♦ “The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled while giving them an excuse to denigrate people at the bottom (both white and non-white) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated,” writes Victor Tan Chen in The Atlantic (“The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy”). The problem isn’t just that successful people have more money and the working class is struggling. In what Chen calls the “extreme meritocracy,” we’ve come to define our self-worth in terms of educational and professional success, which means that we’re inclined to think of those who have not attained these things as unworthy failures. Chen analyzes all this in economic terms, focusing on job loss and the decline of private-sector unions. But he circles back to culture: “For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose.” Religion makes us resilient. (I would add “joyful.”)
Working-class voters who swung toward Trump are not stupid. They know that our establishment—progressive, libertarian, and ideologically free-market—is largely hostile to religion and tradition. The bottom half of society is increasingly “skeptical of the faithless, lonely, and uncertain world that the cultural left represents to them.” And “the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.” Ol’ time religion turns out to be what we need in our postmodern era.
♦ Michael Wear is an Evangelical who worked in the Obama White House and directed the faith outreach initiative during the president’s 2012 campaign for re-election. In a recent interview he had this to say about the pro-abortion extremism of today’s liberalism: “The Democratic Party used to welcome people who didn’t support abortion into the party. We are now so far from that, it’s insane.”
♦ Mexico City recently proposed an amendment establishing a right to doctor-assisted suicide. The “right” relies on the usual progressive perversion of human dignity: “Every person has a right to self-determination and free development of personality. This fundamental human right should enable all people to fully exercise their capacities to live with dignity. The dignified life implicitly contains the right to a dignified death.” By this way of thinking, dignity means self-command and power over one’s destiny. Which of course means that those of us who are in any way dependent lack dignity.
♦ In a 2015 Vox interview, Ezra Klein asked Bernie Sanders if progressives shouldn’t favor greater immigration, “even up to the level of open borders.” Sanders retorted, “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.” He went on to say, “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.”