What’s wrong with Trump?

Talking to an American friend the other day, I said Trump is a savage, which overshadows anything he does or doesn’t do.

In response, I was treated to a litany of Trump’s achievements, most of them in domestic policy, most of them real. I acknowledged as much, adding, however, that such things are transient and instantly reversible. Unlike, unfortunately, the damage Trump’s savagery does to our civilisation.

This isn’t to say I was right and my friend was wrong, or vice versa. We were simply talking about different things and looking at the issue from different vantage points. His view is possible, but then so is mine.

I’d answer the question in the title by saying: exactly the same things that are wrong with modernity. Trump is a quintessentially modern man, which I don’t use as a term of praise.

Because of his high station and larger than life personality, Trump amplifies modernity’s vices, the way a funhouse mirror exaggerates facial features into a grotesque caricature. Or else he takes onto himself modernity’s vices: if modernity is Dorian Gray, Trump is the picture in its attic.

The sickness of modernity takes on its most virulent form in Trump: he is a walking symptom of that malaise and also its contagion. The aetiology of this disease is a neo-pagan reaction against Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom – not just its founding religion but its core understanding of what it is to be fully human.

One doesn’t have to be a believing Christian to see what kind of world that reaction has produced, although some powers of dispassionate observation would come in handy.

Cogent critical inquiry into first causes has given way to the obtuse superstition of materialism, with a logical fallacy at its base. Freedom, which thinkers from Plato to Aquinas understood as liberation from all constraints, including inner ones, preventing one from living a life of rational virtue, got to be seen as liberation from all constraints, full stop. Reason and morality were severed from their divine source and replaced with voluntarism, the primacy of one’s own will with all its fickle vagaries.

As a result, we see a world sinking into an unremitting banality of tastes, ubiquitous vulgarity of philistine consumerism, widespread idiocy elevated to an egalitarian virtue, collapse of unifying morality, increasing monstrosity of persecution and warfare. Add to this the worship of science as a deified panacea, and conditions are in place for mankind to annihilate itself, not just what little is left of our civilisation.

If in Christendom’s past, freedom to choose was seen to be liberating only if one chose well, these days choice itself has become the be all and end all. We have before us an endless menu of moral values, consumer goods, cultural trends, consumer goods, intellectual attitudes, consumer goods, political philosophies – and above all consumer goods.

We are free to choose any or none, knowing that no objective criteria exist to judge the quality of our choices other than our own will. The fallacy of materialism is the logical impossibility of nature creating itself; the fallacy of modern morality is the logical impossibility of living only by one’s own rules.

Can you see whose portrait I am sketching? Just remember who said the other day that he is guided by his own morality and nothing else.

All such seeming abstractions have a direct bearing on how a civilisation of disparate peoples arranges itself politically. As ever, new words appearing or old words acquiring a new meaning act as weathervanes showing which way the civilisational winds are blowing.

A year or so ago, I appeared on a New York podcast whose host never takes his MAGA cap off. “What’s wrong with nationalism?” he asked, knocking me off my stride.

I looked at that imaginary weathervane and saw where it was pointing. You see, I’ve never used ‘nationalism’ (as distinct from patriotism) as anything other than a pejorative term. The question posed by my host could, to me, be paraphrased, without changing its meaning, as “What’s wrong with a primitive, dogmatic, narrow-minded ideology?”

One thing wrong with nationalism is that it’s a denial of Christian politics. That by itself presented little problem to my host who isn’t a Christian. But my other friend is, and yet he presumably doesn’t see anything wrong with nationalism either, because doing so would be tantamount to seeing something wrong with Trump, and that option doesn’t seem to be on the menu.

Nationalism became a force in European politics when the secular state could no longer tolerate the autonomy of the church within its borders.

Before Christendom became just a figure of speech, Europe had been united in its faith and the view of life it entailed. Dynastic squabbles did happen, but they reflected differences among princes, not among nations.

Christian universalism held sway. A Christian from Augsburg had more in common with a Christian from Naples than either had with a Muslim, a Zoroastrian or a pagan – or indeed his compatriot from Augsburg or Naples who wasn’t a Christian. Divisive clefts only appeared when princes began to revolt against the political authority of the Hapsburg Empire and hence the spiritual authority of the papacy.

It was then that nationalism became a battle cry, and it was in the fire of that battle that the Reformation, that anteroom to atheism, was annealed. That adumbrated an era of ‘religious wars’, a glaring misnomer.

An innocent outsider might believe that those wars were fought over recondite matters of dogma and doctrine. In fact, princes didn’t rebel against the Empire because they were Protestants. They became Protestants the better to rebel against the Empire.

That’s how the West’s unity was destroyed – partly in the name of nationalism. And this is how Trump’s nationalism is destroying the last vestiges of that unity, enfeebling the West and strengthening its enemies. Considering that socialist internationalism is working towards the same goal, the West doesn’t seem to have much of a chance.

The politics of Christendom also featured power relationships, but some philosophical and moral constraints were applied to mitigate the fallout. Modernity, on the other hand, has reduced power relationships to sheer arithmetic: whoever has more brawn will dictate. But in Trump this modern vice appears in its crystallised form – and, as all his other vices, it’s presented as a virtue by his fans.

Both the grammar and vocabulary of modern politics are changing before our very eyes. For example, MAGA enthusiasts are extolling their idol’s ‘common sense’ and ‘pragmatism’, both on closer examination revealed as merely synonyms for amorality.

Princes of Christendom were sometimes – often – immoral, but they were never amoral. For that reason, though they could be violent and cruel, sometimes very violent and cruel, their violence and cruelty never acquired the modern casual, industrialised callousness free of prior or posterior pangs of conscience.

Depriving politics of any moral content and reducing it to ad hoc nationalist expediencies ought to appal conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives. Yet no such revulsion is in evidence among MAGA fans, which raises the question of what exactly they wish to conserve. Protectionist tariffs? A West of every nation for itself with the devil taking the hindmost?

Anomie is a ubiquitous feature of our deracinated modernity, which destroys all links between action and any guiding principles, those of a higher variety, that is. Conservative commentators on Trump, such as George Will, single out his impulsiveness, his tendency to respond to his own whims and hardly anything else.

But they don’t trace such qualities and practices back to what Leni Riefenstahl called, in a different context, a triumph of will. A triumph, that is, over reason, faith, morality, custom, culture, tradition – everything that goes into the making of a civilisation.

As I say, Trump is the crystallised quintessence of modernity. One’s evaluation of his presidency is therefore contingent on one’s feelings about this epoch, and you know what mine are.

He’ll be gone in three years, leaving behind a West hopelessly fractured, its enemies perking up, an America universally reviled from without and torn apart from within – and a few achievements in domestic affairs, which are as likely as not to be undone by his successors. But that’s modernity for you.