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America In Uncharted Waters

Time to get busy building the flotilla of arks
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What did you do last night? Not this, I hope. Excerpts:

Most of the major demonstrations took place in urban centers in blue states Clinton won Tuesday — highlighting the demographic divide that shaped the election results.

The former secretary of state’s narrow victory in the popular vote spurred demonstrators in New York to chant “She got more votes!” as thousands amassed in front of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. The crowd stretched several blocks down Fifth Avenue.

Earlier, the protesters had marched from Union Square to Trump’s building, chanting “Donald Trump, go away! Sexist, racist, anti-gay!”

At one point, demonstrators lit an American flag on fire. Later, amid a cacophony of loud chants, a glowing “Love Trumps Hate” banner was held aloft under the iconic Trump Tower sign. The singer Cher mingled in the crowd, doling out hugs.

Hugs from Cher. We live in the best of all possible worlds. More:

Tensions flared particularly high on college campuses. At American University in Washington, students burned American flags and some shouted “F— white America!”

In Austin, students at the University of Texas led a march for hours through the city Wednesday afternoon. As hundreds of protesters wove into traffic, bus drivers high-fived the students. Some in their vehicles got out and hugged them, tears streaming down their faces.

“Seeing this is everything,” said Jennifer Rowsey, 47, as the march passed by a coffee shop next to Austin City Hall where she is the human resource manager. “I felt so isolated,” she said. “I don’t feel so alone now.”

Austin City Council member Greg Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants and a community organizer, joined up with the protesters when they passed by an interview he was giving with local media.

“A lot of people are calling for healing,” he said. “I think we should reject that.”

“A lot of people are calling for healing. I think we should reject that.” And yet a couple of weeks ago, everybody (including me) were worried about Trump and his supporters not accepting the results of the election. Now it’s many on the Left.

More:

Yeah, because hanging in effigy the man half the country just chose as its next president, and burning the American flag, is going to be real good for America.

I don’t believe this is going to be a passing spasm. I believe this comment on the identity politics thread by a graduate student at a major state university describes our future:

They have no intention of waking up to the damage that identity politics are doing to the country. A large proportion of my friends on Facebook are graduate students in the humanities at a major public university. So, as you can gather, they are fully committed to the IP agenda. Today I have been treated to a torrent of self-obsessed whinging about how they could barely manage to get out of bed today, so crippling was the sorrow and fear. Several wondered how they were even going to teach, one comparing today to teaching on the day after 9/11. Several others accused Trump voters of voting against them *personally*. (One wrote, “Each one of of you voted not to protect me….Each one of you cast that vote and said to a living, breathing, human being, ‘I don’t care.’ I want you to know that.”) Others have claimed that “LGBT lives are in danger.” One posted the number for a suicide hotline.

One professor (“Dr. Drew”) in the ecology department at Columbia sent this to his class: https://labroides.org/2016/11/09/an-open-letter-to-my-class/

Imagine if you were a Trump sympathizer in his class, and you received a letter pontificating about how “Last night we saw a refutation of the values that this, and many other, universities hold dear – equality, thoughtfulness, scholarship, and a belief that sound decision making will triumph over the noise and clamor of demagoguery. Unfortunately we also saw that the historical legacies of racism, sexism, and ignorance, still run deep within large swaths of our country.” Would you feel like you were in a position to speak openly about your political positions in class? Would you feel that the ‘equality’ Dr. Drew mentions applies to you?

This isn’t going away. The intense personalization of politics–the belief that if you disagree with me, you reject *me personally*–is not going away. Reading what my colleagues have written over the past 24 hours reveals to me that it is literally unfathomable to them that anyone other than the very worst sort of person could conceivably vote for Donald Trump. It’s easy to write off this hysterical, hyperventilating hand-wringing as a ludicrous overreaction, which it is. But they believe it to their very cores. The prospect of someone’s voting for Donald Trump is so unthinkable to them that they believe that people may actually be contemplating suicide rather than face a world in which Trump has been elected. It’s nihilistic and melodramatic. But they’re teaching your kids, and this is what they’re teaching them, both covertly and overtly.

What scares me most about a Trump presidency isn’t the man himself. What scares me is the coming backlash from the left that has turned identity politics into so deeply personal an ideology. (They have, after all, convinced themselves that identity politics is a matter of personal survival.) Look, with Hillary Clinton, we knew what we were getting. We steeled ourselves to endure increased curtailments of religious liberty, endless war, etc. etc. Trump will perhaps fight a few rear-guard actions on our behalf, and he may even win a few victories for us on SCOTUS and elsewhere. But the backlash from this New Left that brooks no disagreement is going to be unimaginably fiercer than it would have been otherwise.

We’ve purchased two to four years to get our house in order. That work needs to start today. I’ve worked with and know personally the people who are prepared to destroy us. I don’t doubt for a second that they will not hesitate when they have the chance. What little toleration as may previously have existed is gone now. Get ready.

Yesterday, a few readers e-mailed or commented here to say that the Trump win will probably depress sales of The Benedict Option.  I guess it might, but if conservative Christians and fellow travelers believe that Trump is going to arrest the long historical process of desacralization and fragmentation, they’re out of their minds. If they think that the left is going to behave in any way other than what the grad student predicts, they’re deluded. And if they think Trump is going to be anything other than a provocateur and chaos agent, they have not been paying attention.

The great mistake that religious conservatives have made since 1980 is in thinking that all they had to do was get the politics right (and therefore the judiciary), and the culture would take care of itself. How, for example, can any Christian believe in anno Domini 2016 that the election of Donald Freaking Trump is going to turn around the ongoing collapse in the church’s numbers among Millennials, to say nothing of all the other signs of cultural decline.

Trump’s election may — may — have been preferable to Hillary’s, but from a traditional conservative and Christian view, it is still bad news. Peter Hitchens nails it, hard. Excerpts:

Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.

To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty;  to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.

I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive.  I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing.  In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.

Well, now we have what I warned of.

More:

Disaster? Hillary’s war policy in Syria would certainly have been one. Mr Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, which we don’t really know, and his general lack of respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, threaten a different sort of catastrophe. I cannot see this ending happily.

And:

Someone has cut the ropes, and we are adrift on a strange, sinister, powerful current  towards an unknown destination which it might be better never to reach at all.  The liberal democracies have exhausted their form of government, which is increasingly using democracy to reject liberalism, but in an angry and impatient way. This, no doubt, is due to the policies pursued by our existing rulers for 50 years.  But I do not think that will make the experience any more comfortable.  Anger  and contempt for your opponents are poor foundations for civilised government.

Read the whole thing. If you’re a conservative, especially a religious conservative, this is not the time to relax, or to gloat, but rather to prepare. We are no less Weimar America today than we were on the day before the election, when most of us thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. If you are a Christian and/or a conservative true to your convictions, chances are you are going to find yourself having to resist the Trump administration at some point. I wish our incoming president well, because he is our president, but on many, perhaps most, issues, I expect to be in opposition to him, as I would have been with President Hillary Clinton. The fact that Trump has a lot of the right enemies does not make him a good man or a capable president.

One thing I agree with many on the left about: we are in uncharted waters. We don’t need weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor do we need complacency. We need to get busy building the flotilla of arks.

UPDATE: I appreciate this comment from Chris Rawlings:

It’s good to see you saying this, Rod. It’s been amazing to watch some religious conservatives present the Trump win as, somehow, a win for social conservativism. Now that the apparently delicious scent of political power has returned to the rapidly diminishing conservative movement, the principled distaste for the idiosyncrasy, the boorishness, the brutality of the Trump revolution has at least somewhat evaporated. I’ve even watched Catholics rejoice over the fact that Catholics voted for the Republican nominee by a larger margin than they did in 2012. Isn’t that wonderful?

It’s not wonderful. It’s not wonderful that Catholics, and even more overwhelmingly, Evangelicals, helped elect a man who spent a usually socially conservative primary campaign fawning over the “good things” that America’s largest abortion provider does, abortion notwithstanding. The same Republican nominee who was nominated at a national convention wherein Peter Thiel chided religious conservatives to move on from their fixation on moral issues. Is it the desperation for a small whiff of political gainsay that led so many religious conservatives to support a man who is not only profoundly unfit for the office of President, but even spent his career building up a media culture that both helped elect him and continues to help degrade the rest of us?

I understand the Trump voter, although I was not one. I appreciate the economic dissolution that many families and communities experience. I understand the desolation religious conservatives feel when their principles are being attacked by the legion of media, academic, cultural, corporate and now political leaders who govern American lives. I understand the threat that a Clinton presidency posed to all of us. I am very pleased that Hillary Clinton is not going to be president, but that Donald Trump is going to be president very nearly supersedes any joy I feel. Please, let us not pretend that Donald Trump was a “win” for anybody. It was precisely Donald Trump who helped create the cultural, commercial, and media rot that Trump voters felt so oppressed by. It was Trump’s running mate who sacrificed core conservative principle because corporate influence in his state, and therefore his local electoral prospects, were in jeopardy.

With a Republican Party only barely clinging to a thread of religious conservativism—the thread that weaves together an electoral coalition that can win elections—and a social conservative movement essentially coopted by Trump and his supporters, I would say that the Benedict Option is more important today than ever before. It must be emphasized that “religious liberty” is only meaningful, in nomenclature and in political life, if we appreciate just how precious and worthy of protection Christianity in America really is. Can we really say that Christianity in Trump’s America is a prized possession, or at least something more than a cheap prop for nationalist identity? Trump’s election is evidence of the profound need for the Benedict Option, it is not an 11th Hour substitute for it. If we’re honest, it’s already much, much later than the 11th Hour, and rubbing our hands triumphantly at the prospect of a GOP political trifecta might actually hurt more than help.

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