Civil War
WITH THE VICTORY OF Donald Trump in the 2016 election, the nation’s political divisions reached new levels of acrimony and distrust. Before the new president had settled into the Oval Office, congressional Democrats were boycotting his inauguration, calling for his impeachment, and declaring their opposition movement a “Resistance.” The last time Democrats mounted a resistance to a duly elected president was in 1860, when the commander-in-chief was Abraham Lincoln. Commentators quickly began referring to the partisan conflicts that accompanied Trump’s victory as America’s “Second Civil War.”
Observers on the left were bewildered by Trump’s success, particularly his support from evangelicals and religious Americans. According to Pew Research, 81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump, a man who seemed anything but a model of Christian morality.1 Evangelicals still voted for him—and it made leftists apoplectic. Typical of their reactions was a piece by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who fumed—in a typically deranged manner—that the only good thing to come from the “terrible, terrifying Trump years” was “the discrediting of evangelical Christianity. . . . They’ve sold their souls to Donald Trump, who has partaken freely of practically every vice and depravity known to man.”2 The left could not fathom why Christians preferred a morally flawed man, in Trump, who promised to defend religious liberty over a morally flawed woman, in Hillary, who was bound to take it away.
Not only did liberals attack Trump viciously, but they held Trump responsible for the unhinged nature of the attacks on him. To Trump’s enemies, he provoked this bitterly personal warfare against him by his unorthodox, combative political style. They thought: What should Trump expect after tagging his opponent “Crooked Hillary”?
In fact, Trump is more accurately seen as a political counterpuncher, and most of his barbs were reactions to others’ attacks on him. Hillary and her proxies had already called him a racist and deplorable and not fit for office. His survival in the sixteen-candidate Republican primary had been a clinic in how to throw rivals off balance while responding to their challenges. At the same time, it’s safe to say, no president in history has been the subject of as many, or as vicious, verbal assaults (including personal attacks on himself and his family) as Donald Trump.
Trump was a lightning rod for political divisions that had been deepening for decades. Mainstream commentators who wrote about these political divisions seemed to consistently blame conservatives for the discord. They rarely gave even a nod to the fact that conservatives were fighting a defensive battle to preserve their constitutional liberties.
America—an “Oppressor” Nation
A prime example of the myopic perspective of most political commentators was The Second Civil War, a book by veteran reporter Ronald Brownstein. Published in 2007, near the end of the Bush administration and ten years before the Trump era, Brownstein’s book opens with a salvo against Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader. DeLay was forced out of his leadership position and into retirement by a Democrat-engineered criminal prosecution. He was convicted of conspiracy to violate election laws, but the conviction was overturned years later—after his career and reputation had been ruined.
Brownstein seized on a line from what he snarkily called DeLay’s “farewell address,” in which he had advised his fellow Republicans, in passing, not to cooperate so much with their Democratic colleagues. This was probably because DeLay, like many others on the right, thought Republicans regularly got rolled when they did cooperate. But Brownstein cites DeLay’s advice as a symptom of the “extreme partisanship” that had “paralyzed Washington and polarized America.” Republicans were of course responsible.
Nowhere in the 484-page book does Brownstein refer to the 60-year aggression by the left against America’s religious communities and America’s founding principles. Roe v. Wade is mentioned exactly once, in passing, on p. 396. The term “religious liberty” is missing from its index.
The actual origins of America’s current political divisions can be traced to the emergence of the radical left in the 1960s and the riot they staged at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Police and National Guardsmen were forced to battle thousands of rioting members of such groups as the Youth International Party (Yippies), the Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society. The fallout from this debacle destroyed the presidential hopes of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a liberal whose sin was to have supported America’s anti-Communist war in Vietnam.
Humphrey’s defeat paved the way for radicals to move into the Democratic Party en masse, changing its structures and then its politics. Among the radicals’ first achievements was the creation of congressional “caucuses” based on race, ethnicity, gender, and support for progressive causes. These caucuses provided the platforms from which they advanced their leftist agendas within the party, agendas focused on “identity politics” and making America the bad guy.
Over the next four years, the far-left radicals—led by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda—marched into the Democratic Party and swept traditional liberalism away. They replaced it with a leftism that views American society as a system of oppressive hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Leftists believe these hierarchies must be overthrown. Theirs is a collectivist ideology, rooted in Marxism, that is opposed to the American ideas of individual rights, individual accountability, and individual equality. By proposing that America oppresses races and genders, it is a politics that is blind to the opportunities and rights that America actually offers to all its citizens.
Labeling Political Opponents “Phobic”
The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign was a classic prosecution of these identity politics. Although the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, had built her entire career on the political shoulders of her presidential husband, she framed her campaign as a movement against an imaginary “war on women.” She claimed that an invisible patriarchal conspiracy held women down, keeping them oppressed beneath a “glass ceiling.” Sexism—not her own shortcomings as a candidate—blocked her way to the top. These views were not exclusive to Hillary Clinton—these were now the core doctrines of the Democratic Party.
A seminal moment occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign when Hillary addressed an “LGBT for Hillary” fund-raising event. Speaking to the crowd of radical activists, she said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. . . . Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”
This is a revealing statement. According to Hillary and her supporters, America is divided into two kinds of people. On the one hand there are real Americans who care about gay people, minorities, and other victim groups. On the other there are the Trump supporters, the un-American “deplorables” who hate and oppress society’s victims.
This was a frank expression of the Democrats’ hatred for their political opponents. It’s also a major departure from traditional American values of tolerance, compromise, and respect for dissenting opinions. It exposes how the very language of the Democrats’ politics is designed to dehumanize and delegitimize anyone who disagrees with its leftist agendas.
Stigmatizing one’s opponent is a classic radical tactic. It is the thirteenth rule of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”3 Attack your opponents personally and cut them off from any possibility of sympathy. That is why radicals paint their political opponents as homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. They’re not just good-but-misguided people whose religious convictions have led them to a contrasting viewpoint. They are bad people possessed by irrational fears of “the others” because they are different.
According to the left, in other words, people who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage have a kind of mental illness. They are not reasonable people, and their thoughts are not rational thoughts. These ritualistic indictments of the sanity of political opponents destroy the fabric of America’s pluralism, which requires a respect for opposing views and a search for compromise. Calling critics “phobic” is a rationale for denying their First Amendment rights. Shouts of “No free speech for homophobes or Islamophobes” are already heard from leftists on college campuses. Or, to put them all in one fearful basket: “No free speech for fascists.”
“Sexism” and “People of Color”
To erase individual features and circumstances, and to collectivize people into victim groups, the left employs ideological terms of art like “sexism” and “people of color.” “Sexism” is a bastardized term coined by sixties’ radicals in a calculated attempt to appropriate the moral authority of the civil rights movement. The goal is to place “sexism” on the same moral plane as “racism.”
Only a perverse reading of history and the social relations between the sexes could lead to this offensive attempt to link the treatment of African Americans with attitudes toward women. But for radicals the conflation of the two is essential to their Marxist vision of society as a hierarchy of oppression.
Before the invention of the term “sexism,” there were a multitude of adjectives to describe specific bad behaviors involving men and women: “inappropriate,” “indecent,” “rude,” “boorish,” “prejudiced,” “offensive”—all the way to criminal behaviors such as molestation and rape. These adjectives describe a spectrum of behaviors with gradations from what is merely annoying to what is prosecutable. The term “sexism” erases these distinctions and obliterates nuances and individual circumstances by making all these behaviors instances of sexual oppression. Once the obliteration of specific detail takes place, “sexism” can even make a compliment—“My, you’re good-looking”—appear to be an example of gender oppression, and prosecutable as such. An “inappropriate” or “offensive” remark might demonstrate poor judgment. But a “sexist” remark is a criminal injustice.
Differentiating between offensive behaviors, instead of subsuming them under the rubric “sexism,” makes it possible to judge individual actions and motives on the way to arriving at a just remedy. But once these behaviors are grouped under a single term, the alleged “war against women” can begin to seem real. Because it is improper to put oppressor and oppressed on the same moral plane, we are no longer discussing a single instance of inappropriate behavior or a particular interaction in which the female may also share the blame. We are discussing the alleged general “oppression” of women by men. By obliterating the particulars and casting the parties as genders rather than individuals, the question of guilt and innocence is preordained.
The left has also coined the phrase “people of color” to facilitate its anti-white racism. Like “sexism,” this term, too, has entered the general language. The phrase is not grammatical English; nor does it define a coherent group with a common social identity or interest. The Tutsis and Hutus of Rwanda are both people of color. But the Hutus carried out a genocide in which they massacred a million Tutsis. “People of color” is an ideological device whose sole purpose is to promote the idea that people of color are a group oppressed by the only people who are not “of color”—white people.
“People of color” obscures the fact that white majorities in America supported and, in fact, architected the Civil Rights Acts, and have helped to create a society in which black Americans have more rights and opportunities and privileges than blacks in any other country in the world, even those ruled by blacks. “People of color,” with its implication that blacks are still oppressed, obscures the reality that the majority of blacks in America are successful as the result of choices freely made in a free society, while a smaller underclass of blacks have somehow not been able to take advantage of the same opportunities. In other words, “people of color” is a term designed to obscure the fact that people have choices regardless of color for which they are responsible. Bottom line: “people of color” is a racist term that should have no place in America’s culture of equal rights. It is a term created by people who are at war with this culture.
These politically correct words and phrases are weapons in the war of “resistance” that Democrats have waged against Trump from the moment he gained traction as a political figure. Trump was never an ideological conservative. If he has an ideology, it is patriotism. During the campaign this was manifest in his concern about the state of his country, the short shrift it had been given in global trade deals, the trillions squandered in wars that resulted in no gain, the porous state of its borders and the precarious condition of its security. His campaign themes made his patriotism clear: Make America prosperous again, make America safe again, make America strong again, make America great again.
“Patriotism” is not a term of endearment to people on the left, to the globalist elites, or to Democrats generally, who have found it difficult since Korea to support America’s wars against its enemies. The racial haters on the left, in the Democratic Party and the media generally, have twisted Trump’s patriotism and condemned it as a jingoistic and bigoted bravado. Unable to attack patriotism directly, Democrats attacked Trump’s love of country by calling it “white nationalism” and “white supremacy,” i.e., white racism. When he attempted to block—even temporarily—immigrants from a handful of terrorist countries, because their governments could not vet them, the left tarred him as “anti-immigrant” and racist. These extreme distortions of Trump’s positions were relentlessly repeated as the core themes of the Democrats’ resistance, all part of their capitulation to leftist hatred of America itself.
Yet it was precisely Trump’s patriotism that attracted populist support for his candidacy. His genuine love for his country was a key factor in gaining the crucial support of evangelical Christians and Catholics. This coalition pushed Trump over the top in the Republican primaries, when other factions of the party remained skeptical. The same coalition stood strongly behind him through his victory in the general election.
Why the Religious Right Embraced Trump
To the left, the support Trump received from the religious right remained an insoluble mystery. He was thrice married, not particularly religious, and often vulgar and carrying some unsavory sexual baggage. He had supported abortions and gay marriage in the past. Yet evangelicals and Catholics cheered him at rallies, proudly wore Make America Great Again! hats, and pulled the lever for him at the polls.
The reason liberals didn’t understand the religionists was because they had contempt for them, regarding them as bigoted and stupid. But anyone concerned about the half century of aggression that religious communities had suffered at the hands of the left could understand. Anyone who identified with the fight that conservatives waged in defense of religious liberty could understand. And anyone sympathetic to the unapologetic patriotism of religious people could understand why they were solidly for Trump, despite his flaws.
Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, explained this phenomenon succinctly: “My support for Trump has never been based upon shared values; it is based upon shared concerns.”4 These shared concerns have made the religious right a crucial support not only for Trump but for American values and America’s constitutional framework, which are under attack from its enemies within.
Instead of recognizing the way Trump’s patriotic instincts resonated with the religious right, Democrats and their partisan media allies reached for the race card to discredit both. They concluded that evangelicals were attracted to Trump because of racism. “The media have been obsessed with white evangelicals’ unmovable support for Donald Trump,” an opinion piece in the Washington Post reported. “As a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute shows, white evangelicals continue to be dedicated to Trump. His support among this group is at the highest levels ever, despite his alleged moral trespasses and lack of religious orientation” [emphasis added].
The writer goes on to explain: “My new book, Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change, shows white evangelicals are more conservative than other whites on policy issues including welfare, climate change and immigration. Their conservative reaction to demographic change is at the heart of their political agenda and perhaps a response to increasing racial diversity within their own religious community”5 [emphases added].
This last point was a reference to the fact that 24 percent of the evangelical community is actually composed of minorities, whose views the leftist commentator had no intention of exploring. No evidence is given that white evangelicals are racists or that an aversion to demographic change is “at the heart” of the conservative political agenda. But in the rhetorical lexicon of the left, the only conceivable reason one could have for opposing radical politics—anti–free speech, open borders, anti-business, anti-military—is bigotry.
Evangelicals were ready to embrace Trump because he cared about America, and the principles behind America’s greatness, which are Christian in origin. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 and Trump promised to fill the vacancy with an “originalist” judge from a list provided by the conservative Federalist Society, the alliance between Trump and evangelicals was sealed. This promise reflected both Trump’s concern for a community under attack and also his understanding that the same attacks imperiled America’s social contract. Trump’s determination to secure America’s borders, and to brave the racist slurs that the “no-borders” Democrats hurled at him, was a sign of the patriotic passion that formed his political core.
Christians were also reassured by his combative nature, which indicated to all conservatives that the long night of weak Republican leadership and inadequate defense of the Republic was over. There was a new commander-in-chief at the helm, and he was going to defend their country and Constitution.
Trump’s bold actions exposed just how extensively the anti-American left’s influence had come to shape Democratic Party politics. Senator Kamala Harris is one of a handful of leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Like her colleagues, she is a supporter of racial preferences, a practitioner of racial politics, and an advocate of open borders. She opposed Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on the grounds that “Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued legalisms over real lives.”6 In other words, if he were made a Supreme Court Justice, Gorsuch would value the Constitution over Harris’s political prejudices.
When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in Trump’s second year, Democrats went into panic mode at the prospect that the new court might overturn Roe v. Wade. Kamala Harris said of Trump’s appointee, D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, “We’re looking at the destruction of the Constitution.”7 This was the view of leftists who had no respect for the Constitution to begin with. For them, overturning an invented constitutional right as in Roe v. Wade, and allowing fifty diverse states to decide what is appropriate abortion policy for their people—which is what would happen if Roe were overturned—was “the destruction of the Constitution.”
Speaking at a Howard University commencement in 2017, Harris urged her audience to join the Democrats’ resistance to the Trump administration: “Graduates, indeed we have a fight ahead. This is a fight to define what kind of country we are, and it’s a fight to determine what kind of country we will be.” Ignore for a moment the impropriety of addressing a graduating class of students as though they were Democratic Party operatives. Instead, focus on the statement itself.
The call “to define what kind of country we are” is an ominous agenda for Americans. The Constitution already defines the kind of country we are. That document has served America well for over 200 years. It has made this nation a beacon of freedom for the entire world. America is unique among nations in having been defined in its creation. But redefining America is exactly what the radical left and the Democratic Party have been doing for the last fifty years.
It took a Civil War and 200 years of sacrifice and struggle to achieve a society that approaches the ideals laid down in our country’s founding documents. That achievement is now endangered by a party committed to an identity politics that is the antithesis of the ideas and principles the founding established. Instead of cherishing religious liberty and individual freedom, the Democrats offer us a reversion to tribal loyalties and collectivist values. They regard immutable origins—skin colors, ethnicities, genders, and classes—as primary factors in judging individuals and determining what is just.
A nation divided by such fundamental ideas—individual freedom on one side and group identity on the other—cannot long endure, any more than could a nation that was half slave and half free. The urgency that drew the religious right into politics fifty years ago is now an urgency of the nation itself.