On the one hand,many of the pro-Trump thinkers seem to believe that for all his distinctive vices, Trump would probably end up governing largely as a conventional Republican.
.. Reagan-era conservatism had its time and failed, these Trump-supporting intellectuals suggest, and the time has come to roll the dice, to embrace a change agent even if he seems gross and seedy and bigoted, because the alternative is staying on a fatal course.
.. Others take the more modest view that Trump is correct on particular issues (immigration, foreign policy, the importance of the nation-state) where the bipartisan consensus is often wrong, and his candidacy is a chance to vote against an elite worldview that desperately needs to be chastened and rebuked.
.. If Trump gets restrained by his advisers, he’ll be a typical Republican, this combination would go, and if he stays true to his own essential Trumpiness, he’ll be the scourge our rotten system needs.
.. What remains is this question: Can Donald Trump actually execute the basic duties of the presidency? Is there any way that his administration won’t be a flaming train wreck from the start? Is there any possibility that he’ll be levelheaded in a crisis — be it another 9/11 or financial meltdown
.. Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics. The burdens of the presidency will leave him permanently maddened, perpetually undone.
.. Months ago, I worried that Trump was too authoritarian to be entrusted with the presidency. That worry has receded a bit, because authoritarianism requires a ruthless sort of competence that Trump cannot attain.
The Debate Mismatch
Even late in the primary season Trump never shared the stage with fewer than three other rivals, and mostly he was on stage with many more. And during all that time he wasn’t really trying to debate those rivals; as James Fallows writes, he would go “into a kind of hibernation” whenever the conversation turned remotely substantive, and emerge to hurl insults and declaim his promises of greatness restored.
Catholicism at Year Zero
But these models, for all their potential wisdom, are also ones that any start-up Christian communion might adopt. Whereas part of the point of being Catholic — or so one might hazard — is that the church also has two thousand-odd years of prior argument, prior interpretation, and yes, prior rulings to tell us where the rough boundaries of our tradition lie.
.. Where matters are clearly unsettled, in other words, Martens is offering reasonable criteria to guide the church. But by only emphasizing those criteria, he seems to imply that no question is ever permanently settled, that one interpretation simply succeeds another as the church’s history unfolds.
.. Instead, the strong implication is that in every generation the Catholic Church is in roughly the same position as the nascent church of the 1st century, confronting crucial questions anew and reading the signs of the times afresh, and that the positions and teachings of the past are always up for revision when some combination of dialogue, prayer, experience and theological innovation suggests that the time has come to change.
.. but that a penitential path has to be followed prior to a second marriage, and this is the case even if the person seeking a second marriage is a widow or a widower, since one, indissoluble marriage is the ideal.
.. But given Catholicism’s understanding of the indissolubility of marriage, why should this be? Why should the death of one spouse end this marriage?
.. To write and act as if all those centuries don’t matter very much, to brush them away in favor of interpretative moves that start again at the very beginning without regard for what the church has taught in the intervening two thousand years, is to imply a vision of the church as a permanent debating society, an ongoing conversation in which no teaching is definitive so long as a reasonable and sincere Christian can make a case for the opposing view.
.. And again: part of the point of being Catholic, I would have thought, is that we don’t have to keep having these arguments anew in every generation, like a megachurch in the midst of a succession crisis or coping with a superstar pastor’s theological drift; rather, we can treat past teaching as essentially reliable, and indeed treating past teaching as reliable is essential to what being Catholic means.
.. If the early church got marriage and divorce wrong, in other words, why are we so confident it got its dietary rules right?
.. Even read charitably, it seems shot through with an envy of the Anglican communion’s longstanding attempt at letting seemingly contradictory propositions jostle semi-permanently under the same ecclesiastical roof.
.. I am not saying that you can’t be a Christian if you believe that Jesus got important things wrong, that his human nature exposed him to errors and mistakes and misapprehensions that found their way into his teaching. I have a certain respect, indeed, for contemporary writers who are willing to grasp that nettle: I didn’t write on it when it came out, but I admired this piece by Brandon Ambrosino last year for the forthright way it dealt with the “what would Jesus think about homosexuality” question by simply arguing that not only Paul but Jesus himself had a contingent and limited-by-his-times view of sexual ethics, and that contemporary believers need to transcend the limitations imposed by Jesus’s human side — because Jesus’s divine side would want us to.