Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terrible for the “America First” candidate.
A big part of his political message, the one you hear at his stump speeches, is that America has grown weak. America doesn’t win anymore, he says. “Crippled America” is the title of his most recent book.
.. Here’s a candidate whose message depends entirely on convincing Americans that they’re living in a failing nation overrun by criminal immigrants. And for the past two weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been glued to a multi-ethnic parade of athletes, winning easily.
The Idolatry of the Donald
Trump is the natural product of American civil religion.
As Frank Bruni persuasivelyargued in the New York Times, the Republican frontrunner comes off not as “someone interested in serving God” so much as “someone interested in being God.” Trump so closely links himself and the divine that he drifts into boasting of his own accomplishments in the very process of explaining why God is important. The candidate feels he is above the need for God’s forgiveness (as it is written, “there is one who is righteous, yea, just one”) and recently named “an eye for an eye” as his favorite Bible verse, an interesting selection given the New Testament’s assignment of vengeance as God’s prerogative.
.. Of course, Americans might rightly protest that we don’t ascribe divinity to the presidency, but the office is undoubtedly sacralized. Its successes—notably in foreign policy—are attributed to divine blessing. Conventional politicians may be more politic than Trump, but most will happily harness God to tow their pet projects. A classic example is what theologian Michael J. Gorman labels the “divine passive voice,” in which, often in the run-up to war, presidents say things like “We are called…” to subtly invoke a holy authority for their plans. In a Trump White House, the voice would simply become slightly more active.
.. “I do solemnly swear that I, no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there are hurricanes or whatever, will vote on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for President,” he asked Floridian supporters to promise in advance of their state’s primary. This sort of ultimatum is right at home in a civil religion that facilitates unthinking Christian loyalty to the state by means of a clever syncretism: If America is “under God”—if the United States becomes the “city on a hill”—we needn’t worry about obeying God rather than men. It’s all one and the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph is idolatrously mutated into an American tribal deity.
.. “Greatness is defined especially as financial, political, and/or military strength, and this definition carries with it the conviction that both America and Americans should always enjoy and operate from a position of strength and security.”
.. The authority of the White House has expanded to match the sanctity we’ve assigned it. (Not for nothing is it called the imperial presidency.) Themodern office “looks nothing like the modest, businesslike, law-governed executive the Framers envisioned,” and if it did, Trump wouldn’t want it.
“Make America great again” proceeds from a very different appeal than “national greatness” conservatism.
in the last quarter century many of the blue collar voters who had been integrated into the FDR-to-LBJ Democrats and then became “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s have had no intellectuals or policy wonks of their own, no think tanks and magazines that respected their values and interests. Organized labor, which once represented their interests, is nearly extinct outside of the public sector. The cultural left despises and vilifies working-class white men as privileged bigots, period. Neoliberal “New Democrats” focus on an audience of tech billionaires and Wall Street financiers. Conservatives praise the service of working-class men and women in uniform—but God forbid that the same heroic veterans should ask for a raise or a higher Social Security benefit or try to join a union or vote for paid family leave. Lacking any establishment advocates and sympathetic intellectuals, on left, right or center, many white working class Americans have therefore turned to demagogic outsiders like Trump. Where else are they to go?
.. Neoconservative instincts in domestic and foreign policy were linked by the assumption that a broadly prosperous America would possess the moral resolve and economic resources to defeat Communism. With the Soviet challenge removed, neoconservatives lost the political glue that held them together.
.. The greatness Trump invokes is something very different than this shallow appeal to energy for its own sake. Rather than the moral equivalent of war, it’s about apparently small things: meaningful work, economic stability, ordered communities. Neoconservatives defended these small things when they they could be used as weapons in a great ideological struggle. Trump treats them as desirable in themselves.
Time to Face the Hard Truth: The Sky Isn’t Falling on America
Only in a truly demoralized conservative movement could the crass materialism of Donald Trump find a foothold. That kind of nihilistic energy reflects more than just economic anxiety. It evidences a deeper sense of despair about the moral and cultural trajectory of our society.
.. They loved Manchester United but seemed to have little interest in Uzbek soccer. Midway through my service I got an idea of why that might be. Some soccer-loving American friends started going to local games. As longtime fans of the sport, they were strongly under the impression that at least some of the games were fixed. A match would proceed normally for awhile, but in the last few minutes the leading team might start making obvious, clownish mistakes that would ultimately lead to a loss. My friends found it hard to believe that this phenomenon was natural.
.. On the other hand, a society that demands fair football games is positioned to navigate these other problems. We still have a strong sense of fair play, a zeal for excellence, and the kind of political foundation that can sustain a free society.