“The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing development of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of ‘family values’ so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan? …
“There’s a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche—might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective—is troubling enough.
“But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions.”
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Certainly it’s hard on them. OTOH, what choice do they have? Evangelicals are a fairly narrow demographic in non-religious ways, and that demographic has not been doing well, and none of the mainstream candidates have been very supportive. Now, along comes one of the Horsemen, the maximally-corrupt candidate, but he promises that he will promote the interests of non-college-educated white people against their numerous competitor groups. People vote more rationally than we’d like to admit, and who else is there for them to vote for?
The revolutionary possibility is that some more ordinary politician will realize that Trumpism can get 48% of the vote. A candidate with Trump’s policies but lacking his innumerable deficiencies might do quite well. Against Bernie Sanders, he might get a landslide.
And it’s not like Evangelicals are the only ones to practice doublethink. It’s been noticed that many feminists weren’t particularly interested in pursuing the various serious allegations against Bill Clinton. And Bob Packwood had a long string of outright gropings that seem to have been sufficiently counterbalanced by his strong legislative support of women’s rights that it was many years before he was ratted out. I can see the process in myself, too — there was a long drip-drip of allegations against Bill Clinton, some of them quite severe, but I still can’t motivate myself to even read that section of his Wikipedia article. Surprise, surprise, my politics are well-aligned with Clinton’s!