In Grand Rapids last Thursday to do some public speaking, I hung around the next two days to visit homeless shelters and drop in on the annual meeting of the Front Porch Republic, a small group of localists that includes Wendell Berry fans, libertarians, and a democratic socialist. Maybe they’d give me some optimism in a dismal election season.
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat kicked off the conference on Friday night, speaking at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. On the outside it features a statue of Ford along with the Betty Ford garden, the graves of the 1970s First Couple, and an H2O bowl labeled “Water for All of Liberty’s Friends.” (The Fords changed the name of their golden retriever from Streaker—remember 1974’s naked truth?— to Liberty.)
Douthat did not indicate which name better describes this year’s election, but he did describe it as one involving “crazy people close to power” and thus pleasurable for journalists “afraid of boredom.” The U.S. class struggle is “meritocratic upper-class confidence vs. people who feel left out,” with “elite failure as tinder for populist rebellion.” In other words, “We deserve to rule because we’re smart” vs.“You claim to rule because you’re smart, but you keep messing up, so why should you rule?”
But much of the struggle is online, with “populists” devoted to “owning the libs” and “triggering obnoxious, over-educated enemies.” Douthat said a drive around the country shows we’re far from the material concerns that often lead to civil war: The U.S. is still rich, and “even the salt-of-the-earth plumber is not an impoverished person.”
The class struggle, in other words, is not mostly economic: “If you made money by owning a chain of gas stations, you vote for Donald Trump.” That person may be more in touch with the world than a financial analyst, but “the gas station entrepreneur is not a poor worker.” We have a cultural struggle, with those outside of universities and major media ready to stick it to those “who tell us what to say.”
That wasn’t exactly the short-term optimism I was looking for by hanging around in Grand Rapids, but Douthat offered the audience a longer-term reminder: “there’s no country you’d rather be in than the United States.” Particularly as global birthrates collapse, “the most talented people in the world will want to come” to an America with an amalgam of values that may lead to “a cheeseburger in the morning” and “doing yoga in the afternoon.”
The evening didn’t exactly shake me out of the political blues or make me forget the challenge of growing national debt and our tendency to ignore our debts to God. But with a new Forrest Gump film coming out soon, moviegoers might remember that in Forrest Gump (1994) Gump has not the best shrimp boat but the only one that survives a storm. Front Porch Republic board member Jeff Polet, who interviewed Douthat onstage, asked if the U.S. is “the Forrest Gump of the world.”
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