Category: Culture

Virginia Postrel:

A few days after the 2004 election, Gabriel Rossman went for a job interview with the UCLA sociology department. Rossman was finishing a doctorate at Princeton, and his research on how ownership affects mass-media content was a good fit for a school in the entertainment capital. He got the job as an assistant professor.

But he also got a warning about academic culture. At a dinner following his day on campus, two of his future colleagues started ranting about George W. Bush’s re-election. One called it “a referendum against the Enlightenment.” Rossman smiled and nodded, never letting on that he’d cast his ballot for Bush.

Rossman’s story appears anonymously in Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, just published by Oxford University Press. He agreed to break cover because, he said, “I have tenure.” In an interview, he noted that staying in the intellectual closet doesn’t require actively lying, merely letting colleagues assume that everyone shares the same political views.

For the book, political scientists Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr., who are themselves on the political right, conducted detailed interviews at 84 universities with 153 conservative and libertarian professors from six disciplines — economics, political science, sociology, history, philosophy and literature. Participants also completed a formal survey.

Unlike the many conservatives who attack the academy, Shields and Dunn believe in its scholarly mission, and they maintain that right-of-center professors can flourish. “Right-wing hand-wringing about higher education is overblown,” they write in a recent op-ed drawn from the book, declaring that “conservatives survive and even thrive in one of America’s most progressive professions.” Many of those they interviewed expressed love for their institutions. “The university has really given me my life,” a literature professor told them. “It’s a very wonderful place.”

Unfortunately, this happy portrait of thriving conservative scholars depends heavily on economists and professors old enough to recall the Carter administration. Unless left-wing academics come to value, or at least tolerate, political diversity, the study portends a bleak future for intellectual inquiry in the humanities and social sciences.

Only the economists interviewed routinely expressed the conviction that their political convictions were irrelevant to their professional advancement and to the standards of research quality. (The authors seem surprised that right-of-center economists spoke highly of Paul Krugman’s scholarship, if not his New York Times columns.) Economics is also the only field Shields and Dunn studied where professors’ partisan affiliations mirror the general public’s. Marxists are more common in the social sciences and humanities than conservatives.

The modern academy pays lip service to diversity. Yet as a “stigmatized minority,” the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments. “I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a prominent full professor told Shields and Dunn. He’s still hiding because he hopes for honors that depend on maintaining his colleagues’ good will. “If I came out, that would finish me,” he said.

More often, conservatives follow Rossman’s strategy, hiding their views until they’re safely tenured. “Nearly one-­third of professors in the six disciplines we investigated tended to conceal their politics prior to tenure,” write Shields and Dunn. The number rises to nearly half when you exclude economics.

The pattern has also worsened in recent decades. Among those over 65, only 7 percent hid their politics before tenure, compared to 46 percent of those under 45. Without the young economists, that number would look even more extreme.

In their op-ed, Shields and Dunn downplay the common pre-tenure deception as “a temporary hardship.” But the dishonesty corrodes the mission of the university. For instance, a political scientist at a research university told the authors that he wouldn’t assign works byFriedrich Hayek in his political economy class before he was tenured. His fears of political ostracism thereby deprived students of exposure to an influential 20th-century thinker.

Right-of-center scholars also learn not to ask research questions that might suggest the wrong political views. A historian told the authors he’d decided not to write his dissertation on the history of supply-side economics, because he feared the mere choice of the topic might reveal his deviance. So a significant movement in American political and intellectual history went unexamined.

Conservatives can safely study ancient history but not modern American history, economics but not sociology. Literature, largely a politics-free zone until the 1980s, has become hostile territory. When a literature professor suggested that his department could increase enrollments by teaching Jane Austen, he told Shields and Dunn, one colleague “got very upset.” She said “that this was just a way of catering to the prejudices that students learned in high school, and after that she never spoke to me at all,” the professor reported.

When scholars do venture into forbidden territory, or get politically unpopular results, they face stricter scrutiny than their peers. For empirical work, observes Rossman, reviewers ask “Must we believe this?” rather than “Can we believe this?” Quantitative methods do at least provide an accepted, apolitical basis for making one’s case. For historians and literary scholars, a leftist spin is all but required, with apolitical work often deemed boring. Shields and Dunn cite a literature professor who is a permanent adjunct despite a long record of publications. When he asked a colleague what was wrong with his vita, he was told, “It was a nice resume for 1940.”

Shields and Dunn put a positive spin on their results because, like many of their subjects, they want to encourage others on the right to pursue scholarly careers. Research and teaching benefit from a variety of political lenses, they argue. The paucity of conservative professors also gives liberal scholars a misleading picture of the American right, reinforcing the idea that conservatism is incompatible with intellectual rigor. Liberal academics picture Rush Limbaugh rather than an intellectual peer.

To the contrary, most of those interviewed expressed what the authors call a “Madisonian” political philosophy: “It is a political vision that values the discovery of common ground over ideological purity, learned elites over charismatic leaders, and reasoned appeals over passionate exhortations.” If institutions of higher learning refuse to make a place for scholars who share this vision, they will not only stifle inquiry. They will also deprive themselves of vital allies when the inevitable backlash comes to pull them down.

Liberals wonder why there hasn’t been more hue and cry about UW System funding cuts. This helps explain the reason. When the intellectuals don’t support your right to have a point of view different from yours, and their party isn’t in control, the result should be obvious.

Nick Gillespie passes on bad news for Republicans …

College students feel the Bern in a major way, says a new study of people at 100 universities around the country.

According to Student Monitor, a research-and-content shop for student publications, almost three-quarters of respondents said they planned to vote (yeah, yeah, I know: They also plan to go to that Friday 8 A.M. p-chem class too).

Of those planning on voting, fully 44 percent are going to punch a hole for Bernie Sanders, with just 21 percent coloring in for Hillary Clinton and a mere 8 percent rooting for Donald Trump (probably all of them attend Emory).

And there’s this, which can’t be making Reince Priebus or any of the dozen or so Republicans who remember that Mitt Romney got his ass kicked in 2012 by the weakest incumbent since Herbert Hoover: “Among those with a preference, 65% plan to vote for a Democrat, compared to 35% for a Republican.”

Read more at Inside Higher Ed.

… unless it’s not actually bad news if you learn from the news:

It’s easy to file heavily Democratic leanings among college students under “no duh.” But that’s simply ahistorical. Time was when the GOP could pull huge numbers of the student voters and youth voters (18-29 years old) more broadly. Yes, Barack Obama pulverized Romney in 2012, winning 62 percent of the under-30 vote to Romney’s 38 percent. But those numbers were actually lower than in 2008, when Obama pulled even bigger percentages. Yet as recently as 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush split the 18-24 vote, with each taking 47 percent (Ralph Nader pulled 5 percent, almost most certainly from Gore). Ronald Reagan came close to tying Jimmy Carter in 1980 before crushing Walter Mondale among the youngs in 1984. George H.W. Bush trounced Mike Dukakis among the same cohort in 1988 …

Hell, even Richard Nixon pulled 48 percent of the youth vote in 1972 against hippie savior George McGovern. So it’s not like Republicans can’t do well among younger voters, including college kids. In fact, if they want to win presidential elections, they have to. Or at least stay within 10 percentage points or so.

Republicans are unlikely to do so well anytime soon. There’s no question that youth support for Obama was something of an aberration that almost no candidate will match again. He was young, black, progressive, good at soaring oratory, etc. at exactly the right time in recent history. That he was matched up against a broken-down old man who seemed out of touch with almost everything in 2008 and then a blow-dried one-term governor who had created the pilot program for Obamacare in 2012 only served to run up the score among younger voters. Simply put, Obama was a perfect youth candidate while McCain and Romney were terrible youth candidates.

Here’s the problem and opportunity for Republicans: Millennials aren’t idiots, so they’re not simply in the tank for Democrats no matter what (recall the youthful enthusiasm surrounding Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, which was hardly based on Sanders-like promises of more free everything).

In fact, millennials are markedly less partisan than their elders despite having voted big for Obama; they are up for grabs politically and ideologically. But as the Reason-Rupe Millennial poll back in 2014 pointed out, there are certain threshold attitudes that reliably turn off younger Americans. For younger voters, it’s “culture first, politics second” and if you’re against same-sex marriage, pot legalization, and humane treatment of immigrants any conversation is over before it gets started.

Which is to say: It was nice knowing you, Republicans. However awful Donald Trump is when it comes to immigrants, his chief opponent for the GOP presidential nomination, Ted Cruz, is worse. Indeed, one of Cruz’s lines of attack (shared by the editors of National Review and other conservative outlets) is that Donald Trump is soft on immigration. He would, don’t you know, allow back into the United States some of the 12 million illegals he promises to deport, thus revealing his sickeningly inhumane program as just “a poorly disguised amnesty” scam!

When it comes to same-sex marriage, which Americans overwhelmingly support, Republican elders have started to hold their tongues about the wickedness of it all, but it may well be too little too late to win the hearts, minds, and votes of millennials. Sixty-one percent of millennial Republicans support gay marriage, which is higher than the overall average for all voters of all parties and all ages. And yet the GOP leadership can’t quite hide its moral revulsion at the idea of the state treating individuals in a non-discriminatory way and leading GOP folks ranging from Cruz to Mike Huckabee went out of their way to publicly support Kim Davis, the Kentucky County clerk who refused to abide a Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Mounting jesuitical arguments about how it’s really the states that should be deciding marriage law (even as Republicans pass laws defining marriage as only between one man and one woman) or that the Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds. Those sorts of arguments may be great in debating tournaments but they alienate just about everyone else who knows exactly what most Republican leaders have bee saying for decades: Gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married like normal people. In this, by the way, Trump may be less bad than a Cruz or a Kasich, since part of his terrifying “New York values” is plainly not to give a hoot about people’s sexuality. If only he could extend that sense of decency to people’s countries of origin and religion.

You can almost hear the geniuses at Republican Central reading surveys of younger votes and just writing them off, like they have done with Hispanics. Who needs them? We can’t win them anyway because we won’t just dish out free stuff (at least not to kids)! They’ll change parties when they get their first job and encounter FICA taxes (that fund Social Security and Medicare, which we refuse to reform)!

It was only a few years ago that it seemed likely a young crop of Republican pols—including Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—would lead small-government conservatism and libertarianism into the political mainstream. Man, wasn’t that a time! Rand Paul wowed crowds with lines such as

[Republicans] need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with pony tails, without pony tails, with beards, without.

At CPAC (of all places!), he talked about the GOP having become “stale” and “moss-covered.” But the moss won and Rand Paul tacked hard-right during his presidential run, calling for an end to refugees and immigrants from suspect countries, and Marco Rubio promised never to reform Social Security if it was bad for his mother. And the last three Republicans standing are not just weak on the threshold issues millennials care about, they are truly godawful.

The worst part of all this is that millennials don’t love or even like the Democrats and their policies. In 2013, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) issued a report about young voters. Consider this:

Millennials, says the report, don’t care much about abstractions such as that favorite Republican bogeyman, “big government.” But they are into cutting government spending and reducing the national debt, as they realize both things are strangling their future before it begins. Fully 90 percent agree that Social Security and Medicare need to be reformed now, 82 percent are ready to “make tough choices about cutting government spending, even on some programs some people really like,” and 72 percent want to cut the size of government “because it is simply too big.” Only 17 percent want to increase spending on defense and just 30 percent said that “marriage should be legally defined as only between a man and a women,” with 44 percent saying same-sex marriage should be legal everywhere and 26 percent saying it should be up to individual states.

If the Republican Party is in fact ready to implode over the possibility that Donald Trump could be its presidential candidate, whatever rises up from its ashes would do well to understand what millennials—the single-largest generation in American history—wants from its politics. It’s not the played-out, proven-failure, free-government-everything that the wizened “democratic socialist” is hawking, or the neo-con adventurism of Hillary Clinton, each of whom hates Uber, for god’s sake. They are doing well among college students mostly because nobody else is talking to millennials about future that might be more free and more prosperous. The future painted by Republicans isn’t about innovation and prosperity or living your life as you see fit. It’s inevitably about an America where gays are at least still marginalized when it comes to marriage and the drug war status quo is in place. An America where there are no more Mexicans and Syrian refugees and that is great because it has bombed ISIS and whatever inevitably replaces it into submission. Not very inspiring, to say the least.

If the GOP can lay off the culture-war stuff, especially ranking on gay marriage and pot legalization, and stop demonizing the dwindling population of illegal immigrants as the greatest threat to life, liberty, and the American Way, they might have a shot at breaking into double digits with today’s college kids. And tomorrow’s voters for the next 50 years.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) gave a talk to House of Representatives interns:

I want to thank Chairman Brady and the Ways and Means Committee for hosting us here. I had the privilege of joining this committee my second term in Congress. It’s the perfect setting for what I want to talk with you about today. Because it is here, in this committee, that we debate some of the biggest, most consequential issues. Our tax code, health care, trade, entitlement programs, welfare reform. t’s a big deal to be on this committee. And understanding the privilege and the responsibility that came along with it, we took our job seriously.

And we always held ourselves to a higher standard of decorum. We treated each other with respect.  We disagreed—often fiercely so—but we disagreed without being disagreeable. I speak of this in the past tense only because I no longer serve here. But it almost sounds like I’m speaking of another time, doesn’t it? It sounds like a scene unfamiliar to your generation.

Looking around at what’s taking place in politics today, it is easy to get disheartened. How many of you find yourself just shaking your head at what you see from both sides? You know, I see myself in each of you. I came here as a curious college intern. Trying to get a sense of everything. Trying to figure out where to take my life. I would always ask older, more experienced people: what do you know that you wished you knew when you were my age?

This is my answer to that. Here is what I know now that I want you to know—that you cannot see yourself today. And that is not just a lesson for young minds, but a message for all Americans. Our political discourse—both the kind we see on TV and the kind we experience among each other—did not use to be this bad and it does not have to be this way. Now, a little skepticism is healthy. But when people distrust politics, they come to distrust institutions. They lose faith in their government, and the future too. We can acknowledge this. But we don’t have to accept it. And we cannot enable it either.

My dad used to say, if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem. So I have made it a mission of my Speakership to raise our gaze and aim for a brighter horizon. Instead of talking about what politics is today, I want to talk about what politics can be. I want to talk about what our country can be…about what our Founders envisioned it to be. America is the only nation founded an idea—not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. Our rights are natural. They come from God, not government.

While it was a beautiful idea, it had never been tried before. Early on, as our founders struggled to establish a suitable order, they decided that we would not maintain this idea by force. In the first Federalist paper, Alexander Hamilton wrote that “in politics,” it is “absurd to aim at making” converts “by fire and sword.” Instead, we would govern ourselves, with the people’s consent. Again, there was no manual for how to do this. That’s why they call it the American experiment.

So they made each other—and those who came after—take an oath to uphold the Constitution. And every generation since has inherited this responsibility. Leaders with different visions and ideas have come and gone; parties have risen and fallen; majorities and White Houses won and lost. But the way we govern endures: through debate, not disorder. This is one thing about our country that makes it the greatest on earth.

I must admit, I didn’t always find this idea so exciting…As I said, I came to Washington unsure of what I was going to do with my life. And then I ended up working for a guy named Jack Kemp. Jack once played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. He went on to represent the people of Western New York in the House in the 1970s and 80s. He served in the Cabinet under President George H.W. Bush. And, like me, he was once our party’s nominee for vice president.

But I first met Jack exactly where you’d expect…at Tortilla Coast. It’s true…I was waiting on his table. I didn’t bother him that day, but I told a friend I’d love to have the chance to work for him. And, as luck would have it, such an opening soon arose. The thing about Jack was, he was an optimist all the way. He refused to accept that any part of America–or the American Idea–could be written off. Here was a conservative willing—no, eager—to go to America’s bleakest communities and talk about how free enterprise could lift people out of poverty. These were areas that hadn’t seen a Republican leader come through in years, if ever.

I had the chance to accompany Jack on some of these visits. I saw how people took to him. I saw how he listened, and took new lessons from each experience. He found common cause with poverty fighters on the ground. Instead of a sense of drift, I began to feel a sense of purpose. Jack inspired me to devote my professional life to public policy. It became a vocation.

Ideas, passionately promoted and put to the test—that’s what politics can be.That’s what our country can be. It can be a confident America, where we have a basic faith in politics and leaders. It can be a place where we’ve earned that faith. All of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency. Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing the identity politics of “our base” and “their base,” we unite people around ideas and principles. And instead of being timid, we go bold.

We don’t resort to scaring you, we dare to inspire you. We don’t just oppose someone or something. We propose a clear and compelling alternative. And when we do that, we don’t just win the argument. We don’t just win your support. We win your enthusiasm. We win hearts and minds. We win a mandate to do what needs to be done to protect the American Idea.

In a confident America, we also have a basic faith in one another. We question each other’s ideas—vigorously—but we don’t question each other’s motives. If someone has a bad idea, we don’t think they’re a bad person. We just think they have a bad idea. People with different ideas are not traitors. They are not our enemies. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our fellow citizens. Sometimes they’re our friends. Sometimes they’re even our own flesh and blood, right? We all know someone we love who disagrees with us politically, or votes differently.

But in a confident America, we aren’t afraid to disagree with each other. We don’t lock ourselves in an echo chamber, where we take comfort in the dogmas and opinions we already hold. We don’t shut down on people—and we don’t shut people down. If someone has a bad idea, we tell them why our idea is better. We don’t insult them into agreeing with us. We try to persuade them. We test their assumptions. And while we’re at it, we test our own assumptions too.

I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you I have always met this standard. There was a time when I would talk about a difference between “makers” and “takers” in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. “Takers” wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point.

So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way. But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct. I was just wrong. And of course, there are still going to be times when I say things I wish I hadn’t.  There are still going to be times when I follow the wrong impulse.

Governing ourselves was never meant to be easy. This has always been a tough business. And when passions flair, ugliness is sometimes inevitable. But we shouldn’t accept ugliness as the norm. We should demand better from ourselves and from one another. We should think about the great leaders that have bestowed upon us the opportunity to live the American Idea. We should honor their legacy. We should build that more confident America.

This, as much as anything, is what makes me an optimist. It is knowing that ideas can inspire a country and help people. Long before I worked for him, Jack Kemp had a tax plan that he was incredibly passionate about. He wasn’t even on the Ways and Means Committee and Republicans were deep in the minority back then. So the odds of it going anywhere seemed awfully low. But he was like a dog with a bone. He took that plan to any audience he could get in front of. He pushed it so hard that he eventually inspired our party’s nominee for president—Ronald Reagan—to adopt it as his own. And in 1981 the Kemp-Roth bill was signed into law, lowering tax rates, spurring growth, and putting millions of Americans back to work.

All it took was someone willing to put policy on paper and promote it passionately. This is the basic concept behind the policy agenda that House Republicans are building right now. As leaders, we have an obligation to put our best ideas forward—no matter the consequences. With so much at stake, the American people deserve a clear picture of what we believe. Personalities come and go, but principles endure. Ideas endure, ready to inspire generations yet to be born.

That’s the thing about politics. We think of it in terms of this vote or that election. But it can be so much more than that. Politics can be a battle of ideas, not insults. It can be about solutions. It can be about making a difference. It can be about always striving to do better. That’s what it can be and what it should be. This is the system our Founders envisioned. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It’s infuriating at times. And it’s a beautiful thing too.

 

 

David Harsanyi:

Last weekend I began rereading Gustave Le Bon’s fantastic 1895 book about the psychology of large groups, entitled “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” The book basically offers a synopsis of the Trump — and to some extent — the Obama spectacles of the past few years. It’s filled with snippets like this one:

The masses have never thirsted after truth. … Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

And this one:

We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts.

And this one:

We have also seen that they only entertain violent and extreme sentiments, that in their case sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred.

Whatever sparked the Trump movement, it now exhibits most of the irrational attributes of “The Crowd.” And this kind of boorish, herd mentality is human nature. Still, plenty of smart people continue spend a lot of time speculating about the movement’s deeper motivations. Rationalizing it. How many stories today, for example, will focus on the white hardscrabble working-class voter even after Trump ran away with the gray-haired retirees of Florida and the well-heeled homeowners of the Chicago suburbs?

Boy, they really suffer down in Boca.

Smart people like to theorize about Trumpism by imposing their own gripes about the GOP or trade or foreign policy or economics or whatever else they’re irritated by as proof that the GOP could have saved itself if it had only adopted some shrewder strategy. That strategy, amazingly, will almost always correspond with the views of the author. (I’m probably guilty, as well. If only Republicans had incorporated some kind of libertarian drug legalization proposal!) And because these thinkers see the “frustrations” of Trump fans as a manifestation of their clever warnings, they are sympathetic to the cause.

For the Left, Trump’s success supposedly tells us everything America needs to know about the id of the Right and the dead-end of conservatism. For a heaping dose of wishful thinking see Jonathan Chait’s piece on how conservatives openly rejected the working class: “Republican doctrine reflects the conviction that the main evil of modern government is to excessively punish the rich and reward their inferiors.”

Sure it does.

Other smart people like to make common cause with Trump as a way to show just how much they understand the “frustrations” of working and middle classes have with the establishment. So they hitch their aspirations to someone less conservative and less principled and less decent. Guess what? This is America. A man can hate all factions equally.

Other times, the professional political class seems to believe that, rather than making a compelling case of its own, it can piggyback populism by offering some watered-down progressive reforms, or maybe a slight alteration the H-1B visa program. Others, and you can see this troubling trend emerging among Republicans, believe Trump is the inevitable nominee and worth supporting because he’ll be malleable once in office.

Power-hungry egomaniacs are always more reasonable once they’ve taken control of government, I guess.

You’re free to patch together any theory you like, of course, but if you actually listen to the motivations of Trump’s core fans you will not be confused: They want to destroy you. Hang you by your fancy tie. Draw and quarter your career, and scatter the pieces from sea to shining sea. But don’t attack Trump supporters! They’re just salt of the earth, you elitist!

Unlike professional conservative activists, journalists — opinionators or otherwise — have no reason to glad-hand and empathize with 40 percent or so of Republican primary voters who aren’t dismayed by Trump’s violent rhetoric, his authoritarianism, or his self-destructive protectionism. There’s no reason to find common cause with those who don’t find the idea of a president ordering soldiers to murder the innocent families of terrorists — while countermanding American law — to be morally troublesome.

Being a working class American doesn’t mean you lack sense or morals. Those who treat you as if you did are the true elitists.

Nor do writers have any duty to be part of concerted efforts to lure back these voters. Journalists should write truths and arguments as they see them, pushing back against the whims of the mob and dumb notions its leader perpetuate. Everything in Washington disincentivizes the political class from doing this. The mass media — which drive other coverage — are incentivized to give Trump billions of dollars of unearned media, and that is only marginally better than the corrupt sites that do not merely support candidates, but act as shills for them.

“The Crowd” has taken legitimate criticisms about the GOP and transformed them into jokes, convincing itself that elected Republicans — who are often uninspiring, clueless, and spineless, but have stopped countless Obama initiatives — do absolutely nothing and always surrender. They believe that Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio are liberals but Donald Trump is a conservative worth supporting. They’ve convinced themselves that the United States is in worse shape today than it’s ever been in. The men and women of the Great Depression or the 1970s or 9/11 probably disagree.

These voters have heard about the violence, the illiberalism, and the attacks on the freedom of expression. They cheer it on. They justify it. They rationalize it. It’s not about some clause in TPP anymore. It’s a mob. If you support Trump — and I realize not every person who embraces him is paying close attention or fully understands what’s been going on — you’re an ideological opponent of limited government and liberal institutions. As Le Bon put it, “the beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.” Which sounds about right.

I did not know what Politico reports about Ohio Gov. John Kasich:

The Republican nomination can sometimes seem like a contest to see which candidate is most religious. Ted Cruz touts his born-again faith, and he recalls how he “surrendered his heart to Jesus” as an 8-year-old at summer camp. Marco Rubio, who has at different times embraced Catholicism, Mormonism and evangelicalism, says his faith is the “single greatest influence in my life.” Donald Trump, by all appearances, has never attended church regularly and claims that he has never even asked God for forgiveness, but he nonetheless speaksabout American Christians as though they’re a persecuted minority and has earned the widespread support of evangelicals.

There’s good reason to believe, however, that the most religiously driven candidate of all is a man who is remarkably un-theatrical about his beliefs—who even vows, “I don’t go out and try to win a vote by using God. I think that cheapens God.” That would be John Kasich.

There is no easy way to measure how deeply a person believes, of course, or to what degree a politician is driven by faith. But the Ohio governor has gone to Bible study with the same group of men every other week for the past 20 years. He has attended an Anglican church in Ohio for decades because, as he wrote in his book, Every Other Monday: Twenty Years of Life, Lunch, Faith, and Friendship, he likes receiving Communion every week, a practice uncommon in other Christian denominations. When Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died last year after a battle with brain cancer, Kasich quickly expressed sympathy, offering a prayer on Meet the Press: “I’m going to pray for [Joe] because he’s had a lifetime of tears. God bless you, Joe.” (Cruz, in contrast, trotted out an old joke about the vice president just days after Beau’s death.)

The irony here is not just that the most pious Republican candidate has been largely overshadowed in a campaign for which Christianity is a major calling card. As Kasich makes what could be his last big campaign push to win Ohio’s primary on Tuesday, his devout faith might actually be hurting him. The governor’s faith appears to drive his politically moderate stances on immigration, climate change and gay marriage—positions that alienate him from mainstream conservatives whose support Kasich needs to have a chance at the nomination.

***

If the role of religion in Kasich’s life isn’t well-understood, that’s in part because his complex faith journey led him to a denomination that most Americans have never heard of. He was raised Catholic with ambitions to be the best altar boy in his parish, earning him the nickname “Pope” among his friends. But around the time he left for college at Ohio State, Kasich’s belief began to wane. He “drifted away from religion as a young adult,” he wrote in his book. It wasn’t until a drunk driver killed his parents in 1987 that Kasich returned to church. But this time, he entered the Episcopal Church, which his parents had joined later in life.

This is where things get a little tricky: He stayed with his church as it broke off with the mainstream Episcopal Church in the United States in protest over the denomination’s embrace of openly gay priests and bishops. In 2011, Kasich’s home church, Saint Augustine’s Anglican Church in Westerville, Ohio, is one of those that split off under a new, more conservative denomination called the Anglican Church in North America. In departure from mainstream Episcopalians, the ACNA gives local churches the autonomy to decide whether to ordain women, and it politically opposes abortion and euthanasia, while the Episcopal church acknowledges “there may be cases that stand beyond judgment.”

It also supports the traditional view of marriage as being between a man and a woman, and called the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage last year a “stark departure from God’s revealed order.”

At face value, those issues don’t diverge much from a typical conservative family-values platform. But in other ways, Kasich’s religious beliefs appear to have put him at odds with Republican Party dogma. Over the years, he has spoken enough about his faith and quoted Scripture often enough, that it is possible to tie many of his political decisions to tenets of his faith—especially the ones that deviate from GOP orthodoxy. …

That Kasich would link the expansion of health care benefits so explicitly to the Bible upset the conservative establishment, and it wasn’t long before columnists began criticizing Kasich’s betrayal of conservative ideals. Some of his 2016 rivals chimed in too, saying the Medicaid expansion would make “more and more people dependent upon government” (Jeb Bush) and would add to the federal debt (Rick Perry). Kasich, for his part, has brushed aside his critics, and continues to cite his faith as the reason.“When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” he said in 2013. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”

Kasich also diverges from the GOP base in that he believes people have contributed to climate change, citing religion on that front too. “I happen to believe there is a problem with climate change,” he said in 2012. “I don’t want to overreact to it, I can’t measure it all, but I respect the creation that the Lord has given us, and I want to make sure we protect it.” Compare this with Rubio’s claim that “for all we know, God wants the Earth to get warmer.” Here, again, Kasich’s faith seems to be a factor. His denomination recently acknowledged a “serious global ecological crisis” and “the fragility of our earthly existence,” in contrast to the many evangelical churches that do not address the issue of the environment at all.

While his competitors talk about building walls and sending migrants back across the border, Kasich supports a path to legalization. He also has expressed his reluctance to enforce deportation, saying he couldn’t imagine “how we would even begin to think about taking a mom or a dad out of a house when they have not committed a crime since they’ve been here.” That could be a line right out of the ACNA’s Immigrant Initiative—an effort to help immigrants navigate the complicated American legal system—and it’s earned Kasich his fair share of criticism from the far right. After the governor said that undocumented immigrants are “made in the image of the Lord,” Breitbart fired back: “If being ‘made in the image of the Lord’ provides an exemption to America’s immigration law, then that would mean that all of the world’s 7 billion people would be free to violate America’s immigration laws.”

On gay marriage, most of the Republican field has called for the Supreme Court’s decision to be overturned, and indeed, only 32 percent of Republicans report supporting gay marriage. Kasich doesn’t personally favor same-sex marriage, in line with ACNA teaching, but he is refreshingly gracious and tolerant on the issue, citing religious influences. During the recent GOP debate in Houston, he said, “I’ve always favored traditional marriage, but, look, the court has ruled and I’ve moved on. … If you’re in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. That’s my view. And if you don’t agree with their lifestyle, say a prayer for them when they leave and hope they change their behavior.” At an earlier debate in August, he told Fox’s Megyn Kelly, “We’ll accept [gay marriage]. And guess what, I just went to the wedding of a friend of mine who happens to be gay. Because somebody doesn’t think the way I do, doesn’t mean I can’t care about them or love them.” You could call this political pragmatism, but it is underpinned by faith. “God gives me unconditional love,” Kasich told Kelly, by way of explaining his stance on gay marriage. “I’m going to give it to my family and my friends and the people around me.”

***

If you listen closely to what Kasich has said over the years about religion, you start to see a particular theme: He seems less motivated by specific strictures and “values” than by the broader conviction that eternal life changes our perspective on the temporal. Kasich cites the late University of Southern California philosophy professor Dallas Willard as one of his theological inspirations—an unusual choice because Willard was not always accepted by the Christian establishment. His teaching that the Kingdom of God is available here and now—“eternity is already in session,” he was known to say—follows a school of thought known as spiritual formation, or the idea that with discipline and spiritual development, ordinary Christians can grow to become more like Jesus. “I love to envision the potential impact on society if more and more people in government began to live lives of other-centered love,” Kasich wrote in a tribute book to Willard. “I have hope that I can put practices in my life today that can help me not only now but also in the world yet to come.” Kasich, with his unique mix of left- and right-leaning views, seems to have adopted Willard’s focus on the Kingdom of God as far more important than the Republic of the United States.

Focusing on the world to come makes sense for any Christian believer. But in 2016—an unusually freewheeling, insult-filled race—it might be exactly the wrong belief for a presidential candidate to embrace. At a time when voters are demanding immediate solutions to perceived wrongs, patience and the promise of heaven might not mean much at the voting booth.

That hasn’t stopped Kasich. Recently, a voter at a Georgia town hall asked the governor when would he “live out [his] purpose” by finally punching back at Trump and Rubio. Kasich’s response—perhaps not surprisingly—was a study in temperance: “I don’t know if my purpose is to be president,” he said. “Whether I’m president or whether I am not president, OK, I’m carrying out my mission. Don’t you think?”

Eliot A. Cohen begins by asking how the Republican Party got The (non-Republican) Donald:

How on earth did this happen?  Some, like Robert Kagan, think it is solely the result of a prolonged self-poisoning of the Republican Party. A number of shrewd writers—David Frum, Tucker Carlson, Ben Domenech, Charles Murray, and Joel Kotkin being among the best—have probed deeper. Not surprisingly, they are all some flavor of conservative. On the liberal (or, as they say now, progressive) end of the spectrum the reaction has been chiefly one of smugness (“well, that’s what the Republicans are, we knew it all along”), schadenfreude (“pass the popcorn”), and chicken-counting (“now we can get a head start on Hillary’s first Inaugural”). Their insouciance will be stripped away if Trump becomes the nominee and turns his cunning, ferocity, and charm on an inept, boring politician trailing scandals as old as dubious investments with a 1,000 percent return and as fresh as a homebrew email server. He might lose. He might, however, very well tear her to pieces. Clearly, he relishes the prospect, because he despises the politicians he has bought over the years.

The conservative analysts offer a number of arguments—a shifting class structure, liberal overreach in social policy, existential anxiety about the advent of a robot-driven economy, the stagnation since the Great Recession, and more. They note (as most liberal commentators have yet to do) Trump’s formidable political skills, including a visceral instinct for detecting and exploiting vulnerability that has been the hallmark of many an authoritarian ruler. These insights are all to the point, but they do not capture one key element.

Moral rot.

Politicians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times—in the United States, at any rate—there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but can anyone doubt what Trump would have christened the Hoover Dam—or the Washington Monument?

That otherwise sober people do not find Trump’s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. Their editors know that the online versions of their publications attract the vicious, the bigoted, and the foulmouthed. But they keep those comments sections going in the hope of getting eyeballs on the page.

Winston Churchill recalls in his memoir how as a young man he came to terms with hypocrisy, discovering the “enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of a great people.” Inconsistency between public virtue and private vice is not altogether a bad thing. No matter how nasty the realities are, maintaining respectable appearances, minding the civilities, and adhering to the conventions is part of what keeps civilization going.

The current problem goes beyond excruciatingly bad manners. What we increasingly lack, and have lacked for some time, is a sense of the moral underpinning of republican (small r) government. Manners and morals maintain a free state as much as laws do, as Tocqueville observed long ago, and when a certain culture of virtue dies, so too does something of what makes democracy work. Old-fashioned words like integrity, selflessness, frugality, gravitas, and modesty rarely rate a mention in modern descriptions of the good life—is it surprising that they don’t come up in politics, either?

William James, a pacifist who understood this point, argued in The Moral Equivalent of War that “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt.” Just so. Trump might have become a less upsetting figure if he had not wriggled through the clutches of the draft in the 1960s.

Trump’s rise is only one among many signs that something has gone profoundly amiss in our popular culture. It is related to the hysteria that has swept through many campuses, as students call for the suppression of various forms of free speech and the provision of “safe spaces” where they will not be challenged by ideas with which they disagree. The rise of Trump and the fall of free speech in academia are equal signs that we are losing the intellectual sturdiness and honesty without which a republic cannot thrive.

There are other traces of rot. They can be seen in the excuses that political leaders and experts have begun to make as they cozy up to Trump. Like French bureaucrats in the age of Vichy, or Italian aristocrats in the age of Mussolini, they are already saying things like: “I can make it less bad,” “He’s different in private,” “He has his good points,” “He is evolving,” and “Someone has to do the work of government.” Of course, some politicians—Chris Christie, that would be you—simply skip the pretense and indulge in spite or opportunism as the mood takes them.

This is not the first age in which politicians have taken morally disgraceful positions, even by the standards of their time. In the 1950s and 1960s there were flagrant bigots in Congress. But many of them were in other ways public spirited­—think Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, for example, who presided with dignity over the Senate Armed Services Committee for nearly two decades. Lyndon Johnson may not have opposed the evils of his time forthrightly, but he used the full extent of his wiliness to break through the institutionalized discrimination of the South. The villainy of today takes softer forms, but it is pervasive—politicians swallow their principles (such as they are) and endorse a candidate they despise, turn on a judge they once praised, denounce the opposition for behavior identical to their own, or press their branch’s prerogatives and rules to the Constitutional limit, and beyond.

The rot is cultural. It is no coincidence that Trump was the star of a “reality” show. He is the beneficiary of an amoral celebrity culture devoid of all content save an omnipresent lubriciousness. He is a kind of male Kim Kardashian, and about as politically serious. In the context of culture, if not (yet) politics, he is unremarkable; the daily entertainments of today are both tawdry and self-consciously, corrosively ironic. Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults. Go to YouTube and look at old episodes of Profiles in Courage, if you can find them—a wildly successful television series based on the book nominally authored by John F. Kennedy, which celebrated an individual’s, often a politician’s, courage in standing alone against a crowd, even a crowd with whose politics the audience agreed. The show of comparable popularity today is House of Cards. Bill Clinton has said that he loves it.

American culture is, in short, nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump.

The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln, which is a set of ideas about how to govern a country, rather than an organization clawing for political and personal advantage. What is at stake, however, is something much more precious than even a great political party. To an extent unimaginable for a very long time, the moral keel of free government is showing cracks. It is not easy to discern how we shall mend them.