Alan Jacobs

So why am I not voting for Hillary Clinton?

• I think she’s seriously afflicted by dishonesty and hubris, and has demonstrated no ability to learn from, or even seriously to acknowledge, her past mistakes;
• Her longstanding hawkishness, especially in Middle Eastern affairs, is dangerous to the United States and to other countries — and no, I certainly don't think I can count on her “no ground troops” pledge, not given her history in these matters;
• Her deep indebtedness to Wall Street means that she’ll take no action to address serious economic injustice;
• The Democratic Party platform on abortion, which was already more extreme than that of any European country, has grown still more extreme in ways that Clinton enthusiastically supports;
• A Clinton administration would unquestionably continue — and very probably extend — the Obama administration’s assaults on religious freedom.

In short, I believe Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate whose Presidency would — at this point I should probably say will — be very bad for this country, and if the Republicans had nominated a sane person I would very likely be voting for their Presidential candidate this year for the first time in a long time.

I bought my first Bob Dylan record 45 years ago, and I’ve been listening to him closely and frequently ever since. I’ve written about how much he means to me, and I’ve even taught his music and lyrics in classes. I’m gratified that he is the only contemporary songwriter to be surveyed by a great literary critic. But I don’t think he should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I don’t think what he does is literature.

It’s not a lesser thing than literature; it’s just different. Singer-songwriters practice a hybrid art, because to their words they add music and performance. Dylan’s lyrics rarely offer great satisfaction when detached from his music and his voice — if you can find a way to detach them, which, if you’ve ever heard them sung by him, you can’t. The novelists and poets, even the playwrights, are working with a different set of restrictions, a different set of potentialities. Zucchini and pomegranates.

I have a few thoughts about this op-ed by Eric Metaxas. (FYI, I don’t know Eric well, but I do know him, and I think he’s written and done many good things over the years, though I’m not crazy about the political turn he seems to have taken in recent years, starting with the publicizing of his otherwise fine Bonhoeffer biography.)

First, Eric assumes that there are three options: vote for Clinton, vote for Trump, stay home. But you could vote for someone other than the major-party nominees. That’s what I’m going to do. Does that dishonor God? If so, why and how?

Second, Eric says that some of Trump’s comments have made him angry, and acknowledges that many people find him “odious.” But he never acknowledges that many of us wouldn’t vote for Trump even if he treated women with unfailing courtesy. Michael K. Vlock said of Trump, “He’s an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard.” If he were merely an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard, wouldn’t all that be enough to disqualify him from the Presidency? And each of those words accurately describes The Donald.

Third, Eric writes, “It’s a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country’s chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution — and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died — is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever.” Essentially, this is to say that Hillary is Sauron, and the Presidency the One Ring. “If [she gains] it, your valour is vain, and [her] victory will be swift and complete: so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts.” But is there any evidence whatsoever that this prophecy — Eric’s about Hillary, I mean, not Gandalf’s about Sauron — is true? It’s the same claim that Decius makes with his “Flight 93” analogy, but as far as I can tell, none of the people who prophesy so boldly have ever defended it. They just assert it. Saying “it’s a fact” doesn’t making it a fact. The prophecy of ultimate and endless doom is just a guess.

And a despairing guess — which is the element of all this that isn’t poor judgment, but rather a sin. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will not foreclose the possibility of Christian revival in America. And if there ever is Christian revival in America, then surely Eric Metaxas believes that that would be good news for the cause of “genuine liberty and self-government.” Hillary is not mightier than Sauron, and American democracy is not quite that fragile, even if it is profoundly flawed, and the possibility of spiritual renewal is always at hand.

My fellow Christians, don’t give in to despair. Despair can make intelligent and decent people do very strange and very destructive things. Like voting for Donald Trump.

We must set aside our Christian convictions to support Donald Trump so he will protect us against Hillary Clinton’s war on our Christian convictions.

This morning, in the weekly newsletter of Books and Culture, John Wilson announces that the coming November/December issue of the magazine will be its last. I am pretty heartbroken about this, not primarily as a writer (though I expect that I have written for B&C as much as anyone), but rather as a reader.

For twenty-one years, Books and Culture has been one of the most consistently interesting magazines in the English-speaking world. I have often been surprised at the number and range of people who agree with me about that. Alex Star, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine and now an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, once told me that he read every issue in full. Cullen Murphy, former editor of the Atlantic, told me that John Wilson is the best editor in the business.

And yet Christianity Today International, the parent company of B&C, couldn’t make it work; nor did another buyer for the magazine come forth. This is an immensely distressing state of affairs, for anyone who cares about the state of Christian intellectual life, and I hope there will be some thoughtful post-mortems on the whole business. (Though what I really hope is for some deep-pocketed person or organization to decide that raising B&C from the dead is more important than giving money to Donald Trump or the RNC.)

But for now, I just want to thank John Wilson for the consistently superb work he has done on this magazine for twenty-one years. He has recruited first-class writers, paired them with fascinating books, found ways to juxtapose reviews on similar themes — he has done it all. And for me personally, working with John over the years has been enormously rewarding and enjoyable. I am hoping against hope that our working relationship will not end here, though even if it does our friendship will remain strong.

Thank you, John, and may God bless you.

[gallery] drawingarchitecture:

Mario Ricci, Residui D’Architetture

[gallery] thingsmagazine:

Cross-section of the Cordouan lighthouse

Jeremy Corbyn is no Donald Trump, and vice-versa. But the moral lesson is the same. This tale of two parties is a powerful allegory about what happens when you take voters for granted for too long. And the Republican Party leaders now launching a late, hopeless rebellion against Donald Trump this weekend should look at what has happened to the Labour Party, and despair. What these Grand Old Party bigwigs don’t realise – or can’t accept – is that, however much the public may think Trump’s candidacy farcical and find him appalling, voters hate them far than they could ever hate the Donald. The more cynically these establishment politicians move against the leader – endorsing him one day then turning on him the next – the more they confirm the public’s suspicion that they are lying crooks who will stop at nothing to preserve their power. The latest coup against Trump, just like the latest attempt to force Jeremy Corbyn to resign, has only strengthened his position among his supporters. Look at the ovation the Republican nominee received outside Trump Tower last night.

In this post I want to connect my earlier post about what needs to be done to reclaim the term “evangelical” with my frequently-asserted hostility to the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

In a well-known passage from The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis writes,

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic , the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

If one side of this proper training is the delighted recognition of, and attraction to, the good, the other and equally necessary side is the instinctive recoiling from “the disgusting and hateful.” That second kind of response is what Leon Kass appealed to in his famous essay on “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”

I believe that the proper response of the well-former mind and heart to the very idea of Donald Trump as President of the United States is, to put it bluntly, revulsion.

It is possible, of course, to feel that revulsion and then decide that it needs to be mastered. That is what has happened to many Republican politicians who have supported Trump: they let their political ambitions (in the worst case) or political loyalties (in the best) overcome their revulsion. Consider the former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, who as I write has just withdrawn his support for Trump, saying, “He is unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit to be President of the United States.” That formulation is so perfectly accurate that I can’t help thinking that Pawlenty has been saying it in his head for quite some time now but has only today been driven to say it out loud.

I have little respect for politicians who ever, at any point, endorsed Trump, and none whatsoever for those who have not denounced him by this stage of the game, but I understand why they might have careerist reasons for doing what they do. We will set them aside, reflecting that verily, they have their reward — or their punishment, as the case may be.

What concerns me far more deeply is the ordinary, everyday Christian — the person who claims to be an evangelical Christian — who is not revolted by Trump, who lacks the requisite “wisdom of repugnance.” I think, for instance, of the people who have compared Trump to King David, presumably because both are guilty of sexual sin. But those who make this comparison have failed to recognize the difference between one who says “For I know my transgressions, / And my sin is ever before me” and one who says that he doesn't “bring God into that picture” when he does something wrong and follows up by saying “I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad.” And if you don't understand that distinction — and equally if you understand it but for political reasons pretend not to — there is very little about the Christian message that you truly grasp.

By the way, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton here because there is so little evangelical support for Hillary Clinton. She also offers much for us to be appalled by.

And I’m not even making the argument that an evangelical Christian should never in any circumstances vote for Trump. (Not today, anyway.) I am simply saying this: the fact that so many American Christians feel no revulsion at the thought of electing Donald Trump — this man so palpably “unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit” — as the leader of this or for that matter any other nation, but rather express great enthusiasm at the prospect, indicates not just a lack of knowledge but also, and more important, a lack of moral training. The immediate responses are missing or wrong.

There are many criteria we might apply to judge whether a given congregation (or for that matter denomination) is genuinely evangelical, here’s one of them: Is it raising up its people in such a way that they feel repugnance when confronted by truly repugnant ideas — like the idea of Donald Trump as leader of a nation?

What does a healthy response to the current controversy look like? We might turn to the editorial page of the Deseret News for an example. After incisively quoting Proverbs 29 (“when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn”) they state quite straightforwardly their response to Trump’s sexual boasting: “What oozes from this audio is evil.”

My fellow evangelicals: listen and heed. Your very future depends on your ability to do so.

The word ‘Protestant’ ... originally related to a specific occasion, in 1529, when at the Holy Roman Empire’s Diet (imperial assembly) held in the city of Speyer, the group of princes and cities who supported the programmes of reformation promoted by Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli found themselves in a voting minority: to keep their solidarity, they issued a ‘Protestatio’, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared. The label ‘Protestant’ thereafter was part of German or imperial politics for decades, and did not have a wider reference than that.... It is therefore problematic to use ‘Protestant’ as a simple description for sympathizers with reform in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the reader will find that often in this book I use a different word, ‘evangelical’. That word has the advantage that it was widely used and recognized at the time, and it also encapsulates what was most important to this collection of activists: the good news of the Gospel, in Latinized Greek, the evangelium.

— Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History