You Will Lose This Election

Your Party Will Not Win This Election (and That’s a Good Thing)

With Election Day 2024 in sight, I can make one bold prediction: Your party is not going to win.

You might challenge me on this, saying, “But, RDM, you don’t know what party I, the reader, support.” That’s true—but I stand by my forecast. That’s because no matter what party wins the presidency, the Congress, or the state houses this November, no one is going to win.

I do not mean, of course, that one party or other won’t see its candidate in the Oval Office come January, or that we won’t see people being sworn in as members of Congress, senators, governors, and all the rest. That kind of winning will happen, as it always does. What I mean is that no one is going to win the way too many of us define winning in this strange era.

In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, Yuval Levin points out a dangerous illusion of the present: the notion that after one decisive victory, whoever is “on the other side” will go away and will not need to be accommodated.

In truth, Levin argues, American life is pulled in two directions: toward what could be called “conservatism” in one direction and “progressivism” in the other. Those visions look different in different times—and, often, the two sides swap out on specific policy positions—but the basic tension is always there.

This is because, Levin writes, any group of human beings is going to have disagreements. A constitutional order doesn’t eradicate those disagreements but instead structures a careful balance between majority rule and minority rights.

Levin argues that one of the reasons—with some exceptions, of course—that local and state politics tend to be less toxic than national presidential elections is that, usually, those debates tend to be about issues more immediately recognized as practical—what roads get paved, what hospitals get funded—and thus “lend themselves better to bargaining and accommodation.”

At the national level, though, our candidates and our parties aren’t as much about specific issues as they are about tribal identity. Even when motivated by grievance and resentment, as national politics now are, the grievances and resentments are about far different things than, say, the issue of free silver in the William Jennings Bryan era or corporate monopolies in the Theodore Roosevelt era. What this leads to, Levin contends, is the current situation—in which presidential elections become about “political expression” rather than “civic action.”

When we peel down below issues of national scope, we often find that the fundamental problem is not that the “other side” isn’t going to accomplish what we want but that the other side exists at all. With that in mind, we can assume that this one election will put all that aside, and that those people, whoever they are, now permanently defeated and humiliated, will go away. But this is not true.

In his book Democracy and Solidarity, political scientist James Davison Hunter identifies this very dynamic as a culture logic that seeks not specific policy goals but something much bigger: recognition and status and identity.

When that isn’t achieved, we poison ourselves with fantasies that one day—maybe right now—we will finally enact revenge on those who have injured us by not conferring the status we believe we deserve. We want to find our own identity in the kind of “negative solidarity” that unites against a common oppressor. We start, then, to assume that every election is working toward a post-election reality where, as the old hymn puts it, “every foe is vanquished.”

In that kind of world, Hunter argues, in which the sense of status cannot ever be wholly fulfilled, the injury must be constantly emphasized. “Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and both meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve,” he writes.

If what we are seeking is not civic action but status, then outrage becomes authority. This quest for moral worth, status recognition, and self-esteem lends itself to precisely the kind of reality-television identity politics that we see right now.

This becomes a cycle. The more we expect of our politics to express who we are, the less we expect our politics to actually do. That kind of politics, after all, is going to result every time in what we’ve seen over the past 15 years: narrow majorities that teeter back and forth between the parties. Big goals—a New Deal, a Cold War victory, a moon landing—seem out of touch, so we replace those goals with what Hunter calls “millennialism.”

Millennialism is, of course, not a political doctrine but a theological one, rooted in the Book of Revelation’s language of a thousand-year reign of Christ and his people. From the very beginning, Christians have argued about what that means—is it a present reality in heaven or a future expectation after the reign of Christ, or something else? History shows that when those sorts of messianic expectations bubble up without the presence of the actual Messiah, they lead, at worst, to bloodshed—and, at best, to disillusionment and disappointment.

If Joe Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be) wins, the Trumpists and whatever passes for the “right” these days will still be here. If Donald Trump is elected president, the “left” will still be around. Whatever your political views, you can’t have your millennium unless half the country is Raptured.

In his forthcoming book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, CT news editor Daniel Silliman looks at the 50th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon through the grid of Nixon’s lifelong quest for approval.

Nixon’s father, Silliman recounts, ran a general store in what used to be a church, hollowing out the steeple so he could sit and survey the store from there, yelling criticisms at his son to work harder, do better. Silliman demonstrates how Nixon sought security throughout his life in the approval of the voters who would send him to office, in Dwight Eisenhower as a father figure, and in his own triumph over the “elites” from Harvard and Yale who had looked down on him.

Silliman argues that the reason we even have the Watergate tapes is because of that drive for approval. Who, after all, would record the audio of every single moment in the White House? Silliman compares Nixon’s motivation to the old Jack Chick tracts, “This Was Your Life,” in which, before the judgment seat, the sinner sees his entire life replayed in front of everyone (this tract terrified me as a child).

“Nixon had a similar fantasy—a complete recording, everyone on tape from his time in the White House,” Silliman writes. “But in his version, he thought, he would not be condemned but justified.” With a record of his accomplishment as president, he could prove that he had done a good job, that he was worthy of existing, that he was a great man.

The tapes, of course, did the opposite. They showed him to be exactly what he feared people would think he was: crooked, dishonest, a failure—the first president in history to be forced to resign.

Nixon was driven by the wrong things. He expected too much, and public opinion could never love him back. Politics could never be a judgment seat that could justify his life. In this moment in history, we expect something very similar out of our politics: a vindication of who’s right and who’s wrong, a separation of the sheep from the goats, a final and definitive victory.

If that’s what we think winning is, none of us will win. We will just descend more and more into resentment and outrage. We will turn on those we counted on to give us what they never could, or we will seethe in our fantasies of “next time,” when we (this time for sure!) will get that ultimate win.

That’s not what winning is. Until we lose that expectation, we will keep losing—not just as a republic but as people whose lives are meant to be about much more than keeping score.

No one will win this election, ultimately. No one will lose this election, ultimately. Maybe we should ask whether we are seeking something where it can never be found, and ask ourselves whether we should be looking Somewhere else.

My Thoughts on the Trump Shooting

After this weekend’s attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, I wrote this essay on what motivated troubled (usually) young (usually) men to carry out this kind of violence. Here’s an excerpt:

Most Americans recognize the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, along with presidents closer to our own time. Many would struggle, though, to remember when James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce were inaugurated. Yet even those of us fuzzy on much of presidential history can probably identify immediately John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald—just as many who couldn’t name one of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet secretaries know the name of John Hinckley, his would-be assassin. Household names of 1968 like Edmund Muskie or Curtis LeMay have faded out of our memories, but we still know James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan.

Psychologists tell us that people who engage in terrorism of any sort are often well aware of how lasting this kind of notoriety can be. For many, it’s the point of their violence. When all is stable, that sort of perversion can be channeled into more benign vanities. But when—as now—the country seems to be teetering on the edge of something awful, those perversions can turn violent. Under certain conditions, they can tip a society into a cycle of rage and horror.

How are Christians to understand this?

A Christian vision of human depravity recognizes that God is not the author of evil and that evil itself is rooted in human longings and desires (James 1:12–18). The Serpent of Eden did not create a desire to see food as good; it merely appealed to that longing in a way that drew humanity away from God (Gen. 3:1–6). Likewise, the desire to worship, created good, can be perverted into idolatry. The desire for intimacy, created good, can be redirected toward lust.

From Scripture, the Christian tradition classifies evil as rooted in the world, the flesh, and the Devil (Eph. 2:2–3). We recognize that human nature is itself corrupted. We understand that we live in a world that, as the apostle John put it, “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, ESV throughout). And we recognize also that evil is oftentimes provoked by the context of the world around us. The woman caught in adultery was not threatened with being hit by one rock from one man; she was at the mercy of a mob, the function of which undoubtedly amplified and stirred the individual sins of each mob member (John 8:1–11).

You can read the whole thing here.

Now That the Shooting Has Started

For an in-depth conversation on political violence and why the culture wars have tipped over into what seems to be irreparable fragmentation, I talked with the man who gave us the phrase culture wars in the first place, and who warned us well over 20 years ago that we should address the underlying problems “before the shooting starts”—namely, James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia.

Hunter talks about how culture is more important than politics, and that most of the cultural underpinnings plaguing us right now are implicit. They are the things we take for granted in defining reality. He gives really thoughtful insights not only on what went wrong but on the specific ways we can start reweaving the strands of solidarity before things get worse. You can listen here.

Also, check out this conversation Mike Cosper and I had on a special bonus episode of The Bulletin with my friend Elizabeth Neumann. Elizabeth was assistant secretary of homeland security in the Trump administration and is one of the nation’s most respected experts in counter-terrorism. She talks about why people turn to violence and how extremist groups radicalize lonely, isolated individuals. Elizabeth gives specific advice for how, say, youth pastors and other church leaders can help identify vulnerable, bullied, marginalized young people—before they find false and dangerous illusions of belonging on the internet.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Janice Scott from Peachtree Corners, Georgia.

Here’s her list:

Adorning the Dark and The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson: Can this man be any more talented? Songwriter, artist, book publisher, speaker, visionary—these books get at the bottom of his entry into faith as a disinterested pastor’s kid and how the God who is the giver of all talents consumes him and overflows into all aspects of creativity, with space for true and deep discussions about depression and returning to joy.

Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven by James Bryan Smith: An intimate and honest look into the multilayered short life and times of Rich Mullins, musical trailblazer and ragamuffin, with an intro by mentor Brennan Manning.

The Mitford series by Jan Karon: Travel the road, as decades of fans have done, through the world of Father Tim, Cynthia, and the whole town of Mitford, North Carolina—and understand what Christian community can be here on earth.

If I Gained the World by Linda Nichols: A mysterious author who wrote a few books and then disappeared from the publishing scene left behind this rich, descriptive, and intimate fictional story of loss, heartache, and rebirth from the true Lover of our souls.

Bookends by Liz Curtis Higgs: A romantic comedy in the true sense of the word! Just so enjoyable and so well crafted! (Not in the photo—on loan!)

Every Moment Holy Vols. 1–3 by Douglas McKelvey: This book series (published by Rabbit Room Press, from the aforementioned Andrew Peterson) are touchingly beautiful, poignant and timely books of modern liturgies for everyday life. A treasure trove! (Maybe Doug will write a liturgy for being stranded on a desert island!)

A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card: One of the most important books on the topic of lament from one of the most gifted songwriters and musicians.

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus by Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg: This helped me, as a Jewish believer, understand the how the gospel was shaped by the customs, beliefs, and traditions of the Jewish culture in which Jesus lived, and why Christians can gain so much fresh perspective by understanding it and knowing it—a topic, sadly, untaught by the church.

I’m Praying for You: 40 Days of Praying the Bible for Someone Who Is Suffering by Nancy Guthrie: Do you love someone who is hurting and don’t know what to say? This is a practical Scripture-infused guide to prayer, beautifully grounded in Scripture, centered on the one who enters our suffering with us. Made easy to send daily to your loved one.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery: The classic story of the orphaned redhead of Prince Edward Island, Canada—read the whole series! The last book is as good as the first!

The Swan House, Dwelling Place, and The Promised Land by Elizabeth Musser: Incomparable historical fiction starting with the Orly plane crash of 1962 that took away an entire artistic community from the city of Atlanta and left behind many broken hearts—focused on the life of Mary Swan, who loses her mother. A fact-based and heart-centered story on civil rights, art, and growing up in the Atlanta-based South.

Thank you, Janice!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

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Onward,
Russell Moore