The following are my notes for a lecture I presented to the 2017 meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club on Trump and the “social issues.”
- What are the social issues?
- Why are they hard to deal with?
- What’s at stake?
- Why Trump as a social conservative?
He’s not an actual social conservative. He’s OK with “gay marriage,” doesn’t dispute gay military service, had Peter Thiel speak at convention. But social liberalism is not his religion, which it is for Hilary Clinton, the commentariat, the academy, and the upper reaches of the Democratic Party.
- What’s the connection between Trump’s issues – globalism and nationalism – and social conservatism?
- What has he actually done?
Appointment of social conservatives – Neil Gorsuch and other judges, Jeff Sessions, other officials.
Denied international family-planning funds to organizations that promote or perform abortion — that is, imposed an expanded form of the Mexico City policy of previous Republican presidents.
Reversed a lot of Obama-era initiatives.
Got rid of contraception mandate.
Reversed Obama directive on transgender in the military and in education.
Justice Department briefs argued that illegal sex discrimination does not include sexual orientation discrimination and supported conscience rights for service providers.
Said he wanted to end Johnson Amendment.
Showed lack of allegiance to inclusiveness as a supreme ideal.
- Why the progressive insanity?
- Where is all this going to go?
- Does Trump’s election mark the Thermidor of the social revolution?
David Gordon couldn’t be here to talk about Trump and foreign policy, and I can’t really substitute for him, so I’ll talk about the opposite topic, Trump and social issues.
People keep wondering whether the social revolution will reach its Thermidor, the point at which progress stops or reverses. Seems doubtful, recent polls showing growing division between Republicans and Democrats on social issues mostly show Dems have swung violently to the left Republicans only moderately that way.
Still everything’s in play in a way it didn’t use to be. Broadened Overton Window compared to what it would have been.
What’s with Donald Trump? A free-living New Yorker with no apparent religious or moral convictions. But he resists instruction, so his views are likely to reflect the outlook of the ordinary guy. That means they skew conservative on social issues.
He’s not an actual social conservative. He’s OK with “gay marriage,” doesn’t dispute gay military service, had Peter Thiel speak at convention. But social liberalism is not his religion, which it is for Hilary Clinton, the commentariat, the academy, and the upper reaches of the Democratic Party.
He also got the votes of social conservatives, they’re his most loyal supporters. He thinks about things personally, so he wants to reward them and keep their support. He’s not a cold blooded triangulator other Republicans have been.
Why the hysteria? Why the paranoia that leads so many to view a self-indulgent and socially rather liberal New York billionaire as the second coming of Hitler?
Why the fear and hatred directed toward the supposedly backward (the “irredeemable” “deplorables”), who after all include almost everyone who has ever lived, and even today the great majority of the world’s people?
Why do even sober and intelligent liberals accept post-election scare stories at face value? Even before the election, there were numerous fake “hate incidents,” especially on college campuses, and a corresponding demand for “safe spaces” that exclude every hint of opposition.
His campaign, like Brexit, was mostly about globalism and immigration. So why does worrying about those things mean you want to send all the Jews and homosexuals off to camps?
So what has he done?
Appointment of social conservatives – Neil Gorsuch and other judges, Jeff Sessions, other officials.
Reversed a lot of Obama-era initiatives.
Denied international family-planning funds to organizations that promote or perform abortion — that is, imposed an expanded form of the Mexico City policy of previous Republican presidents.
Excluded transgenders from the military and reversed Obama transgender directive for schools.
Got rid of contraception mandate.
Justice Department briefs argued that illegal sex discrimination does not include sexual orientation discrimination and supported conscience rights for service providers.
Vowed to end Johnson Amendment.
Until very recently, effective opposition to globalism, open borders, and lifestyle liberalism—that is, for traditional local ties over global markets, regulatory bureaucracies, and recent understandings of human rights—had all but disappeared. Electoral reverses in Europe and the United States make them seem less invincible.
Brexit and Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized opposition to globalization and open borders rather than lifestyle liberalism, and the connection between the two sets of issues is indirect. Even so, unity is the strength of orthodoxy, including that of the Left, and progressives—who have reason to pay attention—believe that recent movements in support of national and local identity threaten their gains on issues such as abortion, “gay marriage,” and transgenderism.
Commentary regarding Brexit and the recent U.S. election confirms that the educated, well-placed, and articulate tend to view those who retain a sense of the importance of traditional ties and give credence to the boundaries and distinctions that relate to them—citizen and non-citizen, marriage and non-marriage, even man and woman—as bigots. They’re racists, misogynists, and homophobes who pose a threat of violence to others. So why view them as legitimate participants in public life?
The issue regarding all these issues is the value of traditional and informal local connections. If we can live happily as autonomous individuals in a universal order defined wholly by markets and bureaucracies, progressives are right. If they’re wrong, and a good life requires other more local and concrete ties that bind—marriage, family, religion, local and national community—together with the distinctions and arrangements that support them, then the opponents of current public orthodoxy, including serious Catholics, raise issues that need to be addressed.
In part it’s a result of the stripped-down view of man and social order. If at bottom you view the social world as something like an industrial process designed to produce satisfactions and distribute them equally, then family ties and religious and cultural community make no sense unless they are reduced to private predilections of no practical significance.
To the extent they correspond to definite public standards and retain the ability to play an important role in social life—for example, to the extent marriage is viewed as a uniquely legitimate and enduring union of man and woman oriented toward new life—they’re viewed as irrational prejudices that gum up the system. As such, they are expected to reduce efficiency, equality, and stability, so they’re stupid, oppressive, and dangerous. The people who favor them evidently approve of that, so such people must be motivated by ignorance, bigotry, or rage and resentment looking for an excuse to lash out at the helpless. To many people, that conclusion seems a simple inference from basic principles.
So it makes its own kind of sense that respected progressives claim that Brexit, Trump’s victory, and other recent developments result from bigotry and are therefore illegitimate. The evidence is said to be an outburst of hate crimes, although in America verifiable crimes motivated by group or political hatred seem mostly the work of people opposed to Trump.
In any case, hate and bigotry are partly in the eye of the beholder: some say it’s hate to deny Bruce Jenner is a woman, others that it’s hate to write off a quarter of the population as an irredeemable basket of deplorables. At bottom, “hate” now seems to refer mostly to the belief that traditional ways of organizing life have something to be said for them, so traditional connections and distinctions, such as those between the sexes, are not wholly evil.
In short, the dominant view of social order, because it leaves out basic features of human life and considers itself uniquely rational, can’t conceive of reasonable well-intentioned dissent. But for that same reason, the form of life it aims at is not achievable. We’re not going to have a global society, a sort of perfected EU writ large, in which sex, religion, and cultural community don’t significantly affect success and social position. Those things affect people’s actions, attitudes, loyalties, and relations to others, so they inevitably affect how things work out for them. Why would any sensible person wish otherwise? Should we want society to be a big machine that overrides the effects of everything people are and do?
It’s evident such claims are based less on facts than the conviction progressive views are patently correct and opposition purely a matter of ignorance and ill will. It’s hard though to discount their long-term effect when the major news media insist on them and they are backed by other centers of power, such as academia. Repetition transforms accepted understandings, especially when backed by social position and the ability to guide discussion through editorial decisions and manipulation of search results and social media feeds.
The result of recent events, which demonstrate resistance to progressivist universalism, is to allow those now considered political heretics to bring a variety of issues that seemed all but lost back into public discussion. Their situation is still very difficult. Progressives dominate public discussion, and they have absolute faith in their cause, so reverses lead them to redouble their efforts. For that reason we’re sure to see more vigorous attempts to enforce liberal orthodoxy. That’s what happened in the past: AIDs sacralized homosexuality, abortion put radical feminism beyond discussion, and 9/11 turned Islamophobia into a hate crime. If a tendency is considered politically necessary, the more problems it causes the more uncompromising the attempts to impose it.
For now, though, established authorities have lost credit among many people, and the future is unforeseeable. There is a new readiness to defy orthodoxy, new vehicles for dissenters to make their voices heard, and a new willingness among many people to listen and consider. We should use the situation while we have it.
Nor are people going to keep pursuing forever an impossible and destructive vision that disrupts normal beneficial social functioning. So progressives aren’t going to get what they want, a fact they must sense at some level. The result, since they can conceive no rational and humane alternative to their goal, is that they often feel as if they were living on a thin crust of rock over a lake of boiling magma, a sea of foaming racism, misogyny, and whatnot, that is likely to burst out and destroy everything if the slightest crack develops. Hence all the upset, on campuses and post-election, about “safety.”
There is also the problem of identity and social position. The current dogma is that a system of stable identities is oppressive, and to the extent one exists it should be disrupted. That is the significance of the celebratory response to Bruce Jenner’s sexual makeover, and the very recent multiplication of “genders” and its embrace by mainstream institutions. Identity is to be something people construct and reconstruct freely, with each construction getting equal affirmation, and law and social custom ensuring that all identities are utterly irrelevant to social functioning and outcomes—that a genderqueer Latinx gets precisely the same respect, opportunity, acceptance, and likelihood of success as anyone else. The alternative is thought to be slavery and oppression.
That dogma isn’t limited to a few academics. In an age of mass electronic communications, mass higher education, mass graduate school, and mass social climbing, it’s gone mass market. Even when it’s not accepted through and through, it wins all the public arguments because there are no objections to it that count as legitimate. That’s why it’s increasingly coded into the law.
But if all identities are equally supported then no identity is supported. Identity is too basic for anyone to construct for himself, but in the world now emerging no one can expect social support for his actual identity, since any other would be accepted as equally valid. That situation guarantees that there will be a lot of fragile and insecure people who will be intensely alarmed if anything seems, even by implication, to put the equal validity of their chosen identities in question. It will seem an existential attack on what they are, and thus the moral equivalent of murder. That’s why the infinitely multiplying possibilities of “microaggression” are increasingly viewed as a serious problem: each is thought to erase the people microaggressed against.
If respectable opinion submits to such views and sees opposition as evil, and the opinion is based on accepted views of justice and rationality, so that resistance is mostly unprincipled and inarticulate, that’s a serious problem.
To make matters worse, in a number of ways social position really has become more uncertain and identity less reliable. Fewer people get married today. Social media substitute for enduring face-to-face connections. Relations between the sexes become ever more indefinite and unstable. More people move from place to place as employment becomes tenuous, home ownership an impossible dream, and locality less local as America is swallowed up by chain stores, shopping malls, apartment complexes, multi-lane highways, and the evanescent electronic world of the Internet.
Under such circumstances, many people, especially women, young people, minority group members, the unmarried and unchurched, and those who have moved away from their homes and connections, feel insecure. Such feelings are easily exploited for political gain; so politicians and publicists can be counted on to exacerbate them as much as possible. Hence the negative identity politics exemplified by the prominence given the “war against women” in past elections, and the supposed epidemic of shootings of innocent unarmed black men in the most recent ones.
The result of all these tendencies is a perfect storm of political ill-feeling and irrationality, with no prospect of change in the conditions that feed it. If the symptoms were not so harmful to civic health, one might be tempted to give this destructive psychosis a lighthearted name like “Progressive Derangement Syndrome.”
A Catholic Populism?
A Turning Point in the Culture War?
What is Progressive Derangement Syndrome?