How We See 2016 Explains 2024
The way different Americans view the 2016 election explains much about how they view the 2024 elections. Those views rest on deeper understandings of what America is, and should be.
The United States has again become a house divided. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech of that title, I believe our nation cannot endure half embracing the American way of life and half succumbing to German-style nihilism and fascism.
In 1858, Lincoln predicted that our house would not fall but would cease to be divided between freedom and slavery. It would become, he said, “all one thing, or all the other.”
House Divided
In Lincoln’s day, that meant either Democrats would succeed in making slavery lawful everywhere: in states where it had long existed; in states that had attempted to abolish it in the early years of the American republic; and in the millions of square miles of Western U.S. territories waiting to be explored, developed, and transformed into new states.
Or, Republicans would succeed in stopping the spread of slavery, keeping it out of states that had already abolished it, and placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction” throughout the entire nation, including existing states, future states, and all U.S. territories.
That’s what Lincoln meant when he said America would become either all free or all slave—because those two ways of life, along with their moral explanations, are incompatible with each other.
Our division today bears different names and labels, but the principled differences may echo the same fundamental conflicts that existed in Lincoln’s time when we distill complex contemporary moral and political subjects to their philosophical core.
Today, our house is divided between what I call an American way of life versus a German way of life. Let me explain what I mean by these terms.
The American Way
The American way of life made possible, arose from, and was shaped by the American Founding, one of the most important events in all of human history. That significance is not exclusively American; anyone who values individual liberty and human flourishing can learn much by studying the American Founding—just as there are universal lessons for all humanity to be drawn from studying the Greeks and Romans.
The American way of life happens within the context of a constitutional government that has only the few enumerated powers We the People have chosen to give it. This government has one main purpose: to protect the natural liberty and private property of each and every citizen.
As a government of limited powers, it cannot be a provider government. Its purpose cannot be to supply needy citizens with the products and services they desire, nor should it surveil citizens 24 hours a day, monitoring their every move, transaction, and interaction.
The government of the American Founding is neither Santa Claus nor omniscient and omnipotent parents for a nation of perpetual children.
The government of the American Founding is premised upon a faith in United States citizens—that adult citizens can be responsible, productive, courageous, wise, moderate, and just—that they can provide for themselves, care for those they love, and refrain from violating the rights of their neighbors.
The American political condition of limited constitutional government requires certain moral conditions among its citizens, a culture of civic and moral virtue. Only a morally decent people who raise their children well and embrace the responsibilities of adulthood can live freely within a constitutional framework of limited powers and scope.
Simultaneously, a truly free and virtuous people demand that those in government stay out of their way; free citizens will not tolerate political elites who ignore the strict constitutional parameters of government power set by We the People. They say to their own government: Don’t tread on me!
The German Way
By the German way of life, I refer to the German political science and postmodern philosophy that have become hallmarks of German thought over the past two centuries, reaching their zenith in the grand experiment in central planning known as the Third Reich of the 1930s and 40s.
The German way revolves around two poles: the politics of scientific social engineering and cultural-moral nihilism.
Politically, the German way views any social group of people—including an entire national regime—as merely an engineering problem that can be solved through the development and application of appropriate scientific technologies.
Political problems are technical problems.
Just as engineers design plans to assemble various pieces, parts, and instruments to create a better clock, computer, or car, so too political scientists—collaborating with economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists—can design plans for a better society.
The people—the individual human beings within a regime—are viewed as the various pieces and parts required to build a more effective social machine. People are instruments to be used by engineers; human beings are for social scientists what gears and springs are for horologists.
This German approach to political science as social engineering inspired the original progressive movement in the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many early American progressive scholars traveled to Germany to obtain their Ph.D. degrees and then returned to the U.S. to establish the first graduate programs in the social sciences—and elaborate plans for experiments in eugenics.
Woodrow Wilson was one of the most prominent of those early progressive academics, deeply influenced by German thought.
Recall that “führer” is the German word for “leader,” and American progressive thinkers were enamored with the idea of a leader who is free from all legal and constitutional constraints because he is, in a decisive respect, above the laws meant for ordinary people. Wilson devoted an entire lengthy essay to the topic “Leaders of Men,” in which he wrote:
The whole question [for the Leader] is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates… It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.
This is the philosophical foundation of modern progressive central planning and scientific social engineering, of which there have been numerous failed examples—none more infamous than Nazi Germany, where government bureaus employed scientists, policy analysts, and other experts who controlled education, healthcare, housing, agriculture, transportation, production within factories—virtually everything.
Alongside their political science of central planning and social engineering, German thinkers—Nietzsche foremost among them—attacked not merely classical and Biblical morality, but the very concept and possibility of morality.
The result was a form of moral nihilism, a conclusion that there are merely diverse prejudices regarding what is right and wrong, all of which are arbitrary and none of which are true. Morality is for the ignorant who need comforting myths; intelligent individuals do not believe in such foolishness as right and wrong.
That is the postmodern German way.
The Alternatives
The American and German ways of life represent the two main competing social and political movements in the United States today. The chronology of these movements matters significantly, as it sheds light on why different Americans perceive the 2016 election so differently, and the 2024 election, too.
Progressivism preceded the modern conservative movement in the United States by more than half a century. American progressives embraced the German way as early as the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, during which period they began transforming colleges and universities in the United States, as well as elementary education for children, government, religion, journalism, and popular culture.
The modern conservative movement, in contrast, did not begin until after World War II, more than fifty years later. Some of the most influential books and publications that sparked the conservative movement included:
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which was published in 1944.
Richard Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences in 1948.
Ludwig von Mises published Human Action in 1949.
Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953.
William F. Buckley Jr. launched The National Review magazine in 1955.
The Heritage Foundation—the largest conservative think tank in the United States—was not established until 1973. By the time the conservative movement gained some momentum, progressivism had already transformed the United States into a regime that was strikingly more German than American.
In fact, the conservative movement emerged primarily as a response to and critique of progressivism. Those who objected politically and culturally to progressivism began to organize, publish their concerns, and raise funds, leading to the formation of the conservative movement. Without the progressive transformation of the United States, there would be no conservative movement.
The 2016 Election Result: Good or Bad?
This backdrop reveals much about the 2016 presidential election. For conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarian free-market advocates, there were enormous, terrible problems in the United States —in government and throughout our culture—long before 2016.
Conservatives viewed the German way as a grave threat to everything good about the American way of life; thus, they saw progressivism within the United States as a significant danger.
For progressives, things were pretty peachy by early 2016. I do not want to suggest that progressives were entirely pleased with the United States at that time. Progressivism is inherently a reform movement focused on transformation and change, so progressives can never be content with the status quo, regardless of its merits.
Quietude is no progressive virtue.
Nevertheless, progressives had been dismantling the old constitutional United States to make room for a postconstitutional bureaucratic regime, and they had been largely successful. Progressives had been constructing their German-style administrative state for a century, and it had become quite large, powerful, and all-controlling—exactly as they intended.
By 2016, there were few things Americans could do without a tax, fee, fine, license, permit, or regulatory oversight. Americans used to celebrate freely. By 2016, Americans had become accustomed to waiting in long lines for a bureaucrat to place a wristband of permission on them, first.
Progressives saw these as signs of progress, signs that Americans were embracing the German way of life. This is what progressive victory looks like!
Moreover, for decades, progressives had been trying to discredit and dismantle any remnants of morality connected to the natural family unit, the classical understanding of virtue, and personal responsibility. By 2016, they had largely succeeded.
The United States had become a morally bankrupt culture, where ordinary citizens breezily embraced the nihilistic view that no one can say what is right or wrong because all moral opinions are arbitrary and ultimately meaningless. The noun “family” had been almost fully disassociated from the natural family[1] and the concept of personal responsibility had been largely eclipsed by the idea of victimhood.
Large numbers of Americans had stopped asking how they could be more productive and started asking how much they were entitled to. Barack Obama had been President for eight years, and had made clear to the entire world that there was nothing special or even good about the United States.
In 2016, in these ways and many more, progressives were living in a postmodern world they had made. There were more teenage suicides, depression, addiction, and mass random murders of strangers, yes—the math skills of students in public schools were almost as miserable as their reading skills—but those sad statistics were less important than the fact that a man could wear a dress and compel others to call him “her,” a woman could easily leave her husband for another woman, women had as many opportunities to run up credit card debt as men, and the number of unelected bureaucrats employed by the government numbered not in the hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but in the millions. Progressive success!
Then the Presidential election of 2016 happened.
Different Perspectives
For progressives, new and big problems started in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected. For conservatives, the big problems of a morally declining culture and an unconstitutional progressive-fascist administrative state were old problems, long predating Trump getting into politics.
That difference explains much about how different Americans today see the upcoming 2024 election.
For progressives, Donald Trump is the greatest problem in the United States, hands down, nothing else comes close. Progressives will sometimes acknowledge other problems they’d like to see someone else solve, but nothing is more important than defeating Donald Trump on election day (or in the weeks and months before election day in states with mail-in ballots).
Progressives don’t care if it is Joe Biden who beats Trump, or Kamala Harris who beats Trump, or someone else. They care only that Trump be defeated, that Trump not win. I have seen progressives on social media explaining that they will vote for a coffee cup or a flower pot, if that is the main political opponent to Trump. I think they are being honest.
For progressives, it does not matter who wins the 2024 presidential election. It matters only that Trump loses.
From constitutionalists being nominated to the Supreme Court, to his mocking of and occasional pushing back against the administrative state, to the fiasco of January 6th, progressives see Trump as the single greatest problem in the United States and he must be stopped by any means necessary, a message some would-be assassins have taken quite literally.
For conservatives, constitutionalists, libertarians, and others who are not political and cultural progressives, Trump is not the greatest problem in the United States. He is nowhere close to being the biggest problem. In some ways, he is not a problem; he is help. That’s the view of many (though not all) conservatives.
These are people who value the American way of life. Even if Trump doesn’t fully represent the noblest aspects of the America way, he offers assistance in stopping the advance of the German way by pushing back against progressive Democrats, which makes him an ally of those who want a constitutional government and a morally decent society.
Americans who value the American way see gigantic problems that stretch back, decades, all the way to the origins of the progressive movement and the attempt to import German political science, postmodern philosophy, and moral meaninglessness into the United States.
Compared to these colossal, existential regime-level problems caused by progressivism, the personal peccadilloes of Donald Trump don’t much matter. That is why many conservatives don’t care if he uses course language here and there, Tweets rude statements, or mocks his opponents.
For these Americans, nothing is more important than making sure Trump wins, because any Democratic opponent will mean more of the German way of life here in the United States.
That is where we are: Approximately half of our fellow citizens think nothing is more important than Trump losing the election, and the other half thinks nothing is more important than Trump winning the election. And for many of these Americans on both sides, nothing else matters.
What Shall We Do?
For conservatives, Trump’s actions on January 6th don’t matter. For progressives, Kamala Harris’s lack of intelligence and unwillingness to answer any serious questions don’t matter.
Many conservatives view the presidential election of 2016 as a step in the right direction. Progressives see that same election as a terrible wrong that must never be repeated, ever.
It is now incredibly difficult for American progressives and conservatives to understand each other because they cannot see what the others see. Progressives have no idea why anyone would object to a German-style, constitutionally illegitimate administrative state. Don’t conservatives see how smart Anthony Fauci is? Don’t conservatives know that business owners are threats who must be strictly regulated and controlled?
Further, progressives see the moral relativism they peddle as liberating, not acidic or corrosive. They only see women and transexuals doing things, freely, openly, they didn’t do in the past. They don’t talk much about the spiking rates of social pathologies all around us, unless there’s an occasion to call for more gun control, which helps in their effort to expand the German-style regulatory state we now have.
Conservatives cannot believe anyone would vote for a progressive Democrat like Kamala Harris because she represents yet more of what conservatives see as the greatest problem in America: The German-progressive influence on our politics and the cultural degradation it has fueled.
Don’t progressives see the growing homeless camps our cities have become, the teenagers committing suicide because they have no purpose to live, the growing numbers of young Americans who will never afford a home of their own, and the ravages of widespread addiction? Don’t progressives see the dissolution of family in the United States and the terrible human results?
What will become of us? Will our house fall? Will it continue to be divided? Or will it become all one thing, or all the other? These fateful questions are reserved for We The People of the United States of America.
[1] As a sign of how postmodern and progressive the United States has become, the term “natural family” is now unfamiliar to many Americans. Here, then, is a definition:
The natural family is rooted in the biological procreative capacity of the human species at the center of which is the natural distinction between man and woman. The natural family consists of an adult human male who impregnates an adult human female, who then carries to term and gives birth to a human baby, who is then loved and cared for by both the biological father and mother.
The natural family used to be the standard by which all other forms of “family” were understood and judged. Today, the natural family is often disparaged as little more than a remnant of pre-progressive, oppressive, and outdated moral standards. Today, “family” is understood by millions of Americans to mean anything anyone wants it to mean, which is to say the term has no objective or intrinsic meaning, and certainly no meaning rooted in human nature.