Gerson: Right counting on cultivation of desperation
As politics has become a religion in so many lives, political discourse has taken on theological overtones. I am not referring to President Trump’s accusation of a “witch hunt,” which places the FBI in the role of Puritan divines. This is merely an absurd metaphor.
What I am talking about is the appropriation — really the profanation — of religious ideas to serve ideological purposes. In the 20th century, this was often the preserve of the left. Marxism provided a soteriology — a theory of salvation — that caused people to die and kill in service to a redemptive ideal. It is what made communism so appealing, and so dangerous. It gave oppression the veneer of idealism.
The right’s response in the latter half of the 20th century was to reject the whole idea of politics as salvation. Conservatism sought to lower the sights of the political enterprise to serve humbler conceptions of individual liberty and the common good. The proper work of politics was seen as reform rather than redemption; working with the existing fabric of society rather than ripping it up and starting over.
More recently, however, the populist right has taken on a distinctively religious tone. Rather than offering a vision of salvation, it has embraced a certain eschatology: a theory of the end times. The threat of liberalism, in this view, has become so dire that the wrong outcome of a presidential race could mean the end of American civilization. One appalling defense of Trump dubbed 2016 the “Flight 93 election,” on the theory that conservatives have but two choices: “charge the cockpit” or “die.”
There is much wrong with that metaphor, which employs a unifying symbol of American courage as the method to encourage tribal hatreds. That involves a type of desecration, comparable to spray-painting “MAGA” on the Lincoln Memorial. But the September 2016 essay by Michael Anton, who subsequently found temporary employment in the Trump administration, went further than a vague reference to the apocalypse. The threat was defined as liberal activism to promote “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” This was designed, Anton argues, to make America “more Democratic” and “less traditionally American.”
In this secularized eschatology, alarmism is combined with nativism. The Antichrist, apparently, will speak Spanish.
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