With Election Day 2024 in sight, I could make one daring prediction: Your party just isn’t going to win.
You might challenge me on this, saying, “But, RDM, you don’t know what party I, the reader, support.” That’s true—but I stand by my forecast. That’s because irrespective of what party wins the presidency, the Congress, or the state houses this November, nobody goes to win.
I don’t mean, after all, that one party or other won’t see its candidate within the Oval Office come January, or that we won’t see people being sworn in as members of Congress, senators, governors, and all the remainder. That sort of winning will occur, because it all the time does. What I mean is that nobody goes to win the way in which too lots of us define winning on this strange era.
In his recent book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, Yuval Levin points out a dangerous illusion of the current: the notion that after one decisive victory, whoever is “on the opposite side” will go away and won’t should be accommodated.
In truth, Levin argues, American life is pulled in two directions: toward what may very well be called “conservatism” in a single direction and “progressivism” in the opposite. Those visions look different in numerous times—and, often, the 2 sides swap out on specific policy positions—but the essential tension is all the time there.
This is because, Levin writes, any group of human beings goes to have disagreements. A constitutional order doesn’t eradicate those disagreements but as an alternative structures a careful balance between majority rule and minority rights.
Levin argues that one in every of the explanations—with some exceptions, after all—that local and state politics are likely to be less toxic than national presidential elections is that, normally, those debates are likely to be about issues more immediately recognized as practical—what roads get paved, what hospitals get funded—and thus “lend themselves higher to bargaining and accommodation.”
At the national level, though, our candidates and our parties aren’t as much about specific issues as they’re about tribal identity. Even when motivated by grievance and resentment, as national politics now are, the grievances and resentments are about far various things than, say, the problem of free silver within the William Jennings Bryan era or corporate monopolies within the Theodore Roosevelt era. What this results in, Levin contends, is the present situation—by which presidential elections develop into about “political expression” slightly than “civic motion.”
When we peel down below problems with national scope, we frequently find that the elemental problem just isn’t that the “other side” isn’t going to perform what we would like but that the opposite side exists in any respect. With that in mind, we are able to assume that this one election will put all that aside, and that those people, whoever they’re, now permanently defeated and humiliated, will go away. But this just isn’t true.
In his book Democracy and Solidarity, political scientist James Davison Hunter identifies this very dynamic as a culture logic that seeks not specific policy goals but something much larger: recognition and standing and identity.
When that isn’t achieved, we poison ourselves with fantasies that sooner or later—possibly immediately—we are going to finally enact revenge on those that have injured us by not conferring the status we consider we deserve. We want to seek out our own identity within the sort of “negative solidarity” that unites against a standard oppressor. We start, then, to assume that each election is working toward a post-election reality where, because the old hymn puts it, “every foe is vanquished.”
In that sort of world, Hunter argues, by which the sense of status cannot ever be wholly fulfilled, the injury have to be continually emphasized. “Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and each meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve,” he writes.
If what we’re looking for just isn’t civic motion but status, then outrage becomes authority. This quest for moral price, status recognition, and self-esteem lends itself to exactly the sort of reality-television identity politics that we see immediately.
This becomes a cycle. The more we expect of our politics to specific who we’re, the less we expect our politics to really do. That sort of politics, in spite of everything, goes to result each time in what we’ve seen over the past 15 years: narrow majorities that teeter backwards and forwards between the parties. Big goals—a New Deal, a Cold War victory, a moon landing—seem out of touch, so we replace those goals with what Hunter calls “millennialism.”
Millennialism is, after all, not a political doctrine but a theological one, rooted within the Book of Revelation’s language of a thousand-year reign of Christ and his people. From the very starting, Christians have argued about what which means—is it a gift reality in heaven or a future expectation after the reign of Christ, or something else? History shows that when those styles of messianic expectations bubble up without the presence of the particular Messiah, they lead, at worst, to bloodshed—and, at best, to disillusionment and disappointment.
If Joe Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee seems to be) wins, the Trumpists and whatever passes for the “right” as of late will still be here. If Donald Trump is elected president, the “left” will still be around. Whatever your political opinions, you may’t have your millennium unless half the country is Raptured.
In his forthcoming bookOne Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, CT news editor Daniel Silliman looks on the fiftieth anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon through the grid of Nixon’s lifelong quest for approval.
Nixon’s father, Silliman recounts, ran a general store in what was once a church, hollowing out the steeple so he could sit and survey the shop from there, yelling criticisms at his son to work harder, do higher. Silliman demonstrates how Nixon sought security throughout his life within the approval of the voters who would send him to office, in Dwight Eisenhower as a father figure, and in his own conquer the “elites” from Harvard and Yale who had looked down on him.
Silliman argues that the explanation we even have the Watergate tapes is due to that drive for approval. Who, in spite of everything, would record the audio of each moment within the White House? Silliman compares Nixon’s motivation to the old Jack Chick tracts, “This Was Your Life,” by which, before the judgment seat, the sinner sees his entire life replayed in front of everyone (this tract terrified me as a toddler).
“Nixon had the same fantasy—an entire recording, everyone on tape from his time within the White House,” Silliman writes. “But in his version, he thought, he wouldn’t be condemned but justified.” With a record of his accomplishment as president, he could prove that he had done a very good job, that he was worthy of existing, that he was a fantastic man.
The tapes, after all, did the other. They showed him to be exactly what he feared people would think he was: crooked, dishonest, a failure—the primary president in history to be forced to resign.
Nixon was driven by the incorrect things. He expected an excessive amount of, and public opinion could never love him back. Politics could never be a judgment seat that would justify his life. In this moment in history, we expect something very similar out of our politics: a vindication of who’s right and who’s incorrect, a separation of the sheep from the goats, a final and definitive victory.
If that’s what we expect winning is, none of us will win. We will just descend increasingly more into resentment and outrage. We will activate those we counted on to offer us what they never could, or we are going to seethe in our fantasies of “next time,” once we (this time of course!) will get that ultimate win.
That’s not what winning is. Until we lose that expectation, we are going to keep losing—not only as a republic but as people whose lives are supposed to be about way more than keeping rating.
No one will win this election, ultimately. No one will lose this election, ultimately. Maybe we must always ask whether we’re looking for something where it may well never be found, and ask ourselves whether we must always be looking Somewhere else.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
