The Debate with Dom _ _ the Benedictine Continues. Rowan Williams and Trump the "Idolator"

My first observation will be on your recourse to scholarship and quotation of scholarly sources. This presupposes that all wisdom lies with scholars and that we only need to consult the right ‘research’ in the right library to find the answer. This sounds suspiciously like Michael Gove’s attack on expertise doesn’t it? (I have written on this subject in this article (see para 5 in particular):
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/st-greta-and-another-nail-in-the-tory-coffin/)

 I’d rather refer to the way in which Christianity is ‘unto the Greeks foolishness’ and ‘God has made foolish the wisdom of this world’ etc. For scholarship, especially in the humanities, depends, in reality, on assumptions and prejudices held by the scholar a priori and which irresistibly and inevitably feed into the outcome of his ‘findings’. It’s at the level of these supposedly ‘universally acknowledged’ assumptions that it is really the burden of the scholar to *prove* that personal views are smuggled in and the real debate is to be held. This is testified to in the scramble in the media to present ‘reality checkers’ and ‘fact checkers’ who have a definitive hold on truth but who are usually simply reinforcing partisan positions. So your scholar is probably not my scholar and we should really be debating the differences between them.

As examples of this smuggling in I’ll quote *your* scholars. Levitsky and Ziblatt say that the way we live fairly together is for “competing parties (to) accept one another as legitimate rivals”. It was this that “undergirded American democracy for most of the 20^th Century.” Unfortunately our culture reaches back further than the 20^th century and did not begin in an ideological, cultural or religious tabula rasa. It began somewhere not nowhere. That somewhere was pre-existing Christian culture.

“Accepting one another as legitimate rivals” (L and Z) or “Democracy requires pluralism” (Muller) reminds me of the multicultural argument that pitches, for example, all religions present in the west as equal “rivals”. The wisdom of this approach is often put forward as a universally acknowledged given by its partisans. However there is an alternative account. The fact that Sikhs, Muslims and Buddhists can co-exist happily in western societies is not due to multiculturalism but to the very tolerant pre-existing Christian host culture that enables that co-existence and prevents scenes like the bloody expulsion of the Muslims by Buddhists from Myanmar for example. If this is true an attack on that host culture might be very serious. So, out of courtesy and in humility the scholars in question might put forward their findings as opinion rather than fact.

And they might acknowledge that the real debate is how you describe what the West *is* at the outset. Is it a Lockean tabula rasa where some notional version of perfect ‘pluralist’ harmony (smacking of Voltairean rationalist universalism) can be diligently curated by human minds to produce a kind of notional intellectual utopia? Or is it rather something entirely underpinned by a long Christian tradition (1650 years before Locke) on which the whole edifice depends? If *that* is attacked, as it was in the potent symbolism of the burning out of the Presidents’ church everything could fall. Such publicity stunts don’t appeal to Trump’s base by accident. There’s a sound and sane reason *why* they appeal.

I accept that Levitsky and Ziblatt were discussing politics rather than religion but the principle is the same. There are crucial things that underpin the very possibility of pluralism and mutual acceptance.

For another partisan presentation of their own assumptions by scholars I’ll turn to the characterisation of ‘populism’ by your other scholars – Norris, Inglehart and then Muller. They demonise Trump by pinning a pejorative label on him – that of populist (you add ‘authoritarian’ which is somewhat different from simple wielder of authority of course). This is a particular version of Orwell’s fear that language can be manipulated to achieve the outcomes that one wishes as set out in his essay on the use of language in politics and other areas. Democracy is based on the word ‘Demos’ which means the people in Greek and is respectable. If you wish to make a popular vote unrespectable you simply dub it ‘populist’ in spite of the fact that this word is based on the Latin for the people – populus. It’s an interesting sleight of hand and was done repeatedly with the Brexit result.

Muller curiously finds that ‘prioritising the culture and interests of the nation’ in a national politician is grounds for condemnation. I’m not sure what other configurations he wants polities to work in. Is there some airy dispensation that floats above such base and derisory considerations such as one’s culture and national interest that he knows of? He goes on to talk about the ‘neglected and…held in contempt…by elites” exploited and hoodwinked by ‘populist’ manipulators who duplicitously ‘promise to give voice to’ them. I’d guess that he means Trump voters or those who voted for Brexit or Boris Johnson, Orban or Salvini.

If you accept his description of what has happened recently as populism you can’t help but reject it. If you call it democracy it puts a whole different complexion on things. Populism/democracy? That’s the real battleground – language and labels. By choosing the term populism Muller is just putting forward his partisan view on the matter as he has every right to do. What he doesn’t have a right to is to pass it off as incontestable truth of a quasi-scientific (because it’s peer-reviewed scholarship) nature. That’s cheating. I realise that I run the risk of an accusation of being anti-intellectual here but perhaps the level at which this debate is being conducted might protect me against that.

And are the voters of Boris Johnson’s red wall or Trump’s nasty redneck constituency, for example, really these poor dupes that Muller makes them? Were the Brexit voters really stupid unpleasant people? What if they were characterised instead as salt of the earth people with an instinctual love of the excellent culture they are lucky enough to inhabit and which gives such excellent shelter to others who want, in their millions to come to it? Or as a reservoir of sound, pre-scholarly common sense who are wiser than the technocratic priests of the modern ‘wisdom of this world’? Muller’s very characterisation insults such voters (who are foolish enough to prioritise the culture and interests of their nation) from a lofty position that pities their delusions. I wonder who are the proud in the imagination of their hearts here. That’s the real issue I guess.

You’ll say that you haven’t said Trump is a fascist but once successfully branded a populist and an authoritarian it would be disingenuous to suggest that you don’t expect his enemies to make that leap, the ground having been prepared so comprehensively. I can link you to an article on just this I wrote in the New English Review if you are interested.
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=189863&sec_id=189863

To return to Rowan Williams. He pronounces that “racial privilege has long been an idolatry” in the US as an incontestable fact. What does this even mean? Idolatry means (I have already addressed his strange use of this word in an earlier post) worship of an idol. Do Americans worship racial privilege in some manner in temples to it set up for the purpose? And Trump’s ‘idolatry’? I’ve already suggested that instead of this word he meant sacrilege in using the Bible, the Presidents’ church and God as a means to an end in a political narrative. To be idolatry proper he would have to mean Trump was setting up a personality cult like Hitler and Mussolini. Perhaps he really meant that….

On the subject of my personal abuse of Williams. I would defend myself on the grounds that he was the holder of an office with certain responsibilities which, in my view, he and Welby spectacularly fail/ed in. Yes I did make fun of his mincing, cerebral, highbrow, preciousness but that’s because I think that is the problem with these people. It’s the reason why they fail so badly to connect with people who feel they have been neglected, who care about their culture and national interests (Church of *England* anyone?) and to get them back into their national church. These highbrows are never going to connect with the majority of people who got to football matches.

You suggest that I misrepresent you in making the equation between Trump and ‘the mighty’ from the Magnificat (which you admit has powerful political resonances) and Floyd and the lowly and disenfranchised. You insist that this was a conditional equation based on words like ‘might’ and ‘suspect’ mean that you do not directly tie Trump to the Magnificat. I think this quotation from what you wrote makes the equivalence fairly directly however. In response to my saying “…his knee was on no one’s neck.” you reply:

“You are obviously correct that as C-in-C the President does not need to use his own limbs physically to assault US citizens. However his choice of the 1967 words of Chief Walter Headly (I know what these were) to sum up his understanding of how a President should respond to the protests taking place across America speaks for itself. Once again there is no ambiguity or nuance here.”

So you make a direct, if figurative, connection. Trump’s knee is on the citizenry by means of the security forces he commands.

By the way Headly’s comment was not “When the peaceful protest begins the shooting begins”. There is copious footage of looting, beatings (have you seen the one of the female shop owner being savagely beaten on the floor for defending her store by four or five thugs wielding four by two while her husband, held back by other thugs in the door of his store screams “Leave my wife alone!”), arson and even murder available across the US.

And now we have George Orwell’s prophesy coming true in the UK as a legacy of all the action of one renegade cop in the US. “.. every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” 1984

Baden Powell’s statue 2008 removed in Poole, and statues of Francis Drake under threat in Plymouth and Tavistock, Captain Cook’s in Whitby and Gone with the Wind which ironically featured the first black actress ever to win an Oscar taken off the streaming services. Now it is being suggested that Nelson should be removed from Trafalgar Square.

I’m foursquare with Trump against the current insanity of modern liberalism (as opposed to CBL). Why not hold up a Christian Bible in front of a church burnt out by ‘peaceful’ protesters? It seems remarkably sane and states his determination to restore the order for which he is responsible. In the meantime Derek Chauvin seems to be receiving the due process of law for the act that Trump described as revolting.

Don’t feel obliged to pursue this Mark, if you have more pressing concerns though I’m happy if you do. There probably won’t be a meeting of minds as we frame this in counterpoint to each other. In a sense that’s the point. Whose framing is the right one? Your liberal framing or my conservative one? I’d say the underpinning tenets of earthbound conservatism which Trump so unthinkingly and instinctively draws on precede liberalism. Even scholarly authority is involved in the battle.