Greg Daly
President Donald Trump Greg Daly talks to First Things editor RR Reno about what the Trump presidency means
“Populism is the spirit of the moment,” says R.R. Reno, editor of the American journal First Things, pointing to what he sees as key to the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. “Populism has a cultural and spiritual dimension to it as well as an economic one,” he continues, “and my interpretation of populism is a desire for the recovery of something solid at the centre of civic life, so nationalism is the natural default because it’s an attempt to recover the metaphysical meaning of the nation in an era that in which – since 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union, globalisation – the nation has weakened as a point of loyalty and purpose.”
Recent populist votes in the West suggest a call for a “metaphysical strengthening” of civic life, he says, continuing: “This is both a peril and an opportunity for Catholics, a peril because the state has been cast as a competitor with the Church, but opportunity because it betokens a desire for some things that are solid and permanent, of which the Church, of course, has much to offer.”
At the same time, he cautions, there is a danger of making an idol of the nation, noting how Pius XI had warned of this in the 1930s, with the deification of the State being “the great peril and disaster of 1914 to 1945”.
The danger of national idolatry aside, patriotic and communitarian urges are real things, he observes, adding that, “Many people have commented and rightly so that the postmodern age is an age of greater fragmentation, and I think what Trump voters are saying in part – of course, there are many factors, but what they’re saying in part – is they want to make sure they don’t lose that sense of commonality and unity.”
Citing Lincoln’s reference to the “mystic chords of memory” in his first inaugural address, given on what would prove to be the eve of the American Civil War, Mr Reno says, “Americans wrongly think we’re a propositional nation, a nation of an idea, and we are that in part, but we’re also a nation of shared memory and various traditions – my European friends are always shocked when they come to the US by how many flags we have up, and after 9/11 they were everywhere!”
At the same time, he notes, neo-liberalism, both as an economic phenomenon and as a cultural-political ambition, has become more and more openly post-national, which is leading to such reactions as the Trump election, with people wanting to have bonds of unity that matter, and not merely ones limited to market forces.
“People don’t want to live in an ever more fluid world,” he adds, reiterating that this is both a peril and an opportunity for Catholics, “and Catholicism is all about saying the sacramental life of the Church, the teachings of the Church – these are permanent things, they’re rocks, they’re anchors of stability.”
Benediction prayer
New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan will pray at this week’s presidential inauguration – strikingly praying from Wisdom, a book that Protestants such as Mr Trump do not regard as part of the Bible – the first Catholic bishop to pray at such an event since Archbishop Roach prayed the benediction prayer at the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
“It’s funny,” says Mr Reno, “we have an officially secular system, with separation of Church and State – we’re very clear about that – but we have a tradition of a kind of public piety that our politicians cultivate.
“It’s a bit of an irony with Trump – there’s not a lot of piety there, but there wasn’t a whole lot of piety in Bill Clinton either,” he continues. “Sometimes, as the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.”
Among the group of religious leaders who will pray at the Trump inauguration is the televangelist Paula White, who advocates a ‘prosperity Gospel’ that claims God blesses true believers not just in Heaven but with material wealth here on earth, but Mr Reno plays down the significance of this, seeing Ms White as just one of a medley of American preachers.
“Our civil religion is a bastardised Christianity, it always has been,” he says, distinguishing between the religion that people live in their ordinary lives and that on show at civic ceremonies. Noting that the Pilgrim Fathers failed in their attempt to build America as a pure Christian nation, he says this “should be a warning to us all that civic life will always be an extremely imperfect expression of our philosophical and theological convictions”.
Asked whether he thinks the Catholic Church in the US needs to use a long spoon if it intends to sup with Mr Trump, Mr Reno says. “I think it has that,” adding, “I think one of the really good things for the Church with Trump is that he takes the pressure off in the religious liberty area, but there’s no major Catholic leader who supported Trump.”
Not merely have no major Catholics supported Mr Trump, but in March of last year numerous prominent Catholic intellectuals signed a statement opposing him, describing him as “manifestly unfit” for office. This was a mistake, Mr Reno maintains.
“There are reasons to object to Trump, and not to vote for him: you may disagree with his policies, you may think he doesn’t have the proper temperament for the office, but I think there became an anti-Trump hysteria, that I think is very counterproductive,” he says, arguing that he was hardly more manifestly unfit for office than Hillary Clinton who, he believes, is involved in “globalised patronage”.
“Trump clearly rejects globalisation as an ideology, and for me that was very important and that was a very good reason to want to support him,” he says, adding that, “Clinton would have continued the progressive attack on religious institutions in the United States. Defeating her, I felt, was very important, so I think a lesser of evils arguments could be made – a very strong one – for voting for Trump, regardless of how flawed you thought he was as a candidate.”
Originally opposed to Mr Trump’s candidacy, Mr Reno changed his mind over time, even eventually signing a public statement in support of him. Key to his change of mind was an article by Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest called ‘The Meaning of Mr Trump’, which argued, in effect, that Mr Trump was the wrong answer to the right questions, maintaining that the ‘baby boom consensus’ had failed to create a healthy society that works for most Americans.
Concerns
Initially troubled by concerns about Mr Trump’s temperament and his stoking of resentment, Mr Reno wondered too about those horrified by his coarseness, pointing to what he sees as a prominent coarseness in popular entertainment and media. “Are we surprised that one of our politicians adopted this more demotic, more crude approach to communicating with voters?”
Describing Mr Trump as “unquestionably a symptom of a vulgarised culture”, he says, “he’s a vulgar man – there’s no way around it. Would I like a pro-nation, pro-patriotic, intelligent critic of globalism? Yes. But politics doesn’t give us a choice between the perfect and the bad – it gives us a choice between the bad and the less bad.”
Utopian thinking and the quest for perfection is a problem in modern political thinking, he observes, continuing, “The right’s utopia is a frictionless free market in which the State withers away, and societies are organised by markets – they want to privatise everything. It is utopian – it’s Marxism, withering away the State, except instead of withering away with the dictatorship of the proletariat, it’s withering away with the dictatorship of the market.”
On the other hand, he says: “The left has a utopianism that is a kind of multicultural world, baptised by human rights, in which peace and prosperity come to everyone through expert cultural management and political correctness, and our university campuses are very deeply in the grip of that utopianism and they are dysfunctional, unhappy places, as we see from student protests.”
These modern utopian ideals have seduced American political culture, he laments, adding, “we promote them throughout the world now, and that’s just got to stop”.
Mr Trump famously lost the popular vote in November’s election, receiving almost three million fewer votes than Mrs Clinton who received more votes than any candidate ever with the exception of President Barack Obama, but won because of the US’s electoral college system which effectively treats the national election as a total of 51 elections, each of which has a weighted value. The new President won by holding states won by the 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney and narrowly winning a few others, notably Pennysylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.
His gains there appear to have been, in the main, based on economic appeals to communities that have suffered in the face of mechanisation and global competition.
“This is where many of friends say they’re going to be disappointed because he can’t really do anything,” says Mr Reno, who believes Trump voters in those states won’t be so easily disenchanted. “These people aren’t stupid: they know there are these large secular trends. But I remember reading a quote from one of the workers at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis – she said, ‘I’ve never voted for Republican in my life, but this is the first time in 20 years that someone’s actually stood up for me’.”
“Symbolism matters,” he continues. “One of the perversions of our elite is that they think that being smart and having all the policy details in place is really what politics is all about. It’s not – politics is about dreams as well as about fears. These people would like economic prosperity – they may get it, and it may not take the form they would like and there’s going to be dislocation and change, but it just makes a big difference having a leader who says ‘I’m going to fight for you as best I can’, and not one who says ‘You’ve just got to suck it up, and move to North Dakota’.”
The answers both Republicans and Democrats have hitherto given to economically beleaguered communities in the old industrial north simply weren’t good enough, he argues, because they treated people as disposable and as impediments to progress. “Trump came in and said ‘No, this is about you, it’s not about what’s best for Wall Street, or what’s best for Google, or what’s best for Apple,’ and I think that has a huge psychological influence. Politics, as I say, is about dreams and fears – it’s not just interests,” he says.
Price worth paying
Given that politics is about fears as much as dreams, any analysis of Mr Trump must consider how, even if his rise was not – as Walter Russell Mead put it last spring – simply fuelled by racism, ignorance and hate, these all played their part. Asked whether Trump voters were willing to accept these as a price worth paying, Mr Reno disagrees.
“Interracial marriage rates decrease as you go down the social ladder,” he says, observing that “rich, progressive people do not racially intermarry, working class people do at a higher rate.”
Despite this, he says, racial jokes and other harshness are part of the reality of working class life with ordinary people living in a world that’s less carefully policed than his own, without the politically correct etiquette about race he describes as “a very powerful class marker” in American life.
Fears stoked by Mr Trump have not simply been limited to matters of race, of course. Following the conflict between the Obama administration and the Little Sisters of the Poor over the application of the Affordable Care Act, it’s understandable that American Christians of various denominations should have had concerns about religious liberty, but Mr Trump’s proclaimed plans for registering Muslims raise the obvious question of whether it is legitimate to protect one’s own religious liberty by supporting someone who plans to attack that of others.
“You have to defend the Muslims when the rubber hits the road,” says Mr Reno, continuing, “let’s see what he does. We’ll speak out against targeting Muslims. The idea of a registry, things like that – these are ideas that need to be resisted and rejected. I think that’s for the future.”
Observing that anti-Muslim sentiment is a real phenomenon in the US, Mr Reno says: “In my travelling and speaking to Church groups, I’m consistently shocked by very crude assumptions about Muslims trying to impose Sharia law, whereas actually in the United States our Muslim community is exemplary in terms of its assimilation and how they tend to be well-educated.”
While stressing that this doesn’t obviate the need to be vigilant against the possibility of domestic terrorism, he says this degree of assimilation must be acknowledged. “We’re very fortunate in that regard, and we ought to build on that strength,” he says, continuing, “I hope the Trump administration recognises that.”
Perhaps the most jarring moment in the election campaign took place in October, when tapes were released revealing how Mr Trump had, in effect, boasted of and advocated sexually assaulting women.
Given how the pro-life campaign has long argued that opposition to abortion is not merely pro-child but pro-women, the obvious question is how it’s possible that a man who would speak of women this way can be held up as offering any kind of hope for pro-lifers, and whether support for him risks jettisoning what goodwill the pro-life movement has amassed.
“It’s not good, but what can you do?”, says Mr Reno, continuing, “You had to vote for one of two people, you had to support one of two people. People can make up their own mind – they could decide that they’re going to be Pharisees, and be so pure that they’re not going to soil their reputations by supporting someone who has rebarbative dimensions, or they can enter into the fray, and they have to make a choice.”
Pointing out that he doesn’t believe any of his Democrat-voting friends who supported Bill Clinton were in favour of taking advantage of young interns, he says. “I never found myself outraged by my liberal friends for defending Bill Clinton. There are no perfect vessels for advancing what you regard to be as the common good.”
R.R. Reno will be speaking on ‘American Christians in the Age of Trump’ at 8pm on January 26 in the Davenport Hotel, Dublin 2, in a talk organised by the Iona Institute and chaired by John Waters.