You Cannot Shun Your Way to Victory

We May Need to Cut Ties With Trump Supporters, says popular liberal Christian columnist John Pavlovitz today. Reflecting on his relationships with what he imagines is a representative sampling of the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump, Pavlovitz mourns:

I’ve finally had to admit that many of these people were not all that decent, rational, or loving after all; that his cruelty, his violence, his hatred were what they wanted.
It wasn’t about them not understanding him, but about me not understanding them. They weren’t manipulated by him, they were empowered by him.

In so many cases, he didn’t poison their hearts, he reflected them.

They didn’t get fooled by a bigot, they got freed by one.

(Emphasis in the original.)

John has had another epiphany, and like most people who grew up in the church, these epiphanies are a constant theme in his writing. Traditionally, Christians have written about being awakened to the reality of their own failings – and the inescapable fact that they are loved and forgiven anyway. Contemporary left-wing Christians, of which John is certainly one, generally describe their most profound awakenings not as sudden realizations about their own depravity – but the overdue recognition that other people, especially white conservative people, are in fact really, really bad. And not only are they poisonous of heart, that poison was placed there not by the Original Sin in Eden, but by the foundational sin of the entire racist American experiment. So many people I once loved turn out to be wretches! Oh woe to pure and naive me!

The prophets of the Bible were not, as you probably know, a popular crew in their own lands. Hosea and Amos thundered against the wickedness of ancient Israel, and Israel did not want to hear it. Jeremiah preached with such dark vehemence that his very name became a term (jeremiad) for a bitter prophecy of doom. Their words may have become scripturally canonical over time, but these prophets were, to put it mildly, not well-received in their own eras by their own people.

The contemporary left, religious or otherwise, sees itself as part of an ancient prophetic tradition. The role of the responsible citizen is, apparently, to rail against injustices, to expose bigotries, to uncover and discard old and terrible lies. Particularly since 2020, and what might be termed the Woke Ascendancy, leftist politics have taken on an ever-more explicitly moral dimension. We are reminded frequently that we must awaken to the reality that, as the much-celebrated 1619 Project had it, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country… The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.”

That’s right, my lefty friends say. It may be an uncomfortable truth to hear, but it is the truth. And we must say it. Just like Jeremiah.

The prophets of old, however, were not trying to win democratic elections. They knew God was sovereign, and that that particular sovereign God was annoyed with His people. The prophets of old were offering a warning that the people could take or leave as they chose. They were not proposing a political program, much less seeking votes. The modern left, convinced of America’s foundational ills, remains strangely certain that you can win elections by telling people that they are misled at best – or bigots at worst. Recent results suggest that this isn’t a viable national strategy.

The comedian Neal Brennan tells a joke:

“Someone announces that they’re right-wing, and right-wingers are like, ‘Great! Come on in!’ Someone announces that they’re left-wing, and left-wingers are like, ‘Hmm. We’ll see about that.’”

Neal Brennan is younger than I am. It’s a much older joke; anyone familiar with the factional infighting of the left in this country will recognize that this strange obsession with purity politics is old indeed. The difference is that this fixation on ideological conformity, long confined to the margins, is now mainstreamed in the American center-left. There is very little room for disagreement on race, or gender, or history. There is a great deal of focus on ensuring that previously marginalized voices are centered – and previously “privileged” voices sit down, shut up, and listen.

“Talk less and listen more,” the New York Times told aspiring allies in 2020. And many allies, mostly wealthy, educated urban and suburban whites did listen. But the winnable middle? The prescription to “talk less and listen more” came across as preachy, judgmental, and contemptuous. The Democrats found an old t-shirt slogan “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man” and decided that this was a really clever talking point. Even this week, in the aftermath of a bitter electoral defeat, Rep. Jasmine Crockett – a rising star in the party – deployed that trope in a fierce tirade on CNN.

The Trump Administration is staffed by “mediocre white boys,” Crockett declared. For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that’s true. How is the use of “mediocre” and “white” as if they are synonyms a helpful strategy for broadening a coalition? How is the constant insistence that Trump only won because of racism and sexism helping you to defeat him? What hearts and minds are you changing? What new allies are you bringing in?

Eh, maybe it’s time to forget changing hearts and minds. John Pavlovitz wants to throw in the towel on that effort. A plurality of the American electorate is irredeemable, he says. John declares Trump voters are “perpetually cruel, intentionally ignorant, hopelessly malicious people.” The wheat must separate from the chaff, the sheep must give up on family dinners with the goats, the awakened empaths must no longer make small talk with the slumbering narcissists.

Except those “slumbering narcissists” just outvoted your team. Part of the reason, surely, is that you cannot disguise your contempt for them long enough to make common cause; part of the reason, surely, is that when they do express an interest in joining your side, they are told to stay quiet and go to the back of the line.

Fifty years ago, David Bowie sang a warning to those who could not disguise their contempt for a burgeoning social movement:

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through.

Wait a minute, you say. We are the children! We are the ones trying to change the world. Not the Trumpers! You’ve got it backwards!

You miss Bowie’s point. If you declare that millions are beneficiaries of unmerited privileges, that their ancestors were scoundrels, and demand that they prove their progressive bona fides in order to join your movement? You are spitting on them, and like the stiff-necked people who confounded Jeremiah, they will be understandably immune to your consultations. It should not come as news that people do not like to be hectored and shamed.

Shun the Trumpers if you must. Imagine yourselves to be the faithful remnant, and retreat into small communities of the like-minded. Sit around the campfire and swap stories of all the cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters and fathers to whom you no longer speak. Perhaps there will be prizes awarded for the one among you who has cut the most – or the closest -- ties. (“Tonight’s winner is Meghan, who stopped talking to her parents, left her husband, and even refuses to speak with her son, a Trump voter! Give it up for Meghan and her holy sacrifice!”) Sit and wait for a God whose existence you doubt to loose that fateful lightning from his terrible swift sword, and trample out that vintage where the red grapes of MAGA grow. Surely it can’t be much longer. Lord, why do you tarry?

You’ll be waiting a long time. You will miss a lot of people you once loved.

And you will lose the next election, too.