Pragmatism is not compromise – until it is.
As we approach election day, anxieties are running high for supporters of both Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. There are voices from both camps condemning inaction by any as a failure of citizenship, or Christian commitment. They scathingly denounce an unwillingness to vote for their candidate as indefensible, unthinking, unconscionable, short-sighted and with regard to our progeny, an act of wanton neglect.
They give no quarter, brook no argument. Agreeing to disagree is impossible because “this is the most important election of our lifetime” (apparently unaware that this dire warning has attended every modern election since Truman employed it as he sought to dissuade support for the candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower).
This growing tension has now reached fever pitch. Friendships, familial bonds, and the fraternal life within Christian community have been sacrificed to political allegiances. What a sad and shameful moment for too many on both sides our yawning political divide.
I recently posted two articles regarding John Piper’s decision to abstain from voting for either Trump or Biden in the approaching election. The responses which followed suggested to me that I should take time to more fully explain my own decision in this matter. This explanation is of necessity somewhat lengthy, but I trust, as you read it (if you read it) that you will understand that the explanation simply doesn’t lend itself to brevity. The explanation demands a detailed telling.
This growing tension has now reached fever pitch. Friendships, familial bonds, and the fraternal life within Christian community have been sacrificed to political allegiances. What a sad and shameful moment for too many on both sides our yawning political divide.
My reasons for voting neither for Trump (I also did not vote for Donald Trump during the 2016 election for the same reasons, though they are now amplified as a consequence of the last four years) or Biden are both pragmatic, and religious. Allow me to explain.
The modern conservative movement traces its genesis back to several key publications, two of which were Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Bureaucracy , by von Mises. Two European intellectuals who would eventually find themselves, following the aftermath of World War II, teaching in America.
These important publications reanimated the sagging spirits of many on the right. Keynesianism dominated economics and politics during those years, on both sides of The Atlantic (as it would for the next several decades). Many feared that sixteen years of FDR’s New Deal politics threatened to permanently alter the economic and political landscape of the United States. The political zeitgeist of that era was decidedly statist. Hayek and von Mises breathed hope, and more importantly, vision and energy into the still fairly disorganized remnant of libertarians and classical liberals.
Next Richard Weaver’s Ideas have consequences exploded on to the scene, eliciting praise even from theologians Tillich and Niebuhr. It provided not only a way forward, but detailed the gulf which existed between the intellectual right and left.
Kirk’s The Conservative Mind laid siege to the philosophical underpinnings of modern liberalism, further delineating the animating ideals of the intellectual left and right. Furthermore, he began the work of identifying, with clarity, conservative principles and their rich history. More importantly, he tethered conservative thought to a transcendent moral order. Whittaker Chambers, a former Marxist and Soviet spy, and senior editor at Time magazine (who would eventually become a stalwart conservative champion) said simply that “The Conservative Mind was the most important book of the twentieth century”.
There were many other thinker/writers who emerged during the first several decades of the modern conservative movement. Nock, Chodorov, Opitz, Read, Kristol, Buckley, Podhoretz, Friedman, and Frank Meyer to name only a few. Among them, William F. Buckley’s National Review and Frank S. Meyer’s “Fusionism” would play an enormous role in shaping and advancing the conservative movement— and in protecting it from heretics and demagogues.
Conservative leader William Rusher warned, in a 1961 letter to Brent Bozell, that the movement should be protected from falling “into the hands of men and organizations woefully unsuited to the responsibility … and with just a little further bad luck, into the hands of the first really slick demagogue that comes along”.
The ill-suited and the unseemly did, inexorably, begin appearing in short order, testing the intellectual rigor, vigilance, and courage of conservatism’s leaders. The two following examples are offered because they are, I think, analogous to today’s political landscape.
Robert Welch and his recently founded John Birch Society emerged early as a very real threat to the perceived legitimacy of conservatism as a viable political movement. It offered a steady stream of extremist, fringe notions and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories, presented as if they constituted mainstream conservative thought. Ranging from its opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to it accusation that President Eisenhower, the former five star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, was, in fact, “a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy”.
The John Birch Society grew rapidly (the thirst for conspiracy theories was clearly as irresistible to some then, as it is now). By the early 1960’s it boasted chapters in thirty-five states and enjoyed annual revenues of $1,300,000.00 (roughly equivalent to $11,000,000.00 today). Conservative leaders, who at first counted Welch a reliable ally, grew increasingly concerned by his growing extremism— and popularity.
William Rickenbacker, a senior National Review editor, after studying the movement, its leader and adherents, wrote that Birchers were “terribly earnest … but hopelessly ignorant of history … and political theory”. That is, their embrace of conservatism though sincere, was also undiscriminating. Some conservative leaders hoped that simply ignoring them would serve as a sufficient remedy against their growing influence. That proved not to work. In fact as Bircher charges became more extreme, and their voices amplified by their growing numbers, charges of right wing extremism began surfacing among the left, as they sought to discredit the conservative movement as a whole.
Buckley and National Review, along with conservative leaders throughout the conservative movement objected to the Society’s most troubling views, attributing them to the John Birch Society’s leadership, rather than to its members. Welch, in turn, offered polite assurances to change his tone and abandon his most extreme ideas, but little changed.
Conservative leaders, noting with concern the apparent failure of Birch Society members (who reckoned themselves mainstream conservatives) to recognize the glaring contradictions between actual conservative thought and doctrine, and Bircher ideals, aims and means, realized that more stringent measures were in order.
After much discussion, and not a little concern that the move might prove to badly fracture the nascent conservative movement, conservative leaders chose to not merely criticize, but denounce the Birch Society.
The effect was immediate, positive, and ultimately healthy. It was also exhausting. Several years of careful, plodding, and precise essays, speeches, debates, conversations, and even books sought to define, detail and distinguish traditional conservative thought, differentiating it from the populist, nationalistic, paranoid, unpatriotic, and conspiratorial excretions of the John Birch Society.
Shed of that quasi-conservatism, the conservative movement was able to present itself as a responsible, intellectually coherent, and morally sound alternative to the still trending ideals of modern liberalism. Efforts by the left to brand the movement as anachronistic, sinister or just plain quixotic simply failed to resonate with more and more Americans of every stripe. Conservatism was becoming, in its own right, a potent political force. Not in spite of, but because of the care, intellectual integrity and discipline of conservatism’s leaders.
The next great test of the conservative movement would unfold during the strange and dark rise of the George Wallace presidential campaign. A demagogue, vulgarian and wholly unprincipled populist, Wallace campaigned with a sharp eye out for P. T. Barnum’s “sucker born every minute”.
He shrewdly cloaked his populism in the language of the Constitution, appealing to the naive, those with a conservative impulse but lacking in a studied grasp of conservative thought and practice. Most of all, he railed against any convenient target by which he might incite enthusiasm among those resentful of “elites”, “pointy-headed intellectuals”, and the press.
He promised to muzzle voices which spoke in defiance of his movement. He promised violence against those who protested against him. His was a campaign of slogans, but bereft of meaningful policy. He fashioned a makeshift platform only near the end of his campaign, sorely lacking coherence and substance.
Nevertheless, he enjoyed growing support, as did the John Birch Society earlier. Wallace was not a conservative. At best he was a populist. He was also demagogue. He was a dangerous, unprincipled, glib, incendiary, yet persuasive, manipulator. Droves of self-identifying conservatives flocked to his campaign. They cheered his vulgar boorishness, while chuckling at his indifference to convention; all the while believing they were serving conservatism’s cause.
They hailed him their champion as he promised retribution to his opposition. They hurrahed his threats to silence journalists who opposed him. They thrilled at his threats to actually drive over those who dared to stand before his automobile in protest.
Authentic conservative leaders reminded his followers that populism and demagogy are antithetical to actual conservatism. This criticism was, at first, resented by Wallace’s conservative admirers. They considered it “elitist”. This charge, especially, revealed the heart of the problem. Namely, that there was a very real difference between a conservative impulse, or reflex, and an informed conservatism; grasping and reflecting its values, philosophical bedrock, rationale, and rich history.
The latter provided for a conservatism which was full orbed, and consciously aware of the “whys” and “wherefores” of conservative thought; equipped with the reasoned arguments that allowed for the formation of policies which would allow its aims to be realized in governance. It also promoted a political philosophy thoroughly grounded in an ethos tethered to the transcendent, a conservatism devoted to principles over power, because it was devoted to the supremacy of a moral order, trusting in and relying upon providence.
Wallace’s populism made those whose conservatism was not yet fully formed to “feel” that he was their champion, without realizing that Wallace was instead a threat to the values and aims they aspired to; an enemy of, not an ally or protector of what they wished to see accomplished. Worse still, he attracted extreme right-wing groups who had nothing in common with the still nascent conservative movement or its values, but provided a convenient foil for those seeking to label conservatism as kooky, extreme, and incoherent, and thereby delegitimize it, or at least diminish its impact.
Frank Meyer wrote that Wallace’s candidacy had the capacity to “tear apart the American conservative movement and poison the moral source of its strength”. Kevin Smant captures Meyer’s concerns in his book Principles and Heresies. He writes:
When they did, Meyer continued “those of us who attack certain positions as alien to the spirit of conservatism are inevitably criticized on the grounds that those whom we are attacking are also enemies of [modern] liberalism”. But consider the possibility that some who attacked liberalism might pose “other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending”. Meyer thought George Wallace posed such dangers. For Wallace was a “populist”, and populism, Meyer lectured, arose, as did conservatism, out of opposition to liberalism—“the arrogant and naked elitism of the liberals, isolated from the ethics and tradition of the people”. But this “polar opposite of a political perversion” was not conservatism. Liberals wished to impose a “utopian design” upon society; populism “would substitute the tyranny of the majority over the individual … untrammeled by consideration of freedom and virtue.” This was “alien” to the traditional conservative desire for limited, constitutionalist, republican government. Such populism, Meyer went on, was “the air that Wallace breathes. Every speech he makes, every interview he gives, is redolent of it” … his [Wallace’s] combination of nationalist and socialist appeals counted in the rhetoric of incitement of the masses and contempt for the intellect in all its manifestations, is radically alien to conservatives.”
The leadership of the conservative movement read Wallace out of the movement. Though, at first ridiculed as elitist, their foresight proved correct. They would also later criticize the Nixon administration’s penchant for big government “solutions” and its efforts to undermine the rule of law, and the institutions (FBI, the Press, Congress, etc) which guarantee it, and assist in sustaining and giving force to liberty.
Their careful stewardship of the burgeoning conservative movement made possible the later ascendancy of traditional conservatism through the Reagan presidency and its attendant conservative revolution. To be sure, while the Reagan presidency was imperfect, complete with its own failings and shortsightedness, it was nevertheless, a critical inflection point in American history that simply would not have happened absent their courageous and forward looking leadership and principled choices. Their leadership preserved, strengthened and grew the conservative movement, aiding it in shedding extremists, demagogues, populists, and charlatans until it became a major cultural and political influence, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.
Why this brief rehearsal of modern conservatism’s history? Simply put, the conservative ascendancy known otherwise as The Reagan Revolution (again, imperfect and in certain matters wanting) was the consequence of the conservative movement’s rise, and its leadership’s intellectual rigor, moral imperative, and commitment to its underlying philosophy, values and cause. It is quite likely that the profound and trajectory altering changes resulting from that revolution would not have occurred absent their conscientious, reasoned and committed guidance.
That movement today lays in disarray, splintered and disconnected from its philosophical/intellectual and spiritual center. The GOP, whose most identifiable and engaged caucus was its conservative base, is now gutted of mission and ethos. Its brand destroyed. Where a vibrant sense of cause, moral consistency, and conviction once ruled, now entropy, contradiction, confusion, and tawdry self-promotion reigns. Years. Not weeks. Not months. But years, will now be required to rebuild and rebrand.
Meanwhile, following the election, Democrats will likely control the White House, perhaps controlling even the Senate as well as the House. The last four years will have proven to be a costly experiment. The conservative movement is, at present, a spent force; the GOP, a hollow shell; the “Christian Right”, credibly guilty of gross hypocrisy.
Credibly guilty? Yes. Not so long ago, the same evangelical movement raised the alarm regarding immorality and a decided lowering of standards among our political leaders. They pointedly rejected the notion that a political leader, because he was not a pastor or other member of the clergy, was somehow exempt from the same moral code and expectations we held for spiritual leaders. Leadership, after all, requires character in order to be enduring and healthy, and is dependent upon the same temperament and attributes whether that leadership occurs within the Church or within a secular setting.
The following is a declaration, expressing the sentiments and values of the evangelical movement, written and signed by a large number of Christian leaders and intellectuals during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.
To be released on 13 November 1998
As scholars interested in religion and public life, we protest the manipulation of religion and the debasing of moral language in the discussion about presidential responsibility. We believe that serious misunderstandings of repentance and forgiveness are being exploited for political advantage. The resulting moral confusion is a threat to the integrity of American religion and to the foundations of a civil society. In the conviction that politics and morality cannot be separated, we consider the current crisis to be a critical moment in the life of our country and, therefore, offer the following points for consideration:
1. Many of us worry about the political misuse of religion and religious symbols even as we endorse the public mission of our churches, synagogues, and mosques. In particular we are concerned about the distortion that can come by association with presidential power in events like the Presidential Prayer Breakfast on September 11. We fear the religious community is in danger of being called upon to provide authentication for a politically motivated and incomplete repentance that seeks to avert serious consequences for wrongful acts. While we affirm that pastoral counseling sessions are an appropriate, confidential arena to address these issues, we fear that announcing such meetings to convince the public of the President’s sincerity compromises the integrity of religion.
2. We challenge the widespread assumption that forgiveness relieves a person of further responsibility and serious consequences. We are convinced that forgiveness is a relational term that does not function easily within the sphere of constitutional accountability. A wronged party chooses forgiveness instead of revenge and antagonism, but this does not relieve the wrong-doer of consequences. When the President continues to deny any liability for the sins he has confessed, this suggests that the public display of repentance was intended to avoid political disfavor.
3. We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy. Elected leaders are accountable to the Constitution and to the people who elected them. By his own admission the President has departed from ethical standards by abusing his presidential office, by his ill use of women, and by his knowing manipulation of truth for indefensible ends. We are particularly troubled about the debasing of the language of public discourse with the aim of avoiding responsibility for one’s actions.
4. We are concerned about the impact of this crisis on our children and on our students. Some of them feel betrayed by a President in whom they set their hopes while others are troubled by his misuse of others, by which many in the administration, the political system, and the media were implicated in patterns of deceit and abuse. Neither our students nor we demand perfection. Many of us believe that extreme dangers sometimes require a political leader to engage in morally problematic actions. But we maintain that in general there is a reasonable threshold of behavior beneath which our public leaders should not fall, because the moral character of a people is more important than the tenure of a particular politician or the protection of a particular political agenda. Political and religious history indicate that violations and misunderstandings of such moral issues may have grave consequences. The widespread desire to “get this behind us” does not take seriously enough the nature of transgressions and their social effects.
5. We urge the society as a whole to take account of the ethical commitments necessary for a civil society and to seek the integrity of both public and private morality. While partisan conflicts have usually dominated past debates over public morality, we now confront a much deeper crisis, whether the moral basis of the constitutional system itself will be lost. In the present impeachment discussions, we call for national courage in deliberation that avoids ideological division and engages the process as a constitutional and ethical imperative. We ask Congress to discharge its current duty in a manner mindful of its solemn constitutional and political responsibilities. Only in this way can the process serve the good of the nation as a whole and avoid further sensationalism.
6. While some of us think that a presidential resignation or impeachment would be appropriate and others envision less drastic consequences, we are all convinced that extended discussion about constitutional, ethical, and religious issues will be required to clarify the situation and to enable a wise decision to be made. We hope to provide an arena in which such discussion can occur in an atmosphere of scholarly integrity and civility without partisan bias.
Interestingly, John Piper, one of the signatories of this declaration, was then hailed as courageous and principled when he held Clinton, a Democrat, to this standard. Today, he is vilified by many Trump supporters for merely remaining committed to the same values and principles he held fast to then. What has changed, other than the party of the current president?
I recall these same Christian leaders, and their earnest supporters, decrying those who sought to excuse Clinton from accountability because he was “not a pastor, but a president”. That was an excuse which rang hollow, especially given Democrat’s treatment of Senator Bob Packwood’s egregious behavior only a few short years earlier. Few doubted that the left would have found Clinton’s behavior wholly disqualifying had he instead been a Republican.
To the Christian Right, it seemed undeniable that Democrats had elevated power above principle. They were guilty, in effect, of idolatry. Yet now, it seems that some evangelicals are guilty of precisely the thing they condemned only two decades ago.
Consequently, now when either the GOP or evangelicals raise their voices against immorality, flouting the rule of law, profligate spending, or abuses of power, the left, will cry “hypocrisy!”, and they will enjoy the ability to level that charge credibly. The GOP’s surrender to a demagogue, and the Christian Right’s enthusiastic embrace and of a man they would have rejected as wholly unfit had he simply been a Democrat, will effectively mute virtually any protests the right might offer in the near future.
Sadly, the firewalls which have served for decades to protect the nation from the worst impulses of the left now lay in ruins, and will remain so for a long while.
Too many who currently self-identify as conservatives seem to possess little actual knowledge of the tenets, philosophical underpinnings, and history of classic liberalism/traditional conservatism. They are, I think, motivated by a conservative impulse and inclination, but beyond a set of slogans and a well rehearsed litany of conservative catch phrases and calls to action, cannot readily articulate, defend or, at times, even recognize authentic conservatism, or those who pretend to be its champions.
This presents several problems, chief among them is not only vulnerability to a populism presenting itself, through slogans and empty rhetoric, as conservative, though it is bereft of any meaningful commitment to conservative values and governance, but finds well meaning men and women actually supporting and cheering decisions which deeply undermine conservative aims, while further entrenching the very maladies conservatives labor to ferret out of government.
Pragmatically, I found the notion of voting for Trump in 2016 untenable because I was both a longtime observer of Donald Trump, as well as a longtime student of conservative theory and doctrine.
I had observed Donald Trump for a long while, beginning in 1989 when he launched the Trump Shuttle. An airline that, like so many of his businesses and casinos, would eventually end in bankruptcy. To many, familiar only with the image Trump cultivated in his books, interviews and reality TV program, Trump was an exceptional businessman. To those who knew his real history, he was regarded as a shameless self-promoter, who relied on myth, rather than fact, to build the Trump brand.
To those men and women, it was apparent that Donald Trump lacked the temperament, moral character, and knowledge to serve in such a high and consequential office. It was also apparent that not only was Trump utterly unfamiliar with the significant body of knowledge requisite for anyone seeking to serve as president, but he was not, by any reasonable measure, a conservative. Disentangling his past, as well as his current record, from the myths so skillfully propagated by President Trump and his enablers has been done to great effect by many. Their work is readily available for anyone with an open mind, eager for truth and fact, to examine. I do not wish, in this space, to engage in a detailed accounting of his past or present failings. It is enough to say that I found them, and continue to find them disqualifying
It is at this juncture that President Trump’s admirers remind us that we aren’t electing a pastor, but a president, as if such behaviors are only disqualifying for members of the clergy. Clearly, they have little experience in the corporate world. CEO’s and other executives have been released from their positions over such behaviors and attitudes. A search committee would consider a man like Trump to be unfit to lead a company, much less a country. Why? Because they know the simple maxim that “character is destiny”.
As a defense, suggesting that Trump’s moral, ethical, and technical qualifications are largely unimportant because he is not “a pastor” or is “prophetically destined” strikes me as wanting, and lacking in reflection. Particularly as I view the matter through the prism of Paul’s counsel to Timothy. Regarding false teachers, or leaders who seek an office to satisfy vain ambition rather than to faithfully serve the best interest of others, Paul’s counsel is unambiguous.
1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. 2 Timothy 3:1-5 (NIV)
Jesus issued similar warnings within the gospels. During the 2016 election, as I pondered voting “for the lesser of two evils” the madness of the proposition, the tangled web of contradictions such an axiom unavoidably entailed became suddenly apparent. I could not vote for such a man. Nor could I vote for his opponent. Not only do I find that the aims and acts of so much of what now constitutes modern liberalism antithetical to the constitutional federal republic delivered to us by the Founding Fathers, but its devotion to abortion, something I view as infanticide, makes it impossible for me to even consider voting for a Democratic candidate.
I chose instead to vote for a third party candidate. In so doing, I obeyed my conscience, serving as salt and light in a darkened world.
Not everyone agrees with my choice. Good people can disagree. Wise and mature individuals can even agree to disagree. I’m obliged to follow my conscience in such matters, and respect, within reason, the choices of those who might feel that voting for Donald Trump is this moment’s best option.
I will not disparage their choice. I will not suggest that their Christianity is somehow anemic, that they do a disservice to their children and grandchildren if they choose so to vote. I will understand that they have their reasons for doing so.
But they should also remember that those who choose not to vote are, quite probably, doing so for both pragmatic and religious reasons. That they believe the future; theirs, their children, and their children’s children are best served by such a decision. The dictate of tribalism is fierce loyalty. The ethos of the kingdom of God is as uncomplicated as it is singular, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” John 13:35 (NIV).
The family of God has no room for competing tribes for in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” Galatians 3:28 (NIV). Paul wrote in a similar vein to the Church at Corinth noting that “When one of you says, “I am a follower of Paul,” and another says, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you acting just like people of the world? “
My hope and trust remain in Christ, and that faith will find itself best expressed through not voting for either of the major candidates during this election. Some will find that same hope and trust expressed through casting their vote for one of the major candidates. No matter the result, you’ll still be my brother or sister in Christ, fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. We’ll also be fellow Americans, whether you voted for Trump, Biden, or Mickey Mouse– and I’m just fine with that. Let’s each simply obey our conscience– and Christ’s commandment to love one another.
