Still Processing the Day Before Yesterday

Yesterday I did as I have regularly done for 16 years now, and replaced my Wednesday morning, post-Election Day classes with an open conversation, to which I invited any and all who are interested, from around Friends and throughout Wichita and beyond. I’ve had some real successes, I think, with these post-election forums—both in terms of just responding to students’ questions about election minutiae as well as in providing an opportunity for people to vent—but yesterday’s couldn’t have gone better. For close to three hours, going into and through the lunch hour, over 40 students, former students, faculty, administrators, friends, and a couple of television journalists shared thoughts, ideas, concerns, and—in the case of multiple individuals—despair. (The queer students and first-generation immigrants who talked about feeling less safe in an America that has just returned to the White House a man whose campaign regularly promulgated lies about their communities were particularly poignant.)

Processing despair is something I’m seeing all around me, as well as within myself. Donald Trump will be president, will almost certainly never face justice for his crimes and unconstitutional actions, and will be able, with the strong support of a party which, despite its own divisions (and, I still suspect, to its own eventual corruption), will unitedly assist him in pursuing—or, more accurately, get his lackadaisical approval to present in his name—policies that I consider harmful and wrong. That’s depressing, and there are millions of people feeling that depression right now, including people I love dearly. What all of their processing of these depressing facts will lead to remains to be seen. Everyone shares social media stories about people planning to leave the country after an electoral defeat which they find appalling, but in this case I do know one person actively working in that direction, convinced as he is that Trump is going to lay the foundations of an undemocratic, authoritarian state that we won’t be able turn back from.

I don’t think that’s likely, but I do think it’s possible. I also think that the best way to deal with such possibilities is to involve oneself—or, if you’re already involved, get involved even more—with one’s local community, culture, service opportunities, and politics. So today I went to another meeting about parking in downtown Wichita, got into some entirely graspable, non-theoretical, non-fascist arguments with local leaders and others whom I both agree and disagree with (many of whom surely voted for Trump), and it was wonderful. No doubt I’ll once again have something to say about it all soon.

In meantime, I’m an extrovert—I process through talking, writing, sharing thoughts and worries and ideas—as well as a political nerd, and so I have thoughts about Tuesday, beyond my early morning reflections from yesterday. None of them are original, but I may be able to suggest some additions or comparisons to or among them. Basically, I am seeing four main lines of argument emerging among the hot-takes and the as-yet-incomplete electoral and exit polling and survey data out there, at least among the actually serious pundits and observers I follow. The goal is to account for the electoral reality that was clear by late Tuesday night: that support for Donald Trump and the Republicans increased has increased (in general overall, save with white women, but especially among Hispanic men) and that support for the Democratic coalition, under the leadership of Kamala Harris, dropped dramatically (particularly among self-defined Independents).

First, there is the anti-establishment/anti-incumbent/anti-government argument, expertly expressed by my old friend Damon Linker here. Basically, we see throughout the world a profound distrust in all governing institutions and in anyone who defends or seems to represent those governing institutions. Which means that meaning that Harris’s affirmation of Biden’s government programs, her invoking the support of established institutional bodies or agencies or leaders, or her trying to rile people up by accusing Trump (accurately!) of attacking said institutions and programs, just can't capture as many votes as people thought it might (particularly on the basis of the apparent effectiveness of that argument for Biden in the 2022 midterms).

Second, there is the economic argument. So many people have either explicit or, more commonly, vague concerns about their own economic prospects or stability (remember that most people who report concerns about the economy also report that they are personally doing okay), particularly as regards big ticket items--buying a house, paying for college, surviving surgery—that inflation-inflected costs which are, both historically and comparatively, manageable  (gas and food prices) are legitimately magnified in peoples' (particularly low income or entrepreneurial/self-employed peoples') minds, and thus economic worries punch above their weight.

 Third, there is the racism and sexism argument, in all its varieties (though I like the way Tom Nichols expressed it here). One doesn’t have to believe that the majority, or even a plurality, of Trump voters are committed white supremacists to recognize that the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to voting against their own partisan socialization and/or social group when given a message they like or at least are okay that is expressed by an older white male just might be larger than the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to doing the same when the message is expressed by a black female. The messenger matters, in other words.

Fourth, the structural or small-d democratic argument, which Ezra Klein partly makes here. The argument is that, when Biden declared that he was running for re-election after the 2022 midterms, certain restrictions were locked in as far the Democratic party was concerned. There was no Democratic primary, which had two results: 1) it provided the Republicans with an actually persuasive (even if duplicitous) argument that the Democratic nominee had never won an election on her own, thus undermining, particularly among low-information voters, arguments against Trump's authoritarianism, and 2) it robbed Harris and the Democrat party itself of all the procedural campaign advantages (name recognition, position polishing, candidacy distinguishing, etc.) which come along with the way general elections operate in the United States. In lacking this, Harris went into a profoundly shortened general election (and it’s worth noting that almost no one who is actually experienced in presidential campaigns thinks her team actually failed to make the best of a bad situation) without a strong positive message that fit the mood of the electorate she actually needed to win.

All of these are obviously true to one degree or another, and there are different ways in which we can see them amplifying one another. For example, the one might argue—as both Chris Hedges and David Brooks have argued, though in very different ways—that the lack of any kind of genuinely radical, Sanders-esque, and therefore “disruptive” economic proposals to addresses the immense costs of housing, medical, tuition, etc., coming from the Harris campaign, made it easier for Trump to claim the mantle of the person with the true “challenge the status quo” economic plan, thus covering both arguments #1 and #2. (Yes, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were both truly impressive progressive accomplishments, but their very lack of visibility strengthened the ease to which voters, if they even knew about these laws, would have considered them—not unreasonably—as just more of the usual tweaks to an economic system whose fundamental unfairness cannot be denied.) And that’s just one example of the ways all these diagnoses, as well as others that, as the election analysis continues on, are bound to emerge. other ways of processing this massive (though, actually, in terms of the number of people who actually voted in the election, maybe not actually quite “massive”) failure will emerge.

Will it turn out to have been a realignment election? I am instinctively doubtful, partly because I’m not sure the comparatively smaller number of people who actually voted in the election justifies such a broad conclusion, and also because last time I thought so I turned out to be quite wrong. So I hold to that possibility—the hope that Trump is something which, for all the harms I believe his administration will cause, both at home and abroad, to our economy and our foreign policy but maybe most of all to our once-actually-striving-to-be democratic political culture, we will live through, and find some new, probably much diminished, but still worthwhile ordinary politics on the other side. That is what gives my frustrated, still-processing brain a little bit of peace, at least; maybe it will to others as well.

Not a Mea Culpa, But Like Unto It

When Trump won in 2016, I was genuinely flummoxed—disappointed and angry and frustrated as well, of course, but mostly just confused. It signaled the breakdown of practically every electoral pattern that I'd spent the previous 25 years schooling myself in. One of the results was that, while I'm not sure I ever fully believed all the screams about Trump as a Russian agent and all the other "resistance" stuff (what if Clinton called upon the Electoral College to reject Trump as unfit and just pick some other Republican as president? what if the deep state simply refused to acknowledge him as Commander-in-Chief and created a shadow government behind closed doors?), I gave it all far more credence and sympathetic attention than any subsequent, actually reasonable assessment of the situation showed it deserved.

This time, I'm not confused; I can see how it is both politically and electorally possible for a stupid, corrupt, wanna-be authoritarian to craft a message that works, relative to the other option on the table, for what will be, in the end, probably over 75 million Americans—almost certainly only a tiny fraction of whom are themselves inclined to fascism, and probably only a moderately larger fraction of whom rejected the other option on the table for what might be considered fascist-adjacent reasons. I didn't want to believe that, to randomly guess, some 60 million American voters would actually either disbelieve Trump's criminality and authoritarianism or consider it forgivable in light of various issues (like my mother's belief that Trump will keep America out of wars). But the evidence is there, and it's eminently believable.

For 20 years, since Bush's re-election in 2004, I've heard Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives, Christian socialists, and whatever else the people on what is mostly my side of our endless political divides call themselves, look at Republican candidates and look at election results and say: "too bad for America; it was nice while it lasted." As much as I sympathized with the sentiment behind that phrase, and as much as was—and probably always will be—open to taking seriously the presumptions behind it, I really don't think I ever fully believed it. As Dr. Manhattan made very clear, nothing ever ends, so I don't believe it now either. But good grief, my fellow 66 million Americans who made the what I believe to be the right choice, if we don't (and I truly do include myself in that "we") see this as the conclusion of one more iteration of the story of the boy who called wolf, then where the hell are we?

Some Thoughts on the Republican Donald Trump, and All the Other Republicans, Mormon or Otherwise, I Know (and Sometimes Love)

[Note: this is a long and very party-centric set of musings for the day before the presidential election ends and the real electoral and legal chaos begins. For many, that’s a turnoff. But I’m both a scholar of American politics as well as a politics nerd, so that’s what you get. Read on, if you feel so inclined. And yes, this an expansion/revision of a piece published by Insight Kansas, in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere, over a week ago. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

For a great many people—though not, I think, quite as many as some people suppose—in America over the past eight years or so, the problem of Donald Trump and the Republican party is entirely straightforward. Trump is an awful person, who represents awful things—as my fellow Kansas writer Joel Mathis summarized it on Saturday, his whole approach to representative politics has always involved divisiveness, cruelty, and threats of (and sometimes actual) violence--and so anyone who supports him, and any party he is part of, must be, by definition, awful, full stop.

Both personally and professionally, I have a hard time imagining how anyone with a lick of political sense could fail to recognize how potentially counter-productive doubling-down on that attitude is—to say nothing of how arguably un-Christian it is for those of us who take the command to love one’s enemies seriously, and who therefore should be very conscious of the costs to our ability to draw a line between our opinions and electoral divisiveness, cruelty, and possible violence, when it comes to labeling any other human being or group of human beings by definition “awful” (or “evil,” or “garbage,” or “scum,” or "demonic," or “deplorable,” or whatever you prefer). I’m not denying that it’s hard to avoid that doubling-down; civil discourse, maintaining a full-throated defense of one’s beliefs while showing love and respect to others, is really hard when basic civic norms seem to have collapsed. But still, I think that is what both democratic citizenship and Christian discipleship call on us to do. The fact that many smart and good people I know, who appear to me in all other areas of their lives to sincerely affirm both of those aforementioned principles, apparently do in fact double-down on all-or-nothing anger nonetheless, just shows that it’s my imagination that’s lacking. 

Do I think Trump is an awful human being? Yes, absolutely; my opinion of him—“personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, stupidly (and often gleefully) divisive, and politically destructive”—hasn’t changed in the past four years. Do I think that everyone that supports Trump is therefore also awful? No, because “supports” is a broad term, one which technically includes everyone from Stephen Miller, a convicted felon and an unrepentant racist immigrant-basher, and my mother, a wonderful 79-year-old woman whom I love dearly. I mean, they both voted for Trump, so QED, right?

There is a cohort of the politically awoke and online—though again, I am convinced, by both the data on split-ticket voting and personal observation, that the polarizing “Big Sort” of American voters into two rival tribes hasn’t eliminated cross-party familial and social relations nearly to the extent some believe—who might well insist that, whatever the manifold differences between my mom and Stephen Miller, in the present environment they belong in the same category. I can understand that formulation, in the same way I can understand—and even defend as coherent—that formulating of political opinions which leads people to become single-issue voters: that literally nothing else matters except where a candidate stands on stopping abortion, or where a candidate stands on ending the war in Gaza, etc. But however coherent it may be to conclude that if X is awful—a fascist, perhaps, or even, in Trump’s maddeningly nonsensical claim, a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”—then everyone who does something so extreme as to cast a vote in favor of X must therefore be fully baked into X’s awfulness, no matter what they claim, it remains, I am convinced, a deeply unhelpful and, frankly, immature thing to believe.

 [Note: in terms of Trump himself, I continue to think “fascist-adjacent” remains the best label. He isn’t the only authoritarian-wanna-be to have occupied the White House or tried to do so, but the cult of personality, exclusion, and resentment which his rise has lent dominance to within an major political party is, I fear, quite arguably unique in our history (Huey Long, maybe? or Theodore Bilbo?), and deserves to be noted, and feared, as such.]

So, a little pedantic social psychology here. Human beings, both singly and in groups, always act in ways that can be assessed on multiple planes of judgment: historical, religious, strategic, aesthetic, and more. To ignore those different planes—which usually means ignoring all the sorts of things you can know about a person that you’ve actually spent face-to-face, real-world time with, someone you’ve listened to and lived alongside, and instead just focusing on random statements forwarded on social media—is to do something intensely reductive, and therefore almost certainly something that fails to take your fellow human beings seriously, in the way that I think the fundamentals of Christianity, to say nothing of the basic premises of any belief in democracy, particularly of the participatory sort, necessitates.

True, the too-often evil vicissitudes of political life sometimes necessitate reductive, immediate distinctions; you can’t save someone from a lynch mob if you insist upon deliberating as to whether or not extra-judicial mob action might be necessary in any given circumstance. But casting a vote simply isn’t the direct equivalent of that, because absent a voter explicitly affirming such, I just don’t see how someone can meaningfully—in the sense of providing evidence which proves a particular conclusion—discover in the casting of a ballot the same intentionality as swinging a rope over a branch. Passionately insisting on the contrary, that actually every vote fully incorporates the most extreme intentions that anyone can historically connect to said vote, only suggests that one must believe we’re at the point where the electoral agency expressed by actual voters no longer matters—that the incorrect yet sincerely believed intentions of my mother and every other Trump-supporting Republican I know is wholly irrelevant. And if that’s the case, why are you worrying about votes at all? Best of luck with your revolution, I guess. (Though I hope you’ll choose to retreat and form an intentional commune rather than engage in armed revolt, because the record of the latter is atrocious and while the former is often inspiring.)

My mom’s vote for Trump (she believes he’ll keep America out of foreign wars) doesn’t surprise me. She’s a life-long American Mormon, and American Mormons who were born in the 1940s and committed themselves to the socially conservative family model that mostly took over American Mormon culture during the 20^th century, particularly after World War II (the Old Right-style anti-communist paranoia of Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson being the key factor here), were pretty consistent supporters of the Republican party, and that has only very recently slowly begun to change. My father was a life-long Republican too, and while I want to believe that he would have been like a number of other Mormon Republicans I know—my wife’s parents, some of my brothers, a couple of my oldest friends in my local Mormon congregation here in Wichita, to say nothing of Mitt Romney, the most famous Mormon Never Trumper of them all—and recognized the awfulness of Trump and voted against him accordingly, I actually suspect that he would have stuck with the GOP until the bitter end. Socializing one’s voting history, religious beliefs, and regional environment together can do that, sometimes.

This is the sort of thing that leads some to insist on the terribleness of party politics and partisanship in general; in particular, in the case of my religious tribe, it leads some of those of us who want to nudge the great bulk of the Republican-voting Mormon faithful in a properly anti-Trump direction (especially if they live in Arizona!), to double-down instead on the curious statement the Mormon church leadership made in 2023: that in addition to encouraging members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of my church) to be active citizens and affirming the church’s official neutrality—positions they emphasize every year—the church leadership insisted that “members should…vote for those [candidates] who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy.”

In the same way that I can recognize as coherent (even if stupid) single-issue voting, I can recognize that straight-ticket voting, just supporting every Republican or Democrat down the line, can seem a coherent response to certain conditions—like, for example, party having been so fully captured by single cause or candidate that attempting to stop that party on every level seems like the only reasonable way to express one’s discontent. But thankfully, ticket-splitting is something that, in this moment of intense polarization, is very much an active variable in trying to understand the shape of the 2024 elections. That’s true even here in Kansas, where the historical dominance of the Republican party—there is very close to 2 registered Republican voters for every 1 registered Democrat here in the Sunflower State--exceeds the levels of the Mormon corridor.

A month ago, I spoke at the Dole Institute at the University of Kansas about “The Ticket-Splitting Voter.” (You can watch the whole thing here.) One of the other speakers at the event was Stephanie Sharp, a Republican who served three terms in the Kansas House, who is one of the prime movers behind Women 4 U.S., a national organization of self-identifying conservative women determined to work against Trump’s return to the White House. Meeting and talking with her put me in mind of Mormon Women for Ethical Government—an officially non-partisan body that does not engage in any political recruitment, to be sure, but it’s impossible to read their recent defenses of the election system and condemnations of any refusal to accept election results as anything except a rebuke of Trump, what with his constant lies about the 2020 elections and his preparations to lie some more starting this week. MWEG’s membership obviously includes many Democratic and unaffiliated voters, but given its grounding in American Mormonism, and the fact that it got off the ground essentially as a direct response to Trump election in 2016, the sense in which it, like Sharp’s group, and like dozens of other groups like it, all aim to connect with Republican women turned off by Trumpist Republican leaders whose message of protecting women comes off as condescending is hard to deny. Hence, the essential split-ticket voter of the 2024 election: the Republican woman who supports conservative candidates down the line, because that’s what she believes, but votes for Harris at the top of the ticket, because what he represents takes their party in a direction they don’t want it to go. There won’t be remotely as many such split-ticket voters as there will be women—or men, for that matter—who vote a straight-party line, but there may be enough of them to make a difference.

Parties have always included within them various factions, and party leaders—whose primary aim is to win elections, of course—will always be incentivized to paper over those divisions, insisting that their party is a “big tent” which can handle dissent over various issues. But dissent over the party’s own presidential candidate? The Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party, despite its grievances, made its peace with and grudgingly supported both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, and it seems likely the same will go for Kamala Harris. Yet the complete absence of anti-Trump Republicans of real national prominence from the current GOP campaign, from the 2012 Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney to Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence, as well as multiple important Republican voices essentially washing their hands of the GOP, all suggests an even deeper problem on the Republican side.

Even here in Kansas, with its Republican dominance, Trump is commanding only 48% support in the polls, far less than the 56% he won in both 2016 and 2020. The final numbers when all the ballots are counted will almost certainly be above that—I don’t know anyone who thinks there is even the remotest chance Trump could fail to win Kansas. (Ditto for Utah, where Trump’s approval rating stands at a low but still solid 54%.) But the Republican party is facing a real problem here as well as nationally, whether or not it is a problem that will be manifest in the next Tuesday’s results. It’s a problem evident in the decision of a close friend of mine here in Wichita, a deeply conservative man who has voted Republican his whole life, and has basically no political agreement with any of the policies and proposals of the Democratic party, and yet is going to vote, however symbolically, Harris—because of the January 6 riot at the Capitol which Trump abetted, because he is convinced that Trump is going to allow Putin to do whatever he wants in Eastern Europe, because of his personal corruption and disrespect for the rules of the office, and much more. How can a party present itself as representing his preferences, and at the same time that of another friend of mine, a man who—much more typically for Kansas Republican voters—has gone full MAGA, and is convinced that not only did Trump win in 2020 but also that every action he took or winked at in the wake of that election, including the violence of January 6, was entirely justified?

Some Republicans are responding to this divide by denouncing Trump, like Stephanie has, and organizing to help stop his re-election—but that’s exceptionally rare. More common, among those at least willing to speak are, are Republicans like Steven Howe, a current member of the Kansas House, who back in January condemned Trump’s “deceit and lies” and plead with his own party to turn away from their support for the former president, but then came back around to his party and fell in line when November loomed. And then there is U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, the only one of the Republicans Kansans have elected to Congress who has declined to endorse Trump for president. While he’s never condemned Trump directly either, this is a man who, if you’ve paid attention to his careful speeches over the years, clearly has little respect for the nominal leader of his own party. Again, there is basically no chance any of this electorally significant in either my state, in the same way the pleas of well-connected Mormons in Utah will have basically zero chance of moving the great mass of Republican voters in the Beehive state. But it simply underscores a partisan difficulty that will have to be addressed, one way or another.

Parties have endured in American politics because there is no better way to respond to the incentives of our political and electoral system than by organizing into groups which reflect particular interests by promoting particular candidates. The fact that those parties, once their candidates are elected, are going to work to entrench their influence by fully socializing themselves into the institutional and ideological structures through which those who voted for those candidates operate, is simply a by-product of the logic of our constitutional system itself. I’m fully on board with imagining alternatives to that system—but in the shorter term, the reality of cross-party voting, and the potential rise of fusion voting, might be the only routes available to making parties, which at one time genuinely did, however indirectly, manage to reflect and moderate and promote the best versions of the preferences of those who voted for them, do so again.

Of course, in my view, the even shorter-short term solution to the partisan dilemma both posed by and facing (to whatever degree the leaders of the party are willing to admit it) the Republican party is the defeat of Donald Trump. Which, across this country, hundreds of thousands (and potentially even more) of registered GOP voters will contribute to—but many millions more, including my mother, and most of the members of my Mormon congregation, and much of my family and most of my friends and neighbors here in Kansas, won’t. That’s okay. Frustrating, depressing, potentially frightening, but okay, and I mean that—I’m convinced that if Trump becomes president as a result of either outright Electoral College votes or whatever legal and electoral chaos will almost certainly erupt in less than 48 hours, the country will stumble forward (though whether the legitimacy of our constitutional democracy will remains to be seen).

But will the Republican party? Will those stymied Republicans return to the GOP, or join the Democrats, or push for some other yet unforeseen party or party-like formation? I don’t know. But I suspect that any Republican--particularly those of the Mormon persuasion, given that the party re-alignment this division may potentially give rise to could well, given the processes of socialization, impact religious and cultural assumptions which play major roles in one’s church affiliation and much more—who thinks the era of Re-Elected-Trump, or Post-Trump, will be an easy, or easier, one to navigate are probably in for a surprise. (Hopefully whatever surprise the first of those possibilities might pose for the United States won’t be a whole lot worse.)

Dear Mormon Voters of the American West (But Actually, Mainly Just Arizona): Let's Try This One More Time, Okay?

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

The presidential election campaign will come to an end 50 days from today. A lot could change in 50 days, but probably won’t. Ours is a deeply divided nation, as anyone who pays attention to politics already well knows, and that division is significantly the result of structural and sociological factors which there is no reason to believe anything less than divine interventions, at least in the short-term, could alter. Now, as a Mormon actually believes that occasionally there really are divine interventions into history, I do in fact hold out hope for some dramatic change in our calcified political culture. But assuming such is not likely, I, like all the other Latter-day Saints for Harris/Walz out there, have to look in the meantime for small ways that we--and today, I mean specifically my religious tribe--can make whatever meaningful differences we can over the next seven weeks or so.

Thankfully, there’s actual evidence in support of that hope. More than eight years ago, I speculated hopefully on the possibility that American Mormon voters, fully two-thirds of which consistently cast ballots for Republican candidates--and yes, that number has declined slightly in recent cycles, but it still remains mostly constant--might actually balk at the appalling Donald Trump carrying their party’s banner as a presidential candidate, and vote for a non-Republican in sufficient numbers to actually interfere his path to victory. None of that happened.

Instead the Mormon corridor, Idaho through Arizona, embraced the Orange Man, or at least contained a majority of voters who concluded that a narcissistic, vindictive, paranoid, borderline racist and sexist liar, adulterer, and con man was a better choice for the presidency than someone who wouldn’t appoint opponents of abortion rights to the Supreme Court, and directed their states’ Electoral College votes accordingly. (We can curse that stupid 18th-century leftover another time; I made my case against it over a decade ago, and haven't changed my mind since.) And the nation, including all us American Mormons, got the Trump administration as a reward. Which thankfully came to an end in 2020.

What changed in 2020? Again, as everyone who follows politics knows, the changes that mattered were overwhelming in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The place that my people--or rather, the portion of my people who recognize that supporting Donald Trump for president is, as my blogging colleague Sam Brunson recently argued, basically antithetical to any proper understanding what it means, as a 21^st-century American, to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ[1]--had in those changes was extremely minimal. But that’s not the case for Arizona, the fifth of the seven so-called “battleground states” which Biden was able to get win back from Trump nearly four years ago. There, Arizona Mormons mattered. And they need to again.

This isn’t anything new to the political junkies out there, or even just ordinary folks who pay attention to political news. The role which Latter-day Saint voters--and especially, when you really drill down on the demographics, white married middle- and upper-middle-class female Latter-day Saint voters--played in Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory, and could play in Harris potentially prevailing in the Grand Canyon State in 50 days, has attracted the attention of Newsweek, Daily Kos, Axios, Esquire, NPR, Politico, and more. The numbers, after all, don’t lie. It seems likely that about 6% of all the votes cast for a presidential candidate in 2020 in Arizona were cast by members of the Mormon church; that makes for about 200,000 votes, and Biden won that state by less than 11,000, whereas Trump had prevailed over Clinton in 2016 by over 60,000 votes. Did an ideological or political minority among Mormon voters more generally make up the majority of that 70,000+ vote switch in 2020? Did they make up a plurality of it? Did they merely contribute to that switch? Whichever way it was, it was a noticeable difference, one which the sensible minority of LDS voters across the state and elsewhere are rightly busy building upon as I write.

Of course, it would be nice to believe this could be replicated elsewhere in the Mormon corridor, but Utah and Idaho are, frankly, lost causes for at least another generation or more. (I suspect that the entrenchment of a long-standing local conservative LDS leadership culture in states with a much higher relative portions of self-identifying Mormons—42 % in Utah, 26% in Idaho—works against the likelihood of dissident LDS voters being able to leverage their ballots productively within their own groups, but I don’t have the data to judge.) That’s not to mitigate the praise owed to multiple organizations in both states that have been fighting the good fight. Mormon Women for Ethical Government, for example, a wonderful organization with chapters throughout the Mormon corridor and beyond, didn’t exist in 2016, but since that time has done important educational and empowering work among LDS voters and others (officially non-partisan work, to be sure, but given that they describe Donald Trump as “a U.S. president who used his position to generate anger, willfully deceive the public, divide our nation, and weaken our systems of government,” it’s really not hard to see where they stand).

But it is in Arizona, the land of life-long Republican and convinced Harris-supporter John Giles, the Mormon mayor of Mesa, where these kinds of grass-roots actions may genuinely make a difference. Not a huge one; as Giles himself admitted--to his frustration--to the Mormon Land podcast, most of his (and my) co-religionists are too committed to Fox News-enabled narratives about the immigrant or the transgender threat to actually take step back and consider how wrong-headed their continued allegiance to a party led by Donald Trump actually is. That’s why he hopes his party will suffer a resounding defeat come November, so the GOP can--or so he hopes, anyway--start to rebuild itself into something actually constructive. Again, barring some kind of divine event, that almost certainly won’t happen, unfortunately. But little victories matter, sometimes even matter in a big way.

Consider: what if Trump’s current 1% advantage over Harris in Arizona--which even the Trump campaigns knows is soft, resulting in a desperate scramble to activate every low-propensity MAGA Republican voter they can find--drops by half, or even disappears, over the next three or four weeks, with wise LDS voters knocking doors, making calls, placing signs, donating funds, politely signaling in church meetings, and overall just basically modeling for their fellow church members (again, perhaps mostly white, college-educated, middle- or upper-middle-class married female church members) that being a supporter of Vice President Harris and Governor Walz doesn’t turn you into anything disturbing, certainly not anything as disturbing as one of Trump’s ridiculous and pathetic rants last Tuesday? What if they consistently leaned into, in private conversations and social media posts, the LDS Church’s own profoundly (though of course never formally) anti-Trumpish statements and actions when it comes to immigration, posing it against Trump's insistence that suburban women desperately want to be protected from dangerous, low-income, non-English-speaking people moving in next door, and by so doing slowly turn at least a few more faithful, committed, believing, church-attending Mormons in Mesa and Chandler and Gilbert and Tempe and Tucson towards reason, thus evaporating much of Trump’s advantage across the state? That would force the Trump campaign, in the final month of the campaign, to make some hard choices, either of which would benefit the GOP's electoral defeat in the state: they could double-down on securing Arizona, pulling needed resources out of Pennsylvania or Georgia, or they could stick with their current plan, and potentially let Arizona trend away from them. Which, if you do the Electoral College math, would make it possible for Harris to still win even if she ends up capturing only three of the remaining six battleground states. (Well, actually four, because Harris will carry Nevada, as Clinton did in 2016 and Biden did in 2020; the LDS vote won’t make that much difference there, but between them and Hispanic voters and union members, it’ll be enough to win. Harry Reid’s reach, bless his soul, remains long.)

So anyway, Grand Canyon state Mormons, this is your moment: be the White Horse that never showed up in 2016, but which charged through Arizona in 2020, and needs to do so again. Do something vital for the health of our country, despite the majority of our tribe not agreeing with you. It’s important, darn it.

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[1] While I’m in complete agreement with Sam, I personally wouldn’t put things that way, because I think not voting to make a fascist-adjacent crook president of the United States, while obviously the morally correct position, is also a terribly low measuring bar for determining what, politically speaking, it means to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Religious fan of socialism and communalism that I am, I’m not even sure you can live, much less vote, as a 21^st-century American, with our daily lives awash with so much technological excess, economic selfishness, social exclusion, and environmental disregard, and still be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank goodness I believe God is going to save us all anyway, because damn, we all (myself most definitely included) will surely need it.

Putting the Demos on a Pedestal

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

In the preface to Why Liberalism Failed, the manuscript of which “was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election,” Patrick Deneen wrote that “the better course”—at least for all those persuaded by his book’s arguments about the philosophical flaws, contradictions, and corruption of modern liberalism—“lies not in any political revolution but in the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order” (WLF, 2018, pp. xiii, xv). That perspective reflected well the constellation of localist ideas which Deneen has contributed to over the years. By seeing in liberalism an affirmation of individualism and pluralism that invariably leads to the rise of a contractarian state, an economic materialism, and an attendant technocratic elite, all of which actually undermine the demos rather than empower it, the response by anyone concerned about the flourishing of democratic communities has to be focused on the local. WLF didn’t, in my view, engage seriously enough with the broad range of republican arguments which have similarly challenged the liberal order over the decades, making some of its conclusions too easily arrived at, but the questions it implicitly raised about local democracy along the way were valuable ones, and WLF received much balanced praise for articulating a particular kind of post-“fusionism” conservative discontent (even former president Barack Obama, while disagreeing with the book’s diagnoses, was apparently a fan).

Within a year of WLF’s publication though, Deneen appears to have changed his mind about pretty much all that. Writing in the preface of the paperback edition, Deneen explained: 

I know believe I was wrong to think that [the project of developing a political theory which would succeed philosophical liberalism] could take generations….Instead of imagining a far-off and nearly inconceivable era when the slow emergence of liberalism’s alternative might become fully visible from its long-burning embers, we find ourselves in a moment when “epic theory” becomes necessary….[I]n mere months—having seen the American political order assaulted by two parties that are in a death grip but each lacking the ability to eliminate the other, and observing the accelerating demolition of the liberal order in Europe—I now think that the moment for “epic theory” has come upon us more suddenly than we could have anticipated. Such moments probably always arrive before we think we are ready (WLF, 2019, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

The transition from “patient encouragement” to “epic theory” encapsulates well the thrust of Deneen’s new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (which is being officially released today). WLF was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not. Given Deneen’s new focus in RC, that notoriety may well be welcomed by him. Few books are actually “dangerous,” despite the paranoia which censorious activists, clerics, and politicians delight in spreading about them, but the epic—and profoundly unconservative, at least in any sense by which Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, or Russell Kirk would have understood the term—reach of Deneen’s arguments absolutely crosses over into that territory. 

After all, when a book written in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, after hundreds of protestors confusedly but sincerely aimed to violently subvert the constitutional procedures of a presidential election, nonetheless speaks seriously of the need for a newer, better sort of elite to employ “raw assertion[s]” of “demotic power” to challenge American institutions, and blithely quotes Machiavelli praising “discord and division” in his Discourses on Livy, arguing (perhaps facetiously, perhaps not) that “mobs running through the streets” were actually a sign of the vitality of the Roman republic…well, “dangerous” seems to be a fit description (RC, pp. 164-165). Reading Regime Change, it is hard to avoid concluding that Deneen has run out of patience, at least when it comes to what he sees as the wreckage of our present condition. To build upon what Deneen wrote on the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, the ultimate aim of RC appears to be the development of a better, more radical elite, one that could guide the people, unlike former president Donald Trump, towards a “genuine populist revolution.”

The elites which Deneen’s epic theory invokes would be the products of what he calls “aristopopulism,” an elite committed not to the often false (as Deneen effectively documents throughout the book) egalitarianism supposedly as work in the managerial liberalism so prevalent in our late capitalist moment, but rather to what he considers to be a more accurate, classical understanding of “democracy.” On his reading of Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas, the regime which gives greatest credence to the needs and wishes of the people as a whole is one of mixed classes, in the classical “Great Chain of Being” sense. Under such a constitutional order, a virtuous elite would wield the responsibility to govern a community through the intentional writing and enforcing of laws, while the demos would articulate over time customs and norms which would have their own quasi-governing power, one which the elites, in their virtuous wisdom, would recognize and help sustain through positive law. Deneen strongly doubts that a direct reconstruction of such an arrangement would be possible through the corrupt institutions of the Western world today, dedicated as they are, according to him, to the social reproduction our progressive culture and globalized economy. Hence the need instead to be disruptive, and possibly even violent—Deneen speaks of the necessity of “the force of a threat from the popolo”—in changing the rules of the game. As he puts it, we must employ “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (pp. 167, 185). 

The key philosophical assumption behind Deneen’s epic theorizing is his near-total rejection of egalitarianism as it has unfolded over the centuries of liberal modernity. Throughout the early sections of Regime Change, he uncomplicatedly stipulates as a natural fact the “ancient divide that pits the ‘few’ against the ‘many,’” a divide which he describes as “the ‘normal’ condition of politics”; it is, in his view, “an endemic political feature of the human condition” that “there is inevitable inequality in the world,” reflected in either “the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction” (pp. x, 7, 21). A constitutional arrangement which constructively deals with this division will not attempt to paper over its facticity with promises of equal individual rights—especially since, under finance capitalism, those promises have mostly, according to Deneen, been formulated in terms of a (in his view, presumably hopeless) educational dream of turning “’the many’ into ‘the few’” through a “notional redistribution of managerial status to every human” (pp. 37-38). Rather, a better constitutional regime would turn to “the tradition of the West itself,” which looks not to any kind of transformation through either individual development or collective action, but instead to “[c]ontinuity, balance, order, and stability, grounded in the unchanging truths knowable through human reason and also present in the Christian inheritance of the West”—a “common good conservatism,” one which requires “a virtuous people…maintained through the energies and efforts of virtuous elites” who are “oriented to supporting the basic decencies of ordinary people” (pp. 68, 124).

Deneen admits that the aristocratic-populist elites that he hopes will emerge concomitant to the disruptive, “demotic” challenges to the current order--which they, according to his theory, must simultaneously orchestrate in unspecified Machiavellian ways--wouldn’t be able to play this virtuous role immediately.  But he holds out hope that, once the dominant actors in the present order have been mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into retreat, “a genuine aristoi might arise… through a kind of Aristotelian habituation in virtue” (p. 185). This new aristoi, in the midst of the ruins of a liberal order whose collapse had been accelerated through decisive action, would theoretically be capable of modeling for the people their proper role, and thus enabling an eventual return to the mixed constitution of the few and the many which the classical tradition elaborated. 

The dangerous potential--and to those who share his traditionalist conservative sentiments, the dangerous appeal--of Deneen’s epic, revolutionary theory of regime change is thus pretty obvious. It has been standard for radicals of various stripes, infuriated by the economic inequality, the bureaucratic incivility, and/or the juridical injustice of so much of the liberal capitalist state as it emerged over the 20^th century, to call for either a retreat from or revolt against it. The kind of “conservatism” that has historically emphasized the virtues of community (which, it must be remembered, is as often found on the left as the right) frequently opts to express its radicalism via retreat--that is, via turning towards the patient tending to of one’s own democratic, collective space, conscious of the harms which more systematic aspirations often involve. Hence the localist spirit of so many animated by these concerns, whether it be Wendell Berry’s defense of regional food systems, Bill Mckibben’s push for genuine (not corporate-subsidizing) energy independence, or a hundred other examples. But Deneen’s Regime Change, with its calls for revolutionary change, shifts away from such patient work--which, therefore, also suggests that the postliberal shift may be (as Adam Smith intuited in a recent Front Porch Republic essay) a shift away from localist concerns entirely. And to my mind, that means, inevitably and frustratingly, a shift away from actual democracy as well.

Deneen has elsewhere written thoughtfully—though I also think somewhat tendentiously—about the “crisis of democracy,” asserting that the turn to a framework of moral pluralism and pragmatism in the social sciences in the 20^th century resulted in an “institutionalized relativism,” which itself could only result in attacks upon the “absolutism” present in “the mass of humanity who retained conservative beliefs due to unexamined prejudice or hostility to change.” Deneen’s understanding of pluralism in this particular case could be seriously contested, but leaving that aside, just consider his focus: he sees a crisis not relevant to democratic practices and procedures, but rather pertaining to the beliefs of the demos (though not the whole people, however defined: only “subcultures” of it). Deneen’s concern is apparently with the demos, the people, as a category which holds certain beliefs, not with how (or to what degree, or even if) the people, whatever their beliefs, actually govern themselves, which is the usual meaning of “democracy”--that is, rulership by the people.

Regime Change does lay out a positive vision of the demos, defending “the wisdom of the people,” and showing how liberalism—including both the individualism which produced mass democracy and the materialism which produced post-Industrial Revolution liberal capitalism—has tended to marginalize the virtuous capacities of, and undermine the sustaining social conditions of, communities of people in the name of “progress.” (Deneen’s reading of John Stuart Mill is particularly intriguing here.) But that positive vision depends upon the persuasiveness of his affirmations regarding the source of that wisdom, and that persuasiveness is lacking. He does not deny that what he various calls “the people,” “the working class,” or “the many” are currently in bad shape, writing that “[r]eams of statistics demonstrate that they are far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the ‘elites’ that they often disdain” (p. 17). But that data does not stop him from constantly hypothesizing about their traditionalist potential, speaking repeatedly of the “instinctual conservatism of the commoners,” who “tend not to view the world as fungible launching pads, but rather, one of inherited homes” (pp. x, 60). (He holds out hope that they are “potentially more numerous” than their hypothesized opposites as well—p. 159).

Repeated incantations, however, are not arguments. Millions of voters (though not a majority) supporting Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is hardly dispositive support for his insistence upon the immanent existence in the United States of what he curiously calls a “nonaspirant” demos: a people collectively longing for an elite to, through their governing behavior, situate and contextualize and thus perhaps validate their presumably stable routines. As regards those routines, he waxes agrarian in depicting them: “grounded in the realities of a world of limits…in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars” (pp. 27, 23). His repeated formulation of the masses as being perversely victimized by elites who present the “remnants of traditional belief and practice… [that inform] the worldview of the working class” as the views of society’s true oppressors (p. 28), makes it clear that (given that a slight but nonetheless real majority of even those Americans lacking a high school diploma consider the legalization of same-sex marriage to have been good for the country, in the same way that a majority of voters with lower incomes voted for Joe Biden in 2020) that the “working class” which Deneen has in mind is probably very much a “subculture” indeed.

That isn’t to deny that a liberal democratic society ought to enable subcultures to organize and collectively articulate their own communal norms (at its root, that's what any and every "populist" movement, from the People's Party to Occupy Wall Street, have always been about). The atomization inherent to liberal capitalism absolutely should be resisted, and there are important ways in which the organization of local and regional democratic practices and procedures, as both socialist and subsidiarian thinkers have argued, can help accomplish those ends. (It is perplexing that when it comes to the actual political organization of the demos, Deneen gives almost no thought to cities or counties or states; he is critical of what he sees as liberalism's tendency to breakdown "the onetime solidarity of subnational communities," but nonetheless his national conservatism basically leaps from the family and neighborhood--with a nod to the communitarian truth of Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" manta--to the nation-state and the international society beyond--pp. 221, 225-226).)

While even just thinking of the American demos as simply national, Deneen’s recommendations for establishing a foundation for his theorized revival of a true mixed constitution between the few and the many—such as increasing the scope of democratic representation by expanding size of the House of Representatives, or strengthening the power of labor by putting workers’ councils on the same level as corporate boards when it comes to determining company policies and wages, or dramatically mixing the American people across regional and class differences by re-instituting the draft (pp. 168-171, 173-174)—include many excellent suggestions that would promote civic strength and identity, and thus counter the less democratic elements of our current order. But the content of that civic identity—which is, today, profoundly urban and pluralistic—is simply not what Deneen imagines it to be. Nor will it be, not unless his revolutionary aspirations actually include using state power to forcefully inculcate inegalitarian attitudes upon the people, which isn’t something he ever mentions. (He does allows that, in the midst of other imagined, Machiavellian disruptions, “forms of legislation that promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption, should be considered,” but as during a recent debate Deneen participated in alongside Diedre McCloskey, a widely respected transgender economist, he demurred from voicing specifics as to what those forms should be—p. 181). 

In the end, I think that if Deneen wants the demos to find his theory of regime change at all plausible, his articulation of it should show less uncomplicated assurance in the enduring accuracy of what Aristotle, Polybius, or Aquinas wrote about the culture of “the many” in the centuries before the rise of industrial technology, mass consumerism, and urban patterns of life made possible the movement of yeomen into a professional, specialized middle-class, and more explorations of the way that a constitutional order beyond our own would address the demands for greater democratic and socio-economic empowerment. Because such demands are there. As John Médaille observed as part of a response to Deneen years ago, “culture is downstream from breakfast,” and it was the demand for breakfast—not just the ability to obtain it, but also the ability to make decisions about how and where and with whom one should be able to obtain it—which truly gave birth to liberal modernity, far more than John Locke’s philosophical abandonment of the classical mixed constitution. Locke’s ideas, and those of subsequent liberals, arguably served the needs of those seeking breakfast quite poorly in the long-run, making it increasingly easy, over the centuries, for an individualism which prioritized efficiency over community, and progress over common sense, to warp our understanding of the democratic authority which the people came to believe should be equally shared among all breakfast-seekers. But that warping cannot be simply wiped away, much less mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into hiding by the potential threat of some angry mob.

Deneen’s epic, dangerous, anti-egalitarian theory shows great love for “community,” but it is a love which places the demos of the community on a pedestal, presenting their supposedly static traditions and routines as enacted beliefs that will inspire and guide the governing elite, but which denies them any formal ability to make decisions for themselves, or at least not any beyond what Deneen calls “the slow accumulation and sedimentation of norms and practices over time” (p. 132). Deneen has always been suspicious of overly romantic, quasi-religious idealizations of democracy, preferring instead what he once called “democratic realism.” Well, democratic realism has to include, I think, dealing with the people as they actually and presently exist, in all their busy, urban, depressing, glorious, subcultural plurality. Nothing in Regime Change suggests that Deneen places himself in the position of the East German apparatchik mocked in Bertolt Brecht’s famed poem "Die Lösung": Would it not be easier….To dissolve the people / And elect another? Still, one hopes that he will make the effort, in subsequent writing, to make it clear that any postliberal readers who draws that unfortunately not unreasonable conclusion from his book are in the wrong.

On Philosophy, Religion, Nazis, Conservatives, Leftists, Damon Linker, and Me

[Damon Linker--pundit, author, oft-infuritating centrist, and all-around great human being--recently lost his father, and is taking a break from his Substack to take care of family issues. I well understand how consuming the loss of a father can be, and my prayers are with him, his wife Beth, and their children at this time. I thought about delaying this post for a while, but then decided that it ultimately was, in some ways, a kind of a tribute to him and his, to me anyway, deeply clarifying philosophical journey, with just some perhaps interesting comments on political theory, metaphysical hopes, and regime-threatening racism along the way. Part of me thinks he'll appreciate that odd mix. Anyway, best wishes at this difficult time, old friend.]

 Damon and I have been friends for over two decades, going back to when we discovered each other in the late 1990s as two young ABDs working on dissertations on the 18th-century German educator and translator Johann Gottfried Herder. That launched a friendship--perhaps not a super-close one, but one that I've been consistently grateful for over the years--filled with deep disagreements and loud laughs over politics, religion, family, movies, music, and much else. Still, it wasn't until Damon started his Substack "Eyes on the Right," and particularly until he published a series of reflective, searching columns over the past couple of months, that I was able to see, via his writings, just how much we shared, and how much we were divided nonetheless

In the first of those posts, Damon identifies himself as "a peculiar kind...of conservative"; definitely a non-ideological, small-c conservative, whose primary motivation is a "persistent hostility and resistance to unpredictable, rapid change." Damon is up-front about how much of this is a particular anxiety of his, rooted in the painful upheavals of his childhood and young adult life. But it is also intellectual; he strongly identifies with the dispositional conservatism of Michael Oakeshott, who described conservatives as being those who "prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." This kind of conservatism obviously barely has any home in the Republican party of today, or the last 40 years for that matter. Damon not only has no sympathy whatsoever to Trump and Trumpist reactionary wishes to "Make America Great Again"; he wasn't particularly sympathetic to Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" call when he was teenager either. So an ideological right-winger in any sense Damon most definitely is not.

But his same opposition to any kind of transformative promise or crusade also stops him from sympathizing with what he sees as Ahab-like obsessions with "getting" Donald Trump. He was long doubtful about both the Mueller investigation and the Trump impeachments, and he's one of the best advocates out there (or so I think, anyway, even though I don't agree with his conclusion) for the position of treating Trump as a wholly political problem, rather than risking further violence from his cultish defenders by reaching for some kind of legal solution to Trump's baleful effects on our elections. Hence Damon is a centrist Democrat and a "conservative liberal;" the kind of worried and frustrated philosophical centrist who'd probably find a lot of agreement with Judith Shklar (or Jacob Levy) and who joins the Niskanen Center. Turning to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," Damon wistfully observes that, ultimately, what he values is "a place of rest. Constancy. Contentment. Stability. Reaching it, and then holding onto it. Preserving it against the ravages of change."

Those were the lines which struck me most, and sent me off on writing this long post...because that's me. I find everything about that statement simply beautiful, and could not endorse it more. I have a hard time thinking of anything I've ever written or spoken or done even just remotely associated with my obsessive interests in community, simplicity, family, and more that couldn't be summarized by the very same words Damon wrote there.

And yet, my own small-c conservatism ends up pointing me in an entirely leftward direction, however perverse or incoherent that may seem to some. Call it left communitarianism rather than left conservatism if you prefer, but ultimately it's all the same. It's a leavening of Karl Marx's economically-grounded socialism with Christopher Lasch's culturally-grounded populism; a recognition that nothing threatens settled and stable "places of rest" more than (as I wrote) "the dislocating, exploitative social power which the unregulated (and thus invariably concentrating and centralizing) flow of capital gives to those who master it," while also recognizing that any actually democratically empowering alternative to the exploitative, community-undermining reign of finance capitalism should have the aim of (as I also wrote) "jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced...and...done in a manner which [does] not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey--another Progressive!--here) 'the local homes of mankind.'" 

For those whose leftism is fundamentally liberal, which means fundamentally about expanding individual autonomy and opportunity in opposition to collective or environmental limits, or at least is fundamentally oriented around a fear of threats to those liberal goods which, however undeniably bourgeois, have nonetheless made hundreds of millions of lives immeasurably better (no, I don't deny that--I may not be much of a liberal, but I am, adjectivally and procedurally, quite liberal in a Bryanesque way all the same), this kind of thing might only sound like another apology for those invariably authoritarian "red-brown" alliances. As Richard Yeselson once claimed in response to a defense of Lasch by George Scialabba years ago, limiting individual experimentation and expansion in the name of community or simplicity or family or most anything else kills off the engines of liberal capitalism, which only means that there will be less to go around, and "dividing up less [however fairly and justly] leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism." To all that I can only say: yes, I can see that coherence of that terrible intellectual path, and will do my best not to go down it. But my "best" doesn't involve me fleeing from it entirely, particularly not in the direction of Damon's centrism. On the contrary, unlike my friend's pragmatic "distrust [of] romantic longings," I don't think I have ever really even so much as blinked at the prospect of contemplating radically populist, economically mutualist, or religiously communalist collective movements to shore up the things I think must be conserved in the face of liberal modernity. Does that mean I live a localist, agrarian, Luddite life in total support of such things? Not at all. But I don't have any particular distrust of those who aspire to so do, and I try to teach all about them as much as I can.

So what is the real dividing point between Damon and I, the dividing point which led to two people who, in terms of actual electoral choices, are rarely all that different, but whose justifications for those choices and whose hopes for better future choices are radically distinct? Of course there isn't just one thing that led two instinctively small-c conservative people to become a careful centrist liberal and unhappy Democrat on the one hand, and a constantly disappointed but still dreaming utopian and dues-paying Democratic Socialists of America member on the other. Perhaps its as our respective material and cultural backgrounds: Damon grew up in a highly fractured and secular urban milieu, and his conceptions of stability reflect the cosmopolitan pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, while I grew up in very tight and religious and almost-rural milieu, and perhaps unsurprisingly my conceptions of stability reflect the land-based communitarianism of Wendell Berry. (Or, to be utterly academic and nerdy, for anyone who wants to read our respective dissertations, perhaps its because the work of Herder which Damon found most important was his deeply historicist Yet Another Philosophy of History, emphasizing the cultural incommensurability of the rival, particularist goods that different nations will always legitimately conceive and pursue, whereas my favorite work by Herder was the religious anthropology he laid out in Letters for the Advancement of Humankind, emphasizing that there is a centripetal force in all the various expressions of human difference that point towards the unified realization of truly common goods.) But if I did have to pick just one thing, it would probably be the way our personal histories were shaped the undergraduate and graduate educations we received.

In another thoughtful column, Damon talked about how he hopes to "to attain a modicum of wisdom about what mixture or balance of competing visions will be best for the political community as a whole." His unavoidably aristocratic language there, deeply infused with classical philosophical presumptions about the need to "exercise of independent judgment" by "not just standing apart from the various factions on the playground" but also rising above it, reflects his predilection for authors like Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tocqueville, but also his education by scholars working in the tradition of the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss. Damon acknowledged that his "own skeptical and somewhat pessimistic liberalism has been shaped by [Strauss's] work," which among other things preaches its own kind of careful moderation, counseling those who aspire to truth to, as Damon wrote elsewhere, "[protect] society at large from the acids of skepticism and doubt unleashed by philosophical questioning, while simultaneously [speaking carefully so as to protect] philosophers from the righteous indignation of citizens who (rightly) suspect that such questioning undermines belief in the gods of the political community and thus corrupts the virtue of its citizens." In this Damon is hardly unique--there are plenty of liberals whose careful, borderline-aristocratic skepticism were at least partly influenced by scholars shaped by the legacy of Strauss. One of those is the historian Mark Lilla, who was an important figure in Damon's intellectual development. But either way, Strauss's presentation of philosophic inquiry as mandating a certain kind of  "esotericism," a hiding of the truth about ultimate goods from the unenlightened, has an unfortunate magnetic appeal: a promise that hard, uncompromising, almost invariably illiberal and undemocratic truths, truths which ordinary people cannot handle, are available to a select few.

That's the sort of appeal, as Damon has discussed at length, has warped far too many young conservative scholars into accepting philosophical criticisms of democracy as not just arguments worthy of contemplation--since, as Strauss himself wrote, "the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation"--but as exclusive, comprehensive truths which deserve to be politically enacted. Such exclusivity, when poorly understood, can become an apologia for Trumpist-style America-Firstism. Even more tragically, it sometimes settles in people's heads alongside other, even uglier political exclusions: that the esoteric truth of the world isn't available to those of the wrong background, the wrong gender, or the wrong race. And so Strauss, who fled the Nazis to come to America, planted seeds that sometimes grow up alongside genuine Nazis (one of whom, Greg Johnson, whose name I don't remember but whose face I think I do, very probably--as best I can determine from Damon's research anyway--sat beside me in a seminar on Martin Heidegger, another German radical thinker as well as a one-time Nazi, taught by my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America in 1999, where both of us graduated with our PhDs in 2001).

The connection to Heidegger is important here, because like Damon and some of those mentioned above, I read a lot of Heidegger once upon a time, both at my undergraduate and graduate institutions. And like Strauss, Heidegger's comprehensive arguments about the metaphysical weaknesses of Western philosophy--or, more accurately, the metaphysical flaws about the very structure of and the central apprehensions about human existence which liberal democracies and modern notions of individual rights are the flawed fruit of--can have a seductive appeal. Damon talked about this on a recent episode of the excellent podcast, Know Your Enemy. Responding to a question of how Lilla's skeptical liberal break away from the influence of more extreme interpretations of Strauss might have played a role in Damon similarly not being overly seduced by his philosophical esotericism, Damon reflected:

I mean it's funny; it was partly over Strauss, but it was also over Heidegger. I went through a period in grad school where I was, like, deeply seduced by Heidegger and I was just reading him all the time. Not just Being and Time but a lot of the lectures that at that time were just being translated….There was a period there where I really had a kind of temptation to sort of just take the leap. And Heidegger is one of those thinkers who can inspire that. A kind of…religious conversion, like an all-encompassing worldview. It's also like a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought to pieces...a ready-to-hand tool of deconstruction right there. In this period I already knew that Lilla was very skeptical about Heidegger. There was a point in which I started sort of haranguing him, insinuating in a very-handed, Straussian way: “Why don’t you have the courage to really look at these things? This is the truth!” Lilla wrote a very memorable, hand-written letter back to me, in which he basically insinuated that I have Daddy issues...."You’re always looking for some teacher to kind of show you the light, and then they disappoint you, and you leave them behind; you should be a little more skeptical.” He was just always counseling skepticism. Like: “Fine; try on those garments, see how they feel. But then put them down; keep them around, but don’t make them your wardrobe.” That’s my own awkward metaphor, but it very much was: just be cautious! And I think for Lilla that comes from the fact that he was a teen-age convert to a kind of evangelical Christianity, that he then worked his way out of, and it informs his entirely intellectual make-up; you know–don’t get fooled again! That kind of attitude…he ended up passing on to me to some extent, and by the time I got to a certain point, I had inculcated it enough that I was by then pretty inoculated from it all on my own.

I don't have a story like that, but I have a Heidegger story of my own, the practical outcome of which is quite similar to Damon's, but the intellectual path it took me on--one I'm still on to a certain degree--being very different from his. Basically, I wonder if it just come down to the two individuals most responsible for bringing me to an appreciation of Heidegger's deep critique of modernity being Jim Faulconer, a philosopher at Brigham Young University, and Stephen Schneck, a political theorist and my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America. They are both serious scholars and devout religious believers--a Mormon who has written extensively on devotional topics, whose essays have been enormously important to my faith life, and a devout Catholic who has spent the second half of his career articulating an alignment between Catholic social justice teachings and progressive politics; currently, he serves as an appointed member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. And while neither were pious in the classroom--unlike some faculty at both universities, neither ever opened their classes or seminars with a prayer--in retrospect, I have realized that they introduced to impressionable students and budding scholars deeply discomforting critiques of the run-of-the-mill liberal, rational, and individual verities which the capitalist markets, the scientific methods, the technological tools, and the democratic principles which Western modernity takes as settled, critiques not just from Heidegger, but Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Arendt, Rorty, Ricoeur, Wolin, and more, and did so in ways that suggested anything but, as Damon put it, "a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought." On the contrary, to me this introduction to deconstructive arguments--expressed by some of them in the midst of an ugly anti-Semitism, which Faulconer and Schneck never failed to expose as actually undermining the better readings of these individuals' own argument--was received, to use the language of Alan Jacobs, as an "invitation to repair."

Repair what? That which our Western metaphysical presumptions, our capitalist socio-economic confidence, and our distinctly modern belief in the possibility of--indeed the presumed moral requirement of--human technological mastery, all work unknowingly to cover over. To me, the importance of Heidegger's teaching about aletheia, or "unconcealedness" or "disclosure," as that which phenomenologically resides at the heart of "truth," was that it pointed toward, lurking within every claim or discovery, an original and prior revelation, an es gibt--that, in other words, something about that which is, is a gift that has been a given, and that something, that gift, should be attended to. Derrida's articulation of "the trace" functions that way as well; as Jim once wrote, Derrida is can be understood as almost a kind of negative theologian: "the point of his deconstruction is to help us remember what the text calls us to remember but then forgets by its very nature.....deconstruction calls us to the act of remembering, wonder, and praise, and in that to a remembering relation to what we have forgotten rather than to the descriptions of what we have forgotten."  (To those familiar with Heidegger, it should probably go without saying that both Faulconer and Schneck approached his writings with a strong emphasis upon--or at least it appeared to me--the post-Kehre or "turn" towards the poetic in Heidegger, rather than his pre-Kehre work of Being and Time and such.) 

In short, from all these thinkers I received, thanks to Faulconer and Schneck, not an invitation to a potentially threatening truth which warranted liberal skepticism, but rather a philosophical appreciation which communicated more than anything else an appreciate the constructive possibilities of our essential, always particular, but nonetheless collectively shared naiveté. Our very understanding of the world and our place in it, and our ability to think and speak about such things, are conditioned by deep structural "always-alreadys," horizons of understanding--expressions of language, culture, and more--into which we have been thrown and which we can have no other moral obligations towards except the work of tending and care...which is not the same thing as protectively preserving those thrown realities against any change! On the contrary, the aim shouldn't be to distance oneself from the fray, but to authentically engage with it. 

Is that a pretentious (and therefore potentially exclusionary) assumption of one's "authentic" right to engage in acts of tending and building, something which others presumably lack? That the hunt for authentic engagement can become so is something I acknowledge above. But these philosophers, and those who taught me about them, helped convince me that everyone, including those who only wish to exercise a serene, moderate, practical judgment over those still in the cave, are equally subject to thrownness, and thus equally obliged to articulate a subjectivity that puts them in some relationship to the world, even they just wish to survey it. To put it simply, I kind of think we're all unavoidably engaged in the same project-making and meaning-creation. And yes, I do mean creation, which can be just as much directed towards stability as towards reform, revolution, or reaction. You don't have to agree with Marx's Thesis 11 that the point of philosophy is to change the world (though I mostly do)--but it is worth considering, as Stephen once put it to me in a discussion about the German philosophical tradition (from Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger and beyond), the possibly that truth isn't something to contemplate and perhaps, at best, strategically create the conditions for: it is something to be lived. As the sort of Christian who leans more towards abiding notions of grace rather than restrictive notions of commandment, and as a Mormon whose beliefs include a healthy dose of utopianism (however buried over by Mormonism's embrace of modernity those 19th-century ideals may be), how could all that not fail to click for me?

So perhaps that's the story. Not remotely all of it--I could talk about my early exposure to Rousseau and my friendship with Marxists and my years in South Korea and my subsequent fascination with East Asian political thought and the work of Fred Dallmayr (my dissertation advisor's dissertation advisor), and who knows how much more Damon could add to this description of his thinking, even assuming it's accurate (which I hope it is, mostly). But maybe this is enough to add up to a proper intellectual account of where I'm coming from, philosophically speaking, when I read friend's reliably smart but also occasionally disconcerting commentary, and see in it someone whose perspective I both value and understand, and enjoy learning from, but at the deepest level--as opposed to the much more practical and needful political level--I simply don't share at all, however much our justifications for what we believe sound the same. Damon has a small-c conservative sensibility, which makes him want to skeptically push against anyone whom he suspects of wanting to upset the apple-cart, and for that the liberal pluralism of an Isaiah Berlin works far better than any comprehensive philosophical vision, particularly the poorly-read Straussian one too common on the American right today; I also have a small-c conservative sensibility, but since I also believe--thanks to the influence both philosophical and religious visions--that we are all already and invariably in the midst of constant apple-cart-upsetting anyway, I find myself instead pushing to find the space and grace to authentically realize, to locally build or rebuild, that which constituted the cart in the first place. If that makes any sense. 

Oh well. That's friendship for you. It's been years since Damon and I had a proper (non-alcoholic) symposium; this post can't serve as one, and it's the wrong time for one as well, but this heterodox Mormon left conservative raises a class to his mostly secular conservative liberal friend all the same. My memories of you are a blessing, Damon; at this time, I wish your memories of your father to be the same for you.