Desperation in the air

The smell of desperation wafts from several corners at the moment.

For all their current signs of good fortune - the impeachment acquittal, the Democrats' Iowa debacle, the bully pulpit that Trump will have in the form of tonight's State of the Union address, his current job approval number - there's a kind of desperation that can be detected among Trumpists. I wrote about it the other day in a Precipice newsletter:

. . . the dustup engendered by the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal continues to reverberate. The argument that Trump-supporting evangelicals are fully aware of his flaws and pray for his spiritual maturation as well as applaud for his laudable policy moves is superficially compelling, but its plausibility withers in the face of the roaring indulgence the Very Stable Genius got at his rally at King Jesus Ministry in Miami of one of his most egregious character flaws: his establishing of himself as a kind of savior:

During Trump’s speech at El Rey Jesus, he said he’s been the most supportive president for Christians.

Christians “have never had a greater champion — not even close — than you have in the White House right now. Look at the record,” he said. “We’ve done things that nobody thought was possible. We’re not only defending our constitutional rights, we’re also defending religion itself, which is under siege.”

He said his administration has stood up to the pro-abortion lobby, defended the free speech rights of Christians on college campuses and promoted prayer in schools. He also claimed he “got rid” of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates, to support the religious community.

Nice stuff, Mr. President, but what about you? The closest you came to saying anything about the real practice of faith at that rally was asserting that Americans worship God, not government. Beyond that, there’s nothing in your remarks that indicates that you have moved beyond your 2015 “I’m-not-sure-I’ve-ever-asked-for-God’s-forgiveness” observation. It looks like you still view everything through a transactional lens. It looks like your real message to that Miami crowd was “Never mind what’s going on in my heart and soul. Look what I’ve done for you on the policy level. I fight the worldly forces besieging you people. Now, turn out in November and vote for me.”

And the crowd eats it up.

That’s desperation, plain and simple. It’s opting to cast one’s lot with an incoherent charlatan who champions your cause even though his motivation is self-glorification, just because he can give you a little more breathing room in this temporal realm. That suffices in the quest for a leader to a lot of Christians these days.

As I say, much is going right at the moment for Trumpists. Victor Davis Hanson makes a case that Trump is having broad world-stage success in his column today.   Even its title - "Is Trump's Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox?" - suggests a coherence spontaneously emerging from Trump's winging-it style, which is what outlets like American Greatness (for which Hanson has written frequently) have been hoping for. (It saves them the heavy lifting of having to discern and prove a lineage of ideas and principles that have led to their ideology.) Hanson enumerates several examples that serve his point. According to Hanson, there is greater recognition now that China is indeed a totalitarian and expansionist nation due to Trump's protectionist stance. (Never mind that the tariffs have led to a rise in farm bankruptcies, and a bailout to address that that is bigger than Obama's auto-industry bailout circa 2009.) Iran does seem to be tamed as a result of the elimination of Suleimani. The proposal for the creation of a Palestinian state entirely within Israel's borders has had the effect of making plain to one and all that the Mideast has moved on from trying to placate Palestinian whining (whining often manifested as intifadas or rocket barrages). Trump's demand that NATO and bureaucratically and centrally governed Europe generally step up its defense and trade game has shone a spotlight on that continent's decreasing relevance.

Hanson readily admits that Trump's motive in all this is "money-making and win-win deals." But a desperation subtly underlies Hanson's view. He and those who are like-minded had better hope that the alignment of stars continues to favor this motive as a driver of global stability. Trump has stepped on a lot of toes along the way, and the United States, strong as it is, may need some help in some situation one of these days. The above-mentioned Europeans, for instance, are our closest and most natural allies. They are Western nations. If, as it's sometimes characterized, US-China relations constitute a new Cold War, a West with some sense of why it exists and why the world needs it is going to be essential to the task of countering China's decidedly un-Western ambitions.

There's nothing that anchors Trumpism in anything transcendent and immutable. It just seems to be working out somewhat favorably for the moment.

On the opposite side of the Trump Question, desperation also occasionally surfaces. The latest example is Bill Kristol's tweet from a couple of days ago:

Bill Kristol

@BillKristol

Not presumably forever; not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020; not on every issue or in every way until then. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.

Speaking of motives, there's been plenty of parsing of Kristol's, with the Trumpists, of course, claiming he is and always has been an "elitist" and "globalist" (two of the most vacuous terms I've seen in my decades of encountering polemical terminology).

I just think it's a sign of desperation. He has a conservative track record over the course of his adult life, and probably still, underneath this latest fit of intellectual kinkiness, pines for an actual conservative savior to ride in and miraculously alter the landscape. (Don't we all?) He just can't imagine any other alternative to being a provisional Democrat at the moment.

Then there is the readily apparent desperation of the Democrats. Even before their Iowa nightmare, facts such as the winnowing of the field to white candidates, and, increasingly, older white men had the identity-politics zealots despondent. Sanders captures the hearts of a lot of Democrats, but they understand, even if they can't admit it, that the country as a whole is not going to embrace his vision.

At various moments over the course of the next nine months, and certainly on November 3, one faction or another among those contending for the political brass ring will have occasion to raise champagne glasses and loudly cheer, "Well people, we got our cause across the finish line!"

But if what they wanted wasn't rooted in the transcendent, if it didn't provide the guidance and protection of immutable principles, that faction is going to continue to exhaustedly drag one more momentary victory over the finish line, and then one more.

They will still come up short regarding a credible response to the question, "What's your vision and how will it serve us beyond the next five minutes?"