JD Vance Think You are not Christian Enough~One Wonders if He Picked that up While Crossdressing?
 |
| George Douglas |
Opinion Columnist
New York Times
JD Vance doesn’t think our nation is Christian enough to be truly free. Your faithlessness has broken the social compact, and now it is time for the government to seize greater control.
If I had to distill many of our most important economic and cultural controversies to a single question, it would be, “Who decides?” Who are the people who make the most important decisions that affect your life?
My default answer — and the default answer for my branch of American conservatism — has long been quite simple. You decide. You are the person best equipped to understand your own life, your own family, your own career and your own business.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t make profound mistakes. It doesn’t mean that you’re inherently good. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you should walk through life alone — all of us lean on parents, spouses, friends, colleagues, counselors or pastors to help us navigate our way through life.
But what it does mean is that in a world in which every human being is flawed, there is no one innately better qualified than you to decide your own destiny.
I know that some readers want to know how my emphasis on liberty squares with my anti-abortion views, but I see the two views as perfectly consistent. Our rights end where another person’s begins, and none of us have the right to harm another human being in the absence of extreme circumstances. I recognize that people of good faith and good will differ on the personhood of the unborn child, but once you acknowledge an unborn child as a person (as I do), an obligation of care locks in.
Though I’m not a libertarian (I’m more libertarianish), I’ve always appreciated the slogan of the libertarian magazine Reason — “Free minds and free markets.” I’m also reminded of the motto of the Free Soil party, a 19th-century precursor to the Republican Party: “Free soil, free speech, free labor and free men.”
But with great freedom comes great responsibility. Let’s go back to the concept of a social compact. I believe one exists — just not in the same form as Vance believes. As the Declaration of Independence argues, one of the reasons a government exists is to secure the rights of the people.
At the same time, however, the people have certain obligations to one another. Specifically, legal freedom isn’t the same thing as moral license. Ideally, we’ll use our liberty for virtuous purposes. Speaking the truth. Providing for a family. Caring for those in need.
Or, as John Adams wrote in his letter to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, of course. I’ve spent entirely too much of my family’s hard-earned money on superhero movies, for example. (The new “Spider-Man” is glorious.) I’m also a bit too fond of extremely off-road-capable four-wheel-drive trucks — just the thing that every urban columnist needs.
But here’s the crucial point: Unless I harm someone else, it’s not the government’s job to determine whether I’m virtuous enough to enjoy liberty, including economic liberty. It’s my responsibility. I make my choices, I experience the consequences of those choices, and then I change (or don’t change) accordingly.
I recognize that nothing I’m saying is terribly new or original. Instead, I’d label it as a rather standard conservative understanding of the American experiment in the era before President Trump’s dominance. The role of conservatives was often to nudge (and sometimes try to shove) our nation in the direction of more freedom and more choice.
While this could often veer into a reflexive, unthinking and sometimes harmful antigovernment impulse, the pre-Trump push for, say, more free speech in higher education, more religious freedom, fewer constraints on economic activity and greater educational choice was a declaration less that the government was malicious than that it was underqualified.
It was not capable of centrally planning a complex economy, much less of determining the economic or educational future that was best for you.
In this context, democratic socialism was and is a serious problem. It nudges (and sometimes tries to shove) toward more control. When Bernie Sanders said in 2015, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he wasn’t just linking two things — market-driven growth and childhood poverty — that had little to do with each other; he was making decisions that were not his to make.
I’m sharing this little pre-Trump conservative manifesto because it’s important to understand just how radical Vance has become and just how radical the post-Trump Republican Party might become if Vance inherits it.
This summer Michael Knowles, a podcaster with The Daily Wire, interviewed Vance. It was one of the most illuminating discussions of Vance’s views that I’ve seen. I urge you to watch the entire thing, but there is one exchange that stood out. When talking about the former Republican emphasis on economic freedom (as personified by Milton Friedman), Vance said times had changed.
“In hindsight,” Vance said, “part of why Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.”
He continued, “And so being laissez-faire in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez-faire in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites.”
Can we pause here for a moment and reflect on how weird it is for the vice president in Trump’s administration — the most corrupt and libertine president of my lifetime, leading the most corrupt and libertine movement of my lifetime — to scold America for squandering its Christian inheritance?
But even putting aside the staggering hypocrisy, I know what a lot of you are thinking, especially those who remember the 1980s. Vance was born in 1984, so that part of the past is a foreign country to him. It’s still fresh and present to me. I was a Republican. I admired Reagan, but I would not describe America then as particularly devout.
Yes, church attendance was higher, but so were the homicide rate, the divorce rate and the abortion rate. Cocaine in all its forms seemed to be the national drug of choice, and if anything, pop culture was just as raunchy and libertine as it is now. (I’ve got stories from a heavy metal concert or two.)
Some measures of national health have gotten worse since 1980. We have more drug overdose deaths, for example, and there is a real crisis in young people’s mental health, but on balance, America is safer and more prosperous, families are more stable, and the nation is more just and free than it was when it was still emerging from the angst and tumult of the 1970s.
And what does Vance think has replaced Christianity in American public life? Economics. He writes in his book “Communion”: “As the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values.”
There’s a lot of straw-manning in Vance’s arguments. While there are certainly people who think of life in purely economic terms, I haven’t met many of them. In reality, sound economics doesn’t replace moral reasoning; it aids moral reasoning.
Take, for example, affordable housing. A just and moral nation should strive to create an economy and culture in which every person has attainable access to safe and secure housing. Economics helps us separate intention from outcomes. Rent control, for example, can do more harm than good.
Similarly, it can certainly be a sound national goal to preserve a robust manufacturing base. National security demands it, for example. But economics tells us that tariffs can inhibit manufacturing job growth by making products more expensive.
And if you disagree with the choices consumers make, well, then they didn’t really need those things anyway. Or as Trump said, echoing Sanders, when his tariffs were starting to bite, kids “don’t need to have 30 dolls; they can have three.” Vance put it differently: “A million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”
I guess it’s not democratic socialism when a Republican says it.
Vance has even taken aim at the idea that the U.S. dollar should be strong enough to function as the world’s primary reserve currency, seeing it as merely enabling “our mass consumption of mostly useless imports.”
You might disagree, but I don’t think of my toaster, microwave and washing machine (to use a few examples) as “mostly useless.” I see them as useful, and the broad availability of these goods has improved many millions of American lives.
Vance doesn’t limit his condemnations to consumer goods. Speaking to Knowles, Vance said of his feminist classmates, “They define success and achievement as spending as much time in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs. I mean, it’s enough to make somebody a Marxist and say you have totally internalized a set of ideas that is completely opposed to your well-being as a human being.”
You might agree or disagree with any given person’s career choices (the Puritan work ethic has its dark side), but I question the role of the vice president of the United States in that argument. My wife’s career is, quite frankly, none of his business.
It would be a profound mistake to underestimate Vance’s potential appeal. It is true that many Americans make terrible choices. Many of us would absolutely agree that consumerism is bad for the soul. To counter Gordon Gekko (speaking of the allegedly devout 1980s): Greed is not, in fact, good.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
And then if you wrap your moral condemnation in the cross and tie it to a mythical, idealized past, you will tempt millions of Americans into believing that their authoritarian impulses are biblical — especially when you train nearly all of your fire on those godless secular elites who are the root of all evil.
Vance’s ideas are rooted in a contentious branch of Catholic political theology that at its extreme end calls for a virtual union of church and state (called integralism) and at the very least says that government should be clothed with sufficient power to provide for the common good.
Of course, every government should strive to secure the common good, but liberty is one of the most vital common goods in American life. It’s the foundation of the Republic.
But what if liberty conflicts with Vance’s view of the common good? Well then, liberty must give way.
We see this impulse everywhere on the New Right. Free speech is a vital American value, until it’s exercised by drag queens (or Jimmy Kimmel). Socialism is a threat to American freedom, until the Trump administration takes ownership stakes in multiple major American corporations. Religious liberty is a cornerstone of the American experiment, unless Muslims want to open a mosque or have equal access to religious schools.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Don’t think for a moment that the collapse of Trumpism would defeat the New Right. You can see the narrative already forming: The nation was primed for a renaissance until those dreaded neocons hijacked the administration and manipulated us into war with Iran.
In other words: Trumpism hasn’t failed; true Trumpism has never been tried.
In reality, the best way to understand Trumpism isn’t that it replaced one Republican ideology with another but rather that a cult of personality essentially destroyed Republican ideology altogether and we do not yet know what will take its place.
Into this vacuum steps Vance, with a message that is almost perfectly calculated to appeal to angry Christian ears: They did this to you. They replaced the faith of our fathers with an empty faith in economics and a destructive worship of the individual. They hollowed out our churches. They shuttered our factories.
And now they must be obliterated. They must be silenced. Or, to use Vance’s words, “Go after the companies that are destroying this country and reward the companies that are building it.” And who decides which companies are in which category? Well, Vance and his allies, of course.
But that’s nonsense. The role of the government isn’t to withhold liberty from its enemies but to protect the freedom of all its citizens — not because we’re inherently good or wise but because we know the government is not.
Comments