4 days ago
I'm normally a mild guy. Here's what's pushed me over the edge
When I was a baby pundit, my mentor, Bill Buckley, told me to write about whatever made me angriest that week. I don't often do that, mostly because I don't get angry that much — it's not how I'm wired. But this week, I'm going with Bill's advice.
On Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren't motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, 'They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.' This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the populariser of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He's a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Donald Trump acolytes cut their teeth.
In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen's. Vance said, 'People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.' Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.
But that's not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.
Before I explain what I mean, let me first make the obvious point that Deneen's and Vance's assertions that soldiers never fight for ideals is just plain wrong. Of course warriors fight for their comrades. And of course there are some wars such as Vietnam and Iraq, where Vance served, where the moral causes are unclear or discredited. But when the moral stakes are made clear, most soldiers are absolutely motivated in part by ideals — even in the heat of combat.
For his book 'For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War,' the great historian James M McPherson read about 25,000 letters and 249 diaries from soldiers who fought in that war. Their missives were filled with griping about conditions, about the horrors of war — they had no need in their private writings to sugarcoat things. But of the 1,076 soldiers whose writings form the basis of his book, McPherson found that 68 per cent of the Union soldiers and 66 per cent of the Confederate soldiers explicitly cited 'patriotic motivations' (as they interpreted them) as one reason they went into combat. Other soldiers were probably also motivated by their ideals, but they found it too obvious to mention.
'Sick as I am of this war and bloodshed as much oh how much I want to be home with my dear wife and children,' a Pennsylvania officer wrote, 'every day I have a more religious feeling, that this war is a crusade for the good of mankind.' An Indiana man wrote, 'This is not a war for dollars and cents, nor is it a war for territory — but it is to decide whether we are to be a free people — and if the Union is dissolved I very much fear that we will not have a republican form of government very long.'
People who are more theologically advanced than I have a name for that kind of dehumanisation: spiritual warfare. All of us humans have within us a capacity for selfishness and a capacity for generosity. Spiritual warfare is an attempt to unleash the forces of darkness and to simultaneously extinguish the better angels of our nature. Trump and Vance aren't just promoting policies; they're trying to degrade America's moral character to a level more closely resembling their own.
Years ago, I used to slightly know both Deneen and Vance. Vance has been in my home. We've gone out for drinks and coffee. Until Inauguration Day, I harbored him no ill will. Even today, I've found I have no trouble simultaneously opposing Trump policies and maintaining friendship and love for friends and family who are Trump supporters. In my experience, a vast majority of people who support Trump do so for legitimate or at least defensible reasons.
But over the past four months, a small cabal at the top of the administration — including Trump, Vance, Miller and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought — have brought a series of moral degradations to the nation those Union soldiers fought and died for: the betrayal of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, the cruel destruction of so many scientists' life projects, the ruination of PEPFAR. According to the HIV Modeling Consortium's PEPFAR Impact Tracker, the cuts to that programme alone have already resulted in nearly 55,000 adult deaths and nearly 6,000 dead children. We're only four months in.
Moral contempt is an unattractive emotion, which can slide into arrogance and pride, which I will try to struggle against. In the meantime, it provoked this column from a mild-mannered guy on a beautiful spring day. — The New York Times.
David Brooks
Brooks is a book author and political and cultural commentator
