I have qualms about The Centrist Project

I've always thought of myself as a centrist. Two years ago, when the Republican presidential race was heating up, I said that there were three Republican candidates I could not support: Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. I saw all three as extremists and as part of the problem of hyperpartisanship. I also saw all three as unelectable.

I underestimated how repulsed so many independents and Democrats were by Hillary Clinton.

In retrospect, I have to confess that I would probably have broken down and ended up voting for either Paul or Cruz, without enthusiasm but also with no real doubt that I could live with either of them in the White House much more easily than I could live with Hillary being there. Not so Trump, a lightweight, an ignoramus, and an unstable professional conman so unfit for the office that even then I realized that his election would be a threat to national security.

I supported first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio for the nomination. When Trump won it, I realized that the Republican party would never be the same again. Had Trump lost, and had most Republicans clung with sufficient tenacity to their values and their common sense, it might have been possible for the GOP to recover from nominating him, but it would have meant a grueling war to marginalize and exclude the Alt-Right, the racists, the birthers, and the rest of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade. While I had no doubt that Hillary would fail and be replaced after one term, I realized that a Trump victory (as unlikely as it seemed at the time) would probably mean that populism and Know-Nothingism would the Republican future.

I believed then that if Donald Trump were elected president in 2016, it would be the last time a Republican would be elected in my lifetime. Better, I reasoned, four years of Hillary followed by eight or twelve or sixteen of conservative Republican presidents than four years of Trump followed by liberal Democrats in perpetuity.

I still believe that. Thus far, Trump hasn't broken much; the grownups like Mattis and McMaster and (surprisingly) Tillotson have kept him on a tight enough leash to minimize the damage.  He's kept his hands far enough from the steering wheel not to crash the recovery, which is continuing pretty much the trend it was following when Barack Obama left office, as reluctant as the Trumpsters are to admit it. Most of our allies recognize that we've gone temporarily insane, that Trump will be gone in 2021, and that we all are just going to have to ride out the storm.

Usually improving economic figures are good news for an administration. Yet at the end of his first year in office, Mr. Trump finds himself the least popular president at this point in his term since presidential approval polls began.  Ancient, eccentric Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, and even Oprah Winfrey hold substantial leads over him the polls for 2020, and this year's election is shaping up to be a national repudiation of the Donald.

I will always be proud of my support for Evan McMullin's candidacy in 2016. Unlike my Republican friends and relatives, I refused to compromise my conscience. Evan may never have had a chance to win, but nevertheless I, unlike many, didn't throw my vote away by voting for an ignorant and unstable authoritarian conman just in order to beat Hillary. However faint my voice might have been, I spoke distinctly on Election Day, and did not allow my voice to be drowned out by a chorus of "Sieg Heil!"

I do not believe that it will ever be possible again for me to be a Republican. Nor can I ever be a Democrat again. Left without a political home, I've tended to identify with Evan's Stand Up Republic, the Centrist Project (to a degree, and provisionally), and other groups seeking to take America back from the crazies at either end of the political spectrum who at the moment divide power between them.

But that may turn out to be more easily said than done. During the recent Alabama special Senate election campaign, the moderator of a pro-McMullin Facebook group I belonged to disingenuously used the word "pro-life" to describe decidedly pro-abortion Democrat Doug Jones. As happy as I was to see Roy Moore lose, I  was upset when I learned the truth about Jones and confronted her. I was saddened to learn that this particular individual was not only pro-choice but strongly so; she actually claimed that Jones was pro-life "after birth!"Somehow, I had assumed that at least the moderate conservatives who identify with Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn would be people I saw eye-to-eye with on abortion. Apparently not.

Now, I may be overthinking this- I tend to do that sometimes- but recently I've developed a few doubts about the Centrist Project. One of its founders, Charles Wheelan, in his influential book A Centrist Manifesto, expresses essentially Bill Clinton's position on abortion: make it safe, legal, and rare. Let abortion on demand remain the law of the land, but remove this contentious issue from the public spotlight by working to decrease the number of abortions actually performed.

While I commend the desire to make abortions as rare as possible, it seems to me that Wheelan- like Mr. Clinton- fails to realize that the issue won't go away even if became possible to count the number of abortions performed in this country each year on one's fingers.  If one believes, as the pro-life movement believes, that the unborn child represents a human life (and being both incontestably human and undeniably alive, it can be nothing else) and that all human lives have value, that principle would remain. The moral crusade against the arbitrary taking of innocent human life will continue and will remain prominent in the concerns of pro-life voters, no matter how few abortions are actually performed. If one believes as we do, the very fact of its legality is an intolerable moral blight on the nation.

Now, I can buy the idea that the Centrist Movement could be big enough a tent to include both pro-life and pro-choice Americans, that sufficient common ground can be found between them to at least work to make abortion as rare as possible, and that even reducing the number of abortions would be a very good thing. There are purists in the pro-life movement (whose philosophical arguments I cannot dispute but whose position I cannot share) who would rather go down to defeat with an effort to ban all abortions than to join a coalition to eliminate most, and then take the fight into the next stage thereafter.  No, I can't explain why a child conceived as a result of rape or incest would be less deserving of life because of the circumstances of her conception, but I do know that if abortion were legal only in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother's life 98% of abortions would instantly cease. Not good enough, no. But at least a step in the right direction, and a giant step, at that.

But there are limits to how far one can go in making a political program out of compromise. This is something I'm not sure Dr. Wheelan completely understands. His position is one no sincere pro-lifer could possibly accept- at least as a final destination. One does not compromise things like the sanctity of human life. That might not be how Dr. Wheelan sees the abortion issue, but it is how half the country sees it. And there are a hundred positions and causes on which well-meaning and sincere people on both the Right and the Left simply cannot in good conscience compromise.

In such a situation, it strikes me that it behooves the Centrist movement not to be a partisan taking one side rather than the other, or even promoting one particular solution. It seems to me that its role ought to rather be one of promoting dialog, even modeling an arena in which people can strongly hold mutually exclusive viewpoints which by their very nature cannot be compromised while working together to accomplish what we can. If that is what Wheelan has in mind, more power to him.  But Dr. Wheelan's approach to the abortion issue as such can never be seen by a great many pro-lifers as a viable position. It can be a viable step. There are plenty of people in the right-to-life movement who, while they cannot in conscience give up either their conviction that abortion should be illegal or their advocacy of that position, can nevertheless get behind the idea of making it as rare as possible in the interim.

Maybe Dr. Wheelan would even agree. Maybe that's all he has in mind. I'm going to try to find out.

Nor is there any legitimate reason why Roe v. Wade shouldn't be subject to challenge even by those espousing moderation and dialog. The Gallup organization has been taking annual polls on attitudes toward abortion ever since Roe was handed down, and the attitude of the American people as reflected in those polls has literally never been what Planned Parenthood and the Democrats and the media has told us it was. Given the choices of abortion being legal under any circumstances, under most, under only a few, or under none, in every single case, a plurality of those polled have said that it should be legal only under a few. True, a majority has always believed that some abortions should be permitted. But even a majority of those want the law to be more restrictive than Roe allows.

Now, I may be reading Dr. Wheelan and the Centrist Project's agenda wrong. I hope so. But there seems to me to be there's a disturbing undercurrent in what I'm hearing from them, and it comes from a place from which I hadn't anticipated trouble. It may be my own paranoia- in today's political climate, that's not an unreasonable symptom- or it may illustrate the basic division in this country over how we understand some rather basic concepts and terms. For one thing, there seems to be some confusion about the meaning of the word "secular," as in "secular society" or "secular government."

If by "secular," one means a government or nation without an established religion and in which nobody's sectarian beliefs are mandated by law or favored or discriminated against or treated differently than the beliefs of anybody else, I would agree that we have, and ought to have, a secular government. But one of the most pernicious things about the Obama administration and its years in power is that the term has come to carry a secondary meaning, subtly insinuated into our dialog  and as violently in conflict with the spirit of the First Amendment as an established church would be, and as clearly rejected by it even though not as explicitly.

Barack Obama, many noticed, used to prefer the term "freedom of worship" to "freedom of religion." In 2006, he made a speech which seemed, on the whole, to validate the notion of Christians and others carrying the implications of their faith (as opposed to sectarian dogma) into the public square. I found his position flawed, but nevertheless encouraging. But judging from his words and apparent attitudes while in the White House, he seemed to change his mind and come to believe that peoples' religious convictions should be left at the church door. Believe what you want, he seemed to be saying as president, but don't you dare carry your beliefs into the public square, and especially into politics! That would be inappropriate because ours is a secular society! Especially as one familiar with his 2006 speech, I found this profoundly disappointing. The 2006 edition of Barack Obama was someone I might disagree with on certain points, but with whom dialog was invitingly possible. Not so the version who lived in the White House.

In the sense that in it policy concerns raised by people's religious convictions are somehow inappropriate, we are absolutely not a secular society and never have been. Moreover, the Founders never intended that we be a "secular society" in that sense, as even the most cursory reading of what they wrote makes clear.

But things are further complicated by the fact that so many Christians, especially members of the Religious Right, misunderstand the position of the Founders in the opposite direction, as somehow mandating not a somewhat permeable barrier between faith and public policy no barrier at all. The influence of Calvinism on our religious culture can be seen here, and the frequent use of religious language by the Founders has misled some American Christians into more or less missing the point that while the American government is designed to be tolerant of all belief systems, the First Amendment forbids it from favoring one over the others. Devout Calvinist John Adams was exactly right when he in the Treaty of Tripoli, unanimously ratified by the United States Senate. that

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

But the Left misses the point that the ethos of the Founders forbids favoring secularism in the Obaman sense just as much as it forbids favoring Catholicism or Protestantism or Judaism or Islam.  Madison and Adams and even Jefferson would have been aghast at the idea that it was somehow improper for a religious believer to allow his or her religious beliefs to inform his or her political ones. In fact, they would have been shocked at the idea that it could be otherwise, and would no doubt have rightly regarded a religious person who separated his religious beliefs from his political ones as a hypocrite and a person of questionable character!

Mind you, I'm  not talking about religious dogma here. I'm not talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, or the nature of the Sacraments, or anything specifically spiritual. Those have no relevance to the public business of a people espousing a multitude of belief systems when it comes to religion.  We're talking about morals and values, and how these are brought to bear on matters of law and public policy.

Of course, it would be inappropriate to argue against abortion, for example, on the ground that the Bible is against it or that this or that religion forbids it.  But what the religious right and the secular left alike fail to understand is that it would also finally be harmless, and no danger to the First Amendment even though it clearly would violate its spirit. In a society as diverse as ours, the predominant characteristic of "because the Bible says so" as political rhetoric isn't that it's dangerous, but that it's dumb. That's not an argument that's going to be persuasive to anyone to doesn't accept the authority of the Bible. In the public arena, it might perhaps prevail in some of the more isolated locations in the Bible Belt, but nowhere else. As political rhetoric, we would be wise to frown on it, but unrealistic to be afraid of it. The boogeyman of religious conservatives who are trying to "impose their beliefs on the rest of us" a mythical creature, but he represents a tiny minority of the Religious Right whose advocacy of sectarian beliefs on the grounds most of us don't recognize precludes it ever becoming law.  The adoption of measures which they themselves favor in principle on solely religious, biblical or dogmatic grounds would be opposed even by the overwhelming majority of religious conservatives! The notion that religious conservatives seek to "impose their beliefs on the rest of us" is, quite simply, a red herring, and hardly an accurate statement of what happens when a moral belief- even one firmly rooted in religious faith- is argued as a basis for public policy on secular grounds.

Take slavery, for example. As great an embarrassment as this is to the neo-secularists, it was Christian religious principle which animated the Abolitionist Movement. The same is true of the Civil Rights Movement, the movement against child labor, and in fact every significant movement of social reform in our nation's history! I don't think Mr. Obama and the neo-secularists have thought the matter through, however well he seemed to understand it when he delivered his 2006 speech. They may disagree with some of the positions to which the religious beliefs of others lead them, but this would be a very different country if their view of the relationship between religious belief and political belief had prevailed, and not in a good way.

Were William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King trying to "impose their religious beliefs on others?" Hardly. Yet neither eschewed explicitly religious rhetoric any more than did Washington and Lincoln and even Thomas Jefferson. But they did so at a time when mere religiously-based rhetoric was less off-putting to most than it is today, largely because people could distinguish between religious rhetoric and sectarian dogma. in which such rhetoric was far more likely to receive a hearing than it is today and less likely to be misunderstood by those relatively unacquainted with the historical relationship between faith and social reform in America.

King and Garrison and Edgar Gardner Murphy (the clergyman who founded the movement against child labor) and other Christian social reformers throughout our history were advocating moral viewpoints which might have originated in their religious convictions, but which transcended religion. The notion that a religious conviction which has implications for public policy doesn't have a completely legitimate place in political debate if expressed in religiously neutral terms equally accessible to all citizens regardless of religion is unheard of in our history and flies in the face of all precedent. The central tenet of Obaman secularism- the notion that religious faith is something which should be exclusively private and has no legitimate role in public policy- is a recent development alien not only to the thought of the Founders but of the entire American experience.

Perhaps my nose is overly sensitive, I detect a whiff of it in the Centrist Project. Dr. Wheelan, for example, seems leary of the concept of natural law, wanting to base public policy exclusively on empirical considerations. Yet even deist and freethinker Thomas Jefferson did not hesitate to write,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

And with good reason! There are really only two alternatives when it comes to the source and origin of individual rights. It will not do to simply say without further elaboration that they inhere naturally in our very humanity. Any empirical analysis of history would conclude that rarely in the history of our species have they ever been recognized or prevailed. On a purely empirical basis, we would be forced to conclude that nature teaches that human rights are the largesse of the powerful, to be given, withheld, and withdrawn as they see fit. Whether the European concept of the Divine Right of Kings or the traditional Chinese belief in the Mandate of Heaven, throughout history the prevailing notion has been, to quote Mao, that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun." History seems everywhere to teach the lesson that might makes right, and that the only person with rights is the person with sufficient power to enforce them.

A recognition and respect for human rights absolutely require their foundation in a principle which goes beyond the realm of the empirical and overrules what common sense tells us. It must necessarily be based on something transcendent, on an authority greater the one to which nature and history seem to endorse, namely that of kings and governments and rulers and the people with the most guns.

It requires an appeal not merely to nature (which certainly seems, on empirical observation, to argue that human beings are entitled only to those rights which those who have more power than they do see fit to allow them, and only as long as they do allow them) but specifically to God.

Jefferson, deist that he was, saw this. Jefferson's god, it should be noted, is merely the clockmaker deity which deism recognizes, who supposedly created the universe, established natural laws by which it would operate, and then sat back to watch without intervening as things played themselves out. But it was enough. Even the intentions of a deist clockmaker god provided an authority higher than the human powers which history teaches us in practice grant and withdraw human "rights" as they please.

This is a point which shallow pop-atheism and Obaman "secularism" fails to recognize: even the Enlightenment couldn't get rid of God. Nor could it banish him to an hour or so a week on Sunday morning. Any humane, liberal, democratic vision must of necessity appeal to the transcendent against what certainly appears to be history's- and nature's- endorsement of social Darwinism.

And that is my concern about what appears to me to be the worldview of Dr. Wheelen and the Centrist Project. They appear to me to be trying to be neutral at a time when transcendent and purely naturalistic worldviews are in conflict,  But there is nothing neutral about ignoring the point that it simply isn't possible to argue for even the most basic and trivial of human rights, much less for humane, liberal values in general, without being able to appeal from the authority of the ones with the most guns and the biggest club to something higher.

There's another problem, too. If one wonders why so many conservative Christians are taken in by Donald Trump and ignore his clownish and often grossly immoral behavior and policies, it might possibly be because he doesn't invalidate their worldview the way the Democrats and increasingly the culture seem to. To take the empirical position Dr. Wheelan and the Centrists seem to me to be taking and try to avoid the conflict between theism and naturalism which engulfs our culture is to side with the naturalists.  Not only does doing so undermine the logic of our founding documents, but it leaves traditional believers finally nowhere to go but Trump and his ilk.

Now, I should say that I understand that I might be wrong about what Wheelan and the Centrist Project have in mind. I would agree that arguments based on natural law must always be subject to the test of reason. A pragmatic assessment of the pros and cons of a proposal is obviously always in order; after all, the cry of "natural law" has historically been raised in support of slavery, racism, discrimination against women, and all sorts of nonsense. To invoke natural law must always subject one to the question of whether nature does, indeed, decree what is claimed. But that process is a check on the notion that certain policies and practices are in agreement with nature, not a substitute for it. We ought not, for example, to be too quick to decide that all human beings are not equal because we all have different abilities and characteristics and attributes, and in practically any way people can be examined some are superior and some inferior. When we assert that all human beings are created equal, we are saying that all are of equal worth. But how can that be validated without appealing to the transcendent? How can we avoid saying that they are equal in the eyes of God and in their rights and only therefore in their dignity and inherent worth since they are clearly not equal in ways we can quantify and measure? How can we avoid predicating their equality, as Jefferson does, on their having been created equal?

Gentlemen, if you embrace the popular tide of pop-atheism and Obaman secularism, you are nothing but a saner and somewhat more flexible version of the Democrats. You leave no room for the convictions and belief system which has predominated in this Republic since its founding to even have a voice. You undercut the very arguments of the Abolitionists and the civil rights movement and leave us nothing but sentimentality and wishful thinking to take its place.

You cut the very heart out of the instincts which have throughout history made us precisely what you rightly desire that we be again, and choose to operate in an intellectual climate which can never produce anything better than Trump, and probably will end up producing much, much worse.

Again, I may be misreading Dr. Wheelan. I hope so. But if centrism is ever to be anything more than "the mushy middle," it's going to have to insist at the very least on what Thomas Jefferson insisted when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.