How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.17

  But polling data near the end of the campaign suggested that the message was not getting through to evangelicals. Pollsters found that when evangelical leaders spoke out against Trump, they weakened support for the mogul. But, pollsters also found that “few Americans are hearing about the presidential candidates from their clergies.”18 Indeed, only 9 percent of white evangelicals said they had heard their clergy speak about Trump and only 6 percent heard them discuss Clinton. Four political scientists who examined the numbers concluded that support for Trump remained high among evangelicals “in part because local religious elites are not regularly talking about his candidacy. Were those discussions to occur, it’s possible that they would highlight concerns that many evangelical leaders might have about his moral character.” To test that proposition, evangelicals were read portions of editorials that raised questions about Trump’s character and compassion. One suggested that Trump’s appeal is “dangerously close to Satan’s offer to Jesus in Luke 4:9: ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’” The study found that after being exposed to that argument, white evangelical voter support for Trump dropped sharply. But for the most part, evangelical clergy did not speak up and their flocks did not have to confront the problematic nature of the choice before them.

  Of course, not all Christian leaders followed suit. Throughout the campaign Trump would often lash out at them in very personal terms. After Bob Vander Plaats, the CEO of The Family Leader and a prominent conservative in Iowa, endorsed Senator Ted Cruz, Trump attacked him on Twitter, calling him a “phony” and “a bad guy.”* Trump also singled out Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, calling him “truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!”19

  MOORE’S DISSENT

  Even as his fellow evangelists were flocking to Trump’s standard, Russell Moore staked out an increasingly lonely position. “I have watched,” he wrote in February 2016, “as some of these who gave stem-winding speeches about ‘character’ in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.”20

  As important as the political issues were to Christians, Moore wrote, they were confusing means with ends and allowing ideology to overshadow the essential Christian message. “The damage to the movement was not merely political,” he later wrote. “What’s most at stake here is the integrity of our gospel witness and our moral credibility.”21

  For years, he wrote, critics on the secular Left had accused the evangelical Right of being more concerned with power rather than religious conviction. “They have implied that the goal of the Religious Right is to cynically use the ‘moral’ to get to the ‘majority,’ not the other way around,” he wrote. “This year, a group of high-profile evangelicals has proven these critics right.”

  In the weeks before the election, Moore delivered a lengthy critique of the evangelical crack-up in an address entitled, “Can the Religious Right Be Saved?” Conservative columnist Rod Dreher described that speech, delivered as the 2016 Erasmus lecture for First Things magazine, a “eulogy for the Religious Right,” calling it a “generation-defining speech, a line in the sand between the old Guard and the Next generation.”22

  In the lecture, Moore called out the Right’s implicit acceptance of moral relativism.

  In the 1990s, Gloria Steinem said that feminists should put up with a little bit of womanizing from Bill Clinton because he would keep abortion legal. Religious conservatives rightly said that this showed the moral hypocrisy of a feminist movement that inveighed against sexual harassment and office power dynamics—until it became politically inconvenient. Now, a conservative commentator [Ann Coulter] says that she doesn’t mind if the Republican nominee performs abortions in the Oval Office as long as he maintains a hard line against immigrants.23

  But Moore also made it clear that he respected and understood voters who felt they needed to hold their noses in the general election because of the importance of the Supreme Court. He disagreed, but said, “That is a respectable and defensible view.” Instead he turned his fire on the hucksters among the “old-guard religious right political establishment” who had “normalized an awful candidate—some offering outright support in theological terms, others hedging their bets and whispering advice behind closed doors.”

  Moore also noted that the binary choice facing voters in November 2016 did not explain the willingness of evangelical leaders to back Trump during the primaries, choosing him over such other obvious alternatives as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, or even Mike Huckabee. That suggested to Moore a much deeper crisis in the religious Right.

  “To be clear, the 2016 campaign did not provoke this crisis,” he said. “This was a pre-existing condition. The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about.”

  The essential error of the Christian Right was to give politics primacy over faith. At some point, Moore warned, conservative Christians would have to come to grips with the reality that their values were not always going to be politically popular, that they were no longer a “majority.” That meant that they must be prepared to choose between the Gospel and winning elections. If they surrendered their values in order to achieve short-term political successes, he said, they would end up with neither values nor political success. Too many evangelicals were confusing means with ends. “Religious liberty is a means to an end,” he reminded his listeners, “and the end is not political.” Christianity could not allow itself to be bent and warped to win elections, even important ones.

  “A religious right that is not able to tie public action and cultural concern to a theology of Gospel and mission will die, and will deserve to die,” he said. “When Christianity is seen as a political project in search of a gospel useful enough to advance its worldly agenda, it will end up pleasing those who make politics primary, while losing those who believe the Gospel,” said Moore. “Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of Rome’s collapse, and he did not repurpose the Gospel to prop up a failing regime.”24

  Moore was especially pointed in declaring the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity with white nationalism or identity politics:

  We still face racism and nativism and anti-Semitism. The religious right, if it wishes to be genuinely religious, must work toward justice and reconciliation, regardless of whether that means a rebuke to those who are our allies on other issues. White Christians, after all, are not part of the majority culture and never have been, unless they define their primary culture as that of the United States of America. If, instead, my first identity is part of the global Body of Christ, then white middle-class Americans are a tiny sliver indeed.25

  So, Moore, asked, could the so-called religious Right be saved? Yes, but “not by tinkering around the edges.” The Christian Right urgently needed to restore its sense of the first principles of their faith and ultimately what they needed to fight for and conserve. Christians needed to be prepared to stand athwart the onrushing tides of the culture and politics.

  More than that, it will mean a religious conservatism that sees the Church as more important than the state, the conscience as more important than the culture, and one that knows the difference between the temporal and the eternal.26

  But that would have to wait for another year and another campaign.

  PART IV

  RESTORING THE CONSERVATIVE MIND


  CHAPTER 16

  TROLLS AND FLYING MONKEYS: THE RIGHT’S NEW CULTURE OF INTIMIDATION

  AS THE AGE OF Trump dawns, conservatives should realize that politics is no longer a binary choice. To be sure, Democrats and their Hollywood allies will continue to overreach and overreact, making them an easy foil. The boycotts, protests, and assorted hysterical tantrums remind us why voters have turned against the fashionable Left. But on a host of issues, the lines will be blurrier. Ideologically, Trump has made it clear that he intends to break with the long-standing conservative consensus over free trade and limited government. (He mentioned the word “freedom” just a single time in his inaugural speech. Reagan had used the word eight times; George W. Bush twenty-seven times in his second inaugural.) That creates room for contrarian conservatives, who refuse to march in lockstep with the new administration.

  But—and this has to be said—one of the most formidable challenges facing independent conservatives will be the culture of bullying, threats, and intimidation that has become a feature of the Trumpist Right and its binary politics.

  What role will the conservative media play? Skeptics in the conservative media (National Review, Weekly Standard, Commentary, Wall Street Journal, and even elements of Fox News) will undoubtedly mix praise for the new regime with censure. But the new era has created painful professional and personal schisms between Trump skeptics and those more willing to accommodate the new regime. In the first few months of the Trump presidency, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal split over the paper’s coverage, leading to the departures of several key players, including Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Bret Stephens, a consistent Trump critic who now writes for the New York Times.1 Before his departure from the Journal, Stephens publicly lamented the capitulation to Trumpism of conservative thought leaders, presumably including some of his own colleagues. “The most painful aspect of this,” he said in the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, “has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.” Trump’s attacks on the media, Stephens argued, were not simply critiques of liberal bias, which would be fair criticism. “His objection is to objectivity itself,” Stephens said. “He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt—so long as it’s on his side.”2

  The campaign, Stephens told his audience, saw the rise of a pundit class he called the “TrumpXplainers,” who would offer to translate the candidate’s incoherent word salads into something that sounded cogent. “For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble,” Stephens said. “But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.” This posed a painful dilemma for conservatives who declined to adjust their standards. Said Stephens:

  Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers—precisely because I haven’t changed my opinions about anything.

  By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right—again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.3

  In perhaps the most striking section of his address, Stephens compared the Trumpian apologists to the postwar Polish communists described by Czesław Miłosz in his book, The Captive Mind. Miłosz’s colleagues were not coerced into becoming Stalinists, but actually made the transition willingly. Said Stephens:

  They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries.4

  “I fear,” Stephens said, “we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right.” Indeed, as he watched the process of conversion, Stephens concluded that the “mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Miłosz’s former colleagues.” He described the process of rationalization:

  There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.5

  Stephens concluded with a call for “intellectual integrity in the age of Trump.” But he seemed to recognize that the tide was running heavily against him. All of the early signs suggest that the centrifugal forces of the newly emboldened Right media are already proving too strong as, one by one, they fall into line, as even erstwhile serious conservative commentators pen pieces of fawning hagiography. Even though there was scattered dissent among some Alt Right outlets after Trump ordered a missile attack on Syria and flip-flopped on some of his nationalist policies, many in the conservative media will be reluctant to break ranks. As writer Eliana Johnson observed “the conservative media have been increasingly pulled by a tractor beam that demands positive coverage of the president regardless of how far he wanders from the ideas they once enforced. Producers and editors have been faced with a choice: Provide that coverage or lose your audience.”6 This created an extraordinary dynamic. In the past, the White House has had to be concerned about a more or less adversarial media, but President Trump will be able to call upon a passionately loyal alternative media—which includes talk radio, much of Fox News, websites like Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and dozens of Scam PACs—to attack his enemies and provide air cover in adversity. Some of his most enthusiastic cheerleaders have been granted White House press credentials, and others are hatching plans to expand their operations.

  For years, Rush Limbaugh has gibed about what he calls the “state-controlled media”—the liberal news outlets that Limbaugh has long decried for their lack of critical coverage of President Barack Obama—but we may be about to see what one actually looks like. Since so many in the Right media are too deeply invested to be outraged at any failures or reversals from Trump World, they will inevitably be focused on attacking the Left and launching purges of the saboteurs and dissenters on the Right.

  At the conservative website Hotair.com, for instance, writer Jazz Shaw not only defended Trump’s pick of Steve Bannon as a top aide, but also lashed out at Trump critic David French, whom Shaw writes, “Makes sure to work in the buzzword ‘alt-right,’ as so many other Never Trumpers continue to do.” He then dismissed concerns about the white nationalist movement, saying that the term was “dredged up from the gutters of the internet and injected into the common parlance as a tool to smear Trump.” (Actually, as we’ve seen, the Alt Right is quite real, as its leaders will tell you themselves.)

  But Shaw’s larger point is that Trump critics needed to get on board, immediately. Before the election, critics of Trump were accused of trying to elect Clinton because it was a “binary choice.” But after the election, the narrative pivoted. If conservative
s continue to criticize Trump now, Shaw wrote, “you are working to defeat the GOP agenda and advance the Democrats and the Social Justice Warriors.” And he sets out the terms of the purges to come: “And if that’s the case you are no longer momentarily estranged friends. You are, to borrow the title of a truly awful Julia Roberts movie, sleeping with the enemy.” [Emphasis in the original.]7

  The demand that conservatives drop their objections and conform was also taken up by the grassroots. In Wisconsin, even after I stepped down from my daily radio show, there were calls for purges of conservatives (like me) who might dissent from the new regime. The publisher of the Wisconsin Conservative Digest, for instance, sent out a blast email excoriating conservatives who had not backed Trump, calling them “Judas goats,” suggesting that activists retaliate against them after the election. This was curious, because just months earlier (in August 2016) the same publisher had sent out a similar mass email calling on the GOP to repudiate Trump. “If the top leaders, not the old timers of the party stand up and disavow him and tell him to get out let pence [sic] carry the mail we could at least stop the rest of the bleeding,” he wrote on August 15. Within weeks, he had decided to back Trump and began castigating dissidents.

  After the election, he ratcheted up the recriminations, which were aimed not merely at me (I was about to go off the air), but at other hosts and conservative activists who had been critical of the new president. He commented:

  We remember those Benedict Arnolds that tried that, in 1964 and 1980. Where are those people? They died alone and unloved?

  Be smart, turn off Charlie and relegate him to the trash bin. Same with [Green Bay host Jerry] Bader.… Why listen to someone trying to get you to commit suicide?

  Can you endorse their backstabbing? Why?…

  Let them swing slowly, slowly in the wind. Do not be scared of these clowns, call them, kick them in the knees or other places.…