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.
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back 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 popularizer 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 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 like 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 percent of the Union soldiers and 66 percent 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.”
America’s founding fathers and founding documents were very much on the soldiers’ minds. A Union soldier’s wife asked him to leave the army and come home. He responded, “If you esteem me with a true woman’s love you will not ask me to disgrace myself by deserting the flag of our Union.” He added, “Remember that thousands went forth and poured out their life’s blood in the Revolution to establish this government; and twould be a disgrace to the whole American people if she had not noble sons enough who had the spirit of ’76 in their hearts.”
Deneen and Vance stain the memory of the men who fought in that war, especially the men who fought to preserve the Union. Perhaps they are simply extrapolating from their own natures, rather than acknowledging that there are people who put ideals over self.
Deneen’s and Vance’s comments about men in combat are part of a larger project at the core of Trumpism. It is to rebut the notion that America is not only a homeland, though it is that, but it is also an idea and a moral cause — that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God.
There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech Vance did acknowledge that America is partly a set of ideas (though he talked about religious liberty and pointedly not the Declaration). But then when it came time to define America, he talked about a cemetery in Kentucky where his ancestors have been buried for generations. That invocation is the dictionary definition of ancestors and homeland nationalism.
Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it.
There are also two conceptions of society. One is what we’ll call the universalist conception — that our love of family and our love of neighborhood are the first links in a series of affections that lead to our love of city, love of nation and love of all humankind. The other is the identity politics conception of society — that life is a zero-sum struggle between racial, national, partisan and ethnic groups.
If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid. There’s no room for Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory. There’s no room for the kind of racialized obsessions harbored, for example, by the paleoconservative writer Paul Gottfried in an essay called “America Is Not an ‘Idea,’” in Chronicles magazine: “Segregation was also an unjust arrangement, and I don’t regret seeing that go either. But what has taken its place is infinitely more frightening: the systematic degradation of white Americans.”
Last, there are at least two kinds of morality. There is a kind of morality based on universal moral ideals, and then there is tribal morality. Deneen and Vance say they don’t think people are motivated by abstractions. They might try reading the Bible. The Bible is built on abstractions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount contains a bunch of abstractions: blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful. Believe it or not, down through the centuries, billions of people have dedicated their lives to these abstractions.
What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.
Trump’s own message on Truth Social commemorating Memorial Day is a manifestation of political tribalism. Here’s how it opened: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.”
The use of the word “scum” in that context is called dehumanization. It is a short step from dehumanization to all sorts of horrors. Somebody should remind Trump that you don’t love your country if you hate half its members.
People who are more theologically advanced than I have a name for that kind of dehumanization: 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. JD 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 the O.M.B. director, Russell Vought — have brought a series of moral degradations to the nation those Union soldiers fought and died for: the betrayal of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine, the cruel destruction of so many scientists’ life projects, the ruination of PEPFAR. According to the H.I.V. Modeling Consortium’s PEPFAR Impact Tracker, the cuts to that program 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.
