways we have traditionally understood those terms. The increasingly stultifying conformity of American college campuses will likely continue exporting itself to the country as a whole, as an army of those young recent college graduates who helped create that climate at their schools bring their energy and zeal to implementing these ideas throughout the country, while their faculty mentors are brought into leadership positions throughout the administration. 

Biden’s Green New Deal lite, and Public Option health care will gradually result in great disruption at a huge cost, for what are likely to be only marginal improvements at best. Taxes will increase significantly, and economic growth will be no better than sluggish. Foreign policy will revert to the approach of the Obama era, which will embolden China, and fall back on empty posturing in Europe.  Yes, there would be a great outpouring of enthusiasm on the part of the media, the educational and cultural establishments, and the bureaucracy, which may give temporary respite from the non-stop anger of the last three and a half years, but that would eventually be replaced by the protestations and resentment of those who feel their liberties and freedoms being taken away.

If Trump and the Republicans are elected, especially if there are a Republican House and Senate, there will be even further emphasis on economic solutions to problems at home and abroad, further deregulation, an effort to make the bureaucracy more accountable (as was done with the Veteran’s Administration, for example), and a push for school choice and entrepreneurial empowerment for minorities, with a rejection of government embrace of critical race theory.  Immigration reform might be possible. There will be a continued pushback on China for its misbehavior, more pressure on NATO allies to be more self-sufficient in providing for their own defense, and further realignment in the Middle East to continue to isolate Iran and create an Arab-Israeli alliance, which, if achieved, could ultimately induce the Palestinians to agree to a realistic, long term settlement.

The biggest wildcard will be the reaction to a Trump/Republican victory. A replay (or significant escalation) of “the Resistance” which followed the 2016 election would be extremely unhealthy and divisive for the country. While it is almost certain that there will be some rioting by radical groups, the degree to which Democrats choose to enable them will be key; if they accept the results of the election and cooperate in a traditional fashion, things will fairly quickly calm down. If not, it will be a bitter and ugly spectacle. Hopefully, another four years of Trump and Republican governance would cause the Democrat leadership to be a bit more introspective about the moral and intellectual superiority that they project, and to revert to the role of the “loyal opposition,” which is a concept that has served the country in the past and would do so again.

The post Choosing a Path, Not Merely a Person appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Whether President Trump himself would be able to accept defeat and transition peacefully has received large amounts of media attention in recent weeks. Spurred by his repeated claims that defeat would only happen if the election were “rigged.’ 

Much has been written about the concerning trends and rhetoric coming from the President himself and the right in general—painting an array of nightmarish scenarios and asserting that “extremists on the right are the primary danger in the coming days.” But relatively little has been written about the similarly troubling trend growing on the progressive left. 

Last November, I wrote about growing, increasingly promiscuous references to revolution in American discourse (on both sides of the political spectrum).  In what follows, I review six rhetorical patterns on the political left that I argue—especially in combination—create predispositions towards outright rejection of the upcoming election, even violently. Rather than outlier positions, it’s entirely fair to say that each of these narrative patterns has been embraced by what appears to be a sizable majority of people on the political left.  After briefly summarizing each theme, examples are provided from public commentary and journalism in recent months. 

1. The fate of democracy hangs in the balance with this election.  Although this is something that comes up from each side of any political campaign (yes, virtually every year), something really does feel different this year.  When it comes to speculation about democracy being on the edge of a precipice, people really mean it—especially on the left. Listen to some examples:

• The editorial board of the Washington Post argued, “a second term [for President Trump] might injure the experiment beyond recovery.”
• Referring to the uncertainty about a peaceful transfer of power, Thomas Friedman asks “will 2020’s election be the end of our democracy?” and ruminates about a possible “end of American democracy as we know it” connected to a contested election. 
• One filmmaker argues the reelection of President Trump would be “the end of democracy.” 
• And months before the election, Reed Galen of the Lincoln Project (formerly reliable members of the political right) wrote, “We have to make the next 100 days count. Nothing less than the fate of the republic is at stake.” 

To be clear, the narrative here is not that a re-elected Donald Trump would ‘steer the country in the wrong direction.’  It’s that democracy itself may not survive another four years.  

That’s an appraisal that feels overstated, even among many of the President’s strong critics. For instance, Ross Douthat argues for people to see President Trump as a “feckless tribune for the discontented rather than an autocratic menace.”

Whether or not the future of democracy in America actually hangs in the balance with this election, a large group of people in the nation now believe it. And that’s the point.

2. COVID-19 is sweeping over America, made far worse because of President Trump’s leadership. If you had to single out one dominant theme of all the messaging of the last six months about President Trump, this would be it. The virus has expanded because of his decisions. There are literally millions of examples of such a claim—in virtually every media outlet in the nation.

The same voices insist (and warn) that his continued leadership could lead to many more deaths in the year ahead.  

Are either of these contentions true?  Regardless, to pin vast consequences of an uncertain pandemic in our nation on a single man is something the reeks of politics for many. But the point here is that many believe it to be plainly true.   

3. Racism is everywhere—and is a primary force in the Republican party’s recent political resurgence.  While people have seen racism as a problem for a long time, the number of people who see it influencing everything (aka, “systemic racism”) has expanded exponentially, especially on the political left. The entire American system is said to be affected by this corrosive influence—and all the way back. For instance, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall called for more recognition that “systems and institutions that have served so many white people so well were built to do just that. They were not built from the beginning to serve everyone.”

That continues to this very moment, in this estimation. Soon after the death of George Floyd, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor decried the event in a New York Times op-ed as “a chilling affirmation that black lives still do not matter in the United States.” She went on to discuss “the failure of the state to protect black people” and argue that the U.S. “government has abandoned us” after years of being “impervious to [African-American] suffering.” 

Columnist Charles Blow similarly highlights what he calls “the nearly unchecked ability of the state to act with impunity in the oppression of black bodies and the taking of black life.” He goes on to describe a pervasive feeling that “people in power on every level—individual officers as well as local, state and federal government—are utterly unresponsive to people’s calls for fundamental change and equal justice under the law and equal treatment by it.”

Black people not mattering?  Abandoned?  With a government impervious – and utterly unresponsive?  

Alongside extensive commentary accusing law enforcement everywhere of caring less about black lives and being (implicitly) motivated to excessively punish them, the Republican Party itself is now widely regarded on the political left as driven by latent racial animus. Scholar Henry Giroux, for instance, claims that “Racism has become an open political strategy for the Republican Party, and under the Trump administration has become solidified.”  He went on to assert that a “culture of racial violence” is “embedded in reactionary cultural traditions, such as right-wing talk radio, militarized borders, police culture, the rise of mass racial incarceration, a blatant double standard in the justice system, and a rabid nationalism”—concluding, “Trump made it clear that he is a candidate for aggrieved White Americans and that he is willing to fan the flames of hatred and bigotry.”

This is not an outlier view on the left. Despite early data that questioned similar assertions about racial animus propelling President Trump’s election, he has repeatedly made statements that are taken as fresh evidence for “white supremacy” and “racial hatred” as an animating force among Republicans—and across the entire American system. An August report from the Department of Homeland Security went so far as to call violent white supremacy “the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland through 2021.”

Whether or not any of this is, in fact, actually true, the point here is that a large group of people in the nation now believe it.

4. The foundations of the country are rotten too. In the same moment that civil unrest has pressed many conservatives to reaffirm America’s foundational commitments, prominent voices on the left have highlighted recent events as yet more evidence of “fatal flaws” in some of our country’s very beginnings.  For instance, Peter Hornbein writes that the two founding pillars of America are “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The New York Times’ 1619 Project agrees—claiming that  “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

If that’s true, it’s hard to see why the American system should be preserved. Indeed, filmmaker Ava DuVernay argues for the need to “try to dismantle these systems [in America]”—concluding forcefully, “We have to get out of the framework, the way of thinking, that any of this is salvageable—because it’s truly not—it’s built on a rotten foundation.”

Upping the ante, Caitlin Johnstone writes that “the US empire is the single most destructive force on this planet and is corrupt from root to flower….the US-centralized oligarchic empire is corrupt beyond redemption and should be completely dismantled.”

Beyond redemption?  Destructive force?  Rotten foundation?  

Once again, whether or not that aggression and inequity go to the heart of the American experiment, the point here is that a striking number of people in the nation now believe it.

5. The planet is going to burn up if we don’t act quickly to take certain steps—steps that Republicans have not shown the moral courage to do. Worries about climate change as a far off, looming threat have effectively shifted in recent years, especially among the political left, to something much more pressing and immediate. At a summit last year, for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went so far as to say, “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

While some liberals have pushed back on such dire fears, her comment is hardly anomalous when considering the way many people are talking today. In an article that announces the “endgame” and “final battle for the climate,” Adam Tooze calls expanding commitment to “climate stabilization” “the most urgent priority” for society today.  And in a Washington Post piece, Amber Phillips described “scientists’ warnings that in about a decade, without action, the planet will be irreversibly, catastrophically damaged.”

Against such an urgent backdrop, another four years of leadership from President Trump is more than a disappointment for many.  It’s an “existential” threat.  As Frank Lutz summarized, “If you are a believer in climate change, reelecting Trump is literally the end of the world.” In an article called the “Climate Consequences Election,” Nathan Iyer reflects widespread progressive sentiment in writing, “Over the past four years, generations of career civil servants and scientists who have spent a lifetime fighting for environmental protections have watched their life’s work get pissed on by climate deniers gleefully burning their agencies (and our nation) to the ground.”

And in a talk about the fires in California, Joe Biden argued that if Donald Trump “gets a second term, these hellish events will continue to become more common, more devastating, and more deadly”—adding, with “four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?”

Whether or not, in fact, President Trump would move us much closer to the brink of environmental disaster, a large group of people in the nation now believe it. And that’s worth paying attention to as the election nears. 

6. The reason conservatives keep winning is that they are cheating. They are retaining and increasing their power unfairly and dishonestly.  The rapidity with which this particular view has taken hold on the political left is remarkable. With a shock of President Trump’s election that’s never really faded, the lead-up to the next one has involved heightened attention to voting and efforts on the right to preserve (what some call) “ballot integrity” and (others call) “voter suppression.”

Voting manipulation is something that many progressives now see as “widespread”—and happening everywhere Republicans hold power in the country (something conservatives dispute as conspiracy).  

More broadly, scholar Benjamin Park accuses religious groups supporting Trump of being “ dedicated to parroting undemocratic positions that privilege the interests of the few over the rights of the many”—using power as “the privileged class using undemocratic measures to overrule the opinions of the majority.”

This particular narrative has been punctuated (and underlined and bolded) by the heated debates around Supreme Court appointments, both now and in the recent past. For instance, reflecting the consensus view on the left, Gail Collins writes about “Mitch McConnell’s totally undemocratic refusal to bring Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland up for a vote.” The anger about this previous incident remains raw, with each new appointment more salt in the wound.  Upon hearing news of Justice Ginsburg’s death, scholar Reza Aslan tweeted, “If they even TRY to replace RGB, we burn the entire [expletive] thing down.” 

Paul Waldman described the recent Amy Coney Barret hearing to replace Justice Ginsburg as a “disgusting spectacle of GOP dishonesty.” Another commentator said, “Trump and Republicans have broken with tradition and perverted the Constitution to stack the Courts.”And E.J. Dionne went so far as to say “the GOP is lying its way toward expanding the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.”

Whether or not, in fact, these perceptions accurately mirror the intent and actions of Republicans (I don’t believe they do – and my colleague Christopher Cunninham has highlighted one key perspective almost entirely missing from public discussion), the relevant point here is that a large group of people in the nation now believe it. 

These perceptions are real and widespread:  Republicans are lying to us. They are cheating. And they are breaking the rules. 

Of course, rule-breakers, cheaters, and liars need not be tolerated. Indeed, these convictions predispose a uniquely militant response to ongoing happenings politically—with increasing references to the 6-3 Republican Supreme Court and the ongoing Republican majority in the Senate as a kind of “permanent minority Republican coup.” After describing conservative power in the Senate to increase their Supreme Court majority as an effort to “entrench minority rule,” former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes, “There is no reason to accept the structure of our democracy when it repeatedly empowers a ruthless minority to impose its will over the majority.”

Where does this all lead?  And what does it all mean?

Cumulative consequences.  If it’s true that a sizable subset of Americans now believe that Republicans are retaining power dishonestly and illegitimately, and largely due to racism endemic in the party (and the country as a whole from its birth). And if they also believe the fate of democracy, America’s health, and the planet as a whole hinges on regaining the White House, what does that mean for the ability of progressives to accept defeat? (Which is 13% according to FiveThirtyEight Forecasts; 30% according to betting markets and a remarkable 56% according to Gallup polls of who the American public guesses will win).  

It means they won’t accept it.  Many just won’t.  

And really, how could they? (if they believe all the foregoing)

The combined force of all these perceptions above was evident in a recent New York Times feature that began with this introductory commentary:

The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat. In this, he has been aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has fallen into the grips of white nationalism. The Republican base and its white Christian core, facing a loss of its dominant status in society, has radicalized, encouraging party leaders to engage in voter suppression, steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and tolerate the president’s lawless behavior [emphasis my own].

Rampant cheating.  Endemic racism.  And democracy on the brink.

How could anyone willingly go along with four more years of that?

Yes, of course—some on the left would accept the results, however heartbroken they may be.  But the combination of these six narratives above, in my view, make the political left extremely volatile right now. Metropolitan police forces are preparing for violent protests after the election.  Ask yourself this:  if President Trump were re-elected and that happened, how would the larger Democratic Party respond?  

Would they urgently raise their voices to help quell the violence?  Or would they say little and perhaps even rationalize some of the aggression, as progressive thought leaders have so often this summer?  

This is a good time to point out that deep skepticism many feel about these messages above is why some believe a second Trump victory is coming. That is, it’s precisely these  widely held narratives that so many others find exaggerated and repugnant.  So, as the president pushes back on climate and COVID alarmism, and the damning messages about American history and racial equity, many (perhaps more than we know) are planning to vote for him.  

Whatever happens, though, it’s clearly not just such rhetoric on the left—or corrosive comments on the right that are responsible.  It’s the interaction between the two.  Both sides bear moral responsibility for creating conditions of deep discontent and seething animosity . . . as it were, ready to erupt. 

What would it take to trigger the volcano?  

A Biden loss.  Returning to Shadi Hamid, where we began, he proposes: 

A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t), but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy.… In presidential elections, once is a fluke; twice is a pattern. I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change—at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.

He goes on to point out that “A certain kind of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what is and what should be—can fuel revolutionary sentiment.”  “In such situations,” he continues, “acting outside the political process, including through non-peaceful means, becomes more attractive, not necessarily out of hope but out of despair.”

Despair.  Fury.  Rage.  

And all that entails.  That’s what many of us predict a Trump victory would bring America.  

Whether that is the “inevitable backlash of the evil leftists” or the “justified indignation of a people being taken advantage of” would be another point of gaping disagreement.  

None of us would want the violence.  All of us would be horrified by it.  

But it would find us all the same. As Joseph Jimmy Sankaituah has written in a stirring warning to America from Liberia, “Violent conflict can creep up on you, like the darkness of night arriving in gradual shades. The creeping menace can desensitize you until the hour is too late.”

The post Would the Left Accept Four More Years? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Given the constant churn of propaganda against the President—from our one-sided news media, millionaire-pedophiles in Hollywood, and billionaire tyrants in Silicon Valley—it was only a matter of time before this vitriol would seep into the minds of my fellow churchgoers.  

Whether it’s online or in-person, far too many people have asked me, “How can you—as a Latter-day Saint—possibly support Donald Trump!?” 

My response is, “How could any Latter-day Saint possibly not?” 

The modern Democratic Party constitutes an existential threat to our way of life. They want to abolish our freedom of religion, outlaw our freedom of expression, prevent our assembling, and strip our church of its tax-exempt status.

People who hate us would really, really like it if we continued to play nice and keep our heads down. Christianity is no stranger to this type of hate, nor are Latter-day Saints in particular. And I don’t use the word “hate” lightly. 

There seems to be a few main issues that divide us on our choice for president. One issue of debate among Latter-day Saints in America is that of immigration: the (false) premise is that if we truly follow the Savior, how could we turn anyone away? 

The United States has the kindest, most generous immigration policy on earth. No other developed nation welcomes as many immigrants nor hands out its citizenship so freely. Because of the nature of our world-wide missionary experience, we have first-hand love, knowledge, and understanding of so many peoples, cultures, languages, and traditions that are truly part of our world-wide family, regardless of where we live. And we welcome all into the folds of our wards and stakes with open arms and hearts.

But the notion that a stricter immigration policy than the one we have now is somehow un-Christian is unfounded. Democrats continue to promote American immigration policies that lack the consent of the citizens of our country. And that is antithetical to a U.S. Constitution most of us believe is divinely inspired and contrary to our scripturally condoned nature, sometimes commandment, to protect our families and communities. The gathering of Israel includes the strengthening of stakes throughout the world, and we’ve worked hard to this end, including establishing the Perpetual Education Fund. We rejoice when we hear the General Conference announcement of new temples dotting the earth because it means our faith family is growing and strong.

Regarding perhaps the most prejudicial propaganda against the President on this issue, something some Latter-day Saints regard as unforgivable, the Department of Homeland Security refuted the myths that families are separated at the border. Policies on children at the border have not changed since Obama’s presidency. Trump has pushed to improve border security, which has been effective in keeping illegal drugs out of our country and ending the harm to women and children used as human shields by criminal enterprises exploiting weaknesses in our processes. In other words, Trump supports immigration but also is protecting citizens in the U.S. from drug cartels and human traffickers who are destroying our families and harming vulnerable people seeking a better life.  

The destiny of the human race, and that of Christians in particular, depends on the United States’ remaining the strongest economic, cultural, and military nation on the planet. Joe Biden’s policy on open borders, empowering terrorist nations, and conceding to unfavorable agreements with China, while ignoring grave human rights abuses, will lead to the inevitable destruction of that strength.

It is also vital to the Church’s mission to proclaim the gospel that the bulk of its missionary force comes from a country with a strong standing in the world. It will not serve the spreading of the gospel in the 21st Century if the most powerful country on Earth is China, who has driven its Christian citizens into hiding and other religious faithful into labor camps and nightmarish forced organ harvesting. Our faith-cultivated and innate compassion should compel us to stay strong for oppressed people of the world. 

All of this further obscures the danger of Joe Biden’s march toward socialism, which we know is devastating to nations’ economies and souls. Ask a ward member from Cuba, Venezuela, or Ukraine who is suffering from observing the demise of their previous beloved homelands, grateful to have escaped, but mourning for family who weren’t so blessed.

President Trump has also made great strides in peace in the Middle East, neither starting any wars there nor shrugging his shoulders with a fanatical group like ISIS’ rampages and murders. He has brought about normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In his second term, he will continue this peace process. Where there is peace, the Gospel may find an open door. Biden’s policies are contrary to the achievement of peace and do not contemplate the role or advancement of peaceful faith in the world.

Many of us have viewed President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as a reprieve against the totalitarian left’s advancements. They have provided hope that we have a fighting chance to preserve our great nation, at least for a bit longer, and the things that continue to make us a beacon of hope to the world and a shining city upon a hill. A Biden-Harris administration understands full-well what this means to their agenda, and they will snuff that hope by stacking the court.

It is understandable that many in our culture are repelled by their judgment of Trump’s incongruence with the 13th Article of Faith. But as Lance Morrow pointed out “while Trump is a serial fibber and boaster, his ideological foes lie systematically about the nature of the human person, the history of our country, the choice-worthiness of revolutionary ideology, and, as with transgenderism, the very nature of reality.” Do not confuse style with intent. Perhaps we needed a King Cyrus for our time. President Trump is our defender against the Democrats’ war on America, Christianity, and freedom. How could any Latter-day Saint not support him?

The post Latter-day Saints for Trump appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We know what happens next.  Dissolution. Maybe divorce. And sometimes, ugly conflict.   

So, then, what happens when We The People decide that we no longer trust each other—fellow countrymen and women—and the institutions that have long upheld us?  It’s time to seriously ask each other this question.   

For some time now, we’ve been aware how deeply negative our views of each other have become—to the point that 40 percent or more of Democrats and Republicans see the other party not just as people they disagree with, but as a threat to the well-being of the nation. 

Our distrust goes beyond the personal, however, to the institutions Americans have relied on for many years. For instance, a survey just released by NPR/PBS/Marist asked people specifically whether they would trust the results of the election as accurate if their candidate doesn’t win, and only half said yes (with results similar on both sides of the political spectrum). 

What happens when the “sacrament” of democracy—free and fair elections—is no longer held in trust and confidence by large majorities of people?  

We’re about to find out.  

It’s not just elections we’re newly suspicious of as a people, though. A 2020 Gallup poll also found that for the first time in its 27 years of measuring attitudes toward the police, the number of Americans saying they have significant trust in law enforcement fell below a majority—falling five points in the last year to 48%. In addition to that:   

• 49% say they have very little or no trust in televised news (compared with 33% reporting they have “some”and 18% retaining significant trust)—a remarkable 31% jump in distrust since 1973.
• 45% say they have very little or no trust in Congress (compared with 42% saying they have “some” and 13% still having significant trust in the House & Senate)—a 31% increase in distrust since 1973.  
• 37% say they have very little or no trust in the Presidency (compared with 23% with “some” and 39% with significant trust)—a 21% increase in distrust since 1975.
• 36% say they have very little or no trust in big business (with 45% saying they have “some” trust and 19% quite a lot)—a 7% jump in distrust since 1973.

Importantly, these numbers above are general averages across many different groups—with wide disparities across subgroups. For instance, 82% of Republicans and 56% of white people report trusting police—compared with 19% of Black adults and 28% of Democrats.  

Concerns about distrust can also be overstated—with majorities of Americans still holding at least some level of trust in many important institutions, including 64% of Americans expressing at least some trust in our criminal justice system, 73% in church/organized religion, 77% in public schools,  81% in the Supreme Court, 82% in the military, 83% in our U.S. medical system, and 89% in science itself. Even 81% of Americans report having at least some trust in police.  

It’s also the case that trust isn’t always a good thing—with some level of distrust (at least among some of us) potentially a protective factor in ensuring critical thinking.  

Nonetheless, urgent questions remain.  If families and businesses stop working when trust erodes, why should we expect anything different from our nation as a whole?   

There was a reason Abraham Lincoln warned “a House divided against itself cannot stand.”  As David Brooks cautioned last week, “Our system depends on the good will of the players involved. And if that good will isn’t there, then [beware] the spiral of accusation, animosity and enmity.”

In the near-term, fears exist across the political spectrum about what this atmosphere of distrust will mean for the election and its aftermath (an atmosphere both parties are clearly contributing towards). 

Rather than assuaging these concerns—and reinforcing public trust in our electoral system, the occupant of the highest office of our land has made at least five statements over the last few months that very distinctly sow distrust in the upcoming results.   

President Trump has raised questions about mail-in ballots for some time, but it was in June that he spoke more pointedly in a series of three tweets that read:  

• First, “This will be the Election disaster of our time. Mail-In Ballots will lead to a RIGGED ELECTION!”
• Then next, an all-caps, he tweeted: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
• In a third tweet, Trump said “Because of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, 2020 will be the most RIGGED Election in our nation’s history—unless this stupidity is ended,” before accusing his political opponents of “using COVID in order to cheat by using Mail-Ins.”

Since that time the President has returned to this theme multiple times, including remarks that “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if this election is rigged” (mid-August) and that “the only way they’re going to win is by a rigged election” (later August)—a contention he repeated in September: “The Democrats are trying to rig this election because that’s the only way they’re going to win.”

He has added, “they’re trying to steal the election, and everybody knows that” and called it all a “scam.”  

As one commentator put it, “He’s effectively saying the election is illegitimate unless he wins.” Another summarized the message as being, “If any result is not as I declared it to be, that is fraudulent.”

“Basically, both sides are ready to cry foul,” says Lonna Atkeson, director of the Center for the Study of Voting Elections and Democracy at the University of New Mexico. “They’ve set everything up to create a post-election crisis.” 

For an institution so central to our national stability—free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power—these remarks should be troubling to us all.  When some have asked the President directly for public reassurance that he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost, he has said “we’re going to have to see.”   

No, we don’t believe that the world’s oldest liberal democracy is on the precipice of a fascist dynasty. And fears along these lines can be overblown. 

But whether they are true or not, the reality is that a large majority of Americans now hold them as real fears.   

What does that mean—what will it mean—for the aftermath of our election?     

It’s not surprising that in a political world where the two parties feel that the other party poses an existential risk to their survival that we should see claims and counterclaims that are specifically intended to undermine trust. And yet if we accept these claims at face value without thoughtful scrutiny, trust is the inevitable casualty. 

Before people on the left cast the first stone, they also need to acknowledge the extent to which their own rhetoric about electoral fairness impacts public trust. The reporting on gerrymandering and voting rights has too often insinuated a malevolent plot on the right to disenfranchise voters of color—something that ignores legitimate questions about ballot integrity that many thoughtful observers continue to have.   

And rhetoric currently being used to describe Republican efforts to install a Supreme Court justice to replace Ruth Bater Ginsburg has also been concerning. Typically, that involves no acknowledgment that any difference exists between this instance and the earlier situation with Justice Garland (there is a key difference – the Senate and the Presidency are aligned). With a singular focus on the previous rhetoric around “doing this in an election year, the accusations of “dishonesty,” “hypocrisy” and even “not having a conscience” have been relentless. Referring to the likely vote to confirm a new justice, Senator Chuck Schumer went so far as to say, “how can we ever expect to trust them again?”  

That’s concerning to hear from any of our elected officials. But rank-and-file Republicans and national leadership who have been gleeful at the progress in shifting courts to the right, have to at least ask themselves:  What do these changes in the courts we experience as so heartening actually mean, if half the nation comes to see the courts as less trustworthy, at best—and worse, illegitimate or just a “tool of the right”?   

Some of these questions should probably keep us up at night.  They certainly shouldn’t be ignored.  

Because our country is hurting.   

Angry.  Suspicious.  Scared.   

As one journalist summarized at the New York Times this week: 

Even the most hard-bitten sages of the capital have been gripped by dread over what might be in store in the next few months. Between the crescendo of an ugly campaign, a president unrestrained, a pandemic unchecked, the prospect of a disputed election, warnings of violence after Nov. 3, could the level of distrust, dysfunction, and division get any worse? Whatever else could happen? 

We join those praying for a peaceful and fair election. But Jesus called disciples to do more than pray.  He asked them to “watch” (in Hebrew the meaning includes “guard, keeper, watchman, sentry” and is used when describing police and security watching out for public safety).  

May we be watchful and mindful of these concerning signs of trouble in our democratic system.  And may we do all we can to add our voice in moving our country forward to a better place.

The post When Trust Dies appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Here we are in the heat of another U.S. presidential election. The politically obsessed myopia endures. Many see through the two-team prism—you are either for the Democrats or the Republicans. Whichever side you choose, so the thinking goes, you accept all of it. After all, the nation’s soul is at stake! Your side is wholly right, the other side is entirely wrong. Your side is light, the other side is darkness. 

It is a devilish dualism.

As we sit amid the madness, a Book of Mormon teaching on unity begs our attention.

Some 2,000 years ago, a society in the Western Hemisphere was, in important ways, a lot like modern America. About 33 years after the birth of Jesus, we see a people called the Nephites who once enjoyed prosperity and peace but are now too well acquainted with vice. Goodwill and faith in God have, for the majority of them, given way to vain ambition. They pursue power, authority, and wealth at all costs. This leads to class distinctions and the fracture of their religious landscape.

A small group of believers remains among them, led by a holy man named Nephi. He does the miracles so familiar to readers of today’s New Testament. He casts out devils. He raises the dead. He heals sickness. He preaches repentance. He baptizes in the name of Jesus. 

Then an epic and deadly concoction of storms, fires, and earthquakes shakes their entire world into near oblivion. Some cities are submerged in water. Others burn to ash. Roads are broken up. Many people perish. Their surviving kindred can do nothing but mourn, howl, and weep while enduring three days of a vaporous darkness so thick that no light can mitigate it. 

Into this paralyzing darkness comes the piercing, yet gentle, ministerial voice of Jesus. It is a most miraculous occurrence. He explains the what and the why of all they have just experienced. The rampant death and destruction are requisite, He says, with the justice of God for their most egregious violators of societal harmony. He pleads with the survivors to let the gift of extended life spur them on to change their ways. Though they sit in the dark, utterly unable to create their own light, hope remains. How so? As Jesus tells them, “I am the light and the life of the world” (3 Nephi 9:18, emphasis added).

The light returns to the land the following morning. And so, too, does Jesus. The miraculous is turned up another notch. The resurrected Lord of the earth appears in person to a whiplashed, humbled people. He invites them to know for themselves that He is more than a ghost. They approach Him. They touch and feel the evidence of crucifixion in His hands, side, and feet. They are overcome to be in the presence of the King of Kings. They fall at His feet in worship. They shout His praises.

Jesus then delivers one of the finest lessons on unity and oneness the world has ever known. Though a small band of believers and a church were established prior to the great destruction, Jesus pushes the reset button. Notice the how and why of what He does.

With the eyes of all the people upon Him, he invests Nephi and a few others with the authority to baptize. He then shows them and the people how to properly perform this rite. Why do this if, as the Book of Mormon record shows, they already had authority and were already baptizing correctly prior to His coming? Because in addition to their other shortcomings as a society, they could not agree on the basics. They were known for their “great doubtings and disputations” (3 Nephi 8:4).

Jesus repeats three times a simple declaration: “There shall be no disputations among you as there have hitherto been” (3 Nephi 11:28). Who was wrong and who was right in those debates? He does not say. It does not matter. Who is wrong or right is not nearly as important as what is wrong or right. When it comes to arguing and being disagreeable, Jesus declares that “the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil” (3 Nephi 11:29). Hearts boiling over with anger have no place in His loving kingdom. Only the soft, simple hearts of children will do.

Because our elections generate more heat than light, we need frequent reminders that there are no purely evil or wholly good people—no matter their voting preferences. Gulag survivor Alexandr Solzhenitsyn learned this through eight years of deep reflection enabled by the terrors of the Soviet prison system. He was once himself a decorated captain in the Soviet Army. But he was, in his mind, “a murderer, and an oppressor” who in his “most evil moments … was convinced that [he] was doing good.” Only the crushing tutelage of the prison camp enabled his soul to give birth to this remarkable sentence: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Elections certainly matter. But few certainties are found in electoral politics. Ours is an age where, in the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “veracity is taking second place to the mass manipulation of emotion.” Indeed, what Augustine St. Clare says in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, printed in 1852, could be said by many Americans to describe 2020: “Such pious politicians as we have just before elections—such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who’ll cheat him next.”

Can we both hold a strong opinion and confess the limits of what we know? Can we acknowledge that those with different views are probably, like us, genuinely interested in the common good? Do we really want to allow the acids of animus toward our neighbor to destroy both our relationships and our souls? I don’t think we do. Not when we count the cost. Not when we taste the bitter fruit of soured friendships.

Of course, relationship building is expensive (it requires a major investment of time and humility) and we are all too often drawn to cheap things. But a key message of the resurrected Jesus in the Book of Mormon is that even a country as divided as ours can rise to the challenge.

What happened to that Book of Mormon people of “great doubtings and disputations” when Jesus left them? For two centuries afterward, “there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people.” Indeed, “there were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.”

Achieving this utopian-like peace was not an effortless enterprise. Those people reconsidered their ways, abandoned deceitful patterns of thinking, and made better choices. They saw the divine in every face.

A country founded not on left and right but on the simple yet too-often-misunderstood ideal that all men and women are created equal surely can still do the same.

The post A Book of Mormon Missive for the 2020 Election appeared first on Public Square Magazine.