This is no joke! The suffering is very real. Talk of Trump Derangement Syndrome was funny at a point; it is not funny now. The suffering is real: overwhelming feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, helplessness, hopelessness. Liberal adolescent girls are especially prone to this. Celebrities are leaving the country. We have had a series of assassinations by unhinged young men with little comparable from the right. In some polls close to half of liberals give moral approval to political assassination. This is more than disappointment with a political setback like when your team loses: it is "existential dread" in the sense of anxiety that one's very existence is threatened; a real death.
This is not entirely irrational. It is not psychosis. It is paranoid overreaction. But Woody Allen did remind us "Just because you are paranoid, that does not mean that THEY are not after you!" Trump is a "dictator wannabe" who is reckless in his disregard for our entire constitutional order: weaponizing the DOJ for personal vendettas, muscling the courts and the Fed, etc. I, who am of the Right, do not hesitate to describe him as a crypto-fascist. Beyond politics, in his person he has long been an assault on the moral values that hold our nation together: crude, self-centered, contemptuous and insulting in public discourse, detached from factuality, disrespectful of the person, especially the opponent.
There are valid moral/political reasons to be repelled by MAGA and its master. I share these. But the almost clinical level of stress of the Cultural Left is pathological. Reality: the electorate is exactly matched, 50-50, politically. Trump will be out of office in three years. The Left remains fully in charge of all high status institutions. The crazier things he is doing will be nullified (I expect, trusting in the judicial integrity of Barrett and Roberts especially) by the Supreme Court. No, the sky is not falling!
Trump is not himself the primary cause of this dread. Rather, it is structural, inherent in the inner form, the very nature of the Cultural Progressivism that possessed our elite culture over half a century ago. The formal or structural elements of progressivism that incline to this hysteria include:
1. Godless. The Left is formally secular. God is not in the game. To be sure, many religious people are leftist for good religious reasons. But on the Left you keep your piety private, not public or political. You are privately opposed to abortion but politically in favor of its legalization. A Catholic liberal may have lawn signs "Love lives here" or bumper stickers "Save the planet" but not "Jesus, I trust in you." The progressive, obsessed with pluralism of a very specific sort, is always anxious about offending some atheist or Hindu or something!
Without God and the supernatural, this world is all we have. There is no eternity, no afterlife. And so, severe worldly threats (environmental, fascism, racism, etc.) become ontologically overwhelming. We are facing oblivion. By contrast, the religious conservative always has an eye on God and our destiny: everything else has a tentative, light-hearted, paradoxical-ironic dimension to it.
2. Progress. The progressive adores...progress. We are moving forward, into a happy and glorious future, due to science, technology and education. We are moving ever away from, triumphing over a past of ignorance, patriarchy, racism, sexism, and oppressions of every stripe. To "go back" would not be to retrieve and revive the legacy of our American founders, of Athens and Jerusalem! No, it would be to plunge back into the darkness. Evil. Death.
From that perspective, consider: Trump has singlehandedly stopped, perhaps paused, possibly reversed "the Arc of History!" He is anti-science, sexist, racist, xenophobic, fascist, capitalist and every imaginable "...ist." He has squelched every secular, leftist hope for the future. He is something like Satan.
3. Emasculated. Of course, many fine men are progressive. But the culture itself is non-or-anti-masculine just like the Marine culture is masculine. The Left is defined by: deconstruction of virility/femininity, abortion as a human right, aversion to patriarchy and toxic masculinity, a faux-feminism of resentment, victimization and envy (of male privilege). And so, masculinity in its full God-created range is canceled. Progressives do not like forceful evangelists, police, military, competitors, entrepreneurs. But the purpose of masculinity is to protect/provide for mother/with/child. The woman, who is unsheltered in some form by the paternal-or-spousal, in her vulnerability and delicacy, is prone to hysteria. And so, we see that the response of the Democratic Party today is one of hysteria: dispersed anxiety, confusion, disorientation, diffused anger, impotency. This is the response of a woman at risk, unprotected, bereft of the good of the masculine.
4. Sterile Sex. The primary foundation of Cultural Liberalism is sterile sex, the liberation of sexuality from procreation, marriage, family, fidelity. Sexual license. The technology of contraception is what made Cultural Progressivism possible, as an entire civilization, a social order, rather than a minute bohemian subculture. So we have seen the hysteria across the left in the wake of Dobbs. The sexual libertarian knows that contraception is unreliable and so abortion is essential to his lifestyle. To a social order that is essentially sexually-addicted-but-in-denial, the loss of abortion is a loss of life: hysteria and dread!
5. Isolated, Autonomous Self. The sterile, androgynous Self is the autonomous, isolated agent of its own destiny, its own god. This is a lonely place. Liberalism has deconstructed the family, nuclear and extended, as well all all intermediate organizations (Church, bowling leagues, volunteerism, etc.) to leave the naked self alone with mega-corporations and the the expansive state. And so, the progressive self is alone with career, accomplishments, singular relationships. Deprived of the smaller, intermediate organs of subsidiarity, the self is vulnerable to the power of the state.
6. Dependence on Mega-State. The liberal looks to government as a Messiah: the one to save us from all maladies. Politics takes the place previously held by God and Church, family, neighborhood, various communities. The State is the primary force, energizing science/technology/education and overcoming all the oppressions. Great expectations! But if government is so promising, it can also be threatening. That Trump can take over most of the levers of government and wield them so forcefully becomes than an actual existential threat, because those other communities are not there. It is the individual, alone, powerless before the mega-state. The serious conservative prefers small government and expanded intermediate communities; the serious liberal expects great things and invests richly in centralized government. So we see the angst of the progressive in Trump world.
7. Victimology. With identity politics, the Cultural Left imagines politics as the oppression/liberation of dominant and oppressed groups. This replaces the classical economic Left of class warfare between the investor and the worker class. This new paradigm allows the new affluent elite, including the managerial class, to enjoy financial affluence and privilege but claim the high ground morally as they advocate BLM and LGBTQ. Imagine the consternation: the MAGA victory was helped by the flight of black and Latino men to the right. The Left, in BLM and "Defund Police," had attributed a passivity, a victimization and impotency to the black male. Those black males have now exercised agency in voting for Trump. The Left...white, educated, affluent, privileged...now feels itself to be victim, passive, paralyzed, without agency. Existential dread!
8. Imperialistic, Totalitarian Compulsivity. As a form of messianic politics, the Left impulsively infuses all of life with its politics. Disney becomes education in alternate lifestyles. Eating Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream involves us with Israel/Gaza and global warming. The Academy Awards becomes a series of shrill, moralistic, indignant tirades. Football teams need to decide: bend-or-not-bend-the-knee. The conservative sees that politics is not nothing, but it is not everything. Maybe 5-10 % at most. For the real progressive, it is 85%. The conservative would like to eat ice cream, watch the Oscars or football without politics. Not so the Left: you simply cannot watch a movie or game unbothered by sexism, racism and the environment. And so, we have the "totalitarianism of relativism." If MAGA is authoritarian, progressivism is totalitarian. (Read Hannah Arendt on the distinction: the former wants political power but is "live and let live" if you do not challenge him; the later needs to control everything.) Catholic adoption agencies dare not refuse to place a little girl with two gay (or trans?) men! The Little Sisters of the Poor dare not refuse to provide contraception to their workers! That baker dare not refuse a cake for a gay wedding. Furthermore, it becomes imperialistic as it exports its values around the globe. Cardinals from Africa have spoken about cultural imperialism, for example in the Vatican's blessing of gay relations. The dissolution of AID programs finds some justification in the cultural aggressiveness around these issues. John Paul successfully led a coalition with Muslim nations at UN conferences in Cairo and Bejing against Clinton's crusade for abortion. We see here in the fragility of the Left its dangerous compulsion to complete control. That totalitarian compulsion diminishes the more mundane dictatorial propensities of MAGA.
9. Science as an Idol. For the progressive mind, science and technology, fueled by big state, will save us. Robert Kennedy now has us in a civil war within the medical world. It is hard to know what to believe. The ideal of science as a pure, impeccably objective, selfless service of the community has now been disabused. But the important figure here is Dr. Fauci, our own Wizard of Oz. He reigned magisterially through the pandemic, transcendent, Jesuit-educated, non-partisan, follow-the-science guy. Now we learn he systematically repressed all evidence that the thing came from the lab with which he had dealings. He closed down our Churches but allowed BLM rallies. He steps behind the veil as pathetic little man in his deceptions. But the real progressive will not tolerate the cognitive dissonance of their idol. As with Martin Luther King and his treatment of women, the Left will keep them both on pedestals, bowing in awe, in deep denial.
10. Nature Mysticism. For many on the Left, global warming is not a problem to be solved politically, scientifically, and technically. It is existential threat. It is the death of God. We conservatives, as theists, receive Creation as a gift from the hand of our Creator: good in itself but also a gesture within a relationship of Eternal Love. Those who do not share traditional belief in a Creator-Father God, rarely, in this country, adapt a strong atheism. More probable is a soft agnosticism. Among women, widely we find an implicit "spirituality" of pantheism: strong sense of the spiritual as immanent in nature and relationships. Interest in Eastern religions, New Age stuff, Enneagram, psycho-spiritualities. For such, global warming is ontologically catastrophic. It is the end of life as we know it. It overcomes all other issues. It is Absolute Death. Angst!
Going Forward
With this Trump administration, we conservatives are on a roll in the Culture War. But we dare not gloat.
Our current gains may be temporary. The "arc of history" may return after a pause. We do well to play the long game. This Culture War has raged for 55 years. It is getting worse, not better. It will probably be a multi-century war. In a 100 years or so, my great-grandchildren will be engaged with our same four major antagonists: Cultural Progressivism, Communism (largely Chinese), Islamic Jihadism (of various flavors) and your run-of-the-mill nationalist fascists (Putin).
Seeing at this time the fragility and anxiety of the Cultural Left, we do well to give thanks, for all the riches... of family, Church, nation, cultural/historical...and delight in them. We do well to have some empathy and kindness for those not so blessed. With our legacy, we have great expectations for the future.
At the same time, realistically the diagnosis above is sobering. Cultural Progressivism is not merely toxic, it is fatal. Fatal for those we love. Also for us. It is like an addiction, or mental illness, or moral depravity or an infection...it can pull us in and destroy us. To start, we need to inoculate ourselves. We need to detach, with love, and cut cords of co-dependency: not enabling and cooperating, but not victimized, resentful and angry. Rather, confidently, peacefully, prudently we move ahead; fighting the Cultural and the Spiritual War; loving our enemy; strong, calm in heart, intellect and will.
We are not assured of victory here within history. We may well be overwhelmed by the dark forces. Like Obi Wan Kenobi, we may find ourselves like Jedi in hiding. like Aragon, a King-in-exile. Here we invoke the principle of Chiaroscoro: in the darkness, the light shines all the more. We need not win the Culture War. We only need to fight valiantly, charitably, truthfully. The recently deceased Charlie Kirk, not without flaw, is an inspiration to engage respectfully, charitably, truthfully.
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