Winter 2021--Keeping America Great: The Burden Of Conservative Shame

I recently read something shared by one of my friends on Facebook. It was a lengthy reflection on the so-called “spiritual crisis” President Donald Trump has allegedly instigated in the lives of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who choose to continue to support him. The author of this reflection is unfamiliar to me, but I read every single word. I was struck by three key points the author brought up over and over again in his thoughts about us Trump supporters. The first point that caught my attention was that the United States will apparently not be capable of healing spiritually from the destruction wrought by Trump unless we, Trump’s supporters, proactively reject and condemn him. The second point was that Latter-day Saints who support Trump are engaging in idolatry, that we Trump supporters are guilty of placing our “trust in a different savior” than the one we claim to worship in our Sunday church services. And the third point that caught my attention was that the first two points were being put forward by an author who claimed to possess “an almost radical humility” when he turns “to assess others.”

“Radical humility” is not what immediately comes to my mind when I think about someone equating my support for an imperfect politician with idolatry. Without any amount of sarcasm or mockery at all, I am fully aware that we now live in a world where some people consider the thoughts and feelings I will express in this post to be idolatrous. I guess I just think it’s significant to mention that I am trying my best to be aware of how people choose to interpret my words as well as the motivations behind those words.

Since Election Day in 2020, I confess that I have been in a perpetual state of shocked and moderately depressed numbness. The implications of what happened in the last U.S. general election are baffling and potentially world-shattering, depending on which narratives you choose to subscribe to. With Republicans performing incredibly well up and down the ballot, and with President Donald Trump performing better with racial minorities than any other Republican presidential candidate since the early 1960s, the alleged electoral victory of the lackluster and frankly lazy Joe Biden campaign clashed with expectations from every corner of the ideological landscape. Since Election Day, I have heard very few voices (outside of news media) expressing the opinion that a Biden victory was in any way expected. With a bewildering multitude of election irregularity reports coming out of nearly half a dozen swing states, and with the unprecedented levels of continuing passionate activism on the part of the Trump campaign long after the Biden team claimed victory, it is no wonder that these factors have combined with the government overreach inherent in many states' responses to COVID-19 to create a historic pair of phenomena: more Americans than perhaps ever before in our country's history no longer believe our election system maintains its integrity, and Americans generally feel more culturally and politically divided than at any time since the Civil War.

Despite the savagery of contemporary Facebook exchanges and the all-consuming anger and hatred espoused by people on both sides of the right-left divide, I believe it is generally irresponsible to ignore the very real thoughts, feelings, and amped-up discussions so many Americans are having with each other privately. If we do not take seriously these privately-held passions, the more likely it is that our country will continue to suffer from shocks of political outrage, discontent, and even violence. Already, we are seeing this legacy of violence spill out into our streets, our public places, and most upsettingly of all, in our private places of business and neighborhoods. This is what happens when people no longer share any agreement at all on the purpose of government, on the very nature of human existence itself. America is a divided land, and the divisions now cut across and disrupt basic understandings of concepts such as citizenship and virtue, both public and private. For many Americans, the “self-evident” truths of the Founding generation don’t seem so self-evident anymore, and despite what multiculturalism-oriented professors at the academy might try and teach you, this is actually a serious problem for any country that hopes to hold itself together. The United States of America, just like any other society, requires a shared and unifying culture in order to survive. Unfortunately—and mostly due to the ideological assaults perpetrated by cultural and political leftism—America’s shared culture is increasingly becoming one of moral corruption and degeneracy. In an era when mainstream Democratic politicians are openly flirting with the idea of packing the Supreme Court and adding states to the Union for the explicit purpose of solidifying a permanent Congressional majority for leftists, I am fairly confident that the American people are about to suffer major attacks upon their personal freedoms and private sector aspirations, certainly for the next two years at least.

When mainstream Democratic politicians are openly calling for changes to the Electoral College, is it any wonder that some are starting to wonder: how long can our Constitutional form of government hold? How long can red counties and blue counties remain part of the same political framework when, culturally speaking, they are drifting apart at breakneck speed? It used to be that talk of civil unrest and civil war remained in the realm of radical youth politics or embittered separatist circles; nowadays, many Americans are wondering for the first time in their adult lives if political violence will threaten the peace and tranquility of their own neighborhoods. Social media and the big tech companies offer us a number of depressing insights into just how divided Americans have become, and though it is difficult to accurately measure whether or not social media inflames or merely reflects political passions, the anger, hatred, and long-lasting bitterness of our contemporary moment are abundantly clear to all.

Tomorrow, a new administration takes power in Washington, D.C. This administration is propped up and supported by a group of people who are quick to justify using the National Guard to put down a so-called “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, but will spend an entire summer proactively seeking to prevent National Guard protection against the looting, pillaging, and burning of private homes and businesses all across our country as a result of so-called “mostly peaceful protests.” A neighborhood Wendy’s deserves just as much sufficient protection against lawlessness as the U.S. Capitol does, but the political party taking power tomorrow seems to care more about protecting itself than protecting your private property or your Constitutional liberties. This brand of leftist hypocrisy is not particularly new to me, but what is changing tomorrow is the number of lives such hypocrisy will start harming. The inauguration of Joe Biden will symbolically represent the completed and consummated union of the Democratic Party, the Orwellian big tech companies, and the liberal legacy media with the levers of state power. I personally believe the next two years will see a swiftly and negatively changing state of affairs for the American free market and for First Amendment freedoms generally.

We now live in a country with a deep and abiding division between urban and rural America. Luckily for us, our country has a long history of experience with that most wonderful of principles for successful republican government: federalism. Unfortunately for us, too few Americans actually seem to care or understand how federalism is supposed to work as an advantage to all who play by the rules. This is a shame since federalism has such a strong record of allowing us our disagreements while still respecting the realities of peaceful coexistence between otherwise implacable political foes. It’s also a shame to see how sick and tired of politics we are all becoming now at a moment when respectful and constructive political dialogue is needed most. But can you blame us? Speaking for myself alone, I can honestly say that I am tired of engaging in political discussions with “woke” leftists who diminish our nation’s remarkable history, who are openly flirting with the idea of segregating students and employees by race and skin color, who assert that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist.

Not everything should be characterized by a doom-and-gloom attitude. For better or worse, I live in California. And though California is hurdling down the road to serfdom in so many scary ways, plenty of my fellow Californians still seek to resist the leftist onslaught. I am grateful that California voted down the absolutely racist restoration of affirmative action that was Proposition 16, even as my state voted overwhelmingly to support the race-baiting Joe Biden in his bid for the White House. I’m grateful that President Trump secured an even greater proportion of the black and Latino vote than he did in 2016. In so doing, he proved that conservatism does not have to be hopelessly characterized by its more vicious opponents as inherently racist. The overwhelming support Trump and the Republicans received from Hispanics in Florida paved a clear and straightforward path to electoral victories now and in the future. I was thrilled to hear that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project and one of our country’s most preeminent race-baiters, was reportedly infuriated at how many Hispanic voters turned out for Trump. This election proved that the race-baiting of the American left has, to some extent, backfired. This election proved that millions of Americans aren’t afraid to stand up and reject the notion that the U.S. has been a “slavocracy” from its very founding or an exercise in white supremacy to its very core.

As bad as things feel right now, they could be worse. But do not be led astray: things are still pretty bad. What we have recently seen happening to Parler and other forms of conservative presence and thought throughout the online social media infrastructure should seriously be chilling all of us to the bone. We are now living in a historical moment when elements of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have become literal realities, at least in terms of thought police, linguistic cleansing, the rewriting of history, and the brutal application of “social credit” cancel culture. The recent news about Parler is evidence to me that our First Amendment rights and the free market in general are going to be under constant attack for as long as the Democrats control almost completely unopposed the levers of federal power…and as long as they remain obsessed with punishing the nation for the supposed sin of electing Donald Trump in 2016.

I know I have quite the record of making people angry or uncomfortable with what I have posted in the past. I have tried to be authentic, edifying, and truthful while also trying to be courageous and bold in sustaining and defending my beliefs. I know that right now, emotions are running high and feelings are running raw. Through all of that, I would ask a question of those of you who think you are calm enough to give the question an honest hearing.

Would you sincerely like to understand why so many of us conservatives are scared of leftism or are angry at the thought of unopposed leftist control of our government?

If you would like some insight into the answer for this question, I sincerely pray that you will read the following paragraphs with an eye towards simply putting yourself in someone else’s perspective and position. Everything I am about to share has happened to me or my conservative friends in one form or another during the last decade.

We conservatives have been told that we should be upset about what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th of this year. Indeed, many of us are. Our problem, however, is that many of us have been upset about lawlessness, rioting, looting, and destruction of lives and property since the cities of Ferguson and Baltimore went up in flames years ago. We’ve been upset by this kind of behavior for years and right up through the George Floyd-inspired destruction of lives and property that has gripped our nation throughout recent months. But in most of these earlier examples of public looting, rioting, and violence, we feel like our concerns have been dismissively swept aside by those on the other side of the political spectrum.

We conservatives have been told that when Donald Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol, such an action is defined as a violent “insurrection.” Yet when we pointed out that violent insurrection took place last summer when entire sections of downtown Seattle were seized by violent and hostile forces that illegally occupied those areas for months, we were accused of overreacting. Even though the George Floyd riots resulted in police stations being attacked, invaded, and burned to the ground, we conservatives were told to calm down in the face of “mostly peaceful protests” and “summers of love.”

We conservatives have watched with frustration as social media companies have censored or outright banned President Trump from their platforms because they’ve accused the president of inciting riots. Yet we have also watched as Kamala Harris has been allowed to use those same platforms to fundraise for people thrown in jail for their violent participation in the George Floyd riots.

We conservatives have sat by as President Trump has been blamed for using hateful language that allegedly inspired a wide range of violent acts in various parts of the world during the past four years. Yet we heard nothing but silence from leftists who refrained from drawing similar outlandish connections between violent acts and Bernie Sanders claiming that “Republicans are killing people” as long as they stood opposed to Medicare for all. You may recall that in 2017, a violent Bernie Sanders supporter eventually attempted to shoot and kill a number of Republican senators and representatives while they were out playing baseball together in Alexandria, Virginia. We also heard for years from Barack Obama about how racist America’s cops apparently are. But leftists did nothing to tie Obama’s inflammatory rhetoric to the 2016 targeted shooting in Dallas that ended in five police officers being murdered by a man who explicitly sought to kill white cops.

We conservatives have been informed that President Trump is practically a war criminal for encouraging people to march to the Capitol and “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.” Apparently, such language counts as inciting violence. Yet when Kamala Harris says that “peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests that have resulted in over two dozen deaths, thousands of police injuries, and many millions of dollars in damages “will” and “should continue” into the future, apparently such language does not count as inciting violence.

We conservatives have been lectured over and over again about how Trump will launch a violent coup to hold onto his power. Yet we conservatives have been laughed to scorn every time we bring up evidence that the federal bureaucracy and intelligence agencies (commonly and unfortunately referred to as “the deep state”) proactively colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and performed illegal acts of entrapment and espionage against Trump loyalists and operatives in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The result is that terms and procedures such as “coup,” “impeachment,” and “unconstitutional” no longer mean much of anything to anyone anymore.

We conservatives have had to endure four years of being told that the 2016 presidential election was fraudulent, and that a few social media posts by Russian operatives constituted solid evidence of Trump campaign collusion with a foreign power. Yet we are now being told that we have no standing to point out the irregularities of the 2020 election, or the fact that some bureaucrats and some court officials have seemed unusually eager to avoid bringing these issues up for investigation or trial. Back in March and April of 2020, state bureaucrats and governors enacted massive changes in election processes, allegedly for the sake of preventing outbreaks of COVID-19. Those changes resulted in some very worrisome happenings in five or six states on election night, and these unusual activities in vote dumps and other such irregularities were widespread enough to make this particular conservative feel extremely doubtful about the election’s integrity. At the very least, I don’t think conservatives should be called crazy for our doubts. It actually doesn’t take too much meddling or corruption to swing a presidential election one way or the other when it takes place at the level of the state or county.

As a Republican, I have been told that the government can force me to bake a cake for a gay wedding, that I have to do business with people who disagree with me. But I’ve also been told that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter must be free to refuse service to conservatives who express their unpopular opinions. I’ve been told that I am a conspiracy theorist if I believe that conservatives are having their free speech rights steadily eroded. I’ve been told that Republicans are the party of the “evil rich.” But I’ve also noticed that the world’s wealthiest companies—companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and YouTube—seem to have no problem endorsing leftist causes, seem to have no problem suppressing stories about Biden family corruption or proactively and even explicitly working against Donald Trump. I’ve been told that Republicans hate blacks and other racial minorities even as I watched Donald Trump secure better vote totals among those groups than any other Republican presidential candidate since the early 1960s. I’ve been told that we Republicans are a party of war mongers, but I cannot help but notice that the liberal news media refuses to give credit to President Trump for being the first national leader we’ve had in a long time who hasn’t gotten our country involved in a new war somewhere out there in the world. On the subject of liberal news bias, it is endlessly frustrating to be a Republican and to watch as PBS airs a segment about “truth in media” hosted by Dan Rather…the very same Dan Rather who falsified stories about President George W. Bush a decade earlier and whose career in journalism came to an end explicitly because of professional dishonesty.

In the names of science and public health, and in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conservatives have been told to mask up to save lives. However, we conservatives are discouraged from saving the lives of the unborn by telling women that they should not get elective abortions for convenience alone. Apparently, “my body, my choice” applies to child-bearing and pregnancy, but it does not apply to breathing and facial masks. We live in a society in which leftists feel comfortable accusing those of us who are skeptical of mask-wearing with not caring if we kill the most vulnerable among us. But if we conservatives argue that elective abortions-on-demand now constitute a man-made holocaust against the unborn—against the truly most vulnerable among us—we are shouted down.

In the face of COVID-19, we conservatives have been told that the Democrats are the “party of science,” and that we need to limit our movements and associations because doing so is scientifically proven to stop the spread of disease. But the Democrats now represent the same “party of science” that refuses to acknowledge the scientific reality of biological differences between men and women. In the face of COVID-19, we conservatives have been forced to shut down our small businesses, to forfeit our right to work. Again, all of this has been done to allegedly save lives. But if we rush out into the streets to burn down those same small businesses in the name of so-called “racial justice,” we are suddenly the justified oppressed simply seeking to have our voices heard. And if cops get killed in order for our voices to be heard…well, that’s just how it goes in a nation so allegedly dominated by white supremacy as ours is. On the subjects of white supremacy and racism, we conservatives have been told time and time again that the United States of America was founded on the principles of racial oppression and systemic injustice…and yet, we conservatives cannot help but point out that the people accusing the United States of systemic racism are the same people who vote overwhelmingly (and inconceivably) for the Democratic Party, the same Democratic Party that was founded on the twin evils of protecting and perpetuating the institution of slavery and stealing Native American lands. We cannot help but point out that the same political party now calling for race-based reparations, sensitivity training to combat white supremacism, and the teaching of critical race theory to purge the nation of its original sin, is the same political party that encouraged plantation slavery as a positive good, inaugurated Jim Crow segregation and racial eugenics near the turn of the last century, and facilitated the oppression of an entire race of people for political gain.

Why are we conservatives supposed to listen to Bill Nye (who thinks “science deniers” should be thrown into jail), Greta Thunberg, and Al Gore when they advocate the most draconian of measures to combat climate change while conservative leaders, like Donald Trump, receive no credit from the left when they achieve lower emissions numbers and cleaner energy outputs for our country all while securing energy independence from foreign powers? Why are conservatives supposed to unleash the fury of the Me Too movement against figures on the right like Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, but not against Bill Clinton or Joe Biden? Why is public demonization always feeling like such a one-way street? I once was told by a Facebook friend of mine that my political beliefs made me no better than a member of the Taliban in Afghanistan (yes, this really happened to me). My state leaders here in California proactively work to take away my gun, to take away my gasoline-powered car. Democrats in Congress feel it necessary to record videos on social media informing me that I shouldn’t plan on having children in the future because of the negative environmental impact too many humans are having upon the planet. Left-leaning professors and academics have told me that I am intellectually and morally compromised because of my gender and skin color. Media figures have proclaimed for decades that because I oppose illegal immigration, I am a racist. Girls have told me I am sexist because I think feminism damages life’s most important relationships, complete strangers have told me that I am a hateful bigot because I think marriage should only ever exist between men and women, and friends have abandoned me because I believe that little children should not be sexualized and should not be empowered to think they can change their gender.

I realize that the political outlook—in reality, a life outlook—I have just described completely baffles many of you, and I wish there was something more I could do to bridge that gap in perspective. I don’t think I can do that for many of you, but my hope is that something I have said will help you to understand and see the two very separate worlds many of us are now living in. Many conservatives feel scared and angry because they see those two worldviews locked in combat with each other, and figuratively speaking, it is more and more often feeling like a combat to the death (note: that last sentence is NOT a call for or an endorsement of violence). For conservatives, it starts with social media banning and banishing the eccentrics like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and, yes, President of the United States Donald Trump. Then, it escalates to all of conservatism practically being banned from social media, like we saw with Parler. What is next? Who will be cancelled in the near future? Do we cancel musical groups like the Tabernacle Choir and the Piano Guys because both groups had the audacity to perform as part of Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations in 2017?

Some of my friends have asked me in the past: why am I so partisan? In other words, why do I condemn leftism so vociferously and so generally? There are many problems in the world, all with nuances of their own. With this in mind, why do I constantly criticize cultural and political leftism as systems of thought?

I criticize and condemn leftism precisely because it is a constructed and comprehensible system of thought, and I believe it is a common thread in so very many of the various problems that afflict our world, our country, our communities, and our families. Cultural and political leftism ruin everything they touch, from science to Star Wars. I believe leftism ruins lives, especially the lives of those who choose to believe in it. If you want to understand why many conservatives are fleeing social, why many of us are feeling scared and angry, it is because we feel like leftism, as an ideology, is coming after us. We don’t feel like compromising or “unifying” with it because we see it destroying everything we loved about life and liberty. Speaking solely for myself, I feel more and more singled out every day that goes by as a straight, white, Christian man who loves the American Founding. Some of those attributes matter very little to me, others a great deal; none of them feel like crimes or reasons to feel ashamed. And yet, shame seems to be something the left seems all too willing to dole out.

And that brings me to the final topic I wish to address in this post: the political career and presidency of Donald J. Trump. First of all, I wish to make it clear that I resent the treatment of Donald Trump as some kind of war criminal after years of hearing various figures on the left proactively calling for violence against Trump, his family, and Republican politicians in general. But in a more personal sense, I also wish to close out this post by sharing some things that I feel absolutely honor-bound to say on this, the last appropriate and timely occasion.

If you are a Donald Trump voter who now feels shame for lending the man your support, I desperately hope that you are feeling that shame for reasons that are right for you. But please, don’t feel ashamed of supporting Trump just because someone else is pushing you to feel ashamed. Don’t feel ashamed for enthusiastically supporting a politician who tried so hard to actually fulfill campaign promises, who actually reinforced notions like old-fashioned patriotism, who sought to enact sensible policy changes to a government left adrift and floundering by the previous administration, and who maintained a stubborn refusal to submit to leftists and their unfair and unjust moral and intellectual premises. Don’t be ashamed for wanting to make America great again no matter how childish and xenophobic the opposition tries to make that catchphrase sound. Don’t allow those kinds of people to define the parameters of what you can and cannot feel justified in standing up for. Shame is wielded so often and so irresponsibly by the left; please don’t allow that shame to hijack your own good sense about what has happened in our country for the last four years, about what will happen to our country in the next few upcoming years. There are people out there who seek to make you feel guilty about so many things. They want you to feel guilty about driving a car to work, about wanting a big house filled with a large family of carbon-emitting children. They want you to feel guilty about eating meat, sugar, and soda; about owning a gun or an SUV. They want you to feel guilty for insisting on secure borders, national policies that benefit America first and foremost, and politicians who are accountable to the same rules and restrictions they ask the rest of us to obey. For many of you, they want you to feel guilty about your skin color, your gender, your religion, and your very values. They seek to make you feel selfish for wanting to raise your kids in the ways you see fit even as they also seek endless access to confuse and manipulate the gender and sexual identities of your children. They guilt you about your supposed racism, bigotry, sexism, and “unconscious” oppression of others. They are so, so quick to ascribe motivations and feelings and beliefs to you that just are not so, and I emphatically desire to see more of my friends and family set free from the cancel culture of shame and imposed silence.

Through all the anger and hatred and cacophony of voices calling for Donald Trump’s name to practically be stricken from public memory, I feel honor-bound to express my gratitude to a deeply-flawed man who shocked the world—and me—by arising from political obscurity in 2015 to become perhaps the most impactful conservative politician on the national stage since the time of Ronald Reagan. I am intensely grateful for the leader President Donald J. Trump has been for our country for the last four years. He is deeply flawed, eccentric, mean-spirited, often childish, wildly exaggerative, occasionally embarrassing and even rhetorically cruel. These negative attributes are exactly why the last four years have been so astounding to me. Despite his faults, despite his character flaws, and despite his repulsive personal history—all of which kept me from voting for him in 2016—my opinion of him continued to improve day after day from the very moment he first took office in 2017. I have posted at length in the past of President Trump’s many policy achievements, and so I will not do so again here. Instead, I wish to express a more personal form of gratitude for President Trump’s leadership.

I mentioned shame a few moments ago. I’ve dedicated most of this post to explaining the long list of frustrations and fears we conservatives have felt for years and, in some cases, for decades. As a conservative who has been politically aware since I was ten years old, I have felt pressure to feel ashamed of my beliefs starting from a very young age. When Donald Trump took the national stage back in 2015, he offered me something that, at the time, I refused to believe he of all people could offer: clear-headed leadership that repudiated the shame I had been pressured to feel for so many years. Trump came along and offered to take the beatings we conservatives felt we had been taking all our lives. He came along and promised to do what few Republican leaders ever seemed brave enough to do: to actually fight back against the tides of leftism sweeping through our culture, to actually stand against what was going wrong with our country’s government. Trump came along and promised to rip the bark off the diseased and rotting tree of corrupt status quo politics, to rip the façade off a political system that seemed to no longer care about conservative voices or the common people in general. Trump didn’t let false accusations of racism, bigotry, or Nazism distract from his surprisingly reasonable agenda of putting the American economy and its workers first, of reevaluating America’s foreign policy along realistic lines, of freeing America’s people by refocusing the federal government’s efforts to protect our First Freedoms, of openly proclaiming to make America great again by embracing our Founding principles and legacy of prosperity and individual opportunity for all.

I do not feel the need to defend everything President Trump said or did while in office, and I will not do so here. Despite what some people apparently think, I do not look at President Trump as my savior, and I do not idolize him. To think that that’s what some people might think about me prompts me to once again comment on how far apart from one another we are drifting as a people. But with thankfulness in my heart, and with emphatic amazement at an unexpected job well done, I can wholeheartedly say on the balance that I am grateful to have had Donald J. Trump as my president for these past four years. He worked tirelessly to make America great again, and I believe on the balance that he succeeded and overwhelmingly so. I am legitimately sorry that his successes will likely prove to be fleeting in the end.

As I close this post, I am extremely conscious of those of you who were crazy enough to read to the end and who are shaking your head in wonderment that a guy like me can feel the way I do, can believe what I believe, and feel the way I feel. Just know that I am shaking my head too, haha, as I yearn for words more suited to explaining my positions and points of view. At the very least, I have said here what I have felt since Election Day needed to be said.

To Joe Biden, his supporters, and to the Democratic Party in general, I just want to say: please work to keep America great.

--Christopher Peterson, January 19^th, 2021