In Vance’s response, he articulated a series of points that inform the Trump administration’s stance of realism toward the conflict in Ukraine. In geopolitics – the study of politics between nations – realism is a stance that tends to create a feeling of moral disgust, because in contrast with idealism, which aspires to a moral vision for the world, realism suggests that there are only cold facts and calculations to consider. In the realist view, decisions are not based on ethical values; there are only competing interests. Realism avoids questions of who is in the right and who is in the wrong. It dismisses any appeal to principles. It sees all claims in terms of self-interest and leverage. To a pure geopolitical realist, any attempt to invoke morals is “moralistic garbage,” because the world doesn’t work according to morals.

For example, when we try to speak in terms of American morals and values to the Islamic world, or even to Russia, that might make us feel good about ourselves, like we have done the moral thing. But in countries where the rule of law is seen very differently, or where clan and tribal loyalties form much of people’s notions of morality, the projection of American moral messaging is perceived as off-putting and sometimes even disrespectful. It bears clarifying that realism is not necessarily relativistic, seeing all forms of morality as equally valid. Realism simply sees that trying to frame international problems in terms of American morals and values is a waste of energy, and counterproductive.

In a later post, Vance clarified his perspective:

So much of American diplomacy has become pure performance–an obsession with *saying* this or that.

The reason the failed establishment hates President Donald J. Trump is because he chooses his words carefully and, more importantly, is much more focused on *doing*.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 25, 2025

In other words, when we find the Trump administration’s brash and self-interested approach to international relations upsetting, it is probably because we are accustomed to softer approaches that are performative and ineffective. Personally, I am sympathetic to this view to a degree. It is hard to overstate how TV shows like the West Wing and Madame Secretary have affected American understanding of politics, offering visions of how dignified public service advances American goodness and universal values of justice and fairness in the world. This is the idealist approach to geopolitics, that sees diplomacy and the projecting of American influence as a values-driven means for making the world a better place. In the idealist view, communicating our values is every bit as important as advancing our strategic interests. The American president is the leader of the free world, and therefore ought to behave on the world stage in ways that reflect dignity and moral credibility.

The obvious problem is that when we lift the lid and peek under the publicly-dignified facade of American international relations, we find countless horror stories of corruption, waste, and global interference. This has been a stark lesson of the Trump administration’s recent opening of USAID to public scrutiny.

Further, in Vance’s view, our tendencies to emphasize appearances and public etiquette are not ultimately helpful: what matters is what works. Who cares if the process is ugly, a vomit-inducing roller coaster ride of wild public statements? At the end of the day, all we should care about are results.

This question of what (and who) we care about deserves more discussion, in light of a widely-discussed 2019 study in the journal Nature that mapped differences between how conservatives and liberals extend their moral concern in the world. The study showed that the boundaries of conservatives’ moral concern are closer to the individual’s immediate context: self, family, friends, community, and nation. By contrast, the moral concern of liberals extends out to other nations, and even inanimate objects in nature:

With this in mind, Vance’s 2022 statement that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” makes more sense, even if in light of the human impact of the war there, Vance’s statement comes across as morally upsetting. But a realist worldview that frankly acknowledges limitations and tradeoffs in “caring” will always sound jarring to those of us who imagine ourselves to be capable of extending unlimited care to the whole world. In a recent article I noted that empathy tends to have an honesty problem, and our refusal to acknowledge the selective scope of our care in the world seems to be a manifestation of that. When we truly perceive the vastness of suffering in the world, we can shut down emotionally under a wave of compassion fatigue, or we can make judgments about where to focus our emotional energy- in other words, where to care. And it is true that a lack of caring focus is not the same as callous indifference in places like Ukraine, but for actual Ukrainians in early 2025, I am not sure the distinction matters.

It is important to understand that just as in international relations, moral reasoning has stances of realism and idealism. The world is full of moral problems: exploitation, aggression, corruption, and more. And for Christians who understand that all of humanity are God’s children, deserving of our love, it might seem that the more expansive liberal allocation of moral concern is more reflective of Christian morality. After all, if God so loved the world (John 3:16) and is no respecter of persons (Romans 2:11), then why would Christians focus our moral concerns so narrowly on our immediate context?

The answer is that Christian moral reasoning does not lend itself to these kinds of simple judgments. In the Gospel of John chapter 6, we see a stark example of how Christian morality conflicts with most people’s moral instincts. There we read that following the miracle of the loaves and fishes, people followed Jesus and asked him to continue the miracle in perpetuity: “…Lord, evermore give us this bread” (v. 34). After all, knowing how many people in the world suffer from hunger, if you or I had the ability to produce endless food and solve hunger in the world once and for all, wouldn’t that be the moral thing to do? And yet, Jesus declined to do so, explaining that “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever…” (v.51). Jesus’ decision not to do something that would seem obviously moral (solve the people’s hunger forever) was the product of balancing moral and spiritual imperatives. In light of his decision and the conversation that followed, we are told that “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (v. 66).

Likewise, in the gospel of Mark chapter 14, we read of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany. Mark tells us that Jesus’s disciples responded with indignation, as the moral thing would have been to sell the ointment and give it to the poor. Again, this seems morally obvious. Yet, Jesus responded “…Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always” (v. 6-7). This is another example where Christian morality subverts our sense of what is morally straightforward.

More examples can be cited, but suffice it to say that Christian morality recognizes that moral judgments involve hard choices between good things. Christian moral reasoning sees dimensions of morality beyond our superficial reflexive notions of what seems best.

In recent years, the ideological left has been seduced by a concept called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that for the United States, government deficits are not important. If there are needs in the population, that only indicates that not enough money is being supplied and therefore the government should print more. This is an academic fantasy of zero tradeoffs, of endless loaves and fishes for everyone. Under the Biden administration, the Southern border of the U.S. was open to a degree that allowed for an astonishing inflow of people, following democrats’ political lurch to the left on immigration. This is just another manifestation of a “compassion” that is sometimes even phrased in Christian terms, but which refuses to recognize real tradeoffs and human impacts of policy.

In response to these excesses of the left, the Trump administration has implemented orders and policies that reflect the hard reality of scarcity in government resources. One of the most difficult areas of change has been in our policy toward Ukraine, who is now fighting a defense war against an irredentist aggressor. Russia has been openly aggressive toward the U.S. in recent years as well, stealing state and corporate secrets and creating chaos in our public square by flooding social media with bot messaging that inflames our discourse. Russia has a rival vision for the world, “multipolarity,” best articulated by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Dugin is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” to convey his influence over the Kremlin, and Dugin envisions a vast expansion of Russian political and religious control over the world:

The Biden administration’s response to Ukraine was a supportive but cautious supplying of aid for the country’s defense, but at the end of Biden’s term the result was massive loss of life and no decisive end to the conflict in sight. The Biden administration’s messaging on the war was lofty and value-laden, but as J.D. Vance has argued, lofty messaging does not always deliver results. Sometimes we do face choices between courses of action that feel morally validating, versus courses of action that in fact create a moral outcome.

This tension between values and results boiled over in the February 28 meeting at the white house between President Zelensky of Ukraine and U.S. President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. Zelensky showed up to the meeting wearing ordinary clothes of a wartime president, and conservative commentator Brian Glenn immediately berated Zelensky’s choice of clothing, signaling that this meeting was not a friendly environment. When Zelensky challenged Trump and Vance on their inability to recognize the deceptive and amoral nature of Putin’s regime, his remarks were met with defensiveness and escalation until the meeting boiled over and any hope of a timely agreement between our countries fell apart.

Among commentators on the right who have spent years steeped in Kremlin narratives of the world, the meeting was framed as a triumph of Trump standing up to the left. But for another substantial segment of conservative-leaning voters, the meeting was a depressing view into how far we have fallen. American presidents used to speak in moral terms about how the world should work, and they used to offer moral clarity on events beyond our borders. They used to know that even the most die hard political realist must care about things that happen on other continents even for purely self-interested reasons, because our world is so interconnected in so many ways that dominos of geopolitics and finance falling anywhere in the world eventually tip over dominoes in the American heartland. Anyone attempting to Make America Great Again is unlikely to succeed if they are not also bringing about greatness in the rest of the world.

And yet, the Trump administration steadfastly refuses to pronounce the most obvious of moral judgments, that Russia is the aggressor in its war with Ukraine. This refusal to articulate a basic moral judgment is disheartening to many people on the right who see America’s greatness as inextricably tied to America’s moral role in the world. Yet, it can be helpful to slow down and see that there may be method to this decision: J.D. Vance has spoken repeatedly of the promise of diplomacy in resolving the war in Ukraine, and it may be that there are valid diplomatic reasons for holding cards of moral messaging close to the chest. Of course if this is the case, then it would have been helpful for that to be communicated to President Zelensky long before he came to the U.S. and his bewilderment – or maybe diplomatic cluelessness – led to an embarrassing public debacle. Hopefully the Trump administration is making an honest assessment of what could have been done differently in planning and communications, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

In the meantime, as commentators from the left to the right-of-center condemn J.D. Vance in particular, calling him an “opportunist,” a “lapdog,” or otherwise morally deficient, I suggest that the Christian approach would be to do our best to assume good intentions and also be aware of his personal context. Underneath the public persona that Vance carries as part of his political activity, there is a human being. And in Christian understanding, a child of God. In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s formative years are shown to be a tornado of impulsive people acting and reacting to impulses. His grandmother’s Christian faith is described as personal, but never really transcendent in a way that would show J.D. what it means to move beyond reflexive responses to life’s challenges. His recent conversion to Catholicism certainly does offer the promise of transcendent experiences of faith, but even then, his exercise of public Christian morality takes place in an administration that is painfully realist in character, seeing choices not in terms of values or morals but in terms of “deals” and “cards.”

J.D. Vance, more than most public figures, knows the awful power of entropy in families and communities. Whatever his tactical decisions around communications in a time of diplomacy, we can hope that he sees clearly the forces of entropy emanating from the world’s conflict zones and potential conflict zones. We can hope that even in his most realist-leaning moments, he can see how those forces of entropy negatively affect the well-being of everyone in the world, including  Americans. And finally, we can pray that his faith is allowing him to transcend to some degree the turmoil that his office has inherited.

But realistically, some things are not really possible to transcend. Trump’s decision to shut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine appears to have emboldened Russia in its campaign of murder in Ukraine, and lives are being lost that could have been saved. Knowing that Ukraine has recommitted to signing a minerals agreement with the U.S. and has also committed to submit to U.S. leadership in a move toward peace, there is no realist justification for emboldening Russia, who we know will impose greater leverage for a cease-fire as a result. And while it is true that Ukraine might have been able to avoid this situation with different behavior at the White House, it is also true that Ukraine is not the moral compass of the United States, and amoral decisions toward Ukraine’s vulnerable population have an impact on our national soul. Trying to rationalize our cruelty will rot the inner moral resources – Christian or other – of anyone who attempts to do so.

And this is why I sincerely pray for J.D. Vance and a few other members of our current administration who I believe carry some degree of Christian moral reasoning. I hope they can see how “these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” is a core principle in Christian morality that encourages the integration and exercise of multiple stances of morality. This can be tremendously difficult, and I don’t think we should always expect him to thread these moral needles perfectly. Vance’s critics tend to behave with denunciation and sneering, refusing to see that right now he carries a burden of navigating some of the most complex moral commitments imaginable. But seeing clearly the weight and complexity of his burden, I suggest he deserves our prayers.

Here we go.

The Liberal Rules-Based Order AKA Globalism

The kind of globalism that is worth defending and that has broad-based support is the liberal international order or the rules-based order. The first thing to understand about the rules-based order is that we, meaning Americans, built it. We didn’t built it alone, but in the wake of World War 2 we led the way.

The fundamental concept behind the rules-based order is just that: rules. For all of human history, there have been no rules between nations because there is no super-national government to enforce them. (The only exceptions were when a single empire dominated multiple nations, and then there were still no rules to restrain empires.) In this condition, the only things that prevent nations from attacking each other are capacity and threat. Anarchy reigns.

After World War 2, America wanted something better. So we dusted of the League of Nations idea and tried again, this time with the United Nations, which was founded in 1945. But it wasn’t just the United Nations. A whole ecosystem of new international organizations was founded as part of this rules-based order, including the International Monetary Fund (founded in 1944), the World Bank (founded in 1944), the International Court of Justice (founded in 1945), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the World Trade Organization, founded in 1947), and the World Health Organization (founded in 1948).

The core rationale for the rules-based order was to prevent the horror of war, especially world war. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that using a network of ad hoc alliances to keep the peace could backfire if a dispute between two small nations (like, say, someone shooting an archduke) led to a cascade of triggers that dragged every single faction into one giant war. One of the key lessons of the Second World War was the unique danger posed by totalitarian regimes like fascist Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan.

With these lessons from World War 1 and World War 2 in mind, the architects of the rules-based order relied o a whole web of organizations. This makes sense. The United Nations is a quasi world government, but without any actual enforcement power it’s the least useful and least important of the institutions in the rules-based order. Other organizations–like the World Health Organization–with clear goals that benefitted cooperation between nations were much more important because they fostered voluntary cooperation between nations. The hope was that a network of voluntary organizations with practical benefit would knit nations together. But what kind of nations? Liberal ones, that is, nations that respected basic human rights, including civil rights (like free speech and freedom of religion) and economic rights (like private property and free markets).

Basically: liberal nations won World War 2, and they tried to use liberalism to build a more peaceful and stable world in the aftermath, including rebuilding Germany and Japan into liberal nations that could participate in that rules-based order.

In terms of securing peace among its members, the rules-based order has been wildly successful. Liberal democracies don’t go to war with each other, and at least part of the reason for this is that liberal democracies agreed to live by the principles and within the institutional framework of the rules-based order.

But from the very beginning the rules-baed order has had a secondary objective: survive a standoff against totalitarian powers in the First Cold War. Here, too, it was ultimately successful. Some of the credit goes to the nature of nuclear weapons: nobody could afford an all-out confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. But that only explains the lack of an all-out war. Why did the US-led West win? Because liberalism and the liberal order led to far greater prosperity. Ultimately the West outpaced nations with Marxist-derived ideologies economically and scientifically and, as a result, politically and militarily as well.

This, then, is the case for globalism: it’s a proven way for liberal democracies to live in peace with each other and to secure their safety through the prosperity that comes from that peace.

Anti-Globalist Populism

The institutions that the rules-based order relies on have become corrupt politically, economically, and ideologically. During the Covid pandemic, it became painfully obvious that the ostensibly science-based World Health Organization had been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. What good is a World Health Organization that puts the political interests of an authoritarian regime ahead of health? Not much.

The working class is also struggling, both in America and throughout the West, and there’s a widespread belief that international agreements between liberal democracies are to blame. Instead of serving the interests of all, have the economic institutions have been warped by the interests of the super-rich. The starkest example of this is China shock, which is the idea that giving China access to the World Trade Organization in 2001 had a direct and catastrophic impact on American manufacturing. The supposed theory behind allowing China access to the WTO was that it would help the nation to liberalize economically and then politically, bringing China into rules-baed order. That did not happen, meaning America’s workers paid a heavy price for, at best, a dumb political gamble and, at worst, an outright money-grab.

The most outrageous instances of corrupt globalist organizations are not political or economic, but ideological. Activists in wealthy nations have a sordid history of leveraging “aid” as an instrument of cultural imperialism, imposing views that are controversial in their own nations on developing nations, such as when United Nations agencies enforce pro-choice policies on African nations. But the most egregious examples are when arrogant cultural imperialism combines with local politics, as when USAID ended up overseeing the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Peruvian women.

We are living through a crisis of institutional credibility, much of which is self-inflicted. The rules-based order depends on institutions, so the crisis of institutional credibility has infected the rules-based order itself. The populists have a point. Perhaps the rules-baed order was never really that useful, and it was just the threat of annihilation that kept the First Cold War cold. Even if the rules-based order had a role to play, the First Cold War is over, so maybe the rules-based order has served its purpose.

I hope I have done OK on the ideological Turing test and given a good–if brief–overview of the populist anti-globalist position. In truth, it’s not hard to do because the criticisms are serious and real. But now comes the hard part: if the criticisms are real, what should we do about them?

Reform or Revolt?

When something is broken, you eventually have to decide to fix it or get rid of it. And I do believe that the rules-based order is broken, if for no other reason than that it has lost the confidence and trust of so many of the citizens of the liberal democracies that comprise it. So… now what?

The populist anti-globalists want to get rid of it. To some extent, they might even deny that the rules-based order was ever a real thing. Instead, they might argue, it was all pretext and illusion. The only real thing all along was power.

Either way–whether we’re getting rid of something real or dispelling an illusion–what comes next is clear: a world divided into spheres of influence. This is why the anti-globalists are willing to accept Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine and see it largely as America’s fault. Russia is a big, powerful nation. In a world ruled by anarchy the only rule is power. And according to that rule big, powerful nations get their spheres of influence. If you fail to recognize this fact, that’s on you.

From this perspective, it is the United States and NATO who are at fault for Putin invading Ukraine because, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have expanded ever eastward, allowing countries that ought to be in Russia’s sphere of influence to escape: the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, etc. That’s bad enough. But Ukraine? It’s literally on Russia’s border. Refusing to rule out Ukraine joining NATO one day violated Russia’s sphere of influence, and if you poke the bear whatever happens next is your fault.

But if you think that’s bad, look at Asia. Some of our key allies and economic partners–S. Korea, Japan, and Taiwan–are deep, deep within what should geographically be the sphere of influence of the People’s Republic of China. The best possible reading you could put on Trump’s foreign policy is a realistic apprehension that Ukraine isn’t worth fighting for when we have a much, much greater rival in the PRC and far greater exposure in their sphere of influence.

America has an isolationist heritage. George Washington famously argued against permanent treaties, “entangling alliances”, and for most of our history we stayed out of world affairs. What’s so wrong with returning to that world, and embracing a narrow view of the national interest? If the institutions of the rules-based order aren’t working for America, why should we work for them?

That, as I understand it, is the anti-globalist take on Trump’s foreign policy. It might not sound good, but it’s a return from idealism to realism.

Except it’s not actually realistic at all.

The rules-based order may have been born out of an idealistic desire to avoid conflict, especially between liberal democracies, but the grueling decades of the Cold War showed that it’s greatest strength was uniting liberal democracies against the threat of authoritarian regimes. Earlier in this post, I referred to the “First Cold War”. That wasn’t accidental. We are now in a Second Cold War, whether we want to be or not.

There have always been two sides to the rules-based order. On the inside, the rules worked because we all agreed to follow them. Conflicts between liberal democracies were worked out through diplomacy. This might not be because the rules-based order was so wonderful. It might have been because the outside threat of the Soviet Union forced greater cooperation, but even so: the institutions and norms of the rules-based order facilitated that cooperation, allowing for historically astonishing levels of prosperity within the rules-based order.

But outside the rules-based order? That’s the Hobbesian hellscape, and the only thing that matters, ultimately, is force. What’s remarkable is that the rules-based order so readily understood and adapted to that reality. Peace within the rules-based order has always been maintained through adherence to the rules. Peace between the rules-based order and its outside rivals has always been maintained through deterrence. For all its idealism, the rules-based order was impressively–and sometimes even cynically–realistic when it came to is own survival.

That’s why this crisis could only have arisen after the end of the First Cold War. The institutions of the rules-baed order were propped up, to a great extent, by external threat. Without that threat they grew soft, corrupt, and captured.

The question we have before us, then, is whether we–as Americans–would like to fight the Second Cold War alongside the other liberal democracies of the world… or an our own. The answer, if we’re being realistic, is obvious. Even though I concede that it is broken, we should not throw out the rules-based order. We should fix it. Because in the coming decades, we’re going to need it as we haven’t for decades.

Salvaging the Rules-Based Order

I wrote the prior three sections of this post on Saturday, Feb 22. Then today, on Monday Feb 24, I learned that the United States had voted with Russia against a Ukrainian resolution to condemn the invasion and call for Russia to withdraw from Ukrainian territory along with countries like Belarus and North Korea.

The one silver lining to this national disgrace is that it affords us a unique moment of clarity. Nate Oman wrote a great piece articulating the origin of the Western alliance that became NATO, including the observation that:

Far from Making America Great Again, this makes America less powerful, less influential, and makes the world less friendly to our interests. If our allies believe that we will side with aggressive dictators against countries that we have supported, that we will stand with Vladimir Putin rather than the countries of NATO, and that we cannot be trusted to oppose aggressive wars of conquest, they will not trust us. If we do that, they shouldn’t trust us. And that lack of trust means that we will be less powerful, less able to safeguard American interests, and ultimately less able to make the world a better place. It is not in America’s interest to reward those who launch wars of conquest. It is not in America’s interest to live in a multipolar world of regional hegemons rather than the rules-based system birthed by the Atlantic Charter. It is not in America’s interests to side with dictators who are invading democracies.

If we are to salvage the rules-based order, now is a good time to start. The rules-based order is a proud American accomplishment, the crown jewel of our finest hour in World War 2. For almost a century it has served our interests and the interests of freedom-loving people around the world. That, after all, is one of the key insights of liberalism: life does not have to be a zero sum game. Today, the rules-based order is in need of reform. It has been neglected–such as with European nations free-riding on American defense expenditures–and that neglect has allows special interests to hijack the institutions for their own purposes (like the WHO and the WTO) so that ordinary Americans do not benefit from it as they should.

But now is not the time to throw the rules-based order away! If we do, we will splinter the liberal democracies just at a time when the rising axis of authoritarianism–Russian, China, North Korea, and Iran–is growing most dangerous. For our safety, for our prosperity, and for the freedom afforded to all citizens of liberal democracies and especially the oldest constitutional republic in the world, the time has come to recommit to a reformed rules-based order.

I really believe that is what will happen. Eventually. The question is how long it will take for us to rediscover the lessons learned by the Greatest Generation, and how much we will have to suffer before we reclaim their legacy as our own.

Let’s start with David French’s piece at the New York Times: ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is Not the Far Right’s Playground. The piece has basically two parts. In the first, French surveys the impact of the Lord of the Rings on conservatives, giving examples like J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Giorgia Meloni. I’m not sure to what extent “far right” works as a descriptor of these folks, especially Meloni, but–as French points out–lots of groups have latched onto Tolkien’s work like “leftist environmentalists”.

In the second part, French claims that the Lord of the Rings “rebukes some of the movements that claim to love it the most.” Why? Because a fundamental message of the Lord of the Rings is that grasping for power is itself a dark and a dangerous act, regardless of the motives.

Throughout the story the ring calls out to the heroes, speaking to their hearts, telling them that only by claiming power can they defeat power. In a very real way, the will to power is the true enemy in Tolkien’s work. The identity of the villain, whether it’s Morgoth and Sauron in “The Silmarillion” or Sauron and Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings,” is less relevant than grasping after power.

Nathanael Blake of The Federalist replied with: No Surprise, David French Completely Botches J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings in which he attempts to refute French by misrepresentation.

Note that in French’s argument it is not power per se but “the will to power” and “grasping after power” that are the root evil of the One Ring. However, Blake writes that French “equates the temptation of the Ring with power.” He also summarizes French’s position as “power is evil”. Since he then cites the same passage I did (where French specifically says “will to power” and “grasping at power”), I can only see this as a kind of failure of reading comprehension on Blake’s part.

Blake then provides what he thinks is the real message. It’s not that power is bad (which… nobody said). It’s that domination is bad. Which is actually a perfectly reasonable summary of the French’s position, which is the one Blake is supposed to be arguing against. After all, French cited (approvingly) Michael Drout saying that “Rather than reveling in the acquisition and exercise of power, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ celebrates its renunciation, insisting that the domination of others is always morally wrong.”

Thus “domination is wrong” is actually a fair summary of French’s point–not a refutation of it–and Blake is mostly trying to wring substantive water from the stone of semantic quibbling. But then he goes further, and the extreme position he takes is quite illuminating.

According to Blake it’s not power that Faramir and others reject, but it’s also not just domination. It is instead a particularly extreme kind of domination: the kind “that makes people into thralls and slaves.” He elaborates:

The essence of domination is the attempt to elevate oneself to a godlike position and then impose one’s will to the point of obliterating the personhood of others. This is the sort of power the Ring offers and why it cannot be used for good, even by those who otherwise possess and deploy great power of their own. (emphasis added)

The thing that’s so interesting is this: the kind of domination that obliterates the personhood of others is so extreme it’s hard to say that it exists in the real world at all. If it does, it’s certainly at the extremes of actual totalitarianism like one might find in North Korea.

If Blake’s point was just that Tolkien’s message is that domination, not power per se, is the problem: then why take the additional step of making the domination of the One Ring so particular and so extreme? It seems that the only consequence is to specifically exempt lesser domination from criticism. Power is not bad per se. And using that power to dominate others is not bad either. It’s only if you exercise or seek domination “to the point of obliterating the personhood of others” that you have a problem.

So, to recap, French says that Tolkien says domination is bad even when you’re trying to dominate for good reasons.

Blake misrepresents French’s position, but then he actually (accidentally?) engages with it and basically says: no, a little domination is just fine. It has to be really, really extreme before it’s a problem.

Blake is not actually rebutting French’s point. He’s exemplifying it.

The second portion of Blake’s piece is really just a kind of bizarre. He argues that, because Tolkien envisioned a world with a Creator and natural law, “it is a vindication of the New Right”. Well, yeah, sure, if “God exists” and “natural law exists” were the definition of the New Right, sure, but it’s not actually that hard to find devout Christians who affirm both of those principles and don’t agree with the New Right. This is just a clumsy motte and bailey. I’m not sure why Blake included it.

Here’s the thing: any great work of literature (the Lord of the Rings qualifies!) isn’t about just one thing. Good fiction can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. The New Right is free to take from the work whatever they’d like, just as any group can do the same.

But let’s not pretend that a crucial message within the Lord of the Rings is that seeking to dominate others is dangerous, that French correctly identified it, and that Blake is pretty transparently trying to wiggle out of it precisely because domination (for a good cause!) is exactly what he seeks.

In one of the most poignant scenes from The Adam Project, Ryan Reynold’s character meets Jennifer Garner’s character by chance in a bar. Garner is Reynold’s mom, but she doesn’t recognize him because he has time-traveled into the past. He overhears her talking to the bartender about the difficulties she’s having with her son (Reynold’s younger self) in the wake of her husband’s death. Reynolds interjects to comfort his mom (which is tricky, since he’s a total stranger, as far as she knows). If this is hard to follow, just watch the clip. It’s less than three minutes long.

The line that really stuck with me from this was Reynolds telling Garner, “the problem with acting like you have it all together is he believes it.”

When I talked about this scene with Liz and Carl and Ben for a recent episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, I realized that there’s an important connection between this line and apologizing to our kids. And it’s probably not the reason you’re thinking.

The reason you’re thinking has to do with demonstrating to our kids how they should react to making a bad choice. This is also a good reason to apologize to your children. Admitting mistakes is hard. Guilt doesn’t feel good, and it takes practice to handle it positively. You don’t want to allow healthy guilt to turn into unhealthy shame (going from “I did bad” to “I am bad”). And you don’t want to allow the pain of guilt to cause you to lash out even more, like a wounded animal defending itself when there’s no threat. So yeah, apologize to your kids for your mistakes so they know how to apologize for theirs.

And, while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that apologizing to your kids will undermine your authority as a parent. It is important for parents to have authority. Your job is to keep your kids safe and teach them. This only works if you’re willing to set rules they don’t want to follow and teach lessons they don’t want to learn. That requires authority. But the authority should come from the fact that you love them and know more than they do. Or, in the words of the Lord to Joseph Smith, authority should only be maintained “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge” (D&C 121:41-42). If your authority comes from kindness and knowledge, then it will never be threatened by apologizing in those cases when you get it wrong.

In fact, this takes us to that second reason. The one I don’t think as many folks have thought of. And it’s this: admitting that you made a mistake is an important way of showing your kids how hard you’re trying and, by extension, demonstrating your love for them.

The only way to never make a mistake is to never push yourself. Only by operating well within your capabilities can you have a flawless record over the long run. Think about an elite performer like an Olympic gymnast or figure skater. They are always chasing perfection, rarely finding it, and that’s in events that are very short (from a few minutes to a few seconds). If you saw a gymnast doing a flawless, 30-minute routine every day for a month you would know that that routine was very, very easy (for them, at least).

You can’t tell if someone makes mistakes because they’re at the limits of their capacity or just careless. But if someone never makes mistakes, then you know that whatever they are doing isn’t much of a challenge.

So what does that tell your kid if you never apologize? In effect, it tells them that you have it all together. That, for you at least, parenting is easy.

That’s not the worst message in the world, but it’s not a great one either. Not only is it setting them up for a world of hurt when they become parents one day, but you’re missing an opportunity to tell them the truth: that parenting is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and you’re doing it for them.

Don’t take this too far. You don’t want to weigh your kids down with every worry and fear and stress you have. You don’t want to tell them every day how hard your job is. That’s a weight no child should carry. But it’s OK to let them know—sparingly, from time to time—that being a parent is really hard. What better, healthier way to convey that than to frankly admit when you make a mistake?

“The problem with acting like you have it all together is he believes it. Maybe he needs to know that you don’t. It’s OK if you don’t.”

I ran across a humorous meme in a Facebook group that got me thinking about anti-provincial provincialism. Well, not the meme, but a response to it. Here’s the original meme:

Now check out this (anonymized) response to it (and my response to them):

What has to happen, I wondered, for someone to assert that English is the most common language “only in the United States“? Well, they have to be operating from a kind of anti-Americanism that is so potent it has managed to swing all the way around back to being an extreme American centrism view again. After all, this person was so eager to take the US down a peg (I am assuming) that they managed to inadvertently erase the entire Anglosphere. The only people who exclude entire categories of countries from consideration are rabid America Firsters and rabid America Lasters. The commonality? They’re both only thinking about America.

It is a strange feature of our times that so many folks seem to become the thing they claim to oppose. The horseshoe theory is having its day.

The conversation got even stranger when someone else showed up to tell me that I’d misread the Wikipedia article that I’d linked. Full disclosure: I did double check this before I linked to it, but I still had an “uh oh” moment when I read their comment. Wouldn’t be the first time I totally misread a table, even when specifically checking my work. Here’s the comment:

Thankfully, dear reader, I did not have to type out the mea culpa I was already composing in my mind. Here’s the data (and a link):

My critic had decided to focus only on the first language (L1) category. The original point about “most commonly spoken” made no such distinction. So why rely on it? Same reason, I surmise, as the “only in the US” line of argument: to reflexively oppose anything with the appearance of American jingoism.

Because we can all see that’s the subtext here, right? To claim that English is the “most common language” when it is also the language (most) Americans speak is to appear to be making some of rah-rah ‘Murica statement. Except that… what happens if it’s just objectively true?

And it is objectively true. English has the greatest number of total speakers in the world by a wide margin. Even more tellingly, the number of English 2L speakers outnumbers Chinees 2L speakers by more than 5-to-1. This means that when someone chooses a language to study, they pick English 5 times more often than Chinese. No matter how you slice it, the fact that English is the most common language is just a fact about the reality we currently inhabit.

Not only that, but the connection of this fact to American chauvanism is historically ignorant. Not only is this a discussion about the English language and not the American one, but the linguistic prevalence of English predates the rise of America a great power. If you think millions of Indians conduct business in English because of America then you need to open a history book. The Brits started this stated of affairs back when the sun really did never set on their empire. We just inherited it.

I wonder if there’s something about opposing something thoughtlessly that causes you to eventually, ultimately, become that thing. Maybe Nietzsche’s aphorism doesn’t just sound cool. Maybe there’s really something to it.

Part 2: Anti-Provincial Provincialism

My dad taught me the phrase “anti-provincial provincialism” when I was a kid. We were talking about the tendency of some Latter-day Saint academics to over-correct for the provincialism of their less-educated Latter-day Saint community and in the process recreate a variety of the provincialism they were running away from. Let me fill this in a bit.

First, a lot of Latter-day Saints can be provincial.

This shouldn’t shock anyone. Latter-day Saint culture is tight-knit and uniform. For teenagers when I was growing up, you had:

• Three hours of Church on Sunday
• About an hour of early-morning seminary in the church building before school Monday – Friday
• Some kind of 1-2 hour youth activity in the church building on Wednesday evenings

This is plenty of time to tightly assimilate and indoctrinate the rising generation, and for the most part this is a good thing. I am a strong believer in liberalism, which sort of secularizes the public square to accommodate different religious traditions. This secularization isn’t anti-religious, it is what enables those religions to thrive by carving out their own spaces to flourish. State religions have a lot of power, but this makes them corrupt and anemic in terms of real devotion. Pluralism is good for all traditions.

But a consequences of the tight-knit culture is that Latter-day Saints can grow up unable to clearly differentiate between general cultural touchstones (Latter-day Saints love Disney and The Princess Bride, but so do lots of people) and unique cultural touchstones (like Saturday’s Warrior and Johnny Lingo).

We have all kinds of arcane knowledge that nobody outside our culture knows or cares about, especially around serving two-year missions. Latter-day Saints know what the MTC is (even if they mishear it as “empty sea” when they’re little, like I did) and can recount their parents’ and relatives’ favorite mission stories. They also employ some theological terms in ways that non-LDS (even non-LDS Christians) would find strange.

And the thing is: if nobody tells you, then you never learn which things are things everyone knows and which things are part of your strange little religious community alone. Once, when I was in elementary school, I called my friend on the phone and his mom picked up. I addressed her as “Sister Apple” because Apple was their last name and because at that point in my life the only adults I talked to were family, teachers, or in my church. Since she wasn’t family or a teacher, I defaulted to addressing her as I was taught to address the adults in my church.

As I remember it today, her reaction was quite frosty. Maybe she thought I was in a cult. Maybe I’d accidentally raised the specter of the extremely dark history of Christians imposing their faith on Jews (my friend’s family was Jewish). Maybe I am misremembering. All I know for sure is I felt deeply awkward, apologized profusely, tried to explain, and then never made that mistake ever again. Not with her, not with anyone else.

I had these kinds of experiences–experiences that taught me to see clearly the boundaries between Mormon culture and other cultures–not only because I grew up in Virginia but also because (for various reasons) I didn’t get along very well with my LDS peer group for most of my teen years. I had very few close LDS friends from the time that I was about 12 until I was in my 30s. Lots of LDS folks, even those who grew up outside of Utah, didn’t have them. Or had fewer.

So the dynamic you can run into is when a Latter-day Saint without this kind of awareness trips over some of the (to them) invisible boundaries between Mormon culture and the surrounding culture. If they do this in front of another Latter-day Saint who does know, then the one who’s in the know has a tendency to cringe.

This is where you get provincialism (the Latter-day Saint who doesn’t know any better) and anti-provincial provincialism (the Latter-day Saint who is too invested in knowing better). After all, why should one Latter-day Saint feel so threatened by a social faux pax of another Latter-day Saint unless they are really invested in that group identity?

My dad was frustrated, at the time, with Latter-day Saint intellectuals who liked to discount their own culture and faith. They were too eager to write off Mormon art or culture or research that was amenable to faithful LDS views. They thought they were being anti-provincial. They thought they were acting like the people around them, outgrowing their culture. But the fact is that their fear of being seen as or identified with Mormonism made them just as obsessed with Mormonism as the mots provincial Mormon around. And twice as annoying.

Part 3: Beyond Anti

Although I should have known better, given what my parents taught me growing up, I became one of those anti-provincial provincials for a while. I had a chip on my shoulder about so-called “Utah Mormons”. I felt that the Latter-day Saints in Utah looked down on us out in the “mission field,” so I turned the perceived slight into a badge of honor. Yeah maybe this was the mission field, and if so that meant we out here doing the work were better than Utah Mormons. We had more challenges to overcome, couldn’t be lazy about our faith, etc.

And so, like an anti-Americanist who becomes an Americanist I became an anti-provincial provincialist. I carried that chip on my shoulder into my own mission where, finally meeting a lot of Utah Mormons on neutral territory, I got over myself. Some of them were great. Some of them were annoying. They were just folk. There are pros and cons to living in a religious majority or a minority. I still prefer living where I’m in the minority, but I’m no longer smug about it. It’s just a personal preference. There are tradeoffs.

One of the three or four ideas that’s had the most lasting impact on my life is the idea that there are fundamentally only two human motivations. Love, attraction, or desire on the one hand. Fear, avoidance, or aversion on the other.

Why is it that fighting with monsters turns you into a monster? I suspect the lesson is that how and why you fight your battles is an important as what battles you choose to fight. I wrote a Twitter thread about this on Saturday, contrasting tribal reasons for adhering to a religion and genuine conversion. The thread starts here, but here’s the relevant Tweet:

If you’re concerned about American jingoism: OK. That’s a valid concern. But there are two ways you can stand against it. In fear of the thing. Or out of love for something else. Choose carefully. Because if you’re motivated by fear, then you will–in the end–become the thing your fear motivates you to fight against. You will try to fight fire with fire, and then you will become the fire.

If you’re concerned about Mormon provincialism: OK. There are valid concerns. Being able to see outside your culture and build bridges with other cultures is a good thing. But, here again, you have to ask if you’re more afraid of provincialism or more in love with building bridges. Because if you’re afraid of provincialism, well… that’s how you get anti-provincial provincialism. And no bridges, by the way.

I might rewrite my pinned Tweet one day.

It took decades and ultimately I fell into the solution more by accident than by design, but I’m at a point now where setting goals feels easy and empowering. Since I know a lot of people struggle with this—and maybe some even struggle in the same ways that I did—I thought I’d write up my thoughts to make the path a little easier for the next person.

The first thing I had to learn was humility.

For most of my life, I set goals by imagining where I should be and then making that my goal. I utterly refused to begin with where I currently was. I refused to even contemplate it. Why? Because I was proud, and pride always hides insecurity. I could accept that I wasn’t where I should be in a fuzzy, abstract sense. That was the point of setting the goal in the first place. But to actually measure my current achievement and then use that as the starting point? That required me to look in the mirror head-on, and I couldn’t bear to do it. I was too afraid of what I’d see. My sense of worth depended on my achievement, and so if my achievements were not what they should be then I wasn’t what I should be. The first step of goal setting literally felt like an existential threat.

This was particularly true because goal-setting is an integral part of Latter-day Saint culture. Or theology. The line is fuzzy. Either way, the worst experiences I had with goal setting were on my mission. The stakes felt incredibly high. I was the kind of LDS kid who always wanted to go on a mission. I grew up on stories of my dad’s mission and other mission stories. And I knew that being a mission was like this singular opportunity to prove myself. So on top of the general religious pressure there was this additional pressure of “now or never”. If I wasn’t a good missionary, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. Maybe for all eternity. No pressure.

So when we had religious leaders come and say things like, “If you all contact at least 10 people a day, baptisms in the mission will double,” I was primed for an entirely dysfunctional and traumatizing experience. Which is exactly what I get.

(I’m going to set aside the whole metrics-approach-to-missionary-work conversation, because that’s a topic unto itself.)

I tried to be obedient. I set the goal. And I recorded my results. I think I maybe hit 10 people a day once. Certainly never for a whole week straight (we planned weekly). When I failed to hit the goal, I prayed and I fasted and I agonized and I beat myself up. But I never once—not once!—just started with my total from last week and tried to do an incremental improvement on that. That would mean accepting that the numbers from last week were not some transitory fluke. They were my actual current status. I couldn’t bear to face that.

This is one of life’s weird little contradictions. To improve yourself—in other words, to change away from who you currently are—the first step is to accept who you currently are. Accepting reality—not accepting that its good enough, but just that it is—will paradoxically make it much easier to change reality.

Another one of life’s little paradoxes is that pride breeds insecurity and humility breeds confidence. Or maybe it’s the other way around. When I was a missionary at age 19-21, I still didn’t really believe that I was a child of God. That I had divine worth. That God loved me because I was me. I thought I had to earn worth. I didn’t realize it was a gift. That insecurity fueled pride as a coping mechanism. I wanted to be loved and valuable. I thought those things depended on being good enough. So I had to think of myself as good enough.

But once I really accepted that my value is innate—as it is for all of us—that confidence meant I no longer had to keep up an appearance of competence and accomplishment for the sake of protecting my ego. Because I had no ego left to protect.

Well, not no ego. It’s a process. I’m not perfectly humble yet. But I’m getting there, and that confidence/humility has made it possible for me to just look in the mirror and accept where I am today.

The second thing is a lot simpler: keeping records.

The whole goal setting process as I’ve outlined it depends on being able to measure something. This is why I say I sort of stumbled into all of this by accident. The first time I really set good goals and stuck to them was when I was training for my first half marathon. Because it wasn’t a religious goal, the stakes were a lot lower, so I didn’t have a problem accepting my starting point.

More importantly, I was in the habit of logging my miles for every run. So I could look back for a few weeks (I’d just started) and easily see how many miles per week I’d been running. This made my starting point unambiguous.

Next, I looked up some training plans. These showed how many miles per week I should be running before the marathon. They also had weekly plans, but to make the goals personal to me, I modified a weekly plan so that it started with my current miles-per-week and ramped up gradually in the time I had to the goal mies-per-week.

I didn’t recognize this breakthrough for what it was at the time, but—without even thinking about it—I started doing a similar thing with other goals. I tracked my words when I wrote, for example, and that was how I had some confidence that I could do the Great Challenge. I signed up to write a short story every week for 52 weeks in a year because I knew I’d been averaging about 20,000 words / month, which was within range of 4-5 short stories / month.

And then, just a month ago, I plotted out how long I wanted it to take for me to get through the Book of Mormon attribution project I’m working on. I’ve started that project at least 3 or 4 times, but never gotten through 2 Nephi, mostly because I didn’t have a road map. So I built a road map, using exactly the same method that I used for the running plan and the short stories plan.

And that was when I finally realized I was doing what I’d wanted to do my whole life: setting goals. Setting achievable goals. And then achieving them. Here’s my chart for the Book of Mormon attribution project, by the way, showing that I’m basically on track about 2 months in.

I hope this helps someone out there. It’s pretty basic, but it’s what I needed to learn to be able to start setting goals. And setting goals has enabled me to do two things that I really care about. First, it lets me take on bigger projects and improve myself more / faster than I had in the past. Second, and probably more importantly, it quiets the demon of self-doubt. Like I said: I’m not totally recovered from that “I’m only worth what I accomplish” mental trap. When I look at my goals and see that I’m making consistent progress towards things I care about, it reminds me what really matters. Which is the journey.

I guess that’s the last of life’s little paradoxes for this blog post: you have to care about pursuing your goals to live a meaningful, fulfilling life. But you don’t actually have to accomplish anything. Accomplishment is usually outside your control. It’s always subject to fortune. The output is the destination. It doesn’t really matter.

But you still have to really try to get that output. Really make a journey towards that destination. Because that’s the input. That’s what you put in. That does depend on you.

I believe that doing my best to put everything into my life is what will make my life fulfilling. What I get out of it? Well, after I’ve done all I can, then who cares how it actually works out. That’s in God’s hands.

The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

The fact that free speech is not just a legal matter is a vitally important one, because those who restrict free speech to the minimum legal interpretation are actively undermining—wittingly or not—the culture that actual free speech depends on.

Mchangama brought up the example of Athens, which enjoyed a cultural free speech called parrhesia which, Mchangama said, “means something like fearless or uninhibited speech.” Although there was no legal basis for parrhesia, it “permeated the Athenian democracy” and let to a “culture of tolerance”.

Clearly a culture of tolerance is not sufficient. Just ask Socrates. But at the same time legal free speech rights aren’t sufficient, either. The historical examples are too numerous to cite, especially in repressive 20^th century regimes that often paid lip service to human rights (including the late-stage USSR). The laws were there on paper, but a lot of good it did anyone.

Mchangama went on to say that “if people lose faith in free speech and become more intolerant than laws will reflect that change and become more intolerant.” So fostering this culture is vital both to preserve the rights on paper and to ensure those legal rights are actually honored in the real world. So, “how do we foster a culture of free speech?” Mchangama asked. His response, in part:

It is ultimately down to each one of us. So those of us who believe in free speech have a responsibility of making the case for free speech to others, and do it in an uncondescending way, and also one which doesn’t just rely on calling people who want to restrict free speech fascists or totalitarians… [We must] take seriously the concerns of those who are worried about the ugly sides and harmful sides of free speech.

This is a tough balance to strike, but I want to do my part. So let me make two points.

First, the popular line of argument that dismisses anything that’s not a technical violation of the First Amendment is unhelpful. Just as an example, here’s an XKCD cartoon (and I’m usually a huge fan) to show what I mean.

The problem with this kind of free speech minimalism is that its intrinsically unstable. If you support free speech but only legally, then you don’t really support free speech at all. Wittingly or not, you are adopting an anti-free speech bias. Because, as Orwell and Mchangama observe, a legal free speech right without accompanying support is a paper tiger with a short life span.  

Second, the question isn’t binary. It’s not about whether we should have free speech. It’s about the boundaries of tolerance—legal and cultural—for unpopular speech. To this end, Mchangama decries use of pejoratives like “social justice warrior” for those who want to draw a tighter boundary around what speech is legally and culturally permissible.

I’ve used the SJW term a lot. You can find plenty of instances of it here on this blog. I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with it because I don’t want to use a pejorative, but I wasn’t sure how else to refer to adherents of the post-liberal “successor ideology.”

Maybe that decision to use SJW was understandable, but I’m rethinking it. Either way, the reality is that I’ve imbibed at least some of the tribal animus that comes with the use of the term. I have—again, you can probably find old examples here on this blog—characterized my political opponents by their most extreme examples rather than by the moderate and reasonable folks who have genuine concerns about (in this context) how free speech can negatively impact minorities.

I am not changing my position on free speech. Like Mchangama, I strongly believe that the benefits of a broadly tolerant free speech culture greatly outweigh the costs for the disempowered. But that doesn’t mean there are no costs.

Admitting that it’s a tradeoff, that critics have legitimate concerns, and that the question isn’t binary will—I hope—make me more persuasive as a free speech advocate. Because I really do believe that a thriving culture of free speech is vitally important for the health of liberal democracies and everyone who lives within them. I do not want people to lose that faith.

Yesterday I retweeted Ross Douthat:

This morning I read a piece from Damon Linker that I felt could use a little boost from Douthat’s perspective. In the bloody power of symbolic gestures, Damon lays blame for breaching the capitol on the extreme right-wing media and the politicians who have tried to cash in on it.

The Republican Party and its media allies have created this monster for the sake of personal advantage and without the slightest shred of regard for its consequences on the country’s capacity for self-government. The monster is a faction of Republican voters who are increasingly incapable of participating in democratic politics and who long for a form of tyrannical rule.

Damon is not wrong. Just yesterday, Rush Limbaugh said:

There’s a lot of people calling for the end of violence. There’s a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual Tea Party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord didn’t feel that way.

Or did he? I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh pretty consistently from 2006ish to 2008ish. It was a deliberate choice to expose myself to different viewpoints. One of the things I quickly learned is that a lot of the mainstream media attacks on Limbaugh (e.g. NPR) were dishonest. A common approach was to take something he said in an obviously joking way and report it as serious. At the time, I was listening to most of his 3-hour show (at work), so when the latest brouhaha erupted, it would be about a segment I’d heard first hand. I don’t trust establishment media to be honest about conservatives.

On the other hand, plenty of what Rush said disgusted me on its own merits. I remember during the fractious 2016 Republican primary season (I listened again during that period to see what conservative radio was up to), he adroitly refused to back any candidate while giving the impression of being on everyone’s side. It struck me as profoundly cowardly. Rush claimed to care so much about conservative principles and to be so influential, but clearly he was afraid to back a losing horse. Someone really committed to the county and their ideals uses their influence as wisely as they can, they don’t pose as influential while just waiting to see who the winner is so that they can ride their coattails.

But I digress.

Damon Linker is right, but his viewpoint is incomplete, as I said on Twitter:

The important thing to keep in mind about the left-right conflict in the public square is that it’s dramatically asymmetrical. The left owns all the high ground: the universities, the publishing houses, Hollywood, all the major journalist outputs. They have the entrenched power, which gives them more to lose and also more options to choose from, and the result is a careful, low-grade, but brutally relentless prosecution.

The right is at the margin. They have very little to lose and much less traditional power to call on, and so their tactics are far more radical and risky.

To an outside observer, this makes the right much easier to depict as the bad guy, but really the dynamic has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the asymmetric nature of the conflict. Just look at any asymmetric military conflict, like Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq. The American military is overwhelmingly superior and so engages in (relatively) careful operations that emphasize numbers and technical superiority. Because they have lots to lose and lots to work with.

The insurgents adopt much more extreme tactics, from suicide bombing to blue-on-green assassinations, because they have little to lose and little to work with.

Another stark example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where–again–Israel is the cautious incumbent and the Palestinians are the reckless insurgents.

My point isn’t to excuse either side in any way. It’s merely to highlight that the nature of asymmetrical conflict brings about characteristically divergent tactics and approaches. The traditionally powerful side tends to behave conservatively, whether it’s the New York Times or Israel. The traditionally weaker side tends to behave more radically, whether it’s Rush Limbaugh or Hamas.

Some readers might be outraged that I’m excusing Hamas’s tactics or downplaying Israel’s atrocities, but that’s exactly what I want to highlight. I’m not taking a position on these issues. That’s not the topic for today. But I want people to realize that when they like the dominant power (e.g. the New York Times) they interpret their conservatism as mature, respectable, etc. But when they don’t like the dominant power (e.g. someone who opposes Israel) they will emphasize that even relatively moderate tactics (bulldozing houses vs. suicide bombers) are horrific in their aggregate output and will thereby interpret the same conservative tendency as oppression and exploitation.

We have the same double-standard for the weaker side, either lauding the audacity, bravery, and sacrifice of radicalism or condemning the brutality, savagery, and dishonorable nature of the same tendency.

Once you realize that the strong side is conservative and the weak side is radical and also realize that there are ways to interpret each of those positively and negatives–and only once you have these two realizations–you can be read to start thinking about the split between mainstream media (leftwing) and alternative media (rightwing) in America.

As long as the American left dominates our cultural institutions and as long as the American right is willing to burn those institutions down rather than lose them, there is no point assigning blame because the doom spiral will destroy us all.

The only way out is to re-establish norms of tolerance and diversity in the public sphere. I’m not calling for some kind of affirmative action for conservatives. There’s no such thing as objectivity, and so that is impossible to really implement and easy to game and manipulate. For the foreseeable future, the left will be the incumbent, dominant power in all the former institutions. But they need to be more willing to tolerate differences and refrain from exiling conservatives from their public sphere. They need to exercise restraint.

The right has the same obligation: exercising restraint in order to avoid the temptation to act like irresponsible radical and burn our institutions down.

Three final thoughts.

First, there is no policy that will solve our problems. We can’t fix this with laws or procedures. This is a change in how Americans relate to each other across perceived political differences.

Second, it might actually be more effective to depoliticize instead of diversify. In other words, making space for left and right viewpoints is important, but also very hard. It can be easier to just not see everything as political.

Third, I am addressing our cultural institutions. In terms of political institutions, the situation is somewhat reversed. Generally speaking, the conservatives have been the dominant players in recent years, especially when you consider state-level governments as well as the Presidency, and it’s Democrats who have been frustrated by their lack of access to formal power. I’m acknowledging this, but not addressing it for the simple reason that I feel more competent to weigh in on public culture than on formal politics.

Before the mob breached the Capitol yesterday, Trump was powerful enough within the GOP that he could pose a real threat to Democrats in the future. That’s why they tried to remove him previously. (Yes, he was also guilty in my mind, but the political considerations may have dominated.) In 2020 he really scared them by performing much better than polls expected. So a Trump strong enough to dominate the GOP and maybe run again in 2024 is a real threat.

But after the mob breached the capitol yesterday, Trump’s stock went down dramatically with the middle and the right (not just the left). Even many of his own supporters were horrified, which is why we already have ridiculous conspiracy theories about a false flag operation. That tells you how badly Trump screwed up: his devoted followers refuse to believe it was him. As a result, he no longer poses as much of a threat to the Democrats, but he’s still strong enough to hamstring the GOP from within.

If he is impeached and removed he cannot run again in 2024. That would be a killing blow (politically). His faction of the GOP was always a personality cult and never about ideology, so it would collapse without him. (There’s some chance it restarts under Ivanka or something, but thta’s probably a more distant threat.)

The GOP could respond to the vacuum left by Trump’s faction by ushering back in the #NeverTrump conservatives: the only Republicans left with any honor intact after yesterday. They, in turn, would probably be wise enough to incorporate the legitimate populist grievances that Trump initially leveraged, infusing their high-brow philosophy with a compelling pitch to ordinary Americans. This isn’t certain, but there’s a real path forward to a rehabilitated, resurgent GOP that is even stronger than it ever was before or under Trump.

The simplest route for Democrats to stave off this possibility is to leave Trump where he is: a polarizing figure with enough power to tear the GOP apart but not enough to dominate it as he has in the past. If he can run in 2024, he’s not going anywhere and his reduced faction will stay in place, forestalling any sweeping reform of the GOP. The GOP, in turn, will still be strong enough to pre-empt the rise of a real replacement party.

Napoleon said: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” That applies here.
Trump’s buffoonish attempts at a coup were a colossal political mistake. Now that Trump has enraged the broad middle of America (not just the left), they won’t remove him ’cause he’s too useful where he is: an anvil on the prospects of their political rivals.

I’ve talked to Terryl Givens[ref]My dad.[/ref] a few times since his article on abortion for Public Square came out. Both of us are disappointed, but not at all surprised, by some of the reactions from fellow Latter-day Saints. I’ll dive into one such response–a post from Sam Brunson at By Common Consent–but only after taking a minute to underscore the difference between an extreme position and a fiercely-held moderate position. 

There’s a reason why the first section in Terryl’s piece is an explanation of the current legal status of abortion in the United States. Unlike many other developed nations, where abortion laws were gradually liberalized through democratic means, the democratic process in the United States was short-circuited by the Roe vs. Wade decision (along with Doe vs. Bolton). As Terryl explained, American abortion law since Roe is an extreme outlier: “America is one of very few countries in the world that permit abortion through the 9th month of pregnancy.”

If the spectrum of possible abortion laws runs from “never and under no circumstances” to “always and under any circumstances,” our present situation is very close to the “any circumstances” extreme. 

In his rejoinder, Sam rightly points out that Roe is not the last word on the legality of abortion in the United States. Decades of laws and court cases–including return trips to the Supreme Court–have created an extremely complex legal landscape full of technicalities, ambiguities, and contradictions.

But the bottom line to the question of the legal status of abortion in the United States doesn’t require sophisticated legal analysis if we can answer a much simpler set of questions instead. Is it true that there are a large number of late-term abortions in the United States that are elective (i.e. not medically necessary or the result of rape) and legal? That’s the fundamental question, and it’s one Terryl unambiguously asked and answered in his piece (with sources):

Current numbers are between 10,000 and 15,000 late-term abortions performed per year… “[M]ost late-term abortions are elective, done on healthy women with healthy fetuses, and for the same reasons given by women experiencing first-trimester abortions.” 

Thus, the key question of the current legal status of abortion in the United States is irrefutably answered. We live in a country where late-term, elective abortions are legal, and we’re one of the only countries in the world with such a radical and extreme position. 

This radical position is not at all  popular with Americans, as countless polling demonstrates. Here’s Gallup: 

It is possible to quibble about whether the current regime is logically identical to “legal under any circumstances.” No matter, the present state of abortion legality is so incredibly extreme that we can afford to be very generous in our analysis. Here are more detailed poll numbers:

American abortion law is more extreme than “legal under most circumstances” but even if we grant that we still find that combined support for the status quo is just 38% while the vast majority would prefer abortion laws stricter than what we have now. And stricter than what we can have, as long as the root of the tree (Roe) is left intact. 

How Does A Radical, Unpopular Position Endure?

These opinions have been roughly stable, and so you might reasonably wonder: how is it possible for such an unpopular state of affairs to last for so long? One reason is structural. Because Roe short-circuited the democratic, legislative process the issue is largely out of the hands of (more responsive) state and federal legislatures. Individual states can, and have, passed laws to restrict abortion around the margins, but the kind of simple, “No abortion in the third trimester except for these narrow exceptions” law that they would accurately reflect popular sentiment would inevitably run up against Supreme Court where either the restriction or Roe would have to be ovturned.[ref]The matter is especially complicated when you consider that pro-life activists strategically avoid passing laws like this as long as they know that the Supreme Court would overturn the law and thus even more deeply entrench Roe as precedent.[/ref]

As long as Roe is in place, it’s impossible to limit abortion laws. And yet support for overturning Roe, perversely, is very low. Here’s a recent NBC poll:

Here we have a contradiction. Most Americans want abortion to be limited to only a few, exceptional cases. But this is impossible without overturning Roe. And most Americans don’t want to overturn Roe. 

This is the fundamental contradiction that has perpetuated an extremist, unpopular abortion status quo for so long.

The most straightforward explanation is that Americans support Roe while at the same time supporting the kinds of laws that Roe precludes because they don’t understand Roe. And this is where we get to the heart of the responses to Terryl’s piece (and many, many more like his). The only way to convince Americans to support Roe (even though it goes counter to their actual preferences) is to convince them that Roe is the moderate position and that it is the pro-life side that is radical and extreme.

This involves two crucial myths:

1. Elective, late-term abortions do not take place, or only take place for exceptional reasons 
2. The only alternative to Roe is a blanket ban on all abortions

If Americans understood that elective, late-term abortions are legal and do, in fact, take place in great numbers and if they understood that they only way to change this state of affairs would be to repeal Roe, then support for Roe would plummet. Thus, for those who wish to support the present situation, the agenda is clear: the status quo can only survive as long as the pro-life position is misrepresented as the extreme one. 

The Violence of Abortion Protects Abortion

With tragic irony, the indefensibleness of elective abortion makes this task much easier. Abortion is an act of horrific violence against a tiny human being. It is impossible to contemplate this reality and not be traumatized. This is why pro-life activists suffer from burn-out. 

It is not just pro-life activists who are traumatized by the violence of abortion, however. The most deeply traumatized are the ones most frequently and closely exposed to the violence of abortion: the abortionists themselves. This is what led Lisa Harris to write “Second Trimester Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence and Changing the Discourse.” She reports how the advent of second-trimester D&E abortions, which entail the manual dismemberment of the unborn human, led to profound psychological consequences for practitioners when they became common in the late 1970s:

As D&E became increasingly accepted as a superior means of accomplishing second trimester abortion… a small amount of research on provider perspectives on D&E resulted. Kaltreider et al found that some doctors who provided D&E had ‘‘disquieting’’ dreams and strong emotional reactions.

Hern found that D&E was ‘‘qualitatively a different procedure – both medically and emotionally – than early abortion’’. Many of his staff members reported: ‘‘. . .serious emotional reactions that produced physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances (including disturbing dreams), effects on interpersonal relationships and moral anguish.’’

This is the perspective from an abortionist, not some pro-life activist. In fact, Lisa describes performing an abortion herself while she was pregnant: 

When I was a little over 18 weeks pregnant with my now pre-school child, I did a second trimester abortion for a patient who was also a little over 18 weeks pregnant. As I reviewed her chart I realised that I was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus. I went about doing the procedure as usual, removed the laminaria I had placed earlier and confirmed I had adequate dilation. I used electrical suction to remove the amniotic fluid, picked up my forceps and began to remove the fetus in parts, as I always did. I felt lucky that this one was already in the breech position – it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier. With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick – a fluttery ‘‘thump, thump’’ in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a ‘‘thump, thump’’ in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes – without me – meaning my conscious brain – even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling – a brutally visceral response – heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life. Doing second trimester abortions did not get easier after my pregnancy; in fact, dealing with little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder.

This is hard to read. Harder to witness. Harder still to perform. That’s Lisa’s point. “There is violence in abortion,” she plainly states, and the point of her paper is that abortionists, like her, need support to psychologically withstand the trauma of perpetrating that violence on tiny human beings again and again and agin.[ref]Although many, like other doctors quoted in the article, simply refuse to do the procedures at all. The real limits of abortion in the United States are not legal, they are that so few people are morally or psychologically capable of tearing apart tiny human beings.[/ref]

Thus, pro-lifers find themselves in a Catch-22 position. If we do nothing, or soft-peddle the true state of affairs, then the pro-choice myths remain uncontested, and misuided public opinion keeps Roe–and elective abortion at any point–safe.

But if we do describe the true nature of abortion then our audienc recoils in shock. Ordinary Americans living their ordinary lives are unprepared for the horror going on all around them, and they are overwhelmed. They desperately want this not to be true. They don’t even want to think about it. 

If you tell someone that your neighbor screams at his kids, they will be sad. If you say your neighbor hits his kids, they will urge you to call the police or contact social services. If you say your neighbor is murdering his children one by one and burying them in the backyard, they will probably stop talking to you and maybe even call the cops on you. Sometimes, the worse a problem is the harder it is to get anyone to look at it. That is the case with abortion.

Terryl’s piece was a moderate position strongly argued. He is taking literally the most common position in America: that abortion should be illegal in all but a few circumstances (but that it should be legal in those circumstances). He never stated or even implied that other, ancillary efforts should not be tried (such as birth control). 

Abortion is a large, complex issue and there are a lot of ambiguous and aspects to it. But not every single aspect is ambiguous. Some really are clear cut. Such as the fact that it should not be legal to get a late-term abortion for elective reasons. Virtually all Americans assent to this. Why, then, was Terryl’s essay so utterly rejected by some fellow Latter-day Saints?

On Sam Brunson and Abortion

As I mentioned earlier, Sam’s response to Terryl is the first extended one I’ve seen and is pretty representative of the kinds of arguments that are typical in response to pro-life positions. It is a great way to see the factors I’ve described above–the myth-protecting and the violence-denial–put into practice. 

Bad Faith[ref]I’ll use the same headings that Sam did, although I don’t intend to respond to every single point.[/ref]

Terryl’s piece includes this line in the first paragraph:

I taught in a private liberal arts college for three decades, where, as is typical in higher education, political views are as diverse as in the North Korean parliament.

This is what is colloquially referred to by most people as: “a joke,” but Sam’s response see it as an opening to impugn Terryl’s motives: 

Moreover, bringing up North Korea—an authoritarian dictatorship where dissent can lead to execution—strongly hints that he’s creating a straw opponent, not engaging in good-faith discourse.

Is a humorous line at the expense of North Korea really a violation of “good-faith discourse”? Did he really not recognize that this line was written humorously? I suppose it’s possible, since he seemed to think the BCC audience wouldn’t know North Korea was an authoritarian dictatorship without being told. Also, he is a tax attorney.[ref]This is also a joke.[/ref]

Still, it seems awfully convenient to fail to recognize a joke in such a way that lets you invent some kind of nefarious, implied straw-man argument. 

It almost seems like bad faith.

Facts and the Law

This is the section where the first of the two core objectives (defend the myths) is undertaken. Sam characterizes Terryl’s piece as “deeply misleading” and specifically refers to “big [legal] problems,” yet his rejoinder is curiously devoid of substance to validate these claims. For example:

And, in fact, just last week the Sixth Circuit upheld a Kentucky law requiring that abortion clinics have a hospital transfer agreement. So the idea that abortion regulation always fails in the courts is absolutely absurd.

So Terryl says elective abortions are generally legal at any time and the reply is, well those clinics that can provide the abortion at any time for any reason may be required to “have a hospital transfer agreement”. In what way is this in any sense a refutation of the point at hand? 

It’s like I said, “buying a light bulb is generally legal at any time for any reason” and you said, “well, yeah, but hardware stores can be required to follow safety regulations.”

… OK?

None of the legal analysis in this section gets to the core fact: are late-term abortions frequently conducted in the United States for elective reasons and are they legal? If that is the case, then no amount of legal analysis can obfuscate the bottom line: yes, abortions are legal for basically any reason at basically any time. There’s room to quibble or qualify, but–so long as that central fact stands–not to fundamentally rebut the assertion. 

Sam never even tries. 

That’s because, as we covered above, the facts are unimpeachable. Terryl’s source is the Guttmacher Institute, which is the research arm of the nation’s most prolific abortion provider. It’s an objective fact that elective, late-term abortions are legal in the United States as a result of the legal and policy ecosystem descending from the Roe and Doe decisions. Instead of a strong rebuttal of this claim, as we were promised, all we get are glancing, irrelevancies. 

Moral Repugnance

Having attempted to defend the myth that later-term abortions are illegal, in this section Sam turns to the next objective: leveraging the violence of abortion to deflect attention from the violence of abortion.[ref]Not a typo.[/ref]

He begins by citing Terryl:

I am not personally opposed to abortion because of religious commitment or precept, because of some abstract principle of “the sanctity of life.” I am personally opposed because my heart and mind, my basic core humanity revolts at the thought of a living sensate human being undergoing vivisection in the womb, being vacuum evacuated, subjected to a salt bath, or, in the “late-term” procedure, having its skull pierced and brain vacuumed out.

Then he presents his own pararaphse: “[Terryl] finds abortion physically disgusting and, at least partly in consequence of that disgust, finds it morally repugnant.” 

This is an egregious mischaracterization. I understand that the clause “at least partly” offers a kind of fig leaf so that Sam can say–when pressed–that he’s not actually substituting Terryl’s moral revulsion for a mere gag reflex, but since the rest of the piece exclusively focuses on the straw-man version of Terryl’s argument, that is in fact what he is doing, tenuous preemptive plausible deniability excuses notwithstanding. 

To say that the horror of tiny arms and legs being ripped away from a little, living body is the same species of disgust as watching a gall bladder operation is an act of stunning moral deadness.

I understand that urge to look away from abortion. I wish I had never heard of it. And, as we covered above, even a staunch pro-choice feminist and abortionist like Lisa not only admits that abortion is intrinsically violent, but insists that this violence causes a psychological trauma that merits sympathy and support for abortionists who subject themselves to it. She is not the only one, by the way. Another paper, Dangertalk: Voices of abortion providers, includes many additional examples of the way that abortionists frankly discuss abortion in terms of violence, killing, and war when they are away from public view. “It’s like a slaughterhouse–it’s like–line ’em up and kill ’em and then go on to the next one — I feel like that sometimes,” said one. “[Abortion work] feels like being in a war,” said another, “I think about what soldiers feel like when they kill.”

Given this, Sam’s substitution from moral revulsion at an act of violence to physical revulsion at blood and guts is unmasked for what it truly is: a deflection. Abortion is very, very hard to look at. And that’s convenient for pro-choicers, because they don’t want you to see it.

The reset of this section is largely a continuation of the deflection. 

• “Why no support for, for example, free access to high-quality contraception?” 
• “[Y]ou know what I consider disgusting? Unnecessary maternal death.”
• “You know what else I consider morally repugnant? Racial inequality.” 

I do not wish to sound remotely dismissive of these entirely valid statements. Each of them is legitimate and worthy of consideration. Nothing in Terryl’s piece or in my position contradicts any of them. Let us have high-quality contraception, high-quality maternal care, and a commitment to ending racial inequality. 

But we do not have to stint on our dedication to any of those policies or causes to note that–separate and independent from these considerations–elective, late-term abortions are horrifically violent. 

These are serious considerations, and they deserve to be treated as more than mere padding to create psychological distance from the trauma of abortion. Just as women, too, deserve a better solution for the hardship of an unplanned pregnancy than abortion.

To the Latter-day Saints?

Sam writes that, “Although he claims to be making a Latter-day Saint defense of the unborn, his argumentation is almost entirely devoid of Latter-day Saint content.” Here, at least, he is basically correct. Not that he’s made some insightful observation, of course. He’s just repeating Terryl’s words from the prior quote: “I am not personally opposed to abortion because of religious commitment or precept.”

In this section, which I find the least objectionable, Sam tries to carve out space for Latter-day Saints to be personally pro-life and publicly pro-choice, including a few half-hearted references to General Authorities and Latter-day Saint theology. I say “half-hearted” because I suspect Sam knows as well as I do that President Nelson and President Oaks, to name just two, have spoken forcefully and clearly in direct contradiction to Latter-day Saint attempts to find some kind of wiggle room around “free agency” or to view the lives of unborn human beings as anything less than equal with the lives of born human beings. 

No one should countenance the legality of elective abortion at all, but Latter-day Saints especially so.

The Moral Imagination

In the final section, Sam circles back to the myth-defending. The first myth to defend is that elective, late-term abortions do not take place in the United States, which is just a detailed way of saying that the pro-choice side seeks to conceal the radicalism of our current laws.

The second myth to defend, which occupies this section, is the myth that any alternative to our current laws must be the truly extreme option. 

So in this section we encounter new straw-men such as: “it’s not worth pursuing other routes to reduce the prevalence of abortion.” Terryl never says that, nothing in his article logically entails that, and I know he does not believe that. One can say, for example, “theft ought to be illegal” and also support anti-poverty measures, after-school programs, and free alarm systems to reduce theft. Much the same is true here: one can support banning elective abortion and support a whole range of additional policies to lower the demand for abortion.

Similarly, he writes that “I find abortion troubling as, I believe, most people do. But I also find a world without legal abortion troubling.” That sounds modest and reasonable enough, but it’s another straw-man. The Church, as he noted in the previous section, “has no issue with abortion” in exceptional cases. Neither does Terryl. So the issue is not “a world without legal abortion” because no one has argued for that position. The issue is “a world without legal elective abortion”. Omitting that word is another great example of a straw-man argument.

By making it appear as though Terryl wishes to ban all abortions and refuses to consider any alternative policies to reduce abortions, Sam creates the impression that Terryl is the one with the radical proposal. Except, as I’ve noted, neither of those assertions is grounded in anything other than an attempt to preserve vital myths.

Wrap-up

I echo what Terryl originally said: “I do not see reproductive rights and female autonomy as simple black and white issues.” Abortion as a whole is very, very complicated issue legally, scientifically, and morally. There is ample room for nuanced discussion, policy compromise, and common ground. 

But for us to have that kind of a conversation, we have to start with honesty. That means dispensing with the myths that American abortion law is moderate or that abortion is anything other than deeply and intrinsically violent. And it means allowing pro-lifers to speak for themselves, rather than substituting extremist views for their actual positions. 

Because abortion is so horrific, pro-lifers face a tough, up-hill slog. But because it is so horrific, we can’t abandon the calling. We will continue to seek out the best ways to boldly stand for the innocent who have no voice, to balance the competing and essential welfare needs of women with the right to life of unborn children, and to advance our modest positions as effectively as possible.