Blame Trump as a Symptom of the Times, but Until Institutions Address Their Own Sins, The Worst Is Yet to Come.
THE FXBG ADVANCE MONDAY 9/2/26 MORNING READ
By Shaun Kenney, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Ah yes, the doldrums of summer. Where few things are going on and controversy—the common font of the journalistic and opinion writer’s ink—is about as dry as Virginia’s topsoil in an El Nino season.
Just in case you would like to shed a tear for my tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, dried up pea vines whose color mimics that of our post-apocalyptic Canadian wildfire smog, geraniums, my poor lavender plants (don’t ask), my tobacco plants (also, don’t ask), sage, even my marigolds—and I seem to be the only Virginian who cannot grow marigolds to save my life other than through intentional neglect by throwing the seeds on the ground and leaving them to God and the birds and the devil—all struggle in the Piedmont where three million years of geology laughs contemptuously as I attempt to improve a soil well worn out by tobacco, corn, and finally given up to either pasture or forestry.
Did I mention that my tiller is kaput? Or that my tractor has been practically abandoned next to the shop where it is supposed to be fixed but isn’t because hell if I know but here I am whining about it in the shop for the last five years? Or that despite a drought that weeds also want a drink?
Musonius Rufus was a Roman stoic philosopher who argued that any good philosopher must also be a laborer and particularly a farmer, which not only feeds my previously held prejudices but also exposes a certain hypocrisy we see in the world today whenever a question of import arises. Make it a problem of the courts and we all become legal experts. Make it a problem of agriculture and we all become farmers. One can easily imagine the litany of if/then scenarios which inevitably bring in the chickenhawk fallacy—namely that in order to have a valid opinion, one must participate in the thing. Only teachers can have opinions on education, only law enforcement professionals can have opinions on crime, only those who are involved are entitled not just to care but to have opinions that matter—so goes the disease of our time.
When Institutions Become Too Resilient for Democracy
Donnie Johnson writes on the back and forth over stolen elections, particularly with regard to Trump in 2020 without exactly mentioning the hue and cry of the political left in 2016 where Russia stole the election. Both of these hyperbolic claims have been proven demonstrably untrue by serious minds, yet the myth continues and perhaps for no small reason than our culture is indeed soaked in a mindset that when Americans lose we are somehow cheated of victory. Consider sports—how many times has Big Referee (TM) cheated our favorite teams of our well-earned victories?
Consider too our politics. Our noble civic groups against evil corporations and evil government bureaucrats all conspiring to make a buck while the rest of us struggle to afford groceries, rent, and higher energy bills. It is so easy to blame a person or a political apparatus, but far more difficult to focus on solutions in a sea of people who—like it or not—seek to make a buck off of others by hook or crook.
Pace Donald J. Trump.
If you haven’t read Phil Huber’s excellent piece regarding our institutions in the pages of this publication, it is well worth a cup of coffee and your time. Excellent because I quibble with his argument and conclusions, but excellent nonetheless because Huber and Johnson both give us something to chew upon while reflecting on how national trends impact local conversations.
We should open with the categorical truth that despite the myth, our vote—and your vote—doesn’t matter. Statistically it matters about as much as a gnat fart in a hurricane, and while we entertain the notion that every voice matters and every vote matters, the simple fact is that those who argue this use the line are utilizing the fears of a great many people about whether or not their lives do matter for temporary advantage and temporal gain.
Give the Democratic Socialists of America this much—how many times do they have to vote for Medicaid for All only to have their core issues pushed to the shadows? One can almost hear the complaint of many a Tea Party conservative as they vote for one thing and their elected officials do another.
Huber’s penultimate concern is encapsulated as follows:
Weaker institutions reduce accountability. Reduced accountability makes corruption easier to normalize. Polarization discourages compromise. Distrust makes expertise easier to dismiss. Fiscal weakness limits future choices. Reduced investment damages competitiveness. Alliance uncertainty complicates every major international decision. Each problem reinforces the others.
Herein lies my agreement and simultaneous disagreement with the notion that strong institutions keep bad politicians at bay. In one sense, they keep certain politicians at bay. They might even keep bad politicians at bay. Yet sometimes they keep good politicians at bay or worse they keep other politicians at bay—reformers, the opposite political party, radicals, and those who would remove power away from institutions and into the hands of the people themselves.
Yet the problem of strong institutions also entails a resistance to democratic change—not just in the sense when it benefits those who rail against Trump in defense of Our Democracy! (TM) but when it locks out those who disagree with the bureaucracy, disagree with City Hall, and disagree with the influence and direction of the institutions themselves.
The hubris of strong institutions can at times insulate us from incorrect opinions. Yet when mere disagreement is twisted into hate speech, when differing values are caged as dangerous to democracy, or more simply put—when concerns become obstacles to the thing we want—that’s when democracy yields to demagoguery.
That is precisely how you get Trump. Failure to live up to the values of democracy invites the demagogues whose sole virtue is “winning” rather than discourse. This is by no means a disease on the right—Trump populism is warmed over Clinton-era triangulation in more than one aspect.
The Deadwood of the Institutions and How We Got Here
Yet on the flip side of the equation on this, Trump was not an inevitability nor was he the solution to strong institutions seeking to knuckle the other half of humanity under their boots. Many Republicans—and I count myself among them—are horrified at the rise of so-called postliberalism.
There is an element of choice here that should not be ignored. Republicans in their rush to choose a fighter rather than a statesman were begging for a strongman to break through to institutions attempting to break them. In like turn, Democrats worked assiduously to cage the definition of what a Republican was—selfish, narrow, demanding, obtuse, sexist, racist, bigoted, Christian nationalist (though how one struggles to see how Trump is emblematic of that so-called trend—I reject the idea it even exists), or white supremacist (whose values seem to overextend into commonalities such as politeness, manners, punctuality, and respect for others). Demonizing one’s opponents might seem like a great way to win a debate, but it hardly gets to the core of the thing-at-hand—namely that too many Americans were locked out of the institutions or found their careers shipped overseas and were told to “learn to code” by cubicle dwellers with degrees and lattes.
Thus the Clinton Democrats did what the Reagan Democrats did before them and found a politician sympathetic to their values.
The question as to whether Trump was the accelerant is an interesting one, but this ignores the backdrop which Trump adroitly takes advantage of each time he does something outrageous to avoid criticism on something substantive. The question as to whether or not Trump is the spark that set off the deadwood aggregated by the institutions held in thrall to the political left is interesting as well, though it also seeks to avoid blame.
There is a hubris within our institutions which argues that because their world sees the world a certain way, that the world must be that way. Did anyone within academia see Trump winning in 2016? Much less winning again in 2024? How’s about the government bureaucracy which tried to destroy Trump for the better part of a decade?Or in K-12 education which forced a whole series of DEI protocols on parents without their consent? Or in entertainment where hating Trump was just what polite people did at parties? Or even in religion where merely linking the words Christian and nationalism entitled critics to diagnose and dismiss others? Or the media—whose power over the American imagination has by and large dissolved—who barely tried to withhold their contempt for the unwashed mob whose cardinal sin was disagreement?
The accelerant here isn’t Trump but rather a series of brittle and sclerotic bureaucrats, middlemen, educators, administrators, and professionals who refuse to admit that their critics, co-workers, co-religionists, peers, and the whole host of human beings with entirely different lives and experiences just might have defensible and even valid viewpoints worth not just considering but changing one’s mind about. That there are entire swaths of the population who do not agree with the policy of peer pressure and shaming and find it to be downright un-American to do so. Who see the sexualization of everything and recoil. Who see jobs shipped overseas and entire communities wiped out. Who welcome immigrants but respect the rule of law as a precondition. Who believe in the defensible value of each and every human person no matter how small or how old. Who believe that the things we care about—health care, education, transportation, academia—belong to the common good and should not be leveraged to enrich those who see them as a private good. Who believe that marriage and family have long-standing definitions that are tinkered with at our own expense. Who see fatherless homes as the source of many of our social ills. Who believe in opportunity and excellence over the mediocrity of equal outcomes. Who believe and still see lawmaking as an inherently moral process where we approve of moral laws, reject immoral laws, and routinely ask lawmakers to discern between the two. Where effort is admirable, but achievement valuable. Who see the first business of America as business.
Obviously, this is an extraordinary broad coalition with much to attack and pick apart.Yet there is also much in this that is admirable, American, and yes to be defended against a host of Fabian operators striving for their utopias no matter where you are on the political spectrum.
The accelerant here is a familiar one. In the grasping for power, the Greeks would see the inevitable rise of nemesis—balancing. If left unchecked, this is what invites hubris or arrogance, and we have most certainly seen the arrogance of the institutions at play. This inevitably leads to polemos or conflict—which unfortunately is where we find ourselves at present. If we abandon the political to the strongmen, if we continue in a Shakespearian vein allowing one fire to fight one fire, the end is kratos (brute force) then biae (overpowering force) and finally stasis—civil war.
The solution for such things was restraint. For ourselves, we might call it the secular virtues of toleration, inclusion, and diversity—but do we really mean these things when conservatives are locked out of the institutions? Surely it is not liberals who remain locked out. Do we really mean these things when pluralism is discarded in favor of laicization or worse? Do we really mean these things when we see our cities burn in protests, conservatives being assassinated, and violence as the exclusive privilege of the left? When law enforcement is demonized in the enforcement of our laws approved of in democratic process, yet law breakers turned loose on our communities as a sop to social justice?
Trump As Symptom; True Democracy As Cure
I have a good number of friends on the political left whom I enjoy talking with about ideas, culture, books, sports, concerts, family, and all the good things in life. Yet too often, I find myself nodding at times as my friends on the left scold the world, looking at those who aren’t precisely held in thrall to the same opinions as they raise a pint and an eyebrow, knowingly tilt their head, and let them go.
What worries me is that while it is okay for Democrats to behave like Democrats, there is an insistence growing on the right that Republicans should start behaving like Democrats as well. After all, January 6th is no magic word to undo three dozen riots in America’s cities in 2017 and again in 2020. After all, President Trump has had two near misses in assassination attempts. CEOs are being murdered. Charlie Kirk just wanted to talk—and was murdered for it. Democratic socialism is on the rise within the Democratic Party. God forbid that is mirror image ever visit itself within Republican circles.
Until the political left recognizes its own hubris, it will continue to be met with nemesis. Until we start living up to the values of pluralism and intellectual diversity, until we start arguing to understand rather than debating to win, until the Aristotelians start winning the argument against the Nietzscheans—we are in for a bumpy and rocky decade indeed.
For myself, I don’t believe our local politics much less our state politics should reflect any of where national drivers of the public discourse seem to want things to go. Virginians gave America our idea of ourselves and we should jealously defend those principles even if they came to us from imperfect men.
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem. Until we start addressing cures, expect the same symptoms to continue to crop up. Like so many weeds in a garden, we have a moral duty to encourage one another to work for the common good—not our own version of the highest good—but for the common wealth of us all and especially the weakest and most defenseless among us for whom our institutions should (but presently do not) protect.
Otherwise? Expect democracy to fall victim to the demagogues. What we intend to pass down to our children and grandchildren is a decision we make every day when we treat our neighbors as enemies to destroy— r as opportunities to learn more about a thing we may not understand ourselves.
Choose carefully. America depends on it.
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Shaun Kenney is a co-founder of The FXBG Advance and editor of The Republican Standard.
