In Search of the American Center

helps explain one of the mysteries of American politics — given that the Republican economic agenda is unpopular and the country has swung left on social issues, why can’t Democrats win more elections? The answer (one of them, at least) is that as the country has moved left, the Democratic Party’s base has consolidated even farther left, and in the process the party has lost the ability to speak to persuadable voters who disagree with the liberal consensus on a few crucial issues.

.. On abortion, where public opinion has been stable, Democrats have ditched their old attempts at moderation, undercutting the gains that secularization and the liberal turn on other culture-war issues should have naturally delivered them. And the party’s base has no patience anymore for the kind of careful triangulation that Bill Clinton practiced on issues like crime and welfare policy, or for the then-Democratic voters who were reassured by it.
.. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters didn’t differ very much on the actual issues.
.. Whether the Sanders or the Clinton faction rules, the demands of its large, consistently liberal core won’t allow much room for the experiments in outreach that a minority party needs.
.. On both sides of the Atlantic, if you tried to build a consensus politics based around what voters actually want, it would be very moderately culturally conservative and very moderately economically liberal, and it would sit low in the upper left quadrant of our chart — the place where Trump won voters who had previously voted for Obama.
.. But on both sides of the Atlantic, if you sought to place the elite consensus on the same chart, it be much closer to the emptiest of quadrants — the land of austerity and open borders, free trade and the permanent sexual revolution, the Simpson-Bowles plan and Emmanuel Macron.

.. Both Bill Clinton’s self-consciously moderate liberalism and George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism were rooted in a recognition that what the Acela Corridor wants is not quite what the country wants.

Bernie Sanders, Theocrat

Why should secular liberals get to dictate religious doctrine to believers?

.. In January 2016, Vought published a blog post at The Resurgent in which he stated that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”

.. This, Sanders declared at the nominee’s confirmation hearing, was “indefensible,” “hateful,” and “Islamophobic.” “This nominee,” Sanders harrumphed, “is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about.”

.. Sanders defended the line of questioning. Vought “and any other American has the right to hold any point of view they want,” said Sanders, but it is “unacceptable” “to have a high-ranking member of the United States government essentially say Islam is a second-class religion.”

.. It was not enough that Farron supported a legal right to abortion and same-sex marriage; the fact that he privately believed them to be sinful acts was not allowed to pass unchallenged. He was routinely attacked in the media — again, not for anything he had done, but for views about matters theological that he held privately. Farron’s resignation speech was striking: “To be a political leader — especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 — and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”

.. The BBC demands that Tim Farron not think abortion is a sin — even though virtually no one among Britain’s political and media elite believes in the idea of “sin.”

.. A person of faith might justifiably ask: Why does Bernie Sanders get to decide the appropriate theology of salvation? Why do Sky News anchors get to decide what is and isn’t a sin?

.. There is a long and stupid tradition of believing that the American Right threatens to impose an Evangelical Christian theocracy on the United States — that every Republican lawmaker is looking to erect an official church and make women cover their ankles. In reality, it is the proudly irreligious Left that has smuggled religious debates back into our politics. It is the unabashedly secular Left that has knocked down the “wall of separation” and made the afterlife an immanent political issue.

.. Our new theocrats think differently, though, and no surprise: The dirty little secret of secular liberalism is not that its practitioners don’t believe in God; it’s that they believe they are God.

Trump picks antiabortion activist to head HHS family planning section

“Of course, contraception doesn’t work,” she said during a 2003 NPR interview. “Its efficacy is very low, especially when you consider over years — which a lot of contraception health advocates want to start women in their adolescent years, when they’re extremely fertile, incidentally, and continue for 10, 20, 30 years. The prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous.”

.. They falsely claim that pregnancy begins upon implantation of the embryonic human being in the uterus, rather than at the time of fertilization when the life is created.”

Trump and the Religious Right: A Match Made in Heaven

Here’s what everyone’s missing about the surprising bond between the president and the faithful.

Dismissed by the cultural elite. Disrespected by the mainstream media. Delegitimized by the American left. And desperate to stop the bleeding.

.. But it is equally the story of American evangelicalism, whose adherents feel marginalized in a culture that they believe no longer reflects its core values or tolerates its most polarizing principles.

.. why they felt a connection with him as a candidate, or why many feel an even stronger kinship with him as president today. One fascinating explanation, proffered repeatedly during conversations with evangelicals over the past year, is that they identify with Trump because both he and they have been systematically targeted in the public square—oftentimes by the same adversaries.

.. he was also expressing solidarity with an audience that can relate to feeling victimized.

.. “The most politically incorrect thing to do these days is talk about Christianity,” says Steve Scheffler, president of Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Iowa chapter and a prominent grass-roots player in Trump’s victory there last fall. “Religion has been under siege for a long time. And I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but if Hillary Clinton had won, religious liberty in America would basically be finished because of her appointments to the courts.”

.. for Christians who feel they are engaged in a great struggle for the identity of America—and fear that their side has been losing ground—the most important question is not whether Trump believes in their cause, but whether he can win their wars.

.. “Jimmy Carter sat in the pew with us. But he never fought for us,” Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told me after the president’s speech. “Donald Trump fights. And he fights for us.”

.. This casting of Trump as a great champion of the faithful, engaging the forces of secularism on behalf of a beleaguered religious right, is essential to understanding his appeal among evangelicals.

.. Critics point to religious people occupying the highest public offices and governing by their faith, often to the detriment of nonbelievers

.. wonder how this sense of martyrdom came to be so misplaced.

.. Christianity is under attack from the worldly influences of academia and entertainment and media

.. They see people and organizations of faith—florists, wedding cake bakers, Hobby Lobby, the Little Sisters of the Poor—persecuted for living their spiritual convictions. They shudder as pastors are subpoenaed for their sermons. And they fear, as same-sex marriage becomes culturally entrenched, a cascade of further defeats

.. Many Christians believe in the idea of “spiritual warfare,” the concept of God and Satan enlisting their armies of angels and demons to battle for the souls of people through everyday occurrences and experiences.

.. Many also believe in what might be described as divine irony—that is, the notion that God uses flawed, unlikely individuals to achieve his ends and advance his kingdom. (Jacob, Moses, David, et al.)

.. “George W. Bush was one of them, but he was a compassionate conservative. They want someone who’s a fighter

.. “It’s a lot of things: the policy battles, the way he ran his campaign, the way, frankly, that he’s handling the FBI investigation into Russia. Trump doesn’t back down. And that kind of leadership, evangelicals feel like they haven’t seen it from the White House.”

  1. nominating a conservative in Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court;
  2. reinstating and strengthening the Mexico City policy, which eliminates U.S. funding for international nongovernmental organizations that perform abortions;
  3. signing the Congressional Review Act to route federal money away from Planned Parenthood;
  4. and issuing an executive order that begins to broaden religious liberty guidelines

.. “I believe we’re winning this battle,” James Dobson, the lionized Christian author and radio host, said to thunderous applause Saturday night during the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s closing dinner.

.. By standing up and fighting on behalf of a community that has long felt the same way, Trump has earned its lasting loyalty