One such piece is this Rod Dreher post on The American Conservative site. Dreher wonders at conservative's gleeful reaction to the Mueller Report. He favorably quotes a David Brooks column wherein Brooks opines,
And today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.) Things begin to topple.
… Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government.
It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.Dreher also writes,
The center is not holding, and technological changes (as well as cultural evolution) are rendering us unable to recreate a sustainable center. Whether he leaves the White House in 2021, or 2025, after Trump, I believe that the US will be more or less in a Spain 1931 situation. Trump has done nothing to prevent that, and much to hasten its arrival.Although Dreher writes, "I fully endorse David Brooks’s take on the corruption of the system, and his judgment on Donald Trump as a moral catastrophe," he does not proclaim himself a #NeverTrump club member. Instead, Dreher concludes,
. . . if you want to talk about the foundations of society being attacked, believe me, we should all worry about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Silicon Valley on the whole a lot more than we worry about our buffoonish president. What the surveillance capitalists have done, and are doing, matters far more to the future of our democracy and its legitimacy than does Trump.In fact, he doubles down on this conclusion:
I just know that I’m a lot more worried about Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, and the class that they embody, than I am of a crooked real estate magnate from New York who is the weakest and least effective president since Jimmy Carter.Dreher butters his bread by thinking and writing. Although he calls himself a "Bible-thumping troglodyte," Dreher thinks deeply, comes at the world from an Orthodox perspective, and talks about good food and drink frequentl, so he likely makes many conservative evangelical folk uncomfortable.
I share Dreher's fears about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. The tech giants threaten Americans' privacy and possess a near totalitarian power to control public opinion.They cannot, however, send a person to Guantanamo or launch nuclear weapons. Further, I cannot share Dreher's confidence that Trump "stands, however uncertainly, in the way of the Controllers." Trump's admiration of despots indicates that he would give Bezos et al. free rein were they to offer him just a little flattery. In short, I remain a firm member of the #NeverTrump club.
That said, I worry that Dreher and I are both wrong. Americans seem to possess a certain optimism. The current crop of religious populists claim to be on God's side and view Trump as a savior from the evil liberals. Progressives proclaim that they are on the right side of history's long march toward justice for all. It is, however, likely that such optimism is misplaced and America has reached an Orwellian moment. Not the moment when we all loudly admit to loving big brother, although that moment is certainly possible; rather, we have come to the Animal Farm climax when conservatives, liberals, and displaced folks like myself stand outside the window and look "from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but [find it] impossible to say which was which. "
