Abraham Kuyper: Red Tory [and Trumpism?]

A number of years ago I wrote below the fold that the legacy of Abraham Kuyper and the current efforts of English political philosopher Phillip Blond shared a great deal. In turn, then-contemporary American conservatism shared little with either. But two years later there was Trump.

Trump, of course, drew nothing from the wells of serious Christian political thought. Nonetheless, some have argued that Trumpism in the future could effect an American political union of tempered nationalism, rejection of hegemony of neo-liberal financial internationalism, and support of internal economic measure designed to revitalize the working middle class. The 2020 vote of Floridians for the reelection of Donald Trump and an increase in the state minimum wage were cited as support, as was Trump's increased share of the Hispanic vote (compared to 2016).

Whatever hopes I might share with this take on Trumpism after Trump, I doubt it will prove to be the case. Go here to read a short piece by Jonah Goldberg that explains why. Two quotes that summarize Goldberg's case:

First, contrary to the hype, Trump’s performance with black voters and even Latino voters wasn’t so earth-shattering. Exit polls aren’t entirely reliable, but since they’re what many proponents of the new workers party theory are basing their analysis on, they’re worth looking at.

Trump received 12 percent of the black vote, 32 percent of the Latino vote and 34 percent of the Asian American vote. In 2004, George W. Bush received 11 percent of the black vote and 44 percent of both the Latino and Asian American votes. An increase of 1 percent among black voters and a double-digit decrease among Latino and Asian voters isn’t exactly a seismic event. More important, unlike Trump, Bush won not only reelection but also the popular vote.

And this:

Moreover, there’s little in Trump’s record that suggests his support among voters had much to do with pro-worker policies. Deregulation, conservative judicial appointments, corporate and income tax cuts: This is ambrosia for the “Zombie Reaganite” elites—the kind who are “stubbornly moored to laissez-faire fundamentalism and limited government.” The most aggressive policy Trump pushed in the name of the American worker was protectionism, which ended up hurting more workers than helping, and made free trade more popular.

 In short, there will be no Trumpism after Trump. Which means it will be Trump from now until 2024.

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You can read my earlier posts from my walk through James Bratt's Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Eerdmans 2013) here, here, and here. Bratt devotes two subchapter of the chapter "Christian Democrat" to Kuyper's economic theory and policies. Anyone familiar with Phillip Blond's recent book Red Tory: How the Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It will have a good idea of Kuyper's take on a Christian response to the dislocations--economic and social--of industrial capitalism. As Bratt puts Kuyper, 

For economic conservative (that is, neoliberals) and American evangelicals, who assume an automatic affinity between their respective positions, Kuyper's deliverances will be bewildering at best, outrageous at worst. [Kuyper] denounced laissez-faire capitalism as inimical to human well being ...; as out of tune with Scripture and contrary to the will of God; as the very spawn of "Revolution."

But why did Kuyper see the market revolution in such apocolyptic colors?

In replacing the spirit of "Christian compassion" with the "the egoism of a passionate struggle for possession" ... In the abrogation of the claims of the community for the sake of the sovereign individual. In the commodification of labor ... In the idolization of the supposedly free market, which deprived the weak of their necessary protections, licensed the strong in their manipulations, and proclaimed the consequences to be the inevitable working of natural law. In the advertising that inculcated a covetous consumerism as the norm of human happiness.

Does Kuyper's excoriation of a market society put him in the Socialist camp? In a word, no, but whether his hopes for a specifically Christian response to the developing state of affairs bore much chance of changing an inexorable commodification of all of life depended on a relatively homogeneous people with recent memory of non-market society.

On the other hand, "Kuyper was also sensitive to the realities of power. He proposed to divide and balance powers for the best approximation of justice that might be attained on earth." But to get to the heart of matters--and showing his paleo-conservative side, Kuyper believed that

Only proper consciousness would replace materialism and egotism with compassion and equity ... Since the state was incompetent and the market uninterested in generating such values, their cultivation belonged to the agencies of public opinion--church, school, and press.

What Kuyper didn't see was that the church, school, and press were not up to the tasks of inculcating non-market values. The health-and-prosperity "gospel," education oriented toward income-generation, and a press in utter subservience to its corporate paymasters destroyed whatever hope Kuyper had that the "little platoons" could stand between the the individual and the state.