The upcoming election is not primarily a choice between a democrat and a republican, a political party in general, or a liberal and a conservative. Throw those categories, those binaries, out the window. They no longer apply in any significant sense and if they do apply or have some meaning, it’s only in a peripheral token, image, sort of way.
With the rise of Trump and MAGA movement, those old descriptors no longer apply. Trump has laid waste to those old markers. I think one reason the media and politicians from both sides have had trouble responding to Trump and his followers is because they don’t know how to think outside those binaries.
Donald J. Trump is not an ideologue. For most of his life he was a registered democrat with somewhat fairly progressive views (on abortion for example) in general, other than his racism and sexism, which appear to have been baked in from an early age. My point is that he couldn’t care less about political philosophy. He couldn’t care less what serious conservatives or liberals think about most things. He has no overarching political vision or worldview.
I think he will certainly let the people around him implement Project 2025 if he wins; but, he doesn’t care about it. He says he never read it and I believe him. I doubt he’s read a book all the way through since high school, maybe not even then. He is not interested in political philosophy. He isn’t interested in governing, history, political science, economics, philosophy in general, music, art, or literature.
He is interested in one thing: Power. The Republican Party, Fox News, and all the assorted enablers have, for Trump, simply been means to an end. They were just tools. They were the platforms he needed to gain one thing: Power. Trump is all about himself and power. That’s it. If one is looking for something deeper in that dark, black, hole of a soul of his for something more profound, one will probably be looking for a long time.
And his followers, the “MAGA” cult, admire that quality. They want the supposed “strong man.” They want the “dear leader.” They admire the bully, the loudmouth, the guy ready to push everyone else around. They like the bravado, the “just says it like it is,” guy who offends all the right people. He will protect them and also harm those they don’t like or are afraid of. When these people watch “All in the Family,” (dating myself) they think Archie Bunker is the hero.
While this oily, dank, odorous, and sludge like movement has the veneer of a white Christian religious skin stretched over it, it is the antithesis of orthodox Christianity. In fact, it is a revived paganism.
I don’t mean paganism in a derogatory sense but in the common understanding as those spiritual practices and traditions that do not come under the world religions of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. It is normally the term applied to the religious/cultural practices in ancient times, especially in Western Europe, before the rise of Christianity.
The connection I want to make between paganism and Trumpism/MAGA is in their view of power and also the human person and their intrinsic dignity/worth. David Bentley Hart makes this point:
“It is practically impossible for us today to appreciate the magnitude of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition.”
Before Christ, especially in the Roman/Greco world, what made something right or wrong, virtuous or to be praised was strength and power—victory over the weak. Pagans had a difficult time understanding why we should worship a man who was mocked, paraded through the streets, and then brutally killed, publicly executed, on a cross. Hart continues:
“In any event, the new world being brought into being in the gospels is a world in which the grand cosmic architecture of prerogative and power has been superseded by a new and positively ‘anarchic’ order: one in which the glory of God can reveal itself in a crucified slave, and in which, therefore, we are forced to see the face of God in the forsaken of the world. In this shocking and ludicrously disordered order, everything is cast in a radically transforming light, and comes to mean something entirely new and perhaps unsettling. We do not laugh at ‘the man of sorrows’ draped in a mock robe and pierced with a mock crown and jocosely hailed as a king by his persecutors. For us, this figure possesses a grandeur that would have been quite invisible to our more distant ancestors, an ironic beauty that entirely and irrevocably reverses the mockery. It is not he who is absurd, but rather all those kings and emperors who preposterously celebrate their pedigrees, and who rejoice in their power to command and to kill, and who are therefore unaware that the pompous symbols of greatness in which they drape themselves are nothing more than rags and thorns.”
Such an understanding would be lost on Trump and MAGA people. Why? Because they view such things as the pagans once did. To Trump and his cult following, what matters is strength and power. That’s it. They also see no problem identifying the weak, the immigrant, the LBGT+ community, the poor, and other minority groups, including women, as somehow less than straight white men or Americans.
Russell Moore shares the story of that disheveled, frazzled, always looks like he just woke up from an all-night bender and slept in his clothes on a park bench, populist/nationalist Steve Bannon. Bannon talks about creating a culture where “Dave from accounts payable” is instead “Ajax.” By painting a picture of a nation in decline or beset by enemies all around, he lets Dave believe that he can be the hero in this fight.
Moore writes in response:
“There’s an older word for this: paganism. Paganism, after all, demands the sort of significance that is heroic—in which one’s virtues of strength and power are celebrated in story and song.”
He goes on the note that it was the people like Trump, Bannon, and many others who helped turn Dave from accounting into the “hero” who was ready to stormed the Capitol on January 6th. We wonder how it was that some of these people who were realtors, had small businesses, or fairly normal day jobs could be convinced to throw it all away and commit criminal acts of violence and property destruction. They thought they were Ajax. It worked.
The unbridled worship of masculine strength and power, the disregard Trump and MAGA show for the people they view as the enemy or suspect (immigrants, women in general, those with different political views, mainstream media, academia, science, free institutions, etc.) are all signs of a revised modern and even fascist paganism. This recent event should drive the point home. The idea it’s (Trumpism/MAGA) a Christian movement is laughable.
That is really what we face with this coming election. We will either stay the course and continue with a constitutional republic/democratic form of government, based on the rule of law and embedded within a tradition of Judeo-Christian views of human dignity, or we will break off completely and turn toward a modern type of pagan fascism, which could possibly end the American experiment as we’ve known it. Choose wisely. For me, the choice is easy: Never Trump.
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