Why the Center Cannot Hold

For months, the American press, aghast at Donald Trump's presidency, has been predicting a “blue wave” -- voters sweeping Republicans out office and instead electing a massive number of Democrats.

There’s no question that Democrats and progressives despise Trump and are motivated to vote. But the left-wing media engages in what I call “progpaganda” -- the promotion of things they want to be true, endeavoring to shape events, and not merely report on them. This is the same group predicting with “99 percent certainty” that Hillary Clinton was going to win the White House.

American voters appear to have gotten wise to the press’ efforts. But for some inscrutable reason, Republican politicians haven’t. Thus, true to form, the GOP is running with their tails tucked between their legs in an effort to escape the political tsunami that probably wouldn’t occur if they didn’t create it themselves. This year has an unusually high number of congressional Republicans retiring -- at last count, more than 40 -- including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who won his last election by nearly 35 percentage points.

The buzz is that those retiring see the writing on the wall, and are getting out while the getting’s good. (Vox put it bluntly: “Republicans are screwed.”) Some even speculate that establishment Republicans (who loathe Trump as much as the Democrats) are willing to lose Congress to thwart Trump and make a point.

Jennifer Rubin, a conservative writer for The Washington Post, explained in an interview with Politico that, having left the Republican Party, she does not see herself ever going back. Rubin -- and plenty of others on the right -- blame Trump for the GOP’s implosion.

They have it exactly backwards. It is the GOP’s self-destruction that made Trump’s meteoric rise not only possible, but inevitable. The roots of Trump’s triumph can be seen in the “shellacking” that voters gave Democrats in 2010, when they handed Republicans control of the House, and again in 2014 when Republicans took control of the Senate.

Republican and other conservative voters have been begging the GOP to represent their interests in Congress -- to no avail. The people want reduced taxation, simplified regulation, and -- critically -- enforcement of our immigration laws. (Trump’s popular bluster notwithstanding, we don’t really need a wall on our southern border; we need to enforce the laws we have on the books.) They want an end to interminable foreign wars and to international agreements that penalize American companies and American workers.

When the GOP took control of the House in 2010, they told voters they couldn’t do anything without the Senate. When voters gave them the Senate in 2014, the GOP complained that anything they passed would be vetoed by President Obama, a Democrat. In 2016, voters gave the GOP-controlled Congress a Republican president who would sign any remotely conservative legislation they sent across his desk -- whereupon Congress proceeded to do nearly nothing legislatively, save for a tax overhaul.

It’s almost as if, lacking any further excuses for political inertia, Republicans have thrown up their hands and are running for the exits. The predicted “blue wave” isn’t the explanation. It isn’t even their excuse. It’s their reprieve.

Republicans who blame Trump for their current circumstances are fools or blinkered cowards. Trump is only in the White House because the public got fed up with the GOP’s ambivalence, incompetence and incessant capitulation to a perennially hostile (and often frankly deceitful) media.

Compare the press’ coverage of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election with their complaints about Trump in 2016. Romney is upright, steadfast, honorable, truthful, moral, faithful to his wife, dignified, polite and respectful to his political opponents. The press characterized him as evil incarnate; a soulless, grasping robber baron willing to see widows and orphans die to advance his fortune. In 2016, they suddenly purported to care about honor, dignity and “statesmanship.”

Had Republicans displayed the courage of their convictions in the years leading up to 2016, instead of sucking their thumbs every time the press lied about them, voters would have had much greater confidence in the other GOP presidential candidates. As it was, having been sold down the river too many times, voters picked an outsider who clearly could stand up to the press and the left.

Those who bemoan the rise of populist politicians like Trump and the loss of the “political center” bring to mind “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a song written by Joni Mitchell (and based upon the poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats). Mitchell writes:

When the best among us -- our leaders -- lack conviction, what arises in their place is often the product of frustration and resentment. From there, it is backlash after backlash.

The predicted “blue wave” may take place. If it does, it’s worth asking what America will look like if progressives get control of the government. Because they will not suffer from the timidity and self-abasement that Republicans have shown.

From Dr. Russell Kirk, in an essay quoting Yeats:

“Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. . . .

And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. “They will never love where they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear.

Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lord’s favor. But no such age is ours.

Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado, I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistol’s. He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man; for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear, and thus are post-Christian without confessing it.

Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era. . . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. “Oh no, “ they murmured, “not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?”

For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . .

The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . .

Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . .

What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom.

Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the casuses of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch of the tranquillizing drug.

By fashionable philodoxies of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments.

Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . .”

- Posted: March 20, 2007 in From Russell Kirk.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.