By the time you are reading this November issue of Position Papers it may well be the case that Donald Trump has succeeded in his bid to become the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. If this indeed happens, there will no doubt be something akin to the post-Brexit shock – already comparisons have been drawn between the unprecedented support for Donald Trump in the USA and Britain’s surprise Brexit vote last June 23rd. Trump himself told rallygoers that the results on Election Day will “be like Brexit times five.”
The populist filmmaker Michael Moore, while he supports Clinton, is convinced that Trump will be elected by “beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff” Americans in their desire to give the US establishment a collosal thumbs down. Trump for them is, he says, “the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.”
While Moore interprets the disaffection of Trump supporters as economic in origin, for other commentators the root cause is cultural, not economic. This is the opinion of social commentator Anatole Kaletsky of The Guardian who looks at the studies of the motivation for Trump support on the one hand, and for the support of Brexit on the other, that what is happening here is a continuation of the culture wars which began in the 1960s:
It seems, therefore, that the conflicts generally ascribed to economic grievances and globalisation are actually the latest battles in the culture wars that have split western societies since the late 1960s. The main relevance of economics is that the 2008 financial crisis created conditions for a political backlash by older, more conservative voters, who have been losing the cultural battles over race, gender, and social identity.
Trump support and the Brexit vote are, on this reading, “Molotov cocktails” tossed by disgruntled voters into the camp of post-Sixties multiculturalist politicians, whether of the Hillary Clinton stripe, or that of the European Union.
With this in mind, it is interesting to see that, according to a recent report by the Iona Institute, an overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland disagree with their Equality Commission’s prosecution of a Christian-run bakery which refused to a bake a cake with a pro same-sex-marriage slogan. A poll undertaken by the UK’s Christian Institute found that 71% of respondents disagreed with the Equality Commission’s proceedings and 90% said that equality laws should be used to protect people from discrimination and not to force people to say something they oppose. The latter of course appears to be so self-evident that it beggars belief that such a case is being taken.
A recent piece in Spiked on the Asher’s Bakery case mentioned the important distinction drawn by the German born philosopher Hannah Arendt between obligations placed on public services and those placed on private individuals. Arendt, in her essay, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, was commenting on the anti-racial discrimination judgement passed down by the US Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case, by which junior schools in the southern US states were compelled to racially integrate. The decision sparked civil disruption and violence. The real issue, Arendt wrote, was equality before the law. Racist segregation laws violated equality, and their repeal was a matter of “great and obvious importance”. But, at the same time, citizens must remain free to discriminate in their private choices, according to Arendt. White southern mothers should not be compelled, she said, to send their children to school with black children. To do so would restrict individuals’ freedom to discriminate – a right that was “only controlled by dictatorships”. Hannah Arendt was also author of the famous 1963 report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and so was certainly a recognised authority on the question of dictatorship. She must be taken seriously when she designates state restriction on the right of individuals to discriminate as a hallmark of dictatorship. What we are witnessing then, and will no doubt witness more of as long as the freedom to vote remains substantially intact, are visceral reactions against increasingly dictatorial political systems.
And yet, as much as one might sympathise with voters in their rejection of proto-dictatorial political hegemonies, voting with “Molotov cocktails” is at best only an emergency measure in the absence of better options. At worst however, reactionary political choices may give rise to situations worse than the problems they seek to address. This appears to be a real danger in the support for a candidate such as Donald Trump in the USA, or of far-right political parties here in Europe. (Though the question of Brexit is a little more complex to be explained simply in terms of a “reactionary” vote).
In the long run the only answer is for Catholics to end their “cultural diaspora” and engage fully with politics, bringing with them into the political world the light of the Gospel and the social teaching of the Church. For too long Catholics have abandoned the world of politics to those, whether on the right or on the left, whose political worldviews are significantly flawed.
I’d like to finish by quoting a passage from the 2003 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith note on The Participation of Catholics in Political Life which is a rallying call to Catholics to engage in public life:
Faith in Jesus Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), calls Christians to exert a greater effort in building a culture which, inspired by the Gospel, will reclaim the values and contents of the Catholic Tradition. The presentation of the fruits of the spiritual, intellectual and moral heritage of Catholicism in terms understandable to modern culture is a task of great urgency today, in order to avoid also a kind of Catholic cultural diaspora. Furthermore, the cultural achievements and mature experience of Catholics in political life in various countries, especially since the Second World War, do not permit any kind of “inferiority complex” in comparison with political programs which recent history has revealed to be weak or totally ruinous. It is insufficient and reductive to think that the commitment of Catholics in society can be limited to a simple transformation of structures, because if at the basic level there is no culture capable of receiving, justifying and putting into practice positions deriving from faith and morals, the changes will always rest on a weak foundation.