Introduction
Okay, so this was much less of an ordinary election, and much more like a richly deserved paddy-wonking. There are many aspects of this gaudy thing that need to be analyzed with loud hoots of joy, along with some aspects that need to be given the Burkean stink eye. So here goes.
I have seen a lot of elections, but this one was just a slaughterhouse.
A Cluster of Losses
Who lost? Well, obviously Kamala lost, so there is that. This makes it two times that Donald Trump has saved us from the first woman president—not that we know what a woman is though. Maybe the honor of first woman president belongs to Rutherford B. Hayes, so who knows anymore?
But don’t distract me. I was saying that Kamala lost. In addition, the media lost, the pollsters lost, the weaponized justice system lost, the corrupt intelligence agencies lost, the furrowed-brow Europeans lost, the Obamaites lost, the late night ex-comedians lost, the Hollywood celebrities/future Canadians lost, the ayatollahs of Wokeistan lost, the universities lost, and the forces of perpetual war lost. As the saga unfolds, more such losers will be identified as we go.
There is an awful lot to enjoy here, and we certainly should be prepared to enjoy it. But there are also two kinds of conflict coming that we also need to be preparing for. One would be the inevitable leftist counterattack, and the other would be the coming intramural conflicts within the Trump coalition—particularly on the sexual and life issues. Those are two potential losses. They are not losses yet, but the stage is set for such losses.
Priestesses of the Failed Gods
Let us first consider the people who have been losing all along, but who had this election reveal that fact in glaring ways. There is a thing called the 4B movement now, which is calling for women “to not date, marry, sleep with, or have children with men.” That’ll show them. A bunch of those guys (men) apparently voted for Trump, and this modern attempt to pull an anti-Trump Lysistrata has caused a number of deeply-troubled women to remove themselves from the sexual marketplace. Is there anything that Trump can’t do?
A similar impulse has caused many of them to shave their heads, or to don a blue bracelet to signal their grief and commitment. And then there are the numerous freak-outs in cars, promptly posted to TikTok in that needy bucket kind of way.
Now remember that the reason that two-year-olds throw tantrums is that they work. In the past, that approach has proven an effective way for them to get the results they wanted. But suppose something happens, like the parents of said child buy a good book on child discipline . . . and the tantrums stop working. In fact, they even become counterproductive. The pitcher of said fits finds himself in a worse position than before. The market has dried up. Then what?
And so what we are looking at now is a regiment of impotent Maenads. They aren’t scary anymore, just emotionally disturbed. These empty emotional displays are religious rituals being performed for the goddesses of Woke, who have somehow wandered off. The goddesses of Woke apparently decided that it was time for some me-time and self-care. They ditched, and did not leave any forwarding information. So pay no attention to these sad souls, other than to pray for their repentance and conversion. Some of them are going to become Christians. Mark it.
How Great Thou Art
There was an encouraging clip circulating that showed a bunch of Trump supporters out in a hallway, right after Trump’s victory speech, bursting into song, that song being How Great Thou Art. Not only that, but they didn’t have song sheets and knew all the words.
I bring this up in order to highlight what I believe would likely be John Piper’s concern about this kind of thing. After the election results came in, John tweeted something to the effect that God had spared us from one evil, and now we needed to be on guard against another and very different evil.
There is a real challenge in this. How can I answer this effectively, when I agree with every word of it? Given that I do agree with this, as will become evident later in this post, why is there any disagreement?
The difference has to do with John’s suspicions that the people singing in the hallway are all undiscerning syncretists. He is afraid that they are going to take Trump’s entire agenda, including the new squish element on life issues, and the open acceptance of the first half of the Alphabet People (LGB), and cover the whole thing with a thin “How Great Thou Art” veneer. He suspects that they are the kind of people who have a painting of Jesus in the foyer of their home, with Him wearing a blue Trump flag for a shawl. But they don’t.
The reason that outburst of song was so encouraging to me is that it showed how many committed Christians are going to be in positions of influence. And I believe that, in the main, they are going to be far more consistent in their Christian witness than the Christians who attended the MLK 50 conference were. They have much less of a compromising spirit.
The Christians I know in a position to be singing in such hallways are as hard as nails, and they know exactly why they are there. And none of them would ever say of Donald Trump what The Gospel Coalition is willing to say about Taylor Swift.
So my suspicions are every bit as cynical as John’s, but they really are calibrated differently. My calibrations are according to Deuteronomic covenantalism and postmillennialism, while never forgetting the doctrine of remaining sin. By way of contrast, there is a certain kind of baptistic pietism that is constantly worried that God is ever eager to show up and take away our birthday cake. So I do think that we need to be chastened in our fallen exuberance, but not by that.
Crash the Economy?
One of the things that progressives do is that they are willing to use whatever weapons are currently available. They measure their floating righteousness by whatever happens to advance their agenda. If it helps them gain and retain power, then whatever they are currently proposing is, by definition, full of sunshine and uplift. It does not trouble them at all to be diametrically opposed to the Electoral College, and all hot for the Popular Vote . . . until they lose the Popular Vote. Then they pivot to whatever it is next.
If they had lost the Popular Vote, but had won the Electoral College, they would currently be singing the praises of James Madison. And as they do this kind of thing, they are utterly shameless. Whatever happened to those states who pledged their electors to the winner of the Popular Vote? I look forward with keen interest to the moment when California, and sixteen other states, cast their votes for Donald Trump. For are they not part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)?
Going back to the top, they have lost this round in a lot of areas. But there are still a few places where they have significant influence and control, and they will not be reluctant to use them. Their commitment to retaining power is deep and abiding, and we should never forget it. Nixon won a historic landslide, and had a mandate in every direction, and a deep state coup took him out. Trump was sitting on top of a robust economy in his first term, and was looking very strong as he was heading toward reelection. The pandemic and subsequent lockdown was the way in which Trump 45 got rolled. So the bad guys would be more than willing to crash the US economy if it would rid them of this Trump pestilence.
Our current debt to GDP ratio is currently really bad, eighth worst in the world. We are not as bad as such powerhouses of fiscal anarchy as Greece and Italy, but still not good.
Trump is in no position to try to address the debt by means of raising taxes, which would be terrible and counterproductive anyhow, and yet the current set up creates a real vulnerability to financial and monetary machinations that could prove real trouble for Trump’s second term.
So the one thing that Trump can and should do to jump start the economy, and to guard himself against any such economic sabotage, is to deregulate industry like a madman. In his first term, he said that for every new regulation, two old regs had to be removed. I have heard that he has recently vowed, this time around, to make it a requirement to remove four for every new one. That’s the spirit. Our debt load constitutes a financial state of emergency, and so this should be tackled in the name of emergency deregulation.
The NeoCons Again
Trump will also need to guard against two kinds of folks sneeveling back in again. One would be the neocons, who at least believe in something outside themselves, but who would radically undermine Trump’s strengths in foreign policy. Trump has the ability to project strength without ever actually punching the tar baby. There are options other than pacifism or perpetual war.
And the second kind of person is the perennial swamp creature, who since last Tuesday has been busy telling people in the DC area that he always thought Trump had a lot going for him, and that the animus directed at him was quite regrettable. “You may remember that I said so at the time.” They resemble the infamous Vicar of Bray, if you know what I mean. Keep those people out.
Transactional Businessman
Donald Trump has certain personal convictions, obviously, but they would revolve around things like border security and the beauty of words like tariff. When he speaks about such things, he is speaking from the heart. But in other areas, he is speaking as someone who has made certain pragmatic deals.
For example, in his post-election speech storming the gates of transgenderism, a speech that should delight us all, he was simply discharging a debt to Elon. That is a true motivating issue for Elon, and Trump is simply keeping his word. He is doing the same kind of thing he did with evangelical leaders in 2016. In exchange for their support, he promised them judges. Once elected, he kept his word. This keeping of promises was simply too much for some of the cool-kid evangelicals to bear, and so they moved into outrage/disappointment mode over his character issues. They would much prefer a shiny clean candidate who broke all his promises over a tawdry candidate who kept them.
Trump is going to keep his deals in other areas as well. Look for RFK Jr. to get a plum position regarding his concerns, say at the FDA, and for Tulsi to get something equally ripe, and the same for Vivek, and so on.
So when it comes to Trump, Christians ought not to waste any energy in denouncing his ideological impurities, which are really there, but rather should be preparing to negotiate with him. If we make a deal with him, we have good reason to believe that he will keep that deal. This is not because he believes in our life cause, but rather because he believes in deals.
Paris Is Worth a Mass
I like JD Vance a lot, and I have liked him since I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago. He is sharp, aggressive, and is a very talented politician. He is really intelligent, and he understands the force of the pro-life arguments that he abandoned in order to be considered for the veep slot. He knows what he did, in other words. So the positions he is currently taking on the life issue and the LGB issues are theologically and philosophically incoherent.
I do think that we should be willing to make deals with him also, but the one thing I would urge is that we not allow ourselves to be patted on the head as fundamentalists who can’t keep up with the intellectual sophistication of Vance’s adopted Catholicism. He is the one who has adopted positions that are intellectually bankrupt, and is far more personally utilitarian than Catholic. On the life issue, he is in principle a conservative Biden-Catholic, which then reduces to the state having the authority to draw arbitrary and capricious lines across the gestational process, and to declare by statist fiat that personhood exists on one side of the line and on the other side not. He draws this arbitrary line in a different place than would Biden, but it is arbitrary nonetheless. But I want to know why the state has the right to draw arbitrary lines like that, in defiance of both Scripture and natural revelation. Any bishop who would excommunicate Biden would need to do the same for Vance, at least if consistency mattered. And I say this as someone who is really glad that Vance won. But you know me. I am just a fundamentalist trying to follow an argument.
To repeat, to ground pro-life convictions on the basis of Scripture and natural law gives us personhood from the moment of conception on. To ground it on the fact that first trimester ultrasounds don’t pierce the conscience like later ultrasounds do, and therefore making it politically expedient to allow for early abortions, puts the definition of personhood up to the caprices and whims of radically inconsistent Catholics.
Smashmouth Everything Else-ism
Here at the end is where I want to sum up my thoughts about this election by putting all the rest of my jam on the biscuit. Smashmouth incrementalism (on the life issue) never forgets what the ultimate goal is, but is willing to take and hold territory on the way to that final goal. The mentality behind this approach also needs to be applied to all our other cultural and political efforts.
We live in a revolutionary age, and the central characteristic of revolutionary thinking is its impatience. But the characteristic reformational stance is not that way. As Christopher Dawson put it, the Christian church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient.
Our terminology of right wing and left wing came from the seating in the legislature after the French Revolution. The moderates sat on the right side of the chamber while the fire-eaters sat on the left. But they were both revolutionaries. That pattern continues down to the present, and can be really misleading. All true conservatives are categorized by outside observers as being “on the right.” That is the only shelf where they can put us. However, not all right-wingers are conservatives. We still have a great deal of revolutionary thinking on the right, which real conservatives reject.
Revolutionary thinking argues that if change is going to happen, then it needs to happen now. And in order for it to happen now, it needs to be fiery and convulsive. But reformational thinking is yeast in the loaf, working its way slowly. John Brown was an evil revolutionary, and William Wilberforce was a righteous reformer. This impatience is why revolutionary movements are always splintering into increasingly “righteous” shards all over the floor. Purity purges are always in style. Struggle sessions are always just around the corner, because each member of the coterie always has to learn to embrace all the things.
For example, our recent upsurge of Nazi wannabees is made up of revolutionaries, about to burn out in a fizzle. If you want to argue for white supremacy, then you really need to bring your A-game, which they plainly decided not to do. I suspect they will soon disappear in some sort of flash bang.
Big Eva, being more well-read, decided to opt for Eliot’s whimper instead of a bang. They are a spent force, largely discredited now. And being hollow men themselves, they decided on an end that was a tribute to a poem of that same name . . . and I just have to say that it was a literary chef’s kiss.
In the meantime, normal Americans, who believe in Jesus Christ, are going to be working steadily within the constitutional framework that is our rightful legacy, and over time, they are going to do a lot of good. This election provided us with a good example of that. But the example is simply of the first few miles in a long journey. And so we need to learn how to answer the eight-year-old voices from the back seat, asking if we are there yet.
Our Book Giveaways
The Canon title being given away (Nov. 11-15) is my commentary on the book of Romans, helpfully entitled To the Church at Rome.
And in my Mablog shoppe, I am now giving away:
21 Prayers for Pastors on the Lord’s Day.
Letters of Marital Counsel, found here.
Proof as Moral Obligation
And new today . . .
No Artificial Tweeteners