Nixon To China::Trump To Abortion Clinic

The Final Christian Generation Confronts What It Means To Lose A Culture War

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” — Johnny Rotten.

So said the singer of the Sex Pistols at the end of what proved to be their final concert (follow the link to look at the clip). Pro-life supporters of Donald Trump have the right to say the same thing now.

You remember Florida, the state governed by Ron DeSantis, the sensible, competent, anti-woke, pro-life governor rejected by GOP presidential primary voters? That state, that guy? The one who signed into law a bill banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy? Well, Florida has on its fall ballot a measure that would restores the Roe status quo, overturning Florida’s current law.

Here’s Trump saying he’ll probably vote for it. Screenshot above is from that interview. Richard Hanania is right:

Michael Brendan Dougherty is also right:

Why should he stop? In each of the seven states in which an abortion referendum has been on the ballot since Dobbs, the pro-life side lost — even in three red states.

Woke up this morning in Budapest to this astute slap-in-the-face analysis from a pro-life conservative friend back in the US:

1. The pro-life movement wasn't anything approaching a majority and hasn't been for nearly a decade plus if not further, going back to 2015 and the left's decisive victory in the culture war. You can bemoan that, condemn it, and refuse to accept it, but you need to deal with actual electoral politics where they actually are as opposed to where you would prefer them to be from the 1980s to the Bush administration if you are running a political movement.

2. The entirety of pro-life politics after Dobbs was a master class in how not to run a movement. Rather than recognize the electoral realities and adapt to them, there was instead a clear attempt to implement laws, standards, and mores that were never going to prevail under current demographics, particularly in a hostile media and cultural environment. This is going to be true for any serious attempt to achieve cultural reversals, so the idea that this is limited to abortion politics is laughable. Exactly which conservative cultural cause can be championed without this kind of resistance?

3. The idea that this dooms the right in electoral terms is cope. Trump already has his personality cult, a solid 40% of the GOP, that will support more or less anything he wants. The pro-life movement is unable to muster the ability to achieve its preferred results in electoral terms in even the reddest of red states. At this point, abortion referendums are for the right what gay marriage referendums were for the left throughout the 2000s and unless the right is prepared to shift the culture they are going to continue to suffer defeat after defeat on this score.

4. The argument after Trump's 2016 win was that the cultural conservative "real America" can prevail against all the machinations of the left was always a self-serving cope. The left won the culture war and the Great Awokening occurred more or less on Trump's watch, with zero pushback or reversal. None of this has changed and cultural conservatives are in a worse position today than they were in 2016 by far, one that has not been helped by turning Trump into a cult icon.

5. Trump was never on the social conservatives' side. He courted them and sought their approval as a function of his desire for status, power, and his own aggrandizement. If they had achieved political results that could benefit him, he would still be seeking their support, but now he sees them as an obstacle and an embarrassment. If you are seeking to manipulate, influence, or transact business with Trump by all means flatter him, but always understand that he was never your friend and will always turn on you the moment you pose an obstacle to his ambitions.

I wish I could find something to disagree with here. I really do. Here’s Andrew T. Walker, fighting the good fight. Excerpt:

My suggestion is that Trump must do something to allay the concerns of the pro-life community. Talk about what the executive branch can do to protect life. Offer a list of judicial appointees that demonstrate a pro-life jurisprudence. Use the bully pulpit to talk about why families, babies, and the culture of life are better and more beautiful than a culture of sterility, barrenness, and death. Distinguish yourself from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s pro-abortion agenda.

Trump had better offer up something positive, or, once again, he will be his own worst enemy. The parable of Donald Trump is one for whom snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is his brand. Even if Trump and Vance want to sidestep the abortion issue and punt it to state-level politics, they should not give the wrong side the rhetorical wins that pro-abortion forces so badly want. Regardless of debates about federal or state roles, there should always be the argument that fostering a culture of life by loving children is a mark of a decent and humane nation.

Walker published that before Trump said what he said yesterday about the Florida abortion amendment, and before Trump promised government-funded IVF treatments (which is insane from a fiscal perspective, by the way).

I think it’s over for the pro-life movement as a meaningful political force in national politics. We are seeing now that Dobbs was a Pyrrhic victory. It was a Pyrrhic victory because deep down, America is a functionally pro-choice, post-Christian nation. The Sexual Revolution has triumphed. It might not seem clear to you that there is anything connecting LGBT rights to abortion rights, but the truth is, both sets of laws come out of the majority view in America: that advancing sexual autonomy is the summum bonum of our public life. The Sexual Revolution was a cosmological one.

Did we pro-lifers really think we were going to be able to preserve the right to unborn life in a country that has abandoned the idea of legislating to restrict sexual morality? Justice Scalia warned that the Lawrence decision meant the end of morals legislation, and we are seeing that he was right. Did we really think that a country where quite a few people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman is going to be able to hold the line against killing unborn children to protect sexual autonomy? True, there is an organization called PLAGAL, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, and God bless them for their work. But in the end, post-Christian America wants sexual freedom, in all its forms save for pedophilia (for now).

This is where we are. Maybe some of the Christian conservatives who thought The Benedict Option was too alarmist back in 2017 will reconsider their position. The first one who says “but we can’t head for the hills” gets a smack in the face. The book’s premise is that while we small-o orthodox Christians cannot afford to withdraw from politics, if only for the sake of fighting for our religious liberty, we had better come to terms with the fact that America is now post-Christian, and that will have tremendous effects on our personal lives, on the lives of our family members and churches, and on our professional lives. The Benedict Option is not a book about saving America; it’s a book about what we need to do to save the faith in what Aaron Renn would later call “the Negative World”.

The fact that Donald Trump — the man we can thank for delivering the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe — is single-handedly destroying the pro-life movement as a force in Republican politics is emerging as one of the most important political stories of our era. To restate the point: he’s doing it entirely because he has judged that he needs to do this to win in post-Dobbs America. What evidence can you give that he is wrong? In a democracy, politicians say and do what they have to say and do to win. Kamala Harris’s pathetic interview on CNN (more on which in a second) showed her backing away from a number of the public positions she has held and advocated for. She’s transparently hypocritical, but she’s doing this, of course, because she wants to win. Are we shocked that Trump does too?

I admit that I am shocked that Trump is going so far, so fast, on embracing the pro-choice position. Poor J.D. Vance, whom I know to be a real pro-life Catholic, must be humiliated by all this (and please don’t be absurd enough to say that he should stand up to his running mate on this issue; the No. 2 on the presidential ticket would do such a thing, or should; there’s a reason why they are No. 2). Still, it also surprises me that so many pro-lifers are gobsmacked by the fact that the American people support abortion rights, by and large. I thought we were pushing for the abolition of Roe because it was a badly-reasoned decision that removed the abortion issue from democratic debate. Were there people who really thought overturning Roe would be more or less the end of abortion rights, as distinct from turning it back to the states, thereby making it politically possible to restrict, or even ban, abortion? I guess there were. If Trump wins, having abandoned us, we’re dead politically. If he loses, and his loss can be traced to pro-lifers staying home, we be as good as dead as the rest of the Right scapegoats us for our role in allowing the radical-woke Left to triumph.

We are seeing what it means to have lost the culture war. If you look at the polls of how younger voters think of the cultural issues that have been at the center of our politics over the past generation — abortion, gay rights — you will see how badly we have lost. If SCOTUS overturned Obergefell tomorrow, returning the issue to the states, I bet there is not a single state, no matter how ruby-red, that would vote to end same-sex marriage. And if there were one today, within a decade, even that state will have flipped. That’s simply reality. I hate it, you may hate it, but that’s where we are.

Every few months I meet an American Christian somewhere who tells me, “Boy, I used to think you were far out there with the Benedict Option, that you were alarmist, but now I see that you were right.” That gives me no pleasure, because I would love to have been wrong. I have no special vision; I can just read the fundamentals of our cultural change, and draw logical conclusions.

I cannot recommend strongly enough historian Edward J. Watts book The Final Pagan Generation, which is about the way Roman pagans thought about the cultural change sweeping over their society in the fourth century. That’s the century when the Empire flipped from pagan to Christian. The key point there is that the pagan elites did not see it coming. Even as evidence mounted all around them that Roman society was abandoning the old religion for this new creed, most of them could not bring themselves to see what was right in front of their faces. Rome had always been pagan, they figured, and once this new Christian thing passed, everything would settle back into place. Their blindness came in large part from the fact that psychologically, they could not allow themselves to see what was happening. So too with many American Christians in these latter days.

But, just because we have lost the culture war on sexual matters doesn’t mean people on the Right have lost it across the board. I’m generally not a fan of the take-no-prisoners approach of Boniface Option author Andrew Isker, a hardline Calvinist pastor, but he’s right in this tweet, in which he reflects on what the pro-life movement is going to do to itself politically if it snubs Trump in the election, and he wins anyway:

I think this is a very likely outcome. It is strange because many of the prolife arguments to not vote for Trump go something like "we need to teach Trump a lesson" but also "we cannot vote for someone who doesn't hold our position and we're not going to do Machiavellian scheming." It's incoherent. It's just dump-trucking every possible argument against voting for him, even if some of them are contradictory.

My position is the same as it was in 2016: No matter what rhetoric he uses, no matter what he says or doesn't say, I don't think "he's one of us," but he will give us things we want in exchange to our support, and more importantly he will deny very clear, obvious enemies from wielding power against us. This issue is one that is likely going to take longer than our lifetimes to solve, because it involves the changing the nature of our entire society at the root, and the regime that hates us is the one that has made our culture this way and must be destroyed.

Thankfully, the "prolife movement" is not highly centrally organized, and does not operate as a voting bloc. The overwhelming majority of prolife voters also care about tens of millions of third-world peoples invading their nation, they care about feeding their family, and they also want to avoid a world war. They instinctively recognize that the people behind all these things also want child sacrifice, and to oppose them, even with someone not perfectly ideologically aligned, is of the utmost importance to our goals.

The two most likely outcomes for this election is that Trump wins without the support of prolife leaders demonstrating they really don't matter OR he loses and Roe is made federal law and actual, effective prolife work in the states is rendered null.

I don’t think that the Left has the votes to make the Roe provisions federal law, at least not yet. But we can at the very least say that a Harris administration would pursue the most radical pro-abortion policies yet seen from the federal government. Trump may not be on our side in a meaningful sense, but at least he doesn’t hate us. As a pro-life Catholic friend of mine puts it, “The key dynamic at this point is that Trump offers the possibility of Neutral World, Harris is acceding to Negative World. Anyone who thinks you advance pro-life politics in a Negative World is full of crap.”

Besides which, as Isker notes, most pro-life voters aren’t single issue voters. It has always been the most important issue on which I vote in national elections, but by no means the only one. Does it matter to you that a Harris administration would mean open borders, DEI forever, and transing kids? Does it matter to you that a Harris administration would mean that the executive branch would remain in the hands of people who weaponized the state to go after their political opponents — including people who believe the same things you do? Do forever wars matter to you? To expand on a point made by my pro-life Catholic friend above, for Christians, this is broadly a vote on preserving as much of the Neutral World as we can, versus a vote for the acceleration of Negative World (the conceptual distinctions are Aaron Renn’s).

See, this is why the Hungarian Catholic pro-life campaigner I dined with last weekend was so shocked that her American counterparts even have to think about their vote this fall. There is no pro-life party in Hungary, because however culturally conservative the Hungarian people may be, abortion is off the table. Viktor Orban might share Mother Teresa’s views on abortion, but if he tried to change the abortion laws, he would very soon be voted out of power. That’s reality. But if a conservative Christian in Hungary decided that there was no meaningful difference between Left and Right parties because everybody was pro-choice anyway, they would be truly crazy.

Orban’s party is in just about every other way openly pro-Christian in ways that exceed even the US Republican Party. But even then they have limits, knowing that relatively few Hungarians go to church, and that social conservatism here is mostly a cultural matter, residue of the memory of Christianity. I have told my friends in the ruling party that without a real revival of the faith, cultural Christianity won’t last much longer. It is not the role of the state to evangelize and disciple. Either the churches will step up, or they won’t, and Hungary too will slide into the post-Christian decadence ruling western Europe (see below).

The same is true in America. Far, far more people go to church in the US than in Europe, but that number is declining. We conservative Christians may have lost the culture war on all things sexual, but there are still victories to be had. No final victories, because in this life, there are no final victories, nor, as I believe Eliot said, final defeats. But I do agree with Tolkien that we Christians are “fighting the long defeat”. This is not pessimism, but Christian realism. Scripture tells us that in the last days, people will have become thoroughly corrupt. You believe in progress as a historical, even metaphysical, principle? You don’t read your Bible. But as Tolkien put it, and as Father Stephen Freeman brings out (follow the link), for the Christian, there are victories within the long defeat — and in any case, the greatest victory, the defeat of death, came because of the greatest defeat: the murder of God.

I don’t know whether we are living in the Last Days, but I do believe that we are living in the Last Days of the Christian West. Therefore, it is vital for Christians to be able to comprehend the times, and to deliberate realistically — not with sentimental optimism — about how we are to meet the challenge of remaining faithful in these times. I will vote for Donald Trump with no illusions that he is one of us, or sees us in anything other than transactional terms. I will vote for Trump because if I have to choose between a deeply flawed man who doesn’t hate us, and a woman who does hate us, in a time and place where nearly all of the institutions of our society are opposed to who we are and what we believe — well, that’s no contest.

Life is tragic. If you were a Christian in Spain in 1936, you might have hated General Franco, but the reality of the civil war meant that Franco’s enemies despised Christians. They were massacring priests and nuns. Neutrality was impossible then. So how would you choose? America 2024 is very far from Spain 1936, but the logic here is analogous. The political task of the churches now is to navigate the transition to post-Christian America, which entails voting strategically. We’ve lost; now what?

Gibbering Kamala

Did you watch Kamala Harris’s first interview, on CNN? No wonder they want to keep her away from the media. Here’s a link to Part One; here’s Part Two; here’s Part Three.

She’s a gibberer. She avoided answering serious questions, especially about her flip-flopping. So did Tim Walz, who totally dodged questions about his lying about his record. You would never think watching this that she is part of the administration that has been in power these past few years. She had the gall to posit herself as the candidate of change, the one who will “turn the page” — this, even though she has been the No. 2 in the executive branch for the past four years!

She is a phony, to the fingertips. A likable phony, but a phony. If you believe that Kamala Harris is anything other than the California progressive she has always been, you’re dreaming. But hey, it’s a “vibe” election, so it might not hurt her.

Post-Christian America, Anti-Christian Europe

A few weeks back, many of us were appalled by the blasphemous spectacle of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. If you live in Europe, you couldn’t have been all that surprised by it. The ruling classes in most European countries — by which I mean not only the governments, but the cultural and artistic sectors — are in the hands of people who are affirmatively anti-Christian.

That was not a one-off. Comes now a new publication, sponsored by the socialist Spanish government, intended to serve as guidance for Spanish embassies abroad, as well as for domestic institutions, to include LGBT and queer artists in their cultural programming. Follow that link; all of the entries are also translated into English. Here’s one (blurred here, but it’s not blurred in the publication) showing a leering, perverted Christ; in the actual image, his penis is shown in high definition:

Oh, there’s more. This is a “drag king” — a woman pretending to be a man:

Here is a transvestite Virgin Mary:

Here is a Peruvian tranny who questions “white-heterosexual hegemony”:

These are ruling-class values in western Europe today. And people yet wonder why Viktor Orban looks westward and doubts whether civilization will survive.

Lesson for culturally conservative Americans: it can always get worse. Much worse. ‘Evangelicals For Harris’ are fools. If Kamala Harris’s administration could publish something like this, it would. How can you doubt it?