Spring 2021—Politicizing Everything: “Trump Country” Conservatism And The War For Our Culture

 

For years, I’ve heard certain people—especially fellow Republicans—expressing the opinion that conservatives like me need to give up on fighting our war of rhetoric and ideas in defense of America’s traditional culture.

 

Now, in 2021, the cultural fascism of the American left has claimed its latest victims: Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss.

 

When are we going to admit it to ourselves? Our culture is being hijacked by people who have seemingly lost their minds.

 

I like to think of myself as a thoughtful person. I’m not necessarily thoughtful in the sense that I am good about being mindful of others, or being especially considerate of other people’s feelings. I do try, however, to be thoughtful about the bigger picture, about the greater social context of things going on around me. Thoughtful Americans continue to be concerned about what is happening to our country. As a religious person who thinks a great deal about the United States of America as a choice land established by Heavenly Father for the express purpose of standing as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world, I grow more and more worried for the fate of republican government and society as the weeks and months pass by.

 

I am sure we are all tired of hearing about what a crazy year 2020 turned out to be. The worldwide pandemic scare was followed by a fresh wave of racial violence in America’s cities, and this was followed by the contentious presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The 2020 election deserves to be placed in its proper context. The first election under the United States Constitution was held over 230 years ago. It was the least contested, least partisan contest in our country’s history. In 2020, our country went through one of the most partisan, most hotly contested, and most litigated elections in its history. Accompanying this election was a cacophony of voices calling for time-honored institutions like the Electoral College and the Supreme Court to either be transformed beyond recognition or abolished entirely. This puts great stress on our republic, and at times like this I think thoughtful Americans would be wise to take advice from the Founding Fathers…especially one Founding Father in particular: James Madison.

 

Back in 1787, as James Madison was attempting to convince New Yorkers that they should indeed ratify the newly-proposed U.S. Constitution, he introduced the idea of the United States one day becoming a geographically “extended republic” that would, by its very size and diversity of population, act as a preventative against the dangers of factionalism that had ruined the ancient Greek democracies. Madison especially warned against the dangers of “permanent factions,” and he argued that the form of government proposed by the U.S. Constitution would act as a bulwark against those dangers. According to him, people who think of themselves as permanently categorized as farmers versus merchants or as debtors versus creditors would never be interested in compromise. The solution to this problem was to ensure that the United States of America was so geographically large and demographically and ideologically diverse that people would find themselves belonging to many different factions at once. In this way, contention and unwillingness to compromise would be negated. In such a country, Madison predicted that Americans would find a great deal about which to agree with their neighbors, but also plenty about which to disagree. This complex web of overlapping interests and contextualized and shifting political alliances of the moment would lead to a wondrous development: no special interest group of Americans would ever feel like their very lives and worldviews were at risk of being oppressed or destroyed as a result of political disputes. In the United States of America envisioned by James Madison, “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”

 

I certainly think Madison had a good point. Certainly, I think we can agree that permanent factions have led to national disputes that have, once-upon-a-time, torn our country apart. The American Civil War was a conflict fought over the nature of property, over the manner of acquiring and maintaining ownership over such property. One very permanent faction—namely, the Democratic Party—insisted upon the right of Americans to own other human beings as property. Another increasingly immovable faction—namely, the Republican Party—grew more and more cognizant that the other faction’s moral standpoint was inherently flawed and corrosive to civil society. Eventually, as President Lincoln did such a good job of explaining to the rest of the nation, the moral propositions of these two permanent factions could not exist side-by-side in perpetuity. And so, the American Civil War was fought between Union states believing on the one hand that slavery was wrong, and seceding states on the other hand believing that slavery was right.

 

The contemporary danger our country faces again stems from the threat of permanent factions. This time, the issue is identity politics. Leftists are currently seeking to divide Americans into permanently-separated factions based upon racial, sexual, and gender identities. This is why Black Lives Matter protestors will not accept it when the rest of us argue that “all lives matter.” They do not gain political power unless they can convince people to form exclusive groups that will not mix, associate, or compromise with those who are different. This is why Black Lives Matter will never stop lecturing us about how being “not racist” is insufficient. For them, it’s not enough for you and I to not be racist; for them to be satisfied, we all must count ourselves as proactively “anti-racist”…which, of course, is defined in whatever manner the leftists so choose in the given moment.

 

Leftists have to be frustrated that in the 2020 election, Donald Trump increased his vote tallies among almost all racial minority groups. I think this is proof that James Madison was right about American society negating the impact of permanent factions, even in the face of leftist race-baiting and identity politics. Despite allegedly losing the election, in some cases Trump and the Republicans won in rural counties demographically dominated by racial minorities and electorally secured by the Democrats since the days of Reconstruction! More Americans seem willing to push back against the idea that skin color, sexuality, or gender should somehow predetermine a person’s voting tendencies. Although it is just barely beginning to show, the Democrats’ strategy of relying upon unending Hispanic electoral support is no longer a given, as suggested by Democratic strategist David Shor when he admitted that the Republicans are “really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of.” Democratic leaders increasingly seem unaware of how their own ideologies of “structural racism” and “heteronormativity” can actually turn off the interest and enthusiasm of working-class minority voters who do not subscribe to unalterable and pre-packaged leftist doctrines that do little beyond separating Americans into ever-warring permanent factions.

 

That rigid battle lines are being drawn at all in our current culture wars is remarkable considering how powerful and influential leftists and their ideologies have become both in institutions of higher learning as well as in traditional media outlets. In other words, it is miraculous to me that there is any resistance at all to those who now control and corrupt our ideas and values from the ivory towers of college faculty lounges and the production centers of American popular culture in Hollywood and New York. Perhaps one explanation for this is that college professors and newscasters, with their high-profile positions of influence and reputations for thoughtful analysis, cannot help but be noticed in their increasingly thoughtless and hypocritical hyper partisanship. How can thoughtful Americans take the news media seriously when it accuses Donald Trump of incitement to riot even as they downplay or dismiss Senator Chuck Schumer’s violent and intimidating language against the Supreme Court? How can logical citizens and voters take college professors seriously when they write books about the trauma inflicted whenever white women weep in front of black men, but also excuse with seeming indifference the wanton destruction of property and life throughout minority neighborhoods whenever Black Lives Matter riots come to town? How do leftists so often fail to see their own hypocrisy in these matters? I believe the sad answer is that many of them are too busy gloating in their own material and ideological successes to even care at this point. Sooner or later, however, they may be forced to care. An example from this latest election cycle provides a useful illustration: it does not seem like mere coincidence that after this last year of Black Lives Matter riots and the incessant condemnation of cops we’ve all had to endure for the last six or seven years, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2020. This from an organization that endorsed Obama and Biden as recently as 2008 and 2012! This kind of realignment of party voter bases is now underway, and it merely remains to be seen how long the hardcore leftists in the Democrats’ ranks can afford to ignore such shifts.

 

It is definitely true that when all was said and done with the 2020 election (and the subsequent runoff election in the state of Georgia), the Republicans had suffered a crushing defeat in losing the White House and Senate. However, the silver lining of these unfortunate developments is indeed present and deserves to be appreciated: although the Democrats maintained their control of the House of Representatives, they suffered significant electoral losses in that body. Republicans picked up a goodly number of House seats, and there is evidence that most of those seats were lost by Democrats who placed radical leftist ideologies at the forefront of their campaigns. As some commentators have noted, it seems possible that in the winter of 2020-2021, the country as a whole rejected a continued Donald Trump presidency even as it also rejected, in many districts and states, an increased intensity of radical leftism. I am willing to accept the potential legitimacy of that explanation even while still counting myself as an enthusiastic Trump supporter.

 

What we are seeing now all around us is an ongoing sharp division between leftists, who are increasingly dominant in America’s urban areas, and conservatives, who continue to seek haven in America’s rural districts, which continue to make up about 97% of land area in the United States. The worldviews and political beliefs of these two Americas are more irreconcilable than they’ve probably ever been in the last 150 years. Although I believe it was engineered to be this way, the 2020 election was the perfect storm of contention between these two Americas because for those of us who live in “Trump country”—yes, indeed, that 97% of U.S. land area—we could never possibly fathom that the lazy, lackluster, and race-baiting Joe Biden campaign could ever pick up momentum in a historical moment being drowned out (at least to us) by Trump vehicle parades and massive Trump stadium rallies that by some accounts were only rivaled by the country’s enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. For some of us conservatives, we cautiously anticipated a Reagan-style electoral victory for Donald Trump; instead, what we got was a seeming Election Day victory for Trump that felt snatched away from us by a mail-in ballot phenomenon that to this day feels suspect. Allegedly because of COVID-19, swing state voting rules and regulations were changed (often in ways that many of us conservatives believe were unlawful) to allow for a supposed tidal wave of mail-in Biden support that to us felt illicitly manufactured. To be fair, conservatives did not always agree with one another on what had actually happened, what had seemingly gone wrong in the election. But it didn’t matter; perceptions and instincts go a long way in determining emotional reactions, and after November of 2020, the damage had been done. When election fraud investigations were prevented from moving forward in any serious or meaningful ways, the tipping point for angrier conservatives had been reached…and you suddenly had millions of conservative Americans legitimately wondering for the first time in their lives if a U.S. presidential election had indeed been stolen.

 

None of this would have felt so catastrophic if it had occurred in isolation. As a historian, I have long held suspicions that the 1960 presidential election was stolen on behalf of the John F. Kennedy campaign. As a young boy who lived through the 2000 election, I distinctly remember the anger and frustration of Democrats who, at that time, felt that that election had been stolen in favor of George W. Bush. In both of those elections, the sore losers moved on. I would further argue that in both of those cases, the numbers of people who earnestly believed that America’s national election system was permanently broken were relatively small and actually diminished as time went on. None of this is going to be true for the 2020 election. The 2020 election will stand for many, many years as a blow against election integrity in the United States because it combined with destructive cultural trends that matter far more than the simple game of Democrat vs Republican election politics.

 

In an environment where politics are separated from the other aspects and dimensions of society, corrupt elections can be remedied. If parties lose elections, they can always try again next time. If systems or processes are corrupted, investigations can be launched, peaceful protests can be organized, letters to Congress can be written, and good old-fashioned grassroots activism can be mobilized to enact needed changes. In a world where politics and culture are separated, conservatives would not view the 2020 election as a devastating blow to our personal freedoms. We would have grumbled about the suspicious Biden victory, but we would have also counted our blessings too. We would have been invigorated by our excellent electoral showings in the individual states, in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate. We would have moved on with our trust in “the system” more or less as intact as it had been prior to last November. But in the 2020 of reality, the election wasn’t just about which party was in power, which tax plan got put into the national agenda, whether military or social spending got prioritized, or even what kind of man got to occupy the White House for the next four years.

 

Ever since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, American politics have bled into the other aspects of our lives in a multitude of unhealthy and frankly disturbing ways. Since 2008, Americans have been viciously turning on each other, and at the risk of angering some of my readers, I must admit that I don’t believe we should dismiss the viciousness as merely a manifestation of overzealous individuals taking politics too seriously for their own good. I sincerely believe that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 resulted in a fresh wave of radical leftism that was normalized into mainstream American culture under the guise of “progress,” especially in terms of our country’s supposed “original sins” of race-based slavery, racism, segregation, and oppression. Even though history proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that upholding race-based slavery, racism, segregation, and oppression has been official Democratic Party policy at various times throughout that organization’s existence, Democrats in the age of Obama successfully spun a web of lies that implicated all Americans and their shared history in a narrative of shame and guilt that supposedly could only be alleviated by all of us willingly embracing the radicalism we now hear peddled every day by the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Greta Thunberg.

 

How have Americans reacted to the radicalism? What have Americans decided to do with this imposed Age of Obama? Many have enthusiastically embraced the insanity that teaches us that men and women are interchangeable, that giving birth to children destroys the planet, that white people are born inherently racist. Others of us have rejected the insanity and the politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, professors, movie stars, and media personalities who try every way they can to guilt us into jumping off the cliff with the rest of the bamboozled sheep.

 

Contemporary American leftism has given us a country where the ideologies, worldviews, and perspectives on life and human nature itself of those on the right and those on the left cannot possibly coexist with each other. Civilizations usually do not survive intact for long whenever the people living in them cannot agree on some basic shared sense of fundamental morality, and this type of situation is quickly saturating all of contemporary American society. The polarization of opinions and attitudes of people who believe that American history is either inherently good or inherently evil cannot be underestimated. Normal intensity levels of disagreement and vigorous public arguments can all work for the overall positive good, but only when they occur in a cultural and social environment free of irreconcilable worldviews that dissuade dissenters on either side from even wanting to engage in productive debate in the first place. We live in a society in which the deepest questions of reality and truth are now answered by neighbors, friends, and family members in ways that completely annihilate common ground, desires to compromise, or the urge to live and let live. In other words, we have reached the point at which Abraham Lincoln warned that a house or country “divided against itself cannot stand.” Disagreements between Democrats and Republicans about tax laws, welfare spending, or the morality or efficacy of foreign wars are all to be expected in a country that prizes honest political debate; meanwhile, a society in which people can no longer trust each other on questions of gender identity or of our skin colors determining the content of our characters is headed for utter disaster.

 

In Abraham Lincoln’s day, this kind of intractable situation led to state secession and civil war. In 1861, the Union had a leader capable of marshaling the nation’s morality and resources and directing those energies towards a righteous safe harbor. In our day, our own divided culture has separated generally rural Republican counties from generally urban Democratic counties. Within these counties, two very separate and distinct cultures are developing…and these two cultures are implicitly at war with each other. In “Trump country,” right-wingers like myself seek to conserve the principles of America’s Founding in 1776. We believe that America was founded as a great country that needs to be kept great. Conservatives endorse the notion that equal natural rights have been bestowed by God on all human beings. We love limited and local self-government. Many of us still cling to the traditional family begun in marriage between men and women. Many of us still trust the free market economy and the principle of respect for the stewardship of private property to lead us all into a future of opportunity and prosperity. Meanwhile, “Trump country” conservatism is under direct attack by leftists who mistakenly believe that government is the proper vehicle for taking all of us down the utopian road of “progress.” Many if not most American leftists seem to subscribe to the narrative that says America was founded upon great inequities and flaws. Because of this, they say that America needs to be fixed, and that it can only be fixed by “fundamentally transforming” the nation into something distinctly different from the American Founding. For those of us who disagree with them, leftists who refer to themselves as “progressives” believe that hateful speech and ideas must be banned or cancelled. Disgusted that anyone like Donald Trump could ever preside over the nation, leftists believe that government works best only when it is run by elitist “experts.” Infuriated that heretical conservatives might try to find a space for themselves in an increasingly hostile economic system, leftists believe that America’s political tradition of supporting free market economics has primarily resulted in the oppression of certain racial, sexual, and gender groups…and that the solution to this oppression is to banish, persecute, prosecute, and reprogram their deplorable opponents.

 

The United States of America was founded upon ideas, much more so than most countries, civilizations, or societies can boast. During the Civil War, Americans disagreed and fought with one another to determine what, exactly, those ideas were and would be in the future. The same thing is occurring today. I believe the divisions we face, however, are made out to be far more intractable simply by the sheer numbers of people who now express a lack of trust in so many of our societal institutions. Americans on opposing ends of the political spectrum increasingly inhabit completely separate and distinct cultural, economic, and political spaces. In 2019, studies from the Brookings Institution, one of the world’s most influential public policy think tanks, concluded that “America has two economies—and they are diverging fast.” When looking at the increasingly hostile relationship between Democrats and Republicans, it was realized that “not only do the two parties adhere to different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.” On the one hand, there are rural areas inhabited by religious gun owners who hunt and love high school football. On the other hand, there are urban areas inhabited by secular gun-haters who have their groceries delivered to them at home and prefer soccer as their sport of choice. It might be easy and even politically appropriate to describe this dichotomy as too simplistic to be useful, but I am willing to bet that most people would indeed understand this description of our contemporary moment to generally be accurate. Economic and cultural differences drive political division, and political division in the United States has been on the rise since at least the early 1990s. The political center has been shrinking, leaving only diametrically opposed factions on the left and right of the political spectrum. The rise of Donald Trump as a political leader is proof of this; in so many important ways, Trump’s rise to power came about through the cobbling together of a conservative-libertarian working-class coalition of voters who felt betrayed by their political leaders over the course of the last thirty years. And, of course, the vicious backlash against Trumpism has come about through the marshaling of far left voices crying out against what they claim is a resurgence of white supremacist fascism in our country.

 

The radical left’s obsession with white supremacy and fascism is also evidence in and of itself that Americans no longer share broad agreement on what, exactly, are the most pressing problems facing our nation. For example, whereas a majority of Democrats seemingly think that human activity contributes greatly to climate change, a minority of Republicans share that viewpoint. On a host of other topics, Democrats and Republicans not only disagree over policy, but over premises. One might expect a pandemic like the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 to be a unifying experience for our country, but instead, COVID-19 ended up having the opposite effect. The very medicines taken by some with the hope of helping to mitigate the symptoms of COVID-19 were denigrated for no other reason than the fact that President Trump was willing to endorse them and give them a try himself. In many facets of life, Democrats and Republicans no longer wish to share in seemingly non-political ventures or relationships with each other. And now, that apparently includes the simple reading of books written by Dr. Seuss.

 

Conservative commentators and thinkers are constantly chastising each other for failing for too long to heed the wise words of the deceased Andrew Breitbart, the journalist and writer who taught us that “politics is downstream from culture,” and that to change the politics of your country, you must first change its culture. I suppose I’d like to add my voice to this brand of warning: while too many Republicans have been slow to recognize the importance of our culture, the leftists who now firmly control the Democratic Party have been expertly implementing the Breitbart Doctrine in all our major institutions of cultural significance. Too many of us have failed to fight back with the ideas that once made America great, and because of that, American greatness is now on the line.

 

I encourage all of us who still have our wits about us to stand up boldly in defense of “Trump country” conservatism while we still have our voices left to us. Don’t be afraid to do this, to suddenly be seen as “too political” by your friends and family. After all, everything—and I do mean EVERYTHING—has already been politicized by the “woke” social justice warriors among us. If you any doubts about that, take a walk with me down Mulberry Street and consider all the places you WON’T go…because you’ve been cancelled.

 

--Christopher Peterson, March 27^th, 2021