Annex Greenland! Take back the Panama Canal! Canada as the fifty-first state! Speaking at an early January press conference, Donald Trump put the world in a tizzy. German chancellor Olaf Scholz recoiled in disbelief, soberly intoning, “The principle of inviolability of borders applies to every country, whether it is to our east or west, and every state must keep it.” Trump also said he would demand that NATO members spend 5 percent of GDP on defense (the U.S. currently spends less than 4 percent). Former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder sniffed that the target was “a made-up number with no basis in reality.”
The pearl-clutching is sadly familiar. Although the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States has been at the center of public life for nearly a decade, establishment politicians and commentators remain incapable of interpreting his rhetoric. By my reckoning, Trump seeks to convey an important message: Geopolitical realities have changed, and thus American foreign policy must change. And not just American foreign policy. A great deal of the world order constructed after the demise of the Soviet Union must be revised and, in some cases, jettisoned. The era of globalization is over. America must consolidate her alliances and ensure her economic advantages.
Economic globalization did not “just happen.” It was orchestrated by a bipartisan consensus in the 1990s. That consensus led to NAFTA, empowered Silicon Valley, and remade the American financial system as the center of the world economy. Those were heady times. The end of the Cold War was interpreted as history’s verdict in favor of the American Way. The idea was to open up the American economy to the world—so that the world could be Americanized and America globalized.
Our leaders believed that globalization would serve America’s interests. They were convinced that economic integration would enhance U.S. security, just as linking Japan and Germany to the American economy after World War II had transformed enemies into allies. The consensus promised that globalized free markets would create interdependent economics, making for a harmony of interests that would moderate national rivalries. The consensus also held that an enlarged global market would redound to America’s economic benefit. We would specialize in financial management and high-return innovation, while low-wage countries would focus on resource extraction and low-return manufacturing.
Over the past ten years, innumerable commentators have detailed the failures of these promises. Globalization created an environment in which China could emerge as a dangerous rival, moving its economy up the value chain rather than remaining content to manufacture cheap clothes. (Why would we have imagined any other outcome?) Economic interdependence did not deter Putin in Crimea or Ukraine. Globalization succeeded in creating great wealth in the United States, but the benefits flowed largely to the fortunate few, at great social cost. As the gulf between those plugged into the global economy and those left behind in Rust Belt towns grew, the social contract in America frayed.
Globalization was possible only because the United States enjoyed unprecedented military hegemony in the 1990s. During this “unipolar moment,” American power faced no credible adversary. Setbacks in the Middle East after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq exposed limits. But it was only in the 2010s that the decline in American hegemony became evident. Russia’s annexation of Crimea revealed that nations other than the United States could control events, at least in their own neighborhoods.
We should not underestimate the importance of hard power. It’s simply impossible for the architecture of globalization, made possible by American super-hegemony, to endure without our military supremacy. Every aspect of America’s diplomacy, security arrangements, alliances, and especially our financial regime must necessarily change so as to accord with the reality of America’s relative decline from its serene omnipotence in the two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union. Failing to make these changes will produce instability and, eventually, system failure.
Trump’s blunt statements about Greenland, Canada, and NATO are demotic ways of conveying the necessity of significant changes in America’s relations to allies and adversaries. The president was sending a message to the Danish diplomatic corps and other national bureaucracies. He was also preparing the American people for the changes that are needed to respond to the broken promises of globalization. Annexation of Greenland is unlikely. Canadian sovereignty is secure. But Trump will almost certainly put new demands upon our allies, demands that require them to reorganize the resources they control around America’s military and economic needs.
Soon after his remarks, the Danish government backchanneled messages to the Trump transition team suggesting that expanded U.S. military installations in Greenland might be possible. Next on the agenda? Perhaps mining rights for rare earth metals. Canada? Perhaps the new administration will press for energy policies more closely coordinated with the United States. Whatever Trump was signaling in his remarks, it was not “isolationism,” a slur used to discredit those who think realistically about American power in the 2020s. Trump points to the need to reconfigure the capital and resources of our own country and those of our allies to buttress U.S. competitiveness on the global stage rather than supporting the never-fully-realized and already disintegrating global system.
Speaking at a June 2024 Manhattan Institute event, incoming treasury secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged the changing geopolitical situation. He observed that the end of the unipolar moment will require “a grand and global economic reordering” on the scale of Bretton Woods or the Treaty of Versailles. In another setting, Bessent noted that a reserve currency functions within a security zone. American military power undergirds the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. Changes in the scope of our power demand a rethinking of our economic and financial policies and institutions.
In the present global system, the United States plays three crucial roles. We have consumptive power capable of absorbing production from around the world. We provide liquidity to the world, which is to say that U.S. financial markets and the U.S. Treasury Department issue and turn over debt, the essential lubricant for markets. Finally, America provides security to the system, promising to use military might, if needed.
In an obvious way, tariffs and other trade restrictions serve as a tool for regulating access to America’s consumptive power. In a geopolitical environment in which the United States must halt its relative decline in global hegemony, using this tool becomes necessary.
A bipartisan consensus has already imposed trade restrictions on China that target technologies and industries deemed crucial to national security. In September 2024, then-Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill that taxes profits on investments in China at the higher income tax rate rather than the lower capital gains rate. Bessent recognizes that U.S. strategic thinking needs to go beyond measures that target China. Our current account deficit (imports being greater than exports) must be addressed. Our allies need to buy more things from the United States if they want to continue to sell things here. There are also domestic political reasons for tariffs—for example, to encourage re-industrialization that increases middle-class wages and supports the production of military hardware. In view of these factors, it is difficult to imagine that the United States will not erect further trade barriers in the coming years. The mere threat has already motivated foreign leaders to make concessions on trade and other matters.
The Biden administration overestimated American financial power. The super-sanctions designed to paralyze the Russian economy did not work. But the appeal of access to the U.S.-dominated global financial system is far from negligible. For example, the Federal Reserve operates a “repo” facility that allows central banks of other countries to borrow dollars temporarily when they lack liquidity. Access to this and other financial mechanisms will be reframed to strengthen alliances and weaken consortia of adversaries.
In his first term, Trump shocked establishment opinion by questioning NATO. He’s sure to rouse the ire of many by cutting a deal with Putin to end the Ukraine war. Perhaps NATO will remain a cornerstone of America’s military commitments. And perhaps the details of Trump’s deal with Putin will be ill-advised. But the larger truth must be acknowledged: The end of the unipolar moment demands scrutiny of America’s security guarantees to other countries—and revisions must be made when necessary. It is a false and irresponsible moralism that preaches great duties for American power that it cannot fulfill. It is ignoble to promise to do what you cannot.
I have no way to see the future, but of this I am sure: The world is evolving toward a new Cold War. The ideological divides will be less clear than those that obtained during the old Cold War. Economic interdependencies will endure, at least to some extent. But the End of History has ended. Events are undermining globalization. The Financial Times warns that Trump “risks turning the US into a rogue state.” This hysterical response bespeaks a dangerous myopia—or maybe it’s just the bellow of globalist interests anticipating losses to come. Either way, “international norms” are not timeless principles. They are the old truisms of globalization. New realities require new thinking. Ours is a time of reconsolidation. It is not occuring in ignorance or rejection of America’s international responsibilities. Reconsolidation is necessary to renew the sources of power so that we can meet those responsibilities.
The Spiritual Good of De-Globalization
I do not rue the end of globalization. As I note above, globalization undermined the economic conditions of solidarity throughout the West, especially the sense of shared weal and woe that binds elites to the masses. It has also encouraged spiritual disabilities: a soulless technocratic mentality and cocksure arrogance (“I’m on the side of history!”) paradoxically combined with dispirited complacency. Today’s turn toward reconsolidation will bring its own troubles. But perhaps it will also offer remedies.
The American spirit often nurtures a utopian hubris. In 1782, the heady year after Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at the Battle of Yorktown, Benjamin Franklin’s friend, the Pennsylvania luminary Charles Thomson, drew a phrase from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue to describe the American project: novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. The phrase suggests a new beginning destined to change the entire world.
The end of the Cold War and ascendancy of American power gave free rein to this American conceit. The impulse may have been noble. To seek to share one’s inheritance is a generous gesture, as long as it’s not imposed. But the dangers soon became evident. “Thou shalt be a democracy” didn’t always work. It turns out that other peoples have different ideas about how to live. Worse, the global project threatened to eclipse the American experiment. As Christopher Caldwell observes in his review of Angela Merkel’s memoir (“Merkel’s Country”), a progressive mindset too easily shifts loyalty away from a particular nation and directs it toward the larger world aborning, one purportedly attuned to higher ideals. In recent decades, a hoped-for empire, one of material prosperity and universal human rights, superseded the American republic as the ideal, at least in the minds of some.
The end of the unipolar moment returns the United States to a more sober frame of mind, one aware of the fragility of any shared enterprise. In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln endorsed the American creed of liberty and equality, principles that transcend history and place. But he spoke his words during a terrible war. He evoked a place and a history. Our nation’s great principles were made real by the courageous men who signed the Declaration of Independence. The task Lincoln assigns his listeners is to preserve “that nation.” In 1863 and 2025, “that nation” was and is not a Platonic Republic or imperium of human rights. It was and is our nation, the one fought for at Concord and founded in Philadelphia. Lincoln calls us to put our shoulders to the task of ensuring that this nation and its form of government “shall not perish from the earth.”
The vocation of preservation and renewal has reemerged. It will define the politics of the West in the coming years. To say that populism throughout the West answers to the shall-not-perish imperative is a simplification of complex political realities. But it’s not a false characterization.
I coined a phrase to capture the turn toward reconsolidation: “the return of the strong gods.” Some of my friends prefer more straightforward terms, such as “national conservatism.” Whatever our favored label, a turn away from globalization and its ideological justifications is underway, not because of “nativism,” love of “authoritarianism,” or some other atavistic vice, but because globalism has failed. Moreover, the return of the strong gods will not betray America’s native idealism. On the contrary, it will better serve our exalted sense of national destiny by renewing the foundations of our power and prosperity.
From the very outset, many religious figures and political leaders have spoken of America as the “new Israel.” Lincoln was a better theologian, knowing that we are, at best, an “almost chosen” people. Thus qualified, the biblical analogy offers helpful illumination. In the Old Testament, God does not promise a world empire to his chosen people. Rather, they are to be a light unto the nations, a role requiring covenant faithfulness, not dominion. Perhaps the end of the end of history will help us shed the illusion that Americans in the early twenty-first century possess the final and perfect political wisdom—or the supreme power—to govern the world. We need to recover a smidgen of biblical wisdom: We serve the world by preserving this nation and renewing our covenant, which is a covenant with one another as fellow citizens, not with “humanity” or some other abstraction.
Agon is a Greek word that means conflict. Globalization was alluring because it promised peace and prosperity. But agon also means contest, struggle, and trial, which are necessary for human beings to attain nobility, excellence, and transcendence. God gives us crosses to bear, not to burden us with pointless suffering, but to awaken us from the slumber of a complacent, me-centered existence.
Let no reader imagine that I wish for war. It is my hope that wise leaders will navigate the coming challenges with prudence. But we must acknowledge the spiritual benefits of living in a world with serious consequences. Those who visit Israel often note the vigor and vitality stimulated by the undeniable reality of that country’s enemies. Again, this is not to hope for enemies. A fool hastens conflagration, thinking it redemptive. But we should not blind ourselves to the spiritual benefits of escaping the illusions of a post-political, post-national utopia.
Alexandre Kojève prophesied the triumph of the universal and homogeneous state, an empire of technocracy. Perhaps God in his providence is dashing the globalist’s hopes for a world knit together by commerce, pacified by plenty, and managed by experts. The emerging world order of great powers and spheres of influence (or whatever terms seem appropriate) will bring greater tensions, perhaps even larger conflicts. Let us seek to moderate and blunt them. But we should welcome the fact that these challenges will test our loyalties and resolve, not just as nations, but as individuals with roles to play, however minor. That test, that agon, is a blessing, not a curse.
Another Theocracy Scare
The Atlantic spent most of 2024 warning its readers that Donald Trump was a dangerous authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. In the February 2025 issue, the magazine shifts gears. America is being threatened by a theocratic takeover of dangerous religious extremists.
In “Army of God,” Stephanie McCrummen purports to document the extensive influence of a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. Broadly understood, this vision of Christianity is a combative form of Pentecostalism. It emphasizes the demonic control of world powers, while trusting that God raises up righteous warriors to contest them, which the Almighty is doing even now. With the image-driven shorthand characteristic of populist American Protestantism (a powerful rhetorical tradition that can outdo Madison Avenue in arresting formulations), the battleground is framed as Seven Mountains. They are the crucial spheres of modern life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Christians are called to restore Christ’s rule over these seven spheres—the Seven Mountain Mandate—at which point Christ will return in glory.
I’m only vaguely aware of this movement. Some of my Protestant friends tell me not to underestimate the influence of the Seven Mountain Mandate in Pentecostal churches. They express concern that it politicizes the gospel and wrongly theologizes what are prudential judgments about how best to serve God’s kingdom as citizens of a pluralistic, democratic republic. That’s likely to be true. American Protestantism has a long tradition of Bible-only preaching, which means that these communities lack a tradition of natural law to guide political judgment. (Natural law is by no means uniquely Catholic. It is sustained in Protestantism under notions such as common grace and orders of creation.)
But intra-Christian debate about how to frame the Christian vocation of faithful citizenship is not McCrummen’s concern. She wants to warn her readers that America is threatened by a movement that “has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.” She claims that more than 40 percent of Christians in America subscribe to the militant agenda of the New Apostolic Reformation, a number she gets from Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe. Nearly half of American Christians? That sounds as implausible as the recent exaggerated claims made about the extent of nativist Christian nationalism, which Kenneth Woodward debunked in our pages (“The Myth of White Christian Nationalism,” May 2024).
McCrummen credits this movement with building a “sprawling political machine” that exercises vast but hidden influence. Such speculations (and fears) are akin to overwrought conservative concerns about the hand of George Soros, which is seen operating everywhere. Church entrepreneur Lance Wallnau, a leading voice for the Seven Mountain Mandate, has an interest in over-selling his influence in delivering votes to Trump’s column in the recent election. McCrummen ought to be skeptical. Furthermore, there’s more than a little journalistic trickery in her essay, as she draws Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Mike Johnson, and Samuel Alito into the story, implying that they are being influenced by the idiosyncratic biblical schemes promoted by those touting the New Apostolic Reformation.
More significantly, McCrummen fails to recognize the true role Lance Wallnau and other pastors in his movement play in contemporary American politics. At a revival meeting, she tells of a speaker who described the prospect of a Harris presidency as putting “the devil in the White House.” McCrummen goes on to report, “Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.”
This Manichean rhetoric is the photo negative of Atlantic authors such as Anne Applebaum, who warn that Trump is Hitler, Stalin, and Mao rolled into one totalitarian package. They depict our politics as an epochal struggle of liberal democracy—indeed, of all true human values—against the gathering forces of darkness and oppression. In the same issue of The Atlantic that contains McCrummen’s piece, Applebaum tells of an increasingly dire battle being waged across the West between enlightened reason and the benighted “new obscurantism.” The conviction that we are engaged in spiritual warfare is by no means exclusive to the religious right.
McCrummen quotes a scholar who warns that the New Apostolic Reformation “poses a profound threat to democracy.” It’s a strange claim, given the fact that the most damning evidence she adduces is the fact that Wallnau and his team worked overtime to get out Christian voters during the last election. Such efforts are a threat to democracy only for those who regard voters with whom they disagree as undeserving of the franchise. And storming the mountains of media and entertainment? This entails wooing audiences away from secular outlets, not organizing protestors to block streets in Hollywood.
The conviction that world history is charged with an underlying struggle between good and evil is widespread among Christians. And for good reason: It is integral to the Bible’s narrative, as even the most casual reader of the Gospel of John will recognize, not to mention those who take a glance at the Book of Revelation. Hans Urs von Balthasar speculated that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, reveals an ascending spiral of antagonism between God’s redemptive will and Satan’s countermeasures. The stronger the offer of grace, the more violent its rejection becomes. This spiritual conflict takes place in every area of life, especially in our own hearts, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us.
The New Apostolic Reformation may wax in influence, but it’s certain to wane at some point, perhaps quite soon. An influential Protestant dispensationalism of earlier decades encouraged disregard for secular affairs. Dwight L. Moody famously warned that worrying about culture is like polishing the brass on a sinking ship. The gospel message took on a more optimistic hue during the 1990s, when the prosperity gospel was ascendant in many non-denominational churches. Perhaps that cheery outlook was a fitting theologized echo of the go-go Clinton years, when partisan politics mattered less than it does today. The Seven Mountain Mandate? The Obama presidency launched a sustained effort to secure progressive control of America’s essential institutions, and it did so with a great deal of success, as the until-recently-powerful DEI regime made manifest. Are we surprised that conservative Christians would formulate a counter-offensive, drawing from the same progressive playbook, now translated into biblical terms and images?
A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.
American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?
The Inauguration
Handling automotive problems while living in Manhattan brings headaches (as well as comments from friends about the imprudence of owning a car in Gotham). Martin Luther King Jr. Day offered an opportunity to make a trip to a VW repair shop in the Bronx. A two-hour job invariably takes four hours, which put me in the waiting room at noon on that cold Monday. A middle-aged man whose accent strongly suggested that he was an immigrant from Africa was also waiting for his car to be repaired. A few minutes after noon, he fiddled with the TV remote, changing the channel so that we could watch Trump’s inauguration. We missed the swearing in, coming into the broadcast just as Trump began his inauguration speech.
My fellow VW owner sat next to me, stretching out his legs, smiling and nodding. Halfway through the speech, I made some anodyne comments. He responded with pleasant generalizations about our political situation. Our attention returned to the speech, which featured the uniquely Trumpian combination of pugilistic attacks and promises of peace and happiness heretofore unknown in human history. The speech came to an end. I observed that Trump is a remarkable man. My companion agreed, adding, “He’s a big man.” He then made a sweeping gesture with his hand, and said, “He makes the others look small.”
Carrie Underwood sang “America the Beautiful,” with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris behind her singing along. A fellow from the repair desk came in. My neighbor’s car was ready. He went out.
I have no idea whether this fellow voted for Trump. Maybe he pulled the lever for Harris. Perhaps he’s not an American citizen. But that doesn’t matter. His desire to watch one of America’s most important political rituals, his evident interest in our civic life—these revelations warmed my heart. But what most encouraged me was this man’s ability to take an accurate measure of Donald Trump, something few elite journalists and highly paid pundits seem able to do.
I had to wait another hour before my car was ready, during which time I, too, was happy. There’s a great deal of goodwill, intelligence, and devotion in our country. That’s something solid to build upon.
While We’re At It
♦ Aldous Huxley: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of a good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
♦ Something similar might be said of late-1960s hedonism. To smoke pot and sleep with your girlfriend and, in doing so, claim to be fighting the good fight against bourgeois conventionality and advancing the great cause of liberation—those were days of marvelous psychological luxury. Some still try to work the old magic. But transgression has become a cliché. It no longer carries the charge of sanctification.
♦ The progressive left has been for open borders and closed debate. The Trump administration flips these positions. Border enforcement was a day-one priority. A January 20th Executive Order signed by Trump includes this statement: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
♦ In this issue, Matthew Rose analyzes Mircea Eliade’s religious project (“Killing Time”). The Romanian scholar’s star has fallen in recent decades. When I was a college student in 1980, the postwar “study of religion” project (in which Eliade played a foundational role) was still widely influential. In that year, I read Eliade’s most well-known book, The Sacred and the Profane, along with Carl Jung’s Psychology and Religion, Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. Freud didn’t grab me. He took a reductive approach, wherein religion is an outward manifestation of man’s inner psychological diseases. In their different ways, Otto, Jung, and Eliade fed my inchoate religious longings. They allowed that religion grapples with numinous realities and mysterious truths. These authors gave me confidence that my growing interest in spiritual matters concerned something real. I soon concluded that Eliade and the others maintained a scholarly distance that cooled and neutralized their subject matter. (Reading Kierkegaard can make one impatient with scholarly distance.) I turned toward theology: talking about God without interposing theories that purport to explain what people are saying and doing when they talk about God.
♦ In 2024, “Mohammed” was the most popular name given to newborn boys in London. In New York, the top name was Liam. Mohammed came in as the tenth most popular, tied with Michael.
♦ A friend recently observed that death is a natural phenomenon, part of the circle of life, as it were. The comment sent me back to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its exposition of the significance of Christ’s descent into hell on Holy Saturday. Paragraph 635 includes a passage from an anonymous ancient sermon. It tells of Christ’s descent and his search for Adam and Eve. He finds them in their bondage. Rousing them from their slumber, Christ announces: “I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. . . . I order you, O Sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.” We acknowledge that death is real. It is the unavoidable final stage of our life in this world. But we know that we were not made for death.
♦ Writing at UnHerd, Mary Harrington provides compelling analysis of Joe Biden’s strange announcement that the failed Equal Rights Amendment is now part of the Constitution (“Donald Trump is the end of Hilarity”):
With hindsight, Covid was a high-water mark of elite idealism: an apparently widespread belief that you could simply decide what was real, then make it so via a combination of fiat declaration and media censorship. . . . Last week the Biden era’s devotion to reality-as-fiat climaxed not with a bang, but an internet whimper: an apparent effort to meme an amendment to the U.S. Constitution into force, by posting about it online. . . . It was the perfect finale for a regime characterized from its inception by eerie fakeness: what Nathan Pinkoski recently called “a simulacrum of a functioning progressive presidency.”
To some extent, democratic politics has always been about making images and selling them to voters. But there’s little doubt that social media has taken this trend to new heights, encouraged by a consensus in higher education that reality is “socially constructed.” I hope that we can find our way back to real reality.
♦ Joe Biden awarded Medals of Freedom to an eclectic group of worthies—and then, a few days later, to Pope Francis. I penned a semi-serious, semi-satirical column recommending to Donald Trump various candidates for that honor (“Medal of Freedom Recommendations for Trump”). In the spirit of back-seat driving, I’d like to offer unsolicited advice to Congress.
In 2024, Park MacDougald published a detailed account of how foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation funneled money to activist organizations that spearheaded pro-Hamas protests (“The People Setting America on Fire,” Tablet). Congressional staffers should revisit this important article and advise their bosses to hold congressional hearings to investigate this use of tax-exempt money to support radical political organizations.
Foundations are prohibited from participating in political campaigns. Have these foundations engaged in a pattern of funding that amounts to direct support of left-wing politicians in the Democratic Party? A congressional investigation should cast light on foundation spending during 2020 as well. Are internal communications at the Ford Foundation and other foundations explicit in their calculations that supporting BLM would harm Donald Trump’s electoral chances? I’d like to hear foundation heads and grant officers answer these and other questions under oath.
♦ Donald Trump’s election has forced some soul-searching among America’s elites. Writing for RealClearPolitics, Peter Berkowitz identifies a form of elite mea culpa that preserves elite amor propre (“David Brooks Misunderstands the Miseducation of Elites”). This approach, which he ascribes to David Brooks and Michael Sandel, holds that ordinary Americans envy elites for their wealth and privilege. Berkowitz rightly recognizes that this is not the case. Of ordinary people he writes,
They are seldom envious of high achievers like Brooks and Sandel. They do not often aspire to opine from the New York Times’ pages or hold forth in Harvard lecture halls. They don’t generally yearn to send their children to the Ivy League or see them chasing fame and fortune in Manhattan, Hollywood, or Silicon Valley. Most of the time, they prefer to be left alone by the people who think their fancy universities and success in waxing eloquent for a living equip them to manage other people’s lives.
I would go further: Ordinary people don’t like being talked down to, disdained, and told that they are “takers” or lack “diversity” or are in some other way unworthy of the exalted leadership of the Great and the Good.
♦ Consider a common encounter. A rich and powerful person checks in at JFK Airport. His baggage is taken by a woman wearing a tailored dress or a man wearing a coat and tie, signs of respect for the person whom they are serving. And what is that man heading for the first class lounge wearing? Sweatpants and a T-shirt. He can’t be bothered to reciprocate and acknowledge that he, too, should honor and respect those who serve him.
♦ Kathleen Carlson of Vero Beach, Florida would like to launch a ROFTers group. If you want to sit down once a month to discuss the latest issue of First Things, get in touch with her at [email protected].
♦ We rolled out our new website in late January. Our aim was to echo in our online publication the elegance of our print edition. I’m pleased to report that many readers have expressed their approbation. Many thanks to our designer, Cohere Studio, for so faithfully executing our vision. And kudos to Carter Skeel and Miguel Caranti, who oversaw this project from start to finish.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
“I’m Sorry My Colleague Killed Your Sister”
A few weeks ago, while walking through the halls of the hospital where I work, I ran…
Getting Foreign Aid Right
Rhetorical restraint is not prominent in Washington these days. Given the volatile personalities involved and the escalatory…
Defending the Christian Character of England
A couple of years ago, I heard the historian David Starkey describe the Church of England as…
