Although the Republican Party platform continues to promise a constitutional amendment protecting human life from the moment of conception, the pro-life movement has not made any serious attempts to pass that amendment since the 1980s. In recent years, evangelicals have become so concerned about protecting their own religious liberty against federal mandates or court decisions that they have given less attention to imposing a moral agenda on the rest of the nation. Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment proposal to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual. In the early 21st century, leaders such as James Dobson continued this trend by persuading President George W. When the movement emerged in the late 1970s, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson sought federal constitutional amendments to ban abortion and restore school prayer, because they wanted to reverse what liberal rights activists had done at the national level through the Supreme Court. National legislation has long been the goal of the religious right. Indeed, he will give them very little national legislation at all, but will instead offer them maximum latitude to pursue their agenda at the state level - a shift that may portend a potential breakthrough in the nation’s polarizing culture wars. ![]() Trump delivers on his promises, he will not give the religious right what its leaders have traditionally demanded or what the Republican Party platform calls for. Trump was elected with a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than any other Republican presidential candidate has ever received, and he has received strong support from prominent Christian Right leaders. So we must hope that he has the wit to be more than a wrecker, more than a demagogue, and that his crude genius can actually be turned, somehow, to the common good.Īnd if that hope is dashed, we must find ways to resist him - all of us, right and left, in the new chapter of American history that has opened very unexpectedly tonight.ĭonald J. But he will be the president, thanks to a crude genius that identified all the weak spots in our parties and our political system and that spoke to a host of voters for whom that system promised at best a sustainable stagnation under the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite. I fear the risks of a Trump presidency as I have feared nothing in our politics before. I retract none of the warnings that I issued about the likelihood of catastrophe and crisis on his watch. ![]() But in the American context he is like nothing we have seen before - a shatterer of all norms and conventional assumptions, a man more likely to fail catastrophically than other presidents, more constitutionally dangerous than other presidents, but also more likely to carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president. ![]() On the global stage Trump’s populism and nationalism makes him very much a man of his times, with parallels to figures as diverse as Marine Le Pen, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of course Vladimir Putin. 11 or the election of the first black president - since the Cold War ended almost 30 years ago, or since the social crises of the 1960s and 1970s further back than that. What happens next promises (and threatens) to make history as nothing has in America - not even the trauma of Sept. So here he is, soon to be the most powerful man on the face of the earth, with no popular mandate but a Republican majority nonetheless awaiting his direction, a court of hacks and flatterers around him, a bureaucracy and deep state unsure how to respond to him, an unstable world regarding his ascent with apprehension (or, in Moscow and Beijing, satisfaction), and none of the preparation that even the most inexperienced of modern American presidents have brought to their lofty office. ![]() primary and then believed (reasonably, but wrongly) that it had torn him down … and finally, in spite of his own acts of self-sabotage, which seemed egregious but turned out to be insufficient to keep him from his destiny. He has won a truly astonishing victory, and won it in spite of polls and experts and all the data nerds and get-out-the-vote consultants who labored tirelessly for Hillary Clinton … in spite of the opposition of the Republican Party’s past presidents and presidential nominees and most of conservatism’s intelligentsia … in spite of the media that had gleefully lifted him up in the G.O.P. 9, is the 18th of Brumaire by the French Revolutionary calendar - the day in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte led a coup against the revolutionary government, established himself as First Consul, and set about redirecting world history as few men have done before or since.ĭonald Trump is not Napoleon, but for those of us who have cast him as merely a comic-opera authoritarian, a parody of a world-historical figure, his very own 18th Brumaire is a time to reconsider.
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