A couple of quotes from @russellmoore ‘s email “You will…

A couple of quotes from @russellmoore ‘s email “You will lose this election.” I had planned a whole caption but I yield my character limit to Dr. Moore:

At the national level, though, our candidates and our parties aren’t as much about specific issues as they are about tribal identity. Even when motivated by grievance and resentment, as national politics now are, the grievances and resentments are about far different things than, say, the issue of free silver in the William Jennings Bryan era or corporate monopolies in the Theodore Roosevelt era. What this leads to, Levin contends, is the current situation—in which presidential elections become about "political expression" rather than "civic action."

When we peel down below issues of national scope, we often find that the fundamental problem is not that the "other side" isn’t going to accomplish what we want but that the other side exists at all. With that in mind, we can assume that this one election will put all that aside, and that those people, whoever they are, now permanently defeated and humiliated, will go away. But this is not true.

In his book Democracy and Solidarity, political scientist James Davison Hunter identifies this very dynamic as a culture logic that seeks not specific policy goals but something much bigger: recognition and status and identity.

When that isn’t achieved, we poison ourselves with fantasies that one day—maybe right now—we will finally enact revenge on those who have injured us by not conferring the status we believe we deserve. We want to find our own identity in the kind of "negative solidarity" that unites against a common oppressor. We start, then, to assume that every election is working toward a post-election reality where, as the old hymn puts it, "every foe is vanquished."

In that kind of world, Hunter argues, in which the sense of status cannot ever be wholly fulfilled, the injury must be constantly emphasized. "Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and both meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve," he writes.

If what we are seeking is not civic action but status, then outrage becomes authority.