A tentative step toward optimism

. . . and the level of national life that must be addressed if anything is to come of it

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Longtime Precipice readers know that often my inspiration for writing a post comes from coming across two pieces by others that come at a particular subject from different angles - or on different levels, if you’d like. Such is the case today.

I’ve long admired Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His book Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism was published in 2010, halfway through Obama’s first term. I read it around that time, and its exhaustive documentation of Obama’s lifelong immersion in a leftist perspective gave substantiation to my instinctual sense that he was mainstreaming the brand of progressivism most antagonistic to a commonly held notion of the West. In fact, during the 2012 campaign, I was immensely frustrated that more of the details of Kurtz’s book regarding Obama’s web of hard-left associations wasn’t part of the Republican message.

Kurtz has a piece today at National Review titled “Conservative Cultural Comeback: How It Might Be Extended.” Its optimism is laudable, all the more so because it’s also guarded. Kurtz understands that such an extension is by no means a given:

The ability to envision a significantly more conservative future is important, as well as novel. The left has lost its certainty about the future, and this by itself has had huge consequences for its ability to intimidate and silence others. Knowing that a more conservative future is perfectly possible is a victory for freedom. That, in the end, may be the most important outcome of the conservative cultural comeback.

Earlier in his essay, Kurtz poses a what-if question regarding a two-term Republican presidency following what we have now. I’d actually say that such a scenario is likely, but it doesn’t fill me with excitement.

He uses his framing of a period in recent US history as substantiation for considering that such an era could happen again:

If all this [dismantling institutionalized wokeness] happens, it would have been for largely the same reason that we got three consecutive Republican terms in the 1980s and early 1990s, not to mention Republicans alternating with moderate Democrats from Richard Nixon through George W. Bush. The center-right presidencies of 1968 through 2007 were reactions to the excesses of the late 1960s, as embodied in the presidential candidacy of George McGovern.

It isn’t hard to imagine that we might now get at least three consecutive Trump-style presidential terms, all in response to the woke madness that gripped the country after the death of George Floyd.

I’m wary of where he goes from there. Yes, Trump has resolutely acted on the frustrations of a large swath of the populace with his use of the federal purse strings as a cudgel against universities that are engaged in lots of research. But there’s the conflation factor - something I’ve written about fairly often since 2016.

Before I flesh out what I mean, here’s Kurtz:

But here’s a sobering question. What actually happened to the culture from the presidencies of Richard Nixon through George W. Bush? Slowly but surely, what was then called “political correctness” actually cemented its domination of academia, government-run schools, the news media, and Hollywood. The radicals of the 1960s completed their long march through the institutions right under the noses of the center-right political class. Is there any reason to expect a different outcome this time?

I think there is. Richard Nixon, for example, despite some of his rhetoric, actually advanced Lyndon Johnson’s policy of affirmative action. Ronald Reagan considered revoking Johnson’s executive order on preferences, but defenders of affirmative action, both outside and inside Reagan’s administration, prevented this. Nothing much changed under either H. W. or W. Bush, except that the courts continued to entrench preferential treatment. The heroic efforts of William Bennett and Lynn Cheney certainly advanced the education culture wars under Presidents Reagan and H. W. Bush, but their exertions were largely rhetorical. Ultimately, those tactics proved insufficient. And when it came to higher education, W. Bush didn’t even bother to fight rhetorically.

President Trump, by contrast, has uprooted Johnson’s original affirmative action EO and for the very first time has linked a conservative program of higher-education reform to the continued receipt of federal dollars. Federal levers of power have also been used across the entire range of culture-war issues, often for the very first time on behalf of conservative goals. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party has largely been driven by voters furious at the failure of establishment Republicans to fight these cultural battles. The party base is little short of ecstatic over Trump’s willingness to aggressively push back on woke policies.

It is thus now virtually inconceivable that Trump’s Republican successors could attempt anything less. On top of that, a newly conservative Supreme Court has turned sharply against practices like affirmative action — a policy without which the entire program of DEI is difficult to sustain. In short, Trump has transformed the Republican Party on cultural issues for the foreseeable future. Henceforth, Republican voters will expect their representatives to aggressively prosecute the culture wars. This means that political dominance will have far greater implications for the culture than it did in earlier decades.

But Trumpism - incoherent populism that occasionally resonates with actual conservatism - has so thoroughly subsumed the latter that these bold moves could be suddenly reversed - by the guy who made them, or a successor who is in his mold (which is assuredly the kind of Republican candidate we’re going to have in 2028).

Let me put it this way: if an actually conservative president played this kind of hardball with research universities, I’d applaud it. Since it’s Trump doing it, I can’t get too excited. His need to couch his reasoning in the language of insults and unmitigated combativeness indicate he has no understanding of what conservative higher education would actually look like.

I do appreciate the way Kurtz wraps up his speculation:

The point is not that it must or will happen, but that it easily could happen. The ability to envision a significantly more conservative future is important, as well as novel. The left has lost its certainty about the future, and this by itself has had huge consequences for its ability to intimidate and silence others. Knowing that a more conservative future is perfectly possible is a victory for freedom. That, in the end, may be the most important outcome of the conservative cultural comeback.

But I still take issue with his use of the term “conservative.” There is the small matter of the universally recognized transformation of the Republican Party in Trump’s image. Conservatism, like an ingredient in a soup, is impossible to extricate from the overall transformed worldview as long as slack is still being cut for glaring personal shortcomings in the Very Stable Genius and all those who hope to increase their power and influence in his wake.

The second piece that came across my radar and had me thinking about this appears at Front Porch Republic. It’s titled “What Was Scattered Was Not Destroyed.” It’s by Colin Gillette, a therapist who lives and practices in Rockford, Illinois.

I don’t know if Gillette has ever read any Frederick Backman, but he’s covering some of the same territory Backman covers in novels such as A Man Called Ove and Anxious People. I also don’t know how Backman would characterize his own approach to spirituality / religion, but he takes a broader, more general approach in fleshing out the theme common to both writers. Namely, that humankind is screaming for a sense of connection, coherence, empathy, and permission to oneself to be flawed to the point of falling apart.

I ought to write a post about Backman at some point, but it would be a digression to go further with it in this essay.

Gillette lays out what’s happened to institutionalized Christianity since the atomization of society got underway:

. . . the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.

The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.

As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?

I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.

Those in leadership positions can sense what’s happened:

I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.

The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

Gillette then brings in Richard Rohr:

It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.

Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.

This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.

But it’s real.

The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot.

Contrast that with Babel. There, the goal was altitude, uniformity, and control. The builders didn’t want to know God; they wanted to reach Him. Skip the wilderness. Bypass the wandering. Get straight to heaven, no questions asked. And now? The tower’s been modernized. It has a podcast. You can tithe from your phone while stuck in traffic. The worship team has a brand. And somewhere in the fine print, if you squint past the LED lights and the PowerPoint slides, you might still find the Gospel. But it’s quiet now. It whispers beneath the noise, waiting for someone willing to descend.

In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. Still, Maslow’s hierarchy lingers on classroom posters, in HR manuals, as a model for a certain kind of growth. Food, safety, love, esteem, and then self-actualization: the “you” you were meant to be, fully realized once the boxes are checked. It sounds clean. Linear. Reasonable. But the soul does not work that way. Not in the wilderness. Not in Rockford. Not in the hollow places where the old certainties no longer hold.

To return to Stanley Kurtz for a moment, I don’t think he’s glossing over the crisis of spirit and heart Gillette is addressing. He’s not some Townhall / Federalist bonehead who just wants to see the Republican brand stomp its opposition into the dust. He understands too much about the human condition for that.

But he seems to think that political-level victory can open the door to a return of human dignity, elevated discourse and the extension of grace.

Look, I know that, whatever form it takes, human affairs will always be, even as advancements are made, a cauldron of folly. But when our species rose above it, with the Locke-Montesquieu-Smith lineage of thought that culminated in America’s founding documents, it was because some people didn’t give up on the quest to identify what really prevents a culture from succumbing to darkness.

I guess my main point today is that a Trump-transformed Republican Party is not the vehicle that will deliver a brighter future. It will not heal the obvious disappearance of commonly held notions of what a life worth living is, of the minimal requirements for a society that promotes human flourishing, and of a sense of a transcendent realm.

The first order of business in the quest for a more human world takes place on an individual level. And here’s where the basic doctrine that has informed the institutional Church comes into the picture. We have to read our Scripture, our Augustine, our Aquinas, on a deeper level. Each of us needs to let consideration of where we stand in relation to Heaven occupy our thoughts all the time.

It’s far more important than the calls you have to make today, the emails you have to send, the deadlines and target dates you have to meet.

Policy initiatives come after that work is underway.

We each and all know what’s missing from life in post-America. It screams to us from deep inside.

Stomping the commies into the dust will not bring about the internal healing that everybody across the spectrum, whether he or she knows it or not, yearns for.