Daniel McCarthy

The new Pew report doesn’t mince words in its headline: 'In US, Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.' In 10 years, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians of any kind has declined by 12 percent. In 2009, just over 50 percent of Americans identified as Protestant; today only 43 percent do. Catholics have declined from 23 percent to 20 percent of the adult population. The biggest declines in Christian identification by demographic group have been among millennials (down 17 points) and Democrats (down 16 points). But dwindling Christian commitments are in evidence across all categories: 'white people, black people and Hispanics; men and women; in all regions of the country; and among college graduates and those with lower levels of educational attainment.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.

The Democratic party and the chattering classes are playing a dangerous game with impeachment. Their are two modern precedents — Nixon’s resignation before his probable impeachment in 1974 and Bill Clinton’s actual impeachment in 1998. But neither is comparable to the contemplated impeachment of Donald Trump. All impeachments are partisan, but this one is in doubly bad faith: it has no chance of succeeding in removing Trump, and it has no chance of acquitting him in a way that will strengthen faith in the country’s institutions. The only outcome possible is to confirm for Democrats and Republicans alike the idea that 2020 is a regime-change moment, for reasons that go far beyond Trump.

Is Donald Trump going to be impeached? Nancy Pelosi is not giving herself much room to maneuver: once a Democratic-led committee of inquiry is assembled, its results are a foregone conclusion. It will recommend impeachment — to fail to do so would only strengthen the president and make Democrats look stupid on the eve of an election. As things are, Pelosi evidently found the pressure from within her party already too great to withstand: her sense of the political risks of impeachment was outweighed by her sense of the danger to her own position from continuing to resist it. So the die is cast. Perhaps this tells us, too, that Joe Biden’s support for the Democratic nomination is dwindling behind the scenes.

Mark Sanford might not eat brains, but he is the closest thing in American politics to the living dead, an authentic Zombie Republican. His career died a decade ago when he was governor of South Carolina and absented himself from office for a few days to go off hiking the Appalachian Trail – or rather boffing the Argentinian mistress. He was censured, nearly impeached, but clung to office anyway until his term expired in 2011. And then, two years later, he shambled back to a familiar haunt, the US House of Representatives. Sanford began his brief national career as a Class of ’94 House Republican insurgent. And there he was again, nearly a decade later, after winning a 2013 special election.

What makes a young man pick up a gun, head to a crowded place, and shoot as many people as he can? Liberals have two answers to this question. First, the availability of guns is by itself enough to cause mass shootings. Some people will want to kill, and the guns let them do it easily. Second, young men are not liberal enough not to kill. They might be Donald Trump supporters, and if that isn’t the same thing as being a white nationalist – for a growing number of liberals, it really is – it is a kind of gateway drug, and the president’s failure to say what liberals want him to say, as often as they want him to say it, allows young men to be radicalized into killers. What could Trump say to stop these killings?

Like some Hobbit or Harry Potter film from 10 years ago, the Democratic debates this summer are so epic in length they must be divided into two parts, each an hours-long endurance test subjecting viewers to candidates 10 at a time, only two or three of whom per night have ever been heard of before. Tuesday’s most familiar faces were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the most left-wing of the serious contenders for the nomination. Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke were the almost-famous figures, the second-tier actors you know you’ve seen before but can’t quite place.

How many times do pundits with conventional sensibilities have to be surprised before they twig to their own blindness? They were surprised by Brexit. They were surprised by Donald Trump. And now, while they’re distracted by Donald Trump’s latest tweets, they’re setting themselves up to be surprised by another nationalist miracle — the wholesale replacement of the decrepit conservative movement by a new national conservatism. The press missed the story of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., an event organized by Yoram Hazony and his newly created Edmund Burke Foundation. The media hive mind had decided that Trump’s tweets were the axis around which political news must revolve for about 72 hours.

Ross Perot, who has just died at age 89, is wrongly remembered as the man who cost George H.W. Bush his re-election in 1992. He should be remembered as the man who cost his own populist ideas their chance to remake American politics 20 years before the election of Donald Trump. Perot showed the promise of populism — then betrayed it, bottling it up for the next two decades. As far as Perot was concerned, if populism could win without him, it shouldn’t win at all. And so he made it as difficult as possible for anyone else — Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and yes, even Donald Trump — to build on what Perot achieved in 1992. And maybe Perot did cost Bush I his re-election, just not in the way most people think.

Sometimes in politics you win without actually winning. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, two candidates who lost in blow-out landslides to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, are the obvious examples. Johnson won in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s campaign that indicated where American politics was heading in the next 20 years. McGovern lost in 1972, but the 'acid, amnesty, and abortion' ideology that held him back at the time became, in only slightly diluted form, the regnant social orientation of the Democratic party from his day to our own.More recently, Ron Paul lost his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination — in 2008 and 2012 — but won anyway.

Joe Biden bled last night. Kamala Harris slashed him to ribbons over his opposition to busing and his kind words for long-ago segregationist colleagues. But Harris, who has a knack for turning left-wing dogmas into vivid images and personal stories, made only the most generic of pitches on her own behalf in her closing statement. Most of the other officeholders on stage were similarly uninspired. Bernie Sanders was a bracing alternative to Hillary Clinton four years ago. But his message is now just repetition—nothing makes him a different or better candidate than he was in 2016, even as the country has changed profoundly and the field of rivals he now faces is nothing like the one-on-one race with Clinton.

When America’s educated elite imagines what the Republican party will look like after Donald Trump, whether he’s defeated next year or leaves office in 2025, they think in terms of the past. The Grand Old Party will once more be the party of Mitt Romney and the Bush dynasty, those formerly reviled figures now celebrated by the center-left as decent Republicans in contrast to Trump. They are the obvious and inevitable alternative to him. Aren’t they? If you don’t have Mr Hyde, then you must have Dr Jekyll. If you topple Saddam Hussein, then you obviously get a tolerant, pluralistic liberal democracy. America’s educated elite is not really in truth well-educated at all, and it has the moral sophistication of a Star Wars movie.