A cry for cohesion

The consensus among my right-leaning friends and me is that the reelection of Donald Trump against an elite consensus that pulled no punches in trying to keep him from office may be the most significant political realignment in our lifetimes. A new mood is afoot in the country, and those of us who spend our days trying to discern what time it is (1 Chronicles 12:32) are still processing it.

But something tectonic has happened. What our cultural betters told us was impossible—that Donald Trump could win a large victory by amassing one of the greatest demographic shifts in recent history—happened. At the same time, however, the temptation to explain this phenomenon by Trump alone is, I think, not to dig deep enough. Elections are far more indicative of moods than they are of policies and personalities. As I’ve heard it rightly described of Trump in 2016, he did not create a movement; he saw a movement few else did and tapped into it with aplomb. That truth came roaring back once again on Nov. 5.

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat focuses on the shifts underfoot in a marvelous Nov. 16 essay titled “Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.” Douthat argues that we have entered a new epoch of global history, one where the prior 80 years of unquestioned allegiances and norms are giving way to new (and old) ways of seeing the world.

Populism, the excesses of wokism, digital ecosystems, mass immigration, COVID and its besetting manias, insti­tutional distrust, and decentralized forms of media have obliterated the old, reliable ways of thinking. Douthat notes that many people voted for Kamala Harris because they saw Trump as a threat to democracy—but also that many others voted for Trump because they saw progressive elites as a threat to democracy. “We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated,” he writes. “All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested—with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and ‘post-liberal’ elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.”

The horns of this dilemma are feuding versions of post-­liberalism. One post-liberalism is a militant secularization that collapses all meaning into feeling, victimization, and whatever other critical theory categories it computes. The other post-liberalism is a rightward-pulling identitarianism and anti-secularism. Add to this mix the coming disruption of, well, everything with artificial intelligence and the reality of demographic decline in a post-marriage and post-child society, and things are “not great, Bob,” to invoke the popular online GIF.

That leaves many of us wondering what we are to do, say, and think as Christians. America did not elect a social conservative in Donald Trump, but if there is a detectable conservatism beneath the electoral coalition of Donald Trump, it is what I am calling “social cohesion conservatism.” A lot of Americans have watched with alarm the last four years and the last decade pass by, aware of the social forces that are tearing the country apart. The pace of social progressivism’s advance and the inability of our cosmopolitans not to look askance at middle America’s values proved too much. There is a desire for a new cohesion and a palpable angst for America to turn back to saner times. This election was a referendum on normalcy, hence the terminology of the “normie” revolution entering our national vocabulary.

Christians are going to have a hard time navigating this terrain if the two dominant modes of social engagement are essentially both post-Christian forms of identitarianism. Reading Douthat’s essay makes me think about the mission of Christianity in this fracturing age, and I keep coming back to three prerequisites for cultural cohesion that our society is crying for but unable to identify with any lasting poise: truth, stability, and permanency.

Where else can America find such ballast than in the timeless truths of the Christian story? In challenging times where a center of gravity seems elusive, Christianity is uniquely positioned to be that voice for cohesion. We need a stable and permanent foundation for such things as family, love, purpose, truth, justice, and integrity—all the things that are desired and also mocked. The results of a secularizing culture may remind America that it does not simply need a return to normalcy (as good as that is), but that it needs a voice for civilizational anchoring that only Christianity can truly provide.