For several years now, Moore has been the energetic and winsome spokesman for a next-generation religious right — one that no longer regards itself as a moral majority, that recognizes that traditional religion in all its forms has become a counterculture in the West
.. Having spent the late Obama years trying to reconcile themselves to growing marginalization, to sudden secularization and increasing liberal pressure on their institutions, they suddenly find themselves with a real share of power — with allies all over the Trump cabinet, whatever the president himself may believe — in a political alignment that almost nobody saw coming.
.. But Dreher’s deeper, “how to build a counterculture” argument matters regardless of whether his prophecies are accurate
.. how do you think we got Trumpism? There is blame enough to go around, but the weakness of religious community is an important part of the story
.. if every Protestant megachurch were one degree more liturgical and theological
.. Being a bit of a dogmatist myself, I’m skeptical that a robust institutional Christianity can be built on the premises of contemporary liberal theology and the cultural shifts that it accommodates.
Robert Frost said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
Robert Frost said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
.. At one point she declares, “Formalism, adherence to a document that was written by people who are no longer here to judge our situation, all is repugnant to me,” and I practically screamed at the book in my hands that that attitude is basically spitting on the Constitution.
Trump’s populism isn’t fascism. So what is it?
if fascism was going to spread to the United States, it would have done so in the 1920s and 1930s, when fascism and related ideologies were gaining the support of enlightened, forward-thinking people all over Europe. Authoritarian and antidemocratic movements were taking hold nearly everywhere from Portugal and Spain in the west to Greece and Russia in the east. For European intellectuals and politicos, democracy wasn’t the future; fascism and communism were. Yet neither ideology attracted more than a few adherents in the United States.
.. Fascism, in order to thrive, needed conformity and deference to the wisdom of planners. It was the doctrine of elites, not mavericks or crackpots. The Nazis purged many accomplished people from high positions, but most of the elites either tolerated or supported them. They captured the government first, but the universities, the established churches and the cultural institutions soon fell into line.
.. As for Trump’s chances of effecting a fascist putsch, does anyone seriously imagine that his populist creed stands a chance of winning over the elites who populate our universities, news media, cultural institutions and entertainment industry?
.. The Trump phenomenon is a distinctly American upheaval: ugly in its overtones, philistine in its aesthetics, incoherent in its tenets, occasionally disruptive of valuable traditions and institutions, but basically a necessary remedy to the centralizing dynamic of consensus liberalism.
.. The populist movement that’s turning our politics upside down won’t win them over, but it will weaken their influence and rattle their pieties. And when the dust settles and the United States is still the free and vibrant place it was before — when the nation hasn’t metamorphosed into some fascist dystopia — they just might engage in a little self-criticism.
Obama Shows His True Colors as He Leaves Office
Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports plus another quarter-million State Department documents.
.. The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree”
.. Even the word “leaker” is misleading. Leak makes it sound like a piece of information a whistleblower gives Woodward and Bernstein to expose misdeeds in high office. This was nothing of the sort. It was the indiscriminate dumping of a mountain of national-security secrets certain to bring harm to American troops, allies, and interests.
.. What makes this commutation so spectacularly in-your-face is its hypocrisy. Here is a president who spent weeks banging the drums over the harm inflicted by WikiLeaks with its release of stolen materials and e-mails during the election campaign. He demanded a report immediately. He imposed sanctions on Russia. He preened about the sanctity of the American political process.
.. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who went on to be a great Democratic senator, once argued passionately that in the anti-American, anti-democratic swamp of the U.N., America should act unwaveringly in opposition and never give in to the jackals. Obama joined the jackals. Why? To curry favor with the international Left? After all, Obama leaves office as a relatively young man of 55. His next chapter could very well be as a leader on the international stage, perhaps at the U.N. (secretary-general?) or some transnational (ostensibly) human-rights organization. What better demonstration of bona fides than a gratuitous attack on Israel?
.. A more likely explanation, however, is that these are acts not of calculation but of authenticity. This is Obama being Obama. He leaves office as he came in: a man of the Left, but possessing the intelligence and discipline to suppress his more radical instincts. As of November 9, 2016, suppression was no longer necessary.
.. We’ve just gotten a glimpse of his real self. From now on, we shall see much more of it.