Leading up to the presidential election, scholarly commentators like Robert Kagan and Steven Hahn claimed that if Donald Trump were elected, this would show the triumph of the illiberal tradition of American politics in defeating the American liberal tradition.
As I indicated in a post last November, I agree with Kagan and Hahn that the political history of America has been a continuing battle between liberalism and illiberalism. But I think the liberal tradition of American political thought--as expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--has ultimately prevailed over the illiberal tradition. And I see that even in the MAGA movement. I agree that much of Trump's rhetoric has illiberal, and even fascist, overtones. But most of the MAGA voters accept the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence. (I have written previously about the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the rhetoric of the 2020 Republican National Convention.)
Here I use the term "liberalism" in the broad Lockean sense that includes both those who we call "liberals" in America and those we call "conservatives"--as opposed to the illiberal Left (such as the socialists), on the one extreme, and the illiberal Right (such as the reactionaries and fascists), on the other extreme.
We can see the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election. The American illiberal tradition defends the national racial, religious, and ethnic homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies. (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.) But Trump's electoral victory depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump. If Trump's presidency gives into his illiberal propensities, he will alienate these MAGA voters.
If Trump appealed only to illiberal voters like the proponents of Christian theocracy and the white racists, he would never win any election. Given the religious, racial, and ethnic pluralism of the American electorate, Trump can win only with the support of a multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic coalition that includes Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and most of the white working-class voters with large portions of the Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. The evidence for that became clear in the 2020 election, as compared with the 2016 election, in which Trump's vote share in each of these groups trended in his favor. That trend continued in the 2024 election.
As I have argued previously, Trump's chimpanzee politics requires a minimum winning coalition. Trump paid tribute to the liberal pluralism of his winning electoral coalition in the ceremony and the speech for his second inauguration. But he also showed the illiberal face of MAGA by filling the front row seats behind him with tech CEO billionaires, which was a symbolic display of the illiberal thinking of MAGA intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin (more about that in the next post).
In his Inaugural Address, Trump proclaimed that having been miraculously saved from assassination, "I was saved by God to make America great again." This echoes the illiberal message of the MAGA theocrats that Trump has been chosen by God as His Cyrus to save America. But in saying that "we will not forget our God," Trump was careful to suggest that this was an ecumenical God, and therefore he did not establish any particular religious tradition as America's church. In this way, he favored the liberal tradition of Roger Williams over the illiberal tradition of John Winthrop.
Trump's endorsement of religious pluralism was clear in his selection of clergy to deliver the opening and closing prayers--two Catholics (Cardinal Timothy Dolan and the Reverend Frank Mann), two Protestants (Franklin Graham and Lorenzo Sewell), and one Jew (Rabbi Ari Berman). Remarkably, the first printed program for the inauguration included a Muslin cleric--Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a prominent Muslim leader in Dearborn, Michigan, who had endorsed Trump and thus helped Trump win the Muslim votes that he needed to win Michigan. This would have been the first time in history for a Muslim cleric to appear at a presidential inauguration. There was no public explanation for why Al-Husainy was dropped from the program, but there were some newspaper reports from Michigan that Trump's pro-Israel supporters objected that Al-Husainy was sympathetic to Iran and Hezbollah.
Although the Trump voters include Protestant theocrats and Catholic integralists, the liberal religious pluralism of Trump's inauguration gave no encouragement to either group.
By endorsing such a broadly ecumenical religious pluralism, Trump was following the example set by the coronation of King Charles III two years ago, in which the monarchic head of the Church of England displayed his Lockean liberalism by allowing all religious faiths to be represented.
Moreover, one of the dramatic high points of the inaugural ceremony was Lorenzo Sewell's prayer, which was actually an abbreviated rendition of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which was appropriate since January 20th was Martin Luther King Day. Sewell emphasized King's appeal to the Lockean liberalism of the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its principle that "all men are created equal."
King's "Dream" was that America would finally fulfill the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Trump stressed this explicitly in his speech: "Today is Martin Luther King Day. And his honor--this will be a great honor. But in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true."
In support of this promise, Trump pointed to the racial and ethnic pluralism of his winning coalition:
"As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying around our agenda with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society: young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban, suburban, rural. And very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote, we won by millions of people."
"To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote. We set records, and I will not forget it. I've heard your voices in the campaign, and I look forward to working with you in the years to come."
And yet any careful viewer of Trump's inauguration should have noticed that it was Janus-faced. The liberal face was the invocation of King's "Dream" of equal liberty for all racial, ethnic, and religious groups. The illiberal face was the prominent front row audience immediately behind Trump--with the seats filled by a half dozen tech CEO billionaires who are the richest human beings on the Earth. If Trump meant this to suggest that these are to become the new oligarchic rulers of America, then he's showing the influence of the illiberal fascist Curtis Yarvin.
No comments:
Post a Comment