Pride, Humility, and Unanimity
Note from Erick: I wrote this after 8pm on March 4th and intended it to go out early on March 5, but hit the wrong button. Also, I’m out on March 5 and 6 because I’m chaperoning a group of 9th and 10th graders to Washington, D.C. May God have mercy on my soul!
I have a lot of friends whose brains have been rotted by the mere presence of Donald Trump on the national stage. I have friends who have done 180º shifts in their views because Trump has staked out a position or rejected a position. I have friends who have ditched the conservative movement because of Trump.
I have friends who are Trump supporters who I know were principled conservatives who have abandoned long-held positions on free markets, unions, peace through strength, fiscal discipline, etc. all because they’re trying to mash together muddled and incoherent policies inside a movement that is not based on ideas, policies, or paths forward, but on the whims of one man.
And I’m not here to talk about or to them today. God bless them.
Instead, I am here to talk to and about my friends who are now so hostile to long-time friends of theirs who like Trump that they cannot rationally and coherently think. They have aligned themselves with progressives in ministry because they’ve been turned off by evangelicals supporting Trump. They’ve aligned themselves with the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center because the SPLC hates the same people. They have lost their ability to rationally think about the law and public policy because their contempt for their former allies drives them.
They have, in short, allowed those they hate and those who hate them to radicalize them. And yesterday, in the United States Supreme Court, they and their friends on the left were the only Americans stunned by the Court’s decision.
MSNBC is having a moment. Law professors and pundits who are anti-Trump convinced themselves and those in their bubble that the 14th Amendment’s third section was a surefire way to stop Trump.
It never made sense.