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The Biden Era Begins

Where social and religious conservatives can find hope now
Screen Shot 2021-01-20 at 2.31.57 PM

I woke up this morning too late to see Biden’s swearing-in. (This week I’ve gone cold turkey off of Ambien, the sleep drug, more about which later; this week, because of it, I haven’t been able to get to sleep until about an hour before dawn.) I caught the last part of his speech. My first reaction: what a relief to have a president who talks like a normal human being. I didn’t vote for the guy, but I’m grateful to hear a presidential speech that doesn’t make me mad — mad, either because I’m angry at the president for what he said or how he said it, or mad with the president at the people or thing he was attacking.

The TV people covering it were startlingly enthusiastic about all of this. I say “startlingly” because I didn’t expect that they would allow their feelings to show quite like this. But they did. This rubbed me the wrong way, not because I’m shocked to discover that journalists are liberal, but because it made me think that this is how press coverage of the Biden administration is likely to be, at least at the beginning: fawning and filled with relief that Orange Man Bad is gone. I was watching ABC, but turned it off because I couldn’t take the gushy tone. I missed this:

Gross. Embarrassing. But I kind of get it. Like I said, I didn’t vote for Biden, but after the way Trump and his minions behaved post-election, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, I am relieved to see the back of him. It’s so exhausting to be wound up constantly. Trump thrived off of anger and conflict. When I saw these tweets about how the Q cultists are melting down, I thought, “Great, now maybe we can be done with them.”

Watching Biden’s speech, I was surprised by the amount of relief I felt that the Trump drama is over. Don’t get me wrong: I think Biden’s policies will be bad for America, especially for social and religious conservatives. But I was surprised by the sense of relief precisely because I think that things are going to be pretty dark for people like me. How to account for it?

This letter from a conservative Catholic reader helped me understand it better:

Well today Trump is gone.  I also perused a number of your postings as I had unplugged from much of my political reading for a time.  It’s interesting to read what others are saying, what I am hearing at my church and what I am feeling.  There does seem to be an overall sentiment of exhaustion and desire for, well, just less political engagement.
My sense is still that we are seeing the scapegoat mechanism in regard to Trump.  He has been defeated and sent away in shame and the hope and desire of people is now bringing about some kind of peace and normalcy.  I think most people, even on the fringes whether BLM or MAGA, want peace or they at least want pacification.  Already we are seeing with Biden the march of liberal ideas with his Executive Orders.  Two of those EO’s will be manifestly anti-life; the Mexico City protocol and opening up about $60 million a year for Planned Parenthood again.  The reality is we have a man who solidly identifies himself as a Catholic but will probably be ushering in the most anti-Catholic policies in history.  And the bishops?  Already the Cardinal of Washington is getting center stage, the USCCB is pledging to work with Biden.  (No doubt they should say that, but there is precious little resistance to Biden’s excommunication worthy actions.)  If any of us did what he is doing our bishop would tell us we needed to go to confession, at the least.  This is one reason Catholics don’t trust their bishops any more, because they won’t stand for anything.  They cannot even be unified on protecting the unborn.
Anyway, here’s my prediction.  People are exhausted, not just by Trump, but by the constant attacking of Trump and by a year of Covid.  Here is the fatal mistake people very well may make: they will place Biden on the pedestal of the one who saved the nation and given him and his administration about as much power as they want.  In essence, for four years we heard that Trump was dangerous because he had too much power.  Just watch as Biden ends up being far more dictatorial than Trump ever was.  He’s doing it all in the name of idealistic pursuits and I don’t think there is much will to stop him.
I don’t foresee any kind of conflict or fight on the part of most people.  What I see is the prime opportunity for a Huxleyan revolution and people are going to welcome it, not just because their attitudes have changed, but because people just want the madness to stop.  They think they got rid of the dictator, now they are about to lay down and let the real dictator take over.  America is about to be remade.
Though I wouldn’t use the word “dictator” to describe either Trump or Biden, I think this is right. It highlights the real gift that the January 6 insurrectionists gave to Joe Biden and the Democrats. Most Americans don’t want to live in a country in which things like that happen, instigated by the President of the United States. As long as Biden can keep talking in a calm, normal, irenic way — his speech was good at that — he will be able to get a lot of what he wants. He’s got the press corps in his back pocket. And, as the Catholic reader pointed out, the policies Biden is going to push for in some areas are quite bad.
I find myself this afternoon pretty sour about what Trump and his followers did. Had Trump not acted like a lunatic at the first presidential debate, he might have had a second term. Had he been just a little bit different, and more normal, in dealing with Covid, same deal. Had Trump not told Georgia Republican voters to stay home in the Senate runoff, we probably would still have a Republican Senate to restrain Biden. Had Trump not been a lunatic about the election result, we wouldn’t have had a mob storming the Capitol.
The past year of Trump’s presidency, especially the past two months, has been one massive own goal. I’m really sick and tired of the QAnon garbage, and all the stupid distractions we on the Right have created for ourselves, that have only ended up helping the other side, in part by sending the Right down so many idiotic rabbit holes. As if the only choice was between Zombie Reaganism or MAGA-Q. Somebody the other day, maybe on Twitter, said that Trump has reduced all conservative politics down to the question of how you feel about him. Nothing else matters to his most ardent followers.
We on the Right have a lot of rebuilding to do. What I want to see is not a return to the pre-Trump GOP status quo — that way is death, and besides, it’s not even possible — but for the party going forward to find a way to turn populism into a constructive and appealing governing philosophy. Think about where we would be today if Trump had actually cared about the things he ran on enough to see them through. Let us never again think, though, that character doesn’t matter. Our side is going to have its hands full opposing Biden, but we won’t gain power again without a positive vision. Nor will we gain power again as long as Donald Trump is the main factor in GOP politics.
I saw this from the liberal writer Matt Yglesias yesterday, and it gave me hope:

I’m not sure what Yglesias has in mind, but here are some things that I do, as a social and religious conservative.

First, we are a nation that has forgotten God — and not just people on the Left. There is ample evidence that many of us on the Right have done so. There is no legislative or executive action that can call us to repentance for that. Only our pastors, and ourselves.

Second, the falling-apart of our families is not the fault of the government. The state is not forcing us to give our children smartphones. It’s not the government’s fault that many of them use the smartphones to discover hardcore porn. I would welcome laws restricting or (ideally) banning porn, but we do not have to wait on that to do the right thing. We do not have to have the nanny state teach us how to be faithful spouses, and good moms and dads.

Third, the collapse of community spirit is not the government’s fault. In The Benedict Option, I wrote about how the anti-communist dissident Vaclav Benda responded to the political powerlessness of his side by realizing that politics is more than state action. Caring for the common good can be done by everyone, even those outside of political power. It is an impoverished vision of politics that sees it as only what happens in legislatures, or arguments carried out on social media.

Fourth, the loss of cultural memory is a hugely important thing to conservatives, or ought to be. We are forgetting who we are, in part because our institutions want to re-program us (I write about how this works in Live Not By Lies. ). There is no electoral solution to our universities, our news media, and Hollywood having embraced wokeness. The good news is that we have it within our power to resist this. Benda and other dissidents held classes and seminars where they taught real history, and real literature to those who wanted to know the truth. They did this under a communist dictatorship, in the face of an education system that propagandized the young constantly; what’s our excuse? If you have the means to put your kids into classical schools, or to start one, now is the time to do so. Now is the time to support classical education, with your donations, too. Our greatest obstacle now is our imagination, our lack of creativity.

There are more issues, I’m sure. The point is this: I wish we did not have a liberal Democratic president, but that liberal Democratic president is not preventing us from being better servants of God. That liberal Democratic president is not preventing us from taking better care of our families. He is not preventing us from being better neighbors, and is not preventing us from educating ourselves and our children to understand who we really are as men, as women, and as Americans. Did Donald Trump make anybody a better Christian, a better parent, a better neighbor, or a better steward of our cultural inheritance? Really?

It is not the case that we can either be good at conventional politics or we can be good at these other things. We have to be both. But it is more important to be better at the other things, because any political victory is hollow without them. Trump accomplished some good things in his four years, but to the extent that he convinced a lot of us that his holding power meant meaningful change, it was Pyrrhic. He does not leave the churches stronger, or families closer, or community spirit more resilient, or our culture in better shape — but it’s not really the job of a president to do those things. A president can give us things, but he can’t give us meaning.

Make no mistake, these next four years are going to be hard for religious and social conservatives. But if you ever placed hope in the princes and sons of men, you were wrong, and now you — and I — have the chance to turn away from that, and build a creditable resistance to the spirit of the age. Had Trump been re-elected, a lot of us on the Right would have been lulled into a false sense of security, as Woke Capitalism and the other institutions continued to institute soft totalitarian tactics and policies, but the Republican-voting masses wrongly believed that all was well because Trump was in the White House. Time to go back to the real world. We on the Right cannot keep ripping ourselves apart over Donald Trump. The Senate was a gift to the Democrats; do we want more of this? Besides, there will be more real power in being out of political power, if it compels us to get serious about living faithfully in a post-Christian age. Look back at how much culture-changing power the Left accrued, and exercised, despite Trump being in office and the Congress being Republican for half of his term. We can’t hope to match that, but we can do a lot more than we think, if we get off our butts and get to work.

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