Election Reflections

The election of Donald Trump seems to have been rather shocking for almost everyone I know.  Some people are surprised, some are angry, and almost no one I know both expected a Trump victory and wanted to see it happen (although I suspect that this is because I haven’t seen one particular set of friends yet).  I’ve already received an email asking if Jawbone will have some thoughts and, as it turns out, I do.  These are, by necessity, rapidly-composed thoughts, but here they are.

1. The word for this election is “capture”.

1. First, there’s the capture of the American mind.  For months now I have watched political debates follow this formula: “Candidate A is terrible because X.”  Response: “Candidate B is terrible because Y.”  These responses in some very real way don’t make sense.  If I say that Bob is a robber pointing out that Stan is a carjacker isn’t a response so much as a mostly-irrelevant comment connected only by the theme of “crime”.  However, in a world in which one must choose Bob or Stan and only Bob or Stan any argument about the badness of Bob is an argument for choosing Stan.  Therefore, it might be countered as an argument for Stan by arguing against Stan.  The weirdness of these responses was driven home to me most clearly when a friend posted about legal proceedings against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and a friend of his “countered” by complaining about the actions of someone associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.  Obviously for the friend of the friend (at the very least) Arpaio was a stand-in for conservatives/Republicans and BLM was a stand-in for liberals/Democrats.  Moreover, this argument was zero-sum.  Either Republicans “won” or Democrats did and so arguing against Democrats was the same as defending Republicans.  There wasn’t a world in which we agreed that people on both sides of the political divide could behave badly, or even that sometimes a single person could engage in both good and bad behavior.
   This is capture of the American mind.  I have, elsewhere, complained that politics has taken the place of religion as the all-encompassing system of values and this seems to be on display here.  The sides in this fight are each composed of a series of beliefs that do not necessarily hold together and yet we are all being asked to choose all the beliefs of one side.  It’s unclear to me why my position on free trade must align with the same candidate as my position on immigration but apparently they are supposed to.  This is even more difficult for me since no candidate has a position on immigration that I find acceptable.  However, such off-the-grid thinking is discouraged.  Our minds are to be caged in this simple T-maze where there are only two options.
   (As a long aside: there is a very real attempt to limit us to two options.  The scorn for people who do not vote is one sign of this.  Being completely disgusted with the system should result in a withdrawal of support but when it does you are likely to be plagued by friends who insist that there is no third way and that you cannot complain about the results of the election if you refused to support either candidate.  Third party voters get similar scorn from some quarters and in many ways are considered to be branches of the main parties as if they were some heterodox sect of the main religion.  This is consistent with my thesis that many people believe that the world naturally aligns itself along an American liberal-conservative axis and that worldviews that do not map cleanly on to this axis are just weird.)
   As a more esoteric note the replacement of transcendent community identification with identification along nation-state lines appears to be one of the core elements of the Enlightenment project’s realignment of the political landscape.
2. Second, there’s the political capture of the evangelical vote.  This is really an aside into political theory but it’s my blog so you’ll have to live with that for a minute.  Political parties are coalitions of groups each of which has specific interests.  A group has been captured when it will vote so reliably with one party or the other that the home party of the group no longer has to make any concessions towards the special interests of the group.  A captured group can be more or less ignored by its coalition partners who can spend their resources courting less-reliable allies by meeting their demands.  Considerable discussion has occurred about whether the African-American vote has been captured by the Democratic party (a decision that hinges on whether the Democratic party is less responsive to the concerns of its African-American coalition partners than it is of its other partners) but this election seems to have shown that white evangelicals have been captured by the Republicans.  Donald Trump is one of the worst candidates the Republicans could have fielded in terms of meeting the standard demands of Christian conservatives and yet somewhere north of 4 in 5 white evangelicals voted for him.  It appears that as long as Republicans mutter “pro-life” once or twice they can do pretty much anything else and worry only about turning white evangelicals out, not turning them off.  The problem with being politically captured is that it represents a loss of political power.  If evangelical voters back candidates to influence politics for God’s good ends it seems that in many cases this deal has now thoroughly backfired.  Political capture lowers the ability of evangelicals to extract political concessions from their coalition partners and in the specific case of Donald Trump the action of supporting Trump appears to have lowered the standards of white evangelicals who are now much less concerned about the character of politicians than they were a few electoral cycles ago.
3. Finally, there’s cultural capture.  I intend to write a free-standing article about this issue, which is hardly restricted to this election, but there’s reason to believe that this electoral cycle has demonstrated that the culture has eaten evangelicalism without nearly the stomachache is should have gotten from that.  The fact, noted above, that white and black evangelicals are sharply politically split certainly suggests that evangelicalism is less a distinct culture unto itself but a subset of other more powerful cultures.  I believe that it is inevitable that the reigning cultural paradigm will attempt to capture the dominant religion but it is unfortunate to see that it seems to have worked.

2. We are not God.  It is easy to be entranced (even captured) by the American vision of specialness.  Politicians invoke American exceptionalism and we invoke a sense of grand purpose and destiny in our lives.  However, it has not been entrusted to us to fix the world.  Our vision far exceeds our grasp and it is easy to see problems that we cannot fix and then fixate on them.  We have been called not to be super-special global heroes for good but to be God’s servants where we are.  I am called to serve my family, my friends, my students, my coworkers.  I am not called to stop the civil war in Syria (although I am called to take the actions that become available to me that might bring the world towards that goal).  I am not called to end the racial divide in the nation (although I am called to be an agent of God’s reconciliation where I live).  As Americans we can vote and these votes count.  This can make us feel that we must be able to solve the nation’s problems.  However, today I talked to two African women, each of whom comes from a different country with a fake democracy (i.e., there is voting but the same person will remain President regardless of what the votes say).  Are they less able to be Christian because their votes count for nothing in their home countries?  No – and simply because we can throw a drop in the ocean does not mean that God’s work for us is to change the ocean.  Indeed, it is possible that God does not have work for us in the sense of getting things accomplished so much as being the sort of people He has asked us to be, people full of love, mercy, justice, and compassion.  Perhaps these will have great effects on many people and perhaps they will only touch a few but it seems to me a strange form of modern works-righteousness to insist that our goodness must reach into the far corners of the world before it counts.

3. Trump won largely, it seems to me, by pulling support from one of the traditional Democratic coalition partners.  These would be the blue-collar, white, often union folks.  There has been a lot of talk about all the people Trump quite obviously does not care about but it’s worth pointing out that the Democrats lost the Electoral College (although not the popular vote) by abandoning people for whom the economy is not good and has not really been getting better.  In a world in which we had only two options we might object to this by pointing out Trump’s many faults but in the world enlightened by God’s love we should ask how to love everyone.  What does an economy look like that provides gainful employment for someone with a high school degree and nothing more?  Are we working out way towards an elite economy in which only those who can make it through years of post-secondary schooling can make a solid living?  I find Trump’s racism and misogyny horribly offensive but I am also troubled that we seem to be doing little for people whose jobs are being automated out of existence except mock them for their backwardness.

4. Practice builds character.  One of the most troubling things in this election has been that many people supported and then voted for someone they didn’t particularly like.  The act of defending someone not only influences other but also yourself.  When you say, “Such and such a thing is bad but not so bad,” you speak to yourself first and others second.  It’s rather clear from the sharp shift in how evangelicals perceive the importance of character in politicians that repeatedly saying that Trump’s character wasn’t an issue had an effect.  What other actions have people spent months defending that they probably shouldn’t have?

5. For my liberal friends who are amazed that the uninterrupted march of progress towards a tolerant society seems to have stepped backwards: Christianity has something to say to you, and it’s that evil is predictably common.  It’s not a rare aberration to be stamped out by careful teaching and, once eliminated, never to be seen again, but a pernicious, returning malignancy.  Only constant vigilance is ever a defense against evil, and even then evil is creative and multifaceted.  Personally, I find that both parties are unhelpfully sanctimonious in dispensing moral advice and are generally blind to their own deep moral flaws.  So remember that evil does not rest, and neither must you.  You cannot simply pledge loyalty to a movement and stay on board without constantly reflecting on its direction.  As I said in point #3 liberals probably lost this election by dropping former coalition partners in the crapper (probably at least moderately evil).  However, the loss of power is a pragmatic concern and we are, hopefully, motivated by love of God and not mere pragmatism when we engage in self-reflection.