Liberalism’s quiet victories

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":7.37,"text":"Next week, when Donald Trump strokes a Bible and requests the help of God as president, even a large share of his own fans will doubt that he means either gesture. "},{"start":15.724,"text":"Thirty-eight per cent of them, as well as most Americans in general, have him down as “not too” or “not at all” religious. "},{"start":21.879,"text":"I won’t presume to know the inner life of a stranger. "},{"start":24.634,"text":"But as far as the public is concerned, the US has had, and is about to have again, a leader who is at least atheist-adjacent. "},{"start":31.677,"text":"Within my lifetime, this was unthinkable. "}],[{"start":34.83,"text":"It is worth pausing to mark little liberal wins, such as the creeping secularisation of the most important country on Earth. "},{"start":41.458999999999996,"text":"Seventy per cent of Americans were members of a place of worship as recently as the millennium. "},{"start":46.227,"text":"Now fewer than half are. "},{"start":47.957,"text":"The religious right, while still a force, as Dobbs showed, has to be more covert and euphemistic than it was under Reagan or either Bush. "},{"start":55.049,"text":"Trump keeps the agents of God around him, no doubt. "},{"start":58.179,"text":"But on what a tellingly short leash. "}],[{"start":61.14,"text":"A liberal looking for some shards of light in the general murk doesn’t have to make do with this. "},{"start":65.844,"text":"Here is another intellectual victory so total and pervasive that it tends to pass without notice: "}],[{"start":71.73,"text":"When was the last time someone suggested “de-growth”, and received a hearing? "},{"start":75.947,"text":"When did it last seem deep and clever to name “wellbeing” as something that should displace gross domestic product? "},{"start":81.427,"text":"Pre-Covid? "},{"start":82.569,"text":"Almost everyone in public life now has to pay at least lip service to economic growth: in Europe, which doesn’t have enough, in the US, which does and wants more, in India, which hopes to be a rich country by 2047. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

Trump keeps the agents of God around him, no doubt. But on what a tellingly short leash

"}],[{"start":95.5,"text":"“It’s time we admitted there’s more to life than money,” said David Cameron, who grew up in a rectory, though which wing of it he favoured I don’t know. "},{"start":103.19200000000001,"text":"A prime minister who spoke that sentence in public now wouldn’t see out the week. "},{"start":107.197,"text":"There is nothing like economic stagnation to teach a country that anything you might rate above money — the preservation of nature, universal access to art, leisure time for relationships — itself depends on surplus income. "},{"start":118.989,"text":"GDP, while not everything, is almost everything. "},{"start":122.519,"text":"The priorities of liberal capitalism are harder to question than in the very recent past. "}],[{"start":127.57,"text":"And even this isn’t the ultimate fillip for we who believe in that cause. "},{"start":131.287,"text":"Five winters ago, news of a viral pandemic started to trickle through. "},{"start":135.554,"text":"When the lockdown began, I thought it would be 2025 before tourism, nightlife and the ambient sound of cars would come back in full. "},{"start":142.98399999999998,"text":"Other people I thought I knew well hoped that it would be longer. "},{"start":146.089,"text":"There is a romantic and almost medieval distaste for modern life that simmers away in societies that have been rich for a long time. "},{"start":152.594,"text":"It isn’t confined to nature-is-healing airheads. "},{"start":155.262,"text":"It drove TE Lawrence to the desert, and enamoured George Kennan of pre-industrial Russia. "}],[{"start":160.45999999999998,"text":"Well, it lost. "},{"start":162.414,"text":"My prediction was pessimistic by, what, three years? "},{"start":166.094,"text":"Tourism is rife. "},{"start":167.61199999999997,"text":"I can’t get a table at Goodbye Horses. "},{"start":169.97899999999998,"text":"New York has introduced a congestion charge. "},{"start":172.58399999999997,"text":"In the end, as soon as restrictions eased, people voted with their feet for liberal modernity, even if few of them would think to call it that. "}],[{"start":180.67,"text":"One of the dangers of being excessively online is that you over-index small-time “trends”. "},{"start":185.599,"text":"Yes, quack science is spreading. "},{"start":187.92899999999997,"text":"This or that gasbag reactionary has two million followers. "},{"start":191.49699999999999,"text":"But these things have to be set against larger defeats for the superstitious, the nostalgic and the anti-modern: defeats so structural as to be hard to spot. "}],[{"start":200.64999999999998,"text":"In retrospect, it was a deceptively civilised moment when Trump couldn’t name his favourite Bible verse during a TV interview. "},{"start":207.57899999999998,"text":"“I don’t want to get into specifics.”) Thomas Jefferson had to go through brilliant circumlocutions to pass off his beliefs as something mistakable as Christian faith. "},{"start":215.48399999999998,"text":"It is possible that one or two recent presidents have slyly padded out whatever quantum of religious feeling dwelt inside them. "},{"start":221.81399999999996,"text":"Now? "},{"start":222.70699999999997,"text":"Going through the motions is enough. "},{"start":224.67399999999998,"text":"Like no other modern figure, Trump shows that liberalism is beleaguered, and quietly rampant. "}],[{"start":229.77999999999997,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftmailbox.cn/album/189199-1737250939.mp3"}