By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Author’s Note: I’ve tried to get
this piece out a couple of times, but the extraordinary events of the past few
weeks have brought other news to the top of the heap. This report from NatCon4
covers events that happened a few weeks ago, but, as
current affairs keep demonstrating, it is far from old news.
Earlier in the month, I attended NatCon4,
the fourth annual meeting of the so-called national conservatives, a right-wing
faction aligned with Donald Trump at home and with figures such as Viktor Orbán
and Giorgia Meloni abroad. (Meloni would not enjoy
being lumped in with Orbán, but I don’t draw the lines.) These would-be
radicals and rightists would very much like the Republican Party to be
something more like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National or Geert
Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid, focused on questions of national
identity. The worse sort identify strongly with Vladimir Putin, which you might
assume would put you out of contention for high office as a Republican, but you’d be wrong if you did.
Unlike their British exemplar, Nigel Farage—who at least
understands his own national traditions—the xenophobia of the so-called
national conservatives in the United States is not limited to immigrants but
extends also to economic contact with foreigners in the form of international
trade and investment. For all their raging against the Left, this puts their
economic views on free exchange and what we call, for lack of a better word, globalization
roughly in line with those of the average
Guardian columnist. They talk themselves into the preposterous
belief that buying timber from Canada to build houses in the United States, for
example, is evidence that the scheming transnational elites love money more
than they love their countries, and that there is insufficient patriotism among
the American nomenklatura, as tribune
of the American plebs Sir Niall Ferguson calls them—instead of, you know,
there being a lot of trees in Canada and a lot of demand for
houses in the United States.
More than a few of these NatCons are profoundly stupid or
willfully ignorant—don’t try explaining the difference between a trade deficit
and a fiscal deficit to this crowd, or the fact that the Social Security “trust
fund” is a figure of speech—but mostly what they are is angry and insecure. The
people in the audience are angry and insecure, at least. The ones up on
the stage are, in no small part, what they accuse the hated American
“elites” of being: canny and amoral entrepreneurs willing to sell the authentic
long-term interests of their country and their countrymen for prices that are
surprisingly low. You see a lot of retreads from the old conservative circuit
at NatCon, talking about how Republicans and conservatives have been doing it
wrong for all these years, which makes you wonder what they were doing when
they were running conservative institutions or serving in government.
Sens. Rick Scott, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson shared a
stage in which
they whined, essentially with a single voice, that somebody ought to do
… something! As though they were not senators and, in Scott’s case, a former
governor and contender for Senate leadership in the post-Mitch McConnell era.
(You’re going to miss Cocaine Mitch when he is gone.) That panel was especially
annoying, as one of the things you’ll hear if you are a conservative critic of
Trump is that you are just one of those “elites” hoping for invitations to
Washington dinner parties, doing nothing while Congress spends us into penury.
The senators on that stage spoke very proudly of attending a series of dinner
parties during which they discussed plans to achieve something they all
wanted—raising the debt ceiling so that Congress has more headroom to spend us
into penury. I hope the canapés were good.
(I get a lot of that “inside the Beltway” talk directed
at me. In reality, I live safely distant from Washington, and the only
Georgetown cocktail party I have attended in the past decade was Jonah
Goldberg’s birthday party, which was a lot of fun, as I blurrily recall.)
The weird thing is that if you ask these knuckleheads
what the hell it is they think they are doing, they’ll tell you—many of them
will—that they’re doing all this because they are Christians.
About that, I have some thoughts.
As any halfway serious religiously minded person would
have predicted, the combination of Christianity and nationalism has profoundly
corrupting and trivializing effects on Christianity. The human being being
human, he lives in a small world in the here and now, and whatever spheres of
profundity he may meditate upon when the spiritual mood is upon him, most of
his time and attention is taken up by the essential human things: competition
for material necessities, sexual partners, and—of highest importance once the
physical requirements have been satisfied—status.
Eternity feels really far away—although it isn’t, it is
already here—whereas the coming election in November feels immediate and
urgent. The need to make such contests feel even more immediate and more
urgent is why we have all of these amoral entrepreneurs trying to convince your
grandfather that this is the most important election in American history, that
the choice is between restoration and ruination, etc. If your grandfather has a
minute to stop and think and turns his eyes toward the eternal things, it is
going to be a lot harder for the Heritage Foundation to take $500 from him with
one of its gross, dumb, dishonest direct-mail “surveys.” Whatever you hear from
the pious ladies and gentlemen on the NatCon stage—or at the RNC—the last thing
they want is for these rubes to actually turn their eyes toward Heaven, lest
they notice that God is not watching Fox News, but is watching them.
As it stands, it is inevitable that among these
professing Christians and avowed nationalists, the Christianity is subordinated
to the nationalism.
Yoram Hazony, who is a big deal in this circle (but not
such a big deal that they didn’t misspell his name on at least one sign), is,
in my view, not much of a political writer, but he is even less of a
theologian. (One might not expect an Israeli-American Jew to be entirely up to
speed on the finest points of Reformed doctrine.) He hectored the assembled
believers, telling the gathered representatives of however many of the
6,000-odd (some of them very odd) flavors of Protestantism that they should just
get over their religious differences—and, indeed, that Catholics and
Protestants should just get over their differences, in order to more
efficiently serve the cause of nationalism. Ah, yes: Just get over it! Where
was Yoram Hazony 500 years ago, when he might have done some good? Poor Martin
Luther did not have anybody like Yoram Hazony to advise him.
Hazony is one of those great anti-elitist American
nationalists who went to Princeton and is a dual citizen who lives in a
different country when he is not lecturing Americans about their need for a
stronger sense of national identity, so I suppose that his simpleminded
abrasion of the differences between different Christian communions is of a
piece with the rest of his output. Just get over it. Papacy or
presbytery? Magisterium or sola scriptura? Augustine or Olsteen? Just
get over it. Who cares?
Well, all of the schism and debate in the Christian world
is predicated on the notion that Somebody cares, and that this matters. Not
only does it matter, it matters a great deal. From the point of view of
history—and from the point of view of a serious believer—the religious
differences between Catholics and Protestants surely are of more consequence
than the national differences between the Flemish and the Walloons or even
between the French and the Belgians or the Germans and the Austrians. These questions
involve not only the first things but also the final things. It doesn’t matter
to Hazony et al. because, for them, Trump is the thing—this is pure
idolatry.
But best for the rubes not to think too carefully about
these things. Because there isn’t a lot of obvious support for such
formulations as: “I take my Christianity very seriously; ergo, I must be an
enthusiastic and uncritical supporter of Donald J. Trump.” Or: “I take my
Christianity very seriously; ergo, f—k those immigrants.”
Set aside the obvious questions of what we might very
charitably call “inconsistency,” as much fun as it is to meditate on the fact
that the people who dream of prohibiting pornography are lined up behind the
man who has
literally appeared in pornographic films. Set aside even the character
of Trump himself, a man who never has had a wife or a business partner he
didn’t betray, whose troubles in New York originate in his having been obliged
to pay hush money to a pornographic actress with whom he had a sad little
hotel-room tryst while his third wife (an immigrant who very
likely worked illegally) was at home nursing a baby. What morality asks of
Donald Trump is one question, but the relevant one here is what Donald Trump
demands of his adherents. The thou-shalt-not that should be top of mind here is
not Trump’s adultery (or his idolatry, or his coveting, or his lying)
but the Trump movement’s demand that its adherents bear false witness as a test
of loyalty and condition for good standing.
That Trump recently was nicked by martyrdom makes it that
much easier to sanctify the lies and the fraud and the adultery and the cruelty
and the bulls—t.
Is there a single honest Trump apologist in
America? I cannot think of one. There certainly weren’t any to be seen at the
RNC. All of them bear false witness: about the 2020 election, about the origin
of Trump’s legal troubles, about his business and political record, about his
character, about his religious convictions, about Joe Biden, about the
Democrats, about the state of the country, about Ukraine, about Russia. Trump
is dishonest himself and a spur to dishonesty in others. Read Steve Hayes’ recent
conversation with born-again bulls—t artist Mike Lee to get a taste of it.
Yoram Hazony can stand up there and declare that you
cannot call yourself a conservative if you have any hesitation about public
displays of the Ten Commandments. But can you call yourself a Christian—or, in
Hazony’s case, an observant religious Jew—if you stand in front of those
commandments and systematically violate them in the cause of political
expedience?
“Woe
unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light,
and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! …
Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the
righteous from him.”
I am all for a more prominent role for religion and
religious figures—especially clergymen and religious intellectuals—in public
life. But I expect that to yield results rather different from the ones desired
by the NatCon gang.
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