A Week For the Ages
“Gradually, then suddenly” is easily one of the most quoted phrases from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Though the original context was about bankruptcy, it surely describes what has recently transpired in American politics. It has been, in a word, astounding. What was the most inevitable and boring primary season in recent memory has suddenly been supplanted by one of the most significant series of events in American political history.
First there was the debate that featured the president, who the mainstream media assured us was on top of things and claimed that any talk of cognitive decline was a right-wing conspiracy theory. CNN’s Oliver Darcy made perhaps the biggest face plant of any commentator in his pre-debate piece, which scolded the “MAGA Media” for portraying Biden “as a senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government.” But, he gravely intoned, the Right risks seeing their “bogus narrative about Biden being ripped up in real time.”
Only, it wasn’t. Everything the Right had been predicting came to pass. Finally, we saw the president as he is, the batch of cocktails in his system notwithstanding. Rather than the carefully curated image crafted by Biden’s inner circle of the old yet wise statesman who is in firm control of his faculties, we saw a clearly aged Biden losing his thoughts in mid-sentence. This is the man who controls the nation’s nuclear arsenal—a man who is currently in a state that surely falls under the purview of the 25th Amendment. Like Edith Wilson essentially becoming a shadow president after her husband’s stroke in 1919, it seems as though Jill Biden and a small team, no doubt with help from Barack Obama, are the ones actually running the country as “President” Biden shuffles from venue to venue.
Then, an even more surprising event happened as Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, this past weekend. Due to the flood of pieces that have dissected what took place, I won’t be rehashing what transpired there or discuss the takeaways that are of world-historical importance. (I will mention two must-reads: Josh Abbotoy and Timon Cline’s “One Inch Away” and The American Mind’s feature on the event, including a crucial overview of the events by Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams.)
Of course, we shouldn’t condemn the use of bullseyes and other war metaphors in American politics. Politicians of both sides have used that imagery and rhetoric for centuries. But it needs to be emphasized that the Left, led by President Biden, has built their reelection campaign around the claim that Donald Trump is an existential threat to “our sacred Democracy.” It’s been nothing but The New Republic’s Trump-as-Hitler theme every day for months from Democrats. In an environment in which the Left is working to utterly dehumanize and unperson their political opponent, the shooter simply carried the implications of that campaign message to its logical conclusion.
One trend that has emerged among certain public evangelicals in the wake of the assassination attempt is to condemn both sides equally for fostering today’s political environment. Though it can be argued that similar rhetoric is used by both sides, political violence has been a mainstay of the Left for decades, completely overshadowing anything that’s come from the Right. From the various violent radical groups of the New Left, including the Weather Underground which bombed the Pentagon among other public buildings, the riots that engulfed Washington, D.C. during Trump’s inauguration and the violence that spread across America in the summer of 2020, to the plans to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Left has a long history of planning and carrying out violence against their political enemies. As Josh Abbotoy and Timon Cline noted in their editorial earlier this week, “If the American right behaved like a mirror image of the American left – rioting, looting, burning down cities at the slightest development – we’d have had civil war decades ago.”
Another misstep occurred from the Middle-aged, Sedentary, and Deconstructing movement. While public evangelicals like Ed Stetzer asked their followers on X to pray for President Trump and the families of those killed and wounded, MSD evangelicals took a different path. Russell Moore decried “political violence” on his X account but declined to name the target of that violence: Donald Trump. This is in sharp contrast to when Moore berated evangelicals in a column at Christianity Today for making jokes after Paul Pelosi was attacked inside his San Francisco home. The only response this deserves is Moore’s favorite moralistic cudgel that he frequently uses against Trump and his evangelical voters: Character matters.
The third and final (for now) political earthquake happened when Trump picked his running mate on Monday. Always the showman, Trump heightened the drama as, one by one, he eliminated contenders and then announced his pick of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance on Truth Social.
The first Millennial elevated to the level of president or vice president, Vance is not only simpatico with Trump on policy but can match his unique combination of toughness, fearlessness, and ability to communicate as they try to welcome the working class into the Republican Party. In fact, as Daniel McCarthy, Jeremy Carl, Henry Olsen, Darryl Cooper, Ryan Girdusky, Josh Hammer, and others who understand our political times have noted, he’s the only national Republican with the political acumen and brains to build on Trump’s legacy in the decades ahead.
Moreover, Vance is also a bridge to Silicon Valley tech bros and other high status and successful Americans, whom the Republicans need to court. He’s also very much plugged into right-wing dissident accounts on X, which means that his knowledge of the various constituencies that make up today’s political world is unparalleled.
The first fully bearded president or vice president since Benjamin Harrison, Vance rightly sees that the ruling oligarchy has pulled up the ladder behind them, making it extremely difficult to become an elite without mouthing the correct platitudes and getting that crucial summer internship at Goldman Sachs or Raytheon. As a child of Appalachia, Vance gets that our elites despise the kind of people he grew up with, only being interested in Vance’s own story when he was once one of them—what F.H. Buckley has aptly described as “redneck porn.” Finally, though certainly not definitive, he makes the right people angry—many of the same commentators whose political instincts have been wrong time after time and who pine for a return of Paul Ryan-style Republican politics.
This is not to say that Vance is perfect. He surely has weak points—his open support for the abortion pill last week on Meet the Press is certainly one. And as RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende notes, Vance probably has more limited appeal electorally than other potential vice presidential picks. How he will help the GOP in the states that it needs to win such as Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan is an open question. But I do think Trende gives short shrift to the idea that Vance can help solidify the Rustbelt and the greater Midwest. Finally, both Vance and Trump should keep in mind that though the evangelical political coalition is not once what it was, they shouldn’t take them completely for granted.
Turning to evangelicals in closing, whining about the current state of the Republican Party is simply not going to cut it. The culture war is over—and evangelicals have clearly lost. Though Christians are right to be disappointed in what they’ve witnessed at the 2024 Republican National Convention, they shouldn’t be surprised—this is what Republican politics looks like in the negative world. And as Pastor Darrell Harrison has rightly noted, their expectations need to moderated anyway since the RNC is not a church but “a wholly secular (worldly) entity and always has been.” Currently, it’s a reflection of a culture in which it’s possible that Donald Trump could even win the presidency—which would have been politically unthinkable until just a couple of decades ago.
If evangelicals want to have the impact within the Republican Party they desire, they must organize and get more involved in politics. They must work to expand their political coalition, which is the only way they can move the GOP in a direction they want. Abandoning the GOP altogether is an option, but it’s difficult to see how that will accomplish anything, especially since the U.S. has always been a two-party system. To give some context, the American Solidarity Party, to which some evangelicals have flocked, received a little over 35,000 votes in the 2020 election—which pales in comparison to the over 158,000,000 votes that were cast in total.
The Republican Party is attempting to build a coalition that can win a national election in 2024—not in 1984. It might be difficult to accept, but this is what Republican politics will look like until evangelicals can find their will and regain their influence in the public square.
Image Credit: The Consummation of Empire, Thomas Cole. 1836
Thank you for some common sense on GOP politics and the current cultural moment. I’ve only been active on Twitter since earlier this year, but experiencing the whining and moaning of Christians about the GOP is grating. It is short sighted and myopic. The only answer is exactly what you say it is, getting involved. The Precinct Strategy is one powerful way to do that, but most Christians would rather sit behind their keyboard and phone and complain, so much easier to proclaim your moral superiority that way.
They are also short sighted and myopic in not realizing where were are in 2024 is the result of well over 300 years of Enlightenment thinking and secularism on Western culture. We’re really going to turn the ocean liner of secular negative culture America around over night? As I always say, work like it depends on you, but pray because it depends on God. That was how the founding generation saw it, and how our generation must see it if we’re to have a re-founding.
Thanks for what you do at American Reformer.