I read the full piece by David Brooks “Getting Trump Out of My Brain” from August 8 and I am just not in a generous mood after reading it through a handful of times. I kept looking for something more that the implication that the ‘mainline protestant’ ethic is the only civilizing glue for our society. I have tried to be generous but I really do see this sentiment there.
I am not the only one who does not agree with the implication other creeds were absorbed into that ethic. Hundreds of commenters voiced their disapproval. He writes as if the ‘mainline protestants’ were the only one’s to give us the strength to pursue success, justice, and happiness. So here are two paragraphs that hurt to read
For example, let’s look at our moral culture. For most of American history mainline Protestants — the Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and so on — set the dominant cultural tone. Most of the big social movements, like abolitionism, the suffragist movement and the civil rights movement, came out of the mainline churches.
Hey i think he let a lot of thinkers who are not mainline off of his list. Worse yet, in the following paragraph other creeds are mentioned but not really on par with the mainline.
As Joseph Bottum wrote in “An Anxious Age,” mainline Protestants created a kind of unifying culture that bound people of different political views. You could be Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or atheist, but still you were influenced by certain mainline ideas — the Protestant work ethic, the WASP definition of a gentleman.
Ouch. How about mentioning how Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or atheist thought influenced the mainline ideas? Several commenters picked up on this one-sided, trickle-down theory about mainline Protestant virtue. I happen to be catholic and see no need to give a nod of gratitude to Protestantism for creating my sense of justice. I accept Protestantism as much as the reverse being true. How about the American sentiment of defending unalienable rights or a sense of Justice that all creeds possess? All the groups mentioned recognized the dominant cultural tone was familiar, just and should be considered as universal.
But what I have mentioned so far is preliminary to my real trouble with the piece. What was sorely missing was a explicit statement of how Trump and Trumpism, is as true a manifestation that same mainline protestant thinking as the WASP definition of a gentlemen. Nativism, sexism, hatred, and greed are all impulses and conduct woven into Western thinking-- less virtuous threads of course. In fact, threads of horrible behavior are in all cultures. One commenter wrote how in Buddhist thought Trump would be seen as 'the diabolical god Mara.’
The diabolical god Mara, the provocateur of fear, lust, envy and all the other emotions that poison our souls. As he sat under the Bodhi tree, Buddha ignored Mara's seductive daughters, his army, and his flaming arrows.
Instead of emphasizing how Trumpism is a break with the past, Mr. Brooks needs to take ownership of the vices as well as its virtues of Protestantism and by extension conservatism. He should not be able to run from this. He is not about to wash Trump out of his hair easily. None of us are. Conservatives need to recognize this as a debacle too.
It was good to see hundreds of commenters at the times and here (including a diary by ursulafaw) that do not let he and his conservatism—whatever that stands for now—off the hook.
It’s clear that Trump is not just a parenthesis. After he leaves things will not just snap back to “normal.” Instead, he represents the farcical culmination of a lot of dying old orders — demographic, political, even moral — and what comes after will be a reaction against rather than a continuing from.
That first sentence is true—and the last phrase. However, It is not a farce to peddle in hatred no matter how clownish the delivery. Several commenters emphasized how the civil rights movement evolved in opposition to that dying old order. We all need to accept the diabolical impulses of Trumpism are not just a parenthesis and resist this path we have taken for ourselves.