{"id":86244,"date":"2017-02-06T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86244"},"modified":"2017-02-02T16:05:39","modified_gmt":"2017-02-02T16:05:39","slug":"the-gospel-of-winning-trumps-philosophy-and-its-policy-implications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/the-gospel-of-winning-trumps-philosophy-and-its-policy-implications\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gospel of Winning: Trump’s Philosophy, and Its Policy Implications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brand yourself the best, and you will be, Trump believes. He wants Americans to believe it, too.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Olivier Douliery<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Jan 2017 – <\/em>Prosperity gospel and social Darwinism: Those are the somewhat competing elements adding up to a governing doctrine for newly inaugurated President Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cFormulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture … Stand up to an obstacle. Just stand up to it, that\u2019s all, and don\u2019t give way under it, and it will finally break \u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Norman Vincent Peale<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica will start winning again, winning like never before \u2026 There should be no fear \u2014 we are protected, and we will always be protected \u2026\u2009Most importantly, we are protected by God\u2009\u2026 We must think big and dream even bigger.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 President Trump, Inaugural Address<\/p>\n

By fits and starts, based on shrewd intuition and gut instinct, Donald Trump is building a new political philosophy for Americans. Here and there, even before his inauguration on Friday \u2014 in his appointments, his rhetoric, his bullying of corporations to keep jobs here at home and his trust in evangelist Paula White \u2014 he has provided us with revelations of his core beliefs.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s governing philosophy is a curious blend of Prosperity Gospel and Social Darwinism. Let\u2019s call the resulting potion the American Gospel of Winning. This is the heart of Trump\u2019s \u201cpopulist\u201d vision.<\/p>\n

Trump learned to admire this doctrine in his youth in Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y., and later at Peale\u2019s Calvinist Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Paula White, who is Trump\u2019s spiritual adviser and helped officiate at the inauguration, is a Prosperity Gospel evangelist. The premise of Prosperity Gospel is that if you get right with God, God will get right with you in the here and now by solving your problems and making you successful.<\/p>\n

It is a simplified version of Old Testament theology: Yahweh rewards those who walk in his ways and spurns those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Prosperity Gospel echoes the Biblical covenant between Yahweh and Abraham, renewed through Moses: If the children of Abraham would honor him with fealty, they would inherit the land of milk and honey as their estate. The covenant has come down to us through the Calvinism that arrived on North American shores with the Pilgrims and the Puritans.<\/p>\n

Originally, Calvinism had a special twist for many believers: Only those \u201cpreselected\u201d by God before birth could enjoy his favors during their lives. But during the 18th and 19th centuries, other Protestant doctrines broke down that wall excluding many from enjoyment of God\u2019s bounty. Finding God\u2019s grace, even for Calvinists, became open to all believers. Thereafter all right-minded Americans could aspire to be \u201cwinners\u201d in the eyes of God.<\/p>\n

Social Darwinism was launched as a secular theory of life by the English sociologist Herbert Spencer in 1851 in his book \u201cSocial Statics.\u201d Spencer argued that life was a daily struggle for all creatures and only the most fit would survive.<\/p>\n

After the Civil War, Spencer\u2019s belief in the \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d (powerfully reinforced by Charles Darwin\u2019s evolutionary theory in biology) was grafted onto the root of Calvinism to solidify the American dream of middle-class striving and deserved prosperity.<\/p>\n

The combination of a Prosperity Gospel and Social Darwinism was invoked by industrialists, politicians and courts to legitimate a brute form of capitalism during America\u2019s Gilded Age. Prosperity Gospel doctrines added an aura of divine blessing and deserving virtue to Spencer\u2019s coldhearted competitive struggle for wealth and position.<\/p>\n

Both Prosperity Gospel and Social Darwinism are about \u201cwinning\u201d in life. When fused, the two make a potent psycho-social brew of belief and motivation.<\/p>\n

Under the resulting Gospel of Winning, those who are blessed \u201cwin\u201d \u2014 and their \u201cwinnings\u201d are somehow both earned and a gift of grace.<\/p>\n

How much money and\/or status you have becomes a most reliable sign of how much you have pleased and been favored by God.<\/p>\n

As an inevitable corollary, those who are not blessed will be \u201closers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opponents of Calvinistic Social Darwinism based their objections on 1) the social gospel of New Testament mercy, 2) the old Calvinist duty to care for our fallen world, an obligation felt by elite WASP families and taught at elite prep schools, or 3), the Progressive ideal (think Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt) of social reform through good government, enlisting experts to solve social problems and right social wrongs.<\/p>\n

Trump is all about the Gospel of Winning. It\u2019s the theology behind his call to \u201cMake American Great Again.\u201d His program is to design an American social and legal order where everyone can be a \u201cwinner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s populism is not about top-down, taxpayer-funded, bureaucratic programs but about bottoms-up, community-based, individually driven self-reliance.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s choices for senior positions in his administration are revealing of this vision. In his mind, his appointees are all \u201cwinners.\u201d Many of them, in line with the Prosperity Gospel, are winners to him because they got wealthy the \u201cright\u201d way \u2014 not through unworthy shortcuts like cronyism. They took risks and challenged fate; they were positive thinkers about themselves. They won fair and square in the nasty marketplace of vicious competition. Their financial success proves their worth.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State designee Rex Tillerson epitomizes the pattern, having climbed Exxon\u2019s corporate ladder from a modest starting point to the CEO pinnacle at one of the world\u2019s largest enterprises.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s appointments of generals are even simpler to understand: They were \u201cwinners\u201d on real battlefields.<\/p>\n

So what does Trump\u2019s Gospel of Winning imply for his policy agenda?<\/p>\n

Domestically, first, it will not validate government entitlements being awarded to \u201cvictims.\u201d It rejects the founding premise of the entitlement state that the government must take from those who succeed in order to advantage those who have failed.<\/p>\n

The victim-first vision of the modern entitlement state was offered early on by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution, in a new list of the \u201crights of man and the citizen\u201d in 1793. He asserted that those who did not have enough had a right to share in the wealth of those who had more than enough.<\/p>\n

Franklin Roosevelt adopted a version of this French ideal for the Democratic Party with his 1944 State of the Union speech, when he added \u201cfreedom from want\u201d and \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d to the legitimate expectations of all Americans and all persons regardless of their achievements.<\/p>\n

Provision of health care to Americans under Trump will reverse course, turning away from a government-driven system of mandated enrollments and toward a market-based consumer purchase system with some subsidies for the poor.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Gospel of Winning will fight the rhetoric of victimization tooth and nail. According to Trump\u2019s social psychology, negativity only breeds more negativity. Just put your mind to it, his creed advises, and think of yourself as a winner, as the greatest, as the best. Use your will to banish bad thoughts about yourself and your chances. Brand yourself a winner and sell that brand to the world.<\/p>\n

Ironically, of course, part of Trump\u2019s electoral success lay in arguing to his base that they are being victimized (by unfair trade, illegal immigration, etc.) in ways they don\u2019t deserve, and that he will raise them up and lead them to a promised land of reasonable prosperity in an America restored to lost greatness.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s public preaching of the Gospel of Winning likely will continue to play loose with facts and with sad social realities. This is his style of speaking, as he says, in \u201ctruthful hyperbole.\u201d Some will continue to denounce such rhetoric as a dishonest con for the impressionable.<\/p>\n

Nourished with positive thinking, Trump populism will work hard to create jobs. This goal will be sought through incentives to capital to invest in new and expanded enterprises. Hence Trump\u2019s picks of Wall Street insiders for secretary of the Treasury, his White House economic adviser, and his chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p>\n

The general Trump economic program will be plain-vanilla laissez-faire: low taxes and fewer regulations. But like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump will also intervene, using the bully pulpit to castigate and deconstruct a company\u2019s social license to operate if it does not provide jobs for Americans.<\/p>\n

On education, Gospel of Winning populism will seek to transform public education from a top-down delivery system organized around teachers to a bottoms-up system of work and achievement organized around students and parents.<\/p>\n

Following his mentor Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote \u201cThe Power of Positive Thinking,\u201d Trump will insist that each of us can will his or her way to success. If we see ourselves as winners, we will be winners in time, no matter our race, gender, or ethnic background.<\/p>\n

This will give Trump\u2019s administration a radical new approach to race relations. Trump\u2019s stand is that no one is a victim by necessity; all can be successful, even legal immigrants.<\/p>\n

During a campaign stop in Cleveland, Trump spoke in a charter school in a \u201ctough\u201d neighborhood. He spoke about \u201cthe ladder to success,\u201d saying \u201cI define that as a great education and a great job,\u201d adding, \u201cYou cannot have prosperity without safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

His vision for inner cities is of communities of positive-thinking people working to better their individual conditions. Thus, Ben Carson \u2014 a kind of Prosperity Gospel preacher himself \u2014 is chosen to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development.<\/p>\n

In foreign affairs, Trump\u2019s Gospel of Winning will be more tribal than internationalist. His underlying Calvinist orientation predisposes him to faith in American exceptionalism \u2014 America as God\u2019s chosen \u201cwinner\u201d among nations. That will translate into policies that will keep us aloof from messy entanglements with \u201closers\u201d around the world.<\/p>\n

It will also focus Trump on seeking the most self-interested terms \u2014 \u201cwinning\u201d terms \u2014 for the United States in all negotiations. \u201cWinning\u201d in foreign affairs means rejecting reliance on free markets. Nations avoid \u201closing\u201d to one another economically by erecting trade barriers, manipulating their currencies and favoring domestic producers.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families,\u201d Trump said in his inaugural address. \u201cWe must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Trump won\u2019t stand for being a \u201closer\u201d in anything.<\/p>\n

So, in one sense Trumpism is new to post-World War II America. But, from another perspective, the Gospel of Winning is only bringing back to the fore \u2014 in a newly blunt and unapologetic form \u2014 much older and foundational American presumptions about the individualism underpinning social justice and about our ability to prosper and triumph merely by believing that we can.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Stephen B. Young, of St. Paul, is global executive director of the Caux Round Table, an international network of business leaders working to promote a moral capitalism<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 startribune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Trump\u2019s mind, his appointees are all \u201cwinners.\u201d So what does Trump\u2019s Gospel of Winning imply for his policy agenda? Domestically, first, it will not validate government entitlements to \u201cvictims.\u201d It rejects the founding premise of the entitlement state that the government must take from those who succeed to advantage those who have failed. The victim-first vision was offered early on by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}