Politics is outside the bailiwick of Studio Matters. Yet election of the once-and-future President Trump was so remarkable, so exhilarating in its implications, celebration is mandatory. There should be dancing in the streets. Fireworks, too . But all I have is words. Permit me, please, just a few of them. Just this once.

 

 

It was June, 2015, when Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency. I scoffed at the news. Was this improbable candidacy a performance piece? A spin-off of Celebrity Apprentice? Nineteen other contenders put themselves forward for the Republican nomination that year. It was an inordinate line-up. C-Span took a razor to it, reducing the roster as if it were a counting rhyme: Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians . . . four little, three little, two little Indians . . . . And then there was one!

Come Election Day, November 8, 2016, I voted for the vulgarian real estate mogul for one reason only: to keep Bill Clinton’s wife out of the White House. Nothing else mattered

Come Election Season, 2024, I stood for more than an hour outside a library in the next town. It was 10:00 AM on the first day of early in-person voting in my district. I waited on line with my heart in my throat. In this election, everything mattered.

Yes, keeping Harris herself out of the White House was key. But there was more, so very much more. The Biden administration—Obama’s third term?—had brought us close to the abyss. Installed as Commander-in-Chief, Harris & Co would hound us over the brink. You know the names and purposes of all the stalking dragons. No need to recite them here.

Donald Trump had earned this election. Again, no need to tell you why. You already know. Still, if you want to savor a recap, this post-election conversation between John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, and Victor Davis Hanson, does the job:

 

 

Trump’s resounding win heralds a reprieve from what Martin Gurri dubbed “the Endarkenment.” That is Gurri’s term for the mass descent of American culture into unreason. It “rises like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment:”

The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning . . . . It is the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, welders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It is the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.

A reprieve is a remission, not a cure. The pathogens are sturdy; they retire but do not die. Killing them is the work of generations. The rot has gone too deep, and for too long, to be bleached away by one election. It is impossible to predict how this moment will end.

 

 

Nonetheless, it is hard not to see Providence at work. The country has chosen a man who, flawed as he is, exemplifies certain enduring habits of the Puritan mind. Contra popular caricatures of it, Puritanism was the fecund seventeenth century New England seed bed of what is still called the “American mind.” Donald Trump became the rallying point of a conscientious boldness, a principled stamina, that is America’s inheritance from the Puritans. The spirit of the mythic Yankee—fortitude based on a piety both civic and religious—has much modified. Yet it still breathes, still fights to prevail.

Trump’s victory speech moved me to look up “The Throne Established by Righteousness,” a sermon preached by John Barnard to representatives of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1734. [The old colony had expanded into a province.] Harvard-educated pastor of a Congregational church in Marblehead, Barnard was a highly gifted, influential archetype of the eighteenth century New England divine.

His address begins by acknowledging that government itself originates (“takes its rise”) from God—“the God of Order and not of Confusion.” Good government “has the stamp of the Divine Authority upon it, and comes to us with a thus sayeth the Lord.”

Like a good Thomist, Barnard understood that man is a political animal:

’Tis very evident, the Nature of Man is formed for Government, and necessitated to it, from that Power of Reason and Understanding that is in him, his fixed Bent to Society, and [despite] the many Weaknesses and Imperfections that attend him.

His emphasis on the fundamental urgency of government asserts the reality of natural law. Government—ordered structure and commandment—is necessary for Man, a fallible creature. Crucial as it is after the Fall, this ingrained necessity is so elemental in Man that even in a state of innocence the moral law would have been in force. Aquinas believed the same.

While Man is “formed for government,” Barnard leaves it to human reason and prudence to establish the form that best serves the ends of civil society. For Aquinas, a thirteenth century man, monarchy was the preeminent regime. Four hundred years later, and in the wake of harassment and outright persecution, Puritans sought their freedom elsewhere. The American experiment had is roots in the Puritan movement and its audacious spirit of resistance to tyranny.

Historian Bradley Birzer, writing in First Things on Thanksgiving Day, defined the particular audacity of the Pilgrim pioneers this way:

To be audacious is to be bold in the face of authority, but this particularly Christian bravery sought to harmonize obedience to the one true source of authority with self-governance. And what makes this truly special is that these were ordinary men.

What did these intrepid men see as the great ends of civil government? In John Barnard’s words, these are “that God in all things may be glorified.” Then follows the subordinate end which “respects Man, [and] the common Good of the Society, State, or Kingdom.” For the Puritans—as for us, their heirs—commitment to the common good is a fundamental expression of the biblical demand to give glory to God.

 

John Winthrop Dreams of a City on a Hill, 1630

Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, was the critical founder and first governor of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before the settlers reached the New World frontier, he addressed them in words that have come down to us:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

Five centuries and one astonishing election later, the eyes of all people are upon us again. As we take leave of Thanksgiving and move on to Advent, we might also hold close Winthrop’s closing words:

Therefore let us choose life,

that we and our seed may live,

by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,

for He is our life and our prosperity.