More on John Adams: oligarchy and wealth-envy in a republic

New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah has some further reflections on the second President. John Adams argued that oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy, might overpower the system the Founders had wrought. It's interesting to consider this in the light of Lindsay Chervinsky's exploration of Adams' presidency.

Democracy Is No Bulwark Against Oligarchy

The hard lesson of 2024 is that liberals spent too much time fretting that Donald Trump would subvert democracy if he lost and not enough that Trump would win a free and fair election. We can argue about the reason why voters elected Trump—inflation, transgender hysteria, Joe Biden staying too long in the race—but we can’t pretend that those who cast their vote for Trump didn’t know they were choosing oligarchy...

... 2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy. This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.

None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams; he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766, and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve, lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.” Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that “No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power. Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism, Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”

... [Sociologist] C. Wright Mills identified Adams as a more incisive critic of the power elite than Thorstein Veblen, and Judith Shklar and John Patrick Diggins voiced similar opinions. In the 2016 book John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville, a Yale-trained historian and co-founder of the grassroots group Reclaim Idaho, takes this argument further. “In his letters, essays, and treatises,” Mayville writes, “Adams explored in subtle detail what might be called soft oligarchy—the disproportionate power that accrues to wealth on account of widespread sympathy for the rich.” Adams did not judge this attraction benign, but neither did he believe it could be wished away.

The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions, but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens. Adams thought otherwise. “The rich, the well-born, and the able,” Adams wrote in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–8), “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” ...

Adams may have been naïve about the possibility that a rich sociopath like Trump might eventually come to power, but in Mayville’s view, [Adams's intellectual nemesis Thomas] Jefferson was just as naïve to believe that oligarchy would wither and die if government would only deny it power.

Mayville summarizes Jefferson’s view as “Old World aristocracies would be replaced in the republican age by new natural aristocracies of virtue and talent.” To a great extent that eventually happened, aided in the twentieth century first by the spread of publicly funded high schools where attendance was mandatory and, at midcentury, by the spread of higher education.

Why do rich people exert so much influence? Money is the obvious answer, and Adams acknowledged its power. But in The Discourses on Davila (1790) he emphasized another, more psychological explanation. There is, Adams wrote, a universal desire “to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected, by the people about [us], and within [our] knowledge.” In short: We all live to show off.

This is why Mills compared Adams to Veblen; one might also compare Adams to the journalist Tom Wolfe, the preeminent chronicler of social status in the late twentieth century. Granted, among idealistic college students, associating oneself with the wretched of the earth yields greater status, but for most of the rest of us associating oneself with the rich is what gets the job done.

... During his first presidential term, Trump showed that he could transgress beyond our wildest dreams—flout the woke hall monitors, lie with abandon, defy the law—and get away with it all because he was rich. Even the many Trump voters who pulled the lever for him in 2024 while disapproving of his personal behavior tend to envy the man.

Trump Envy isn’t the only political force out there; that explains why he lost in 2020. But it’s turned out to be shockingly powerful. The United States grew more oligarchical over the past half-century, with the rich accumulating ever-greater power over politics. But Trump represents a quantum leap—supercharged oligarchy not in spite of the public will but because of it. Which makes ours a John Adams sort of moment. 

This was as bleak an electoral outcome as the country has ever seen, and democracy wasn’t the victim. It was the cause.

Superficially, it is easy to think that Jefferson, a plantation- and enslaved persons-owning grandee even if perpetually over his head in debt, would be the advocate for oligarchy. To our eyes, he was an oligarch. But it was the New England lawyer, considered a boring institution builder, who saw more vividly the danger to the republic from wealthy men.

It is still likely in our power to choose, belatedly, against fully substituting the rule of the rich for stumbling, progressive democracy. Do we want to?

Character counts

As I read the largely generous assessments of the deceased former president, I feel old. For so many of these authors, Jimmy Carter was the first president they remember or worked for. Carter was the fifth president whose term -- achievements and questionable decisions -- I remember being sharply conscious of in real time. His presidency came along at the end of a decade in which I'd truly settled into my adult skin. I neither loved him nor hated him; I voted for him twice without passion. It took what Republicans stuck us with in the next decade for me to engage passionately with national politics after the strange interlude created by defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, and fall of Nixon.

Over the years, I've written here quite a bit about Carter and his times. I came to appreciate him, probably far more than I ever could have liked his presidency if I'd been paying more attention.

Chris Geidner, aka LawDork, has drawn lessons from Carter's life that seem worth reproducing.

Jimmy Carter's life gives us a framework for living humanely in this moment

... When I look at Jimmy Carter’s life and accomplishments, I believe that he has provided us with several important guidelines for living humanely this moment:

    •    We must be steadfast in our principles — and be willing to speak out to advance those principles. 

    •    We need not believe that our institutions will protect us to hold out an expectation that they should.

    •    We should do what we can to hold those institutions accountable, improve them where we can, and discard them if we determine that they are not salvageable. 

    •    We must do what we can to protect one another when those institutions fail us, as they inevitably will.

    •    Those with more — materially and otherwise — must stand up for and support those with less. 

    •    We must remain humble and be willing to learn.

These are not easy guidelines to adhere to, and I’m sure that Carter himself failed in doing so at times even as I think he exemplifies them. But, the goal remains.

As we face the inauguration of a man who has shown himself utterly dishonest, selfish, and cruel, we are about to learn again, painfully, that character counts in governance.

Trumpism -- what does it signify? Anything enduring?

The New Republic and its editor Michael Tomasky are serving up a series of articles which endeavor to discern just how much of a break Donald Trump's 2024 election is from historical American voting patterns. Though the Trump regime seems novel in its ostentatious corruption and bottomless ignorance of the work of democratic governance, are we really seeing a profound realignment of political coalitions to meet popular demand?

I should preface this by saying I doubt we are living anything as profound as the realignment that occurred in the 1840s and 50s at the birth of our current parties or even akin of the shuffling of party allegiances in response to the Civil Rights movement which gave the GOP the recalcitrant white South and encouraged Democratic dominance of most cities. 

The presidential election of 2024 was very close. Donald Trump's margin was tiny by historical standards. It seems overblown to assume it points to stable realignment.

But Trump himself seems such a radical break from what Americans at least pretended to expect from a president that we have to think about whether there is really something new, something discontinuous with our history, in this moment.

Tomasky is giving scholars and observers space to take a shot at this question. The New Republic offers a long interview with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. Here are some excerpts to ponder:

Excessively flattering image - but he'd like it

What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?

... ZIBLATT: I think there’s an analogy here to Bonapartism in France. When Napoleon Bonaparte came along, he added a new element to French political culture. And that continues through today. You know, his nephew then ran for president some decades later, [and] every French president ever since has these kind of overreaching tendencies. So it’s now a part of French political culture—along with a Republican tradition and the socialist tradition, there’s a Bonapartist tradition.

 Maybe this is what has happened in the United States. Political scientists used to talk about the liberal tradition in America. But there’s always also been an illiberal tradition. But there’s now a new distinctive illiberal tradition in American politics today, which is the Trumpist tradition. And so, even if we get through this over the next several years, there’s an electorate that’s out there, there’s a way of thinking about—and talking about—the world that is not going anywhere. And so, to make our democracy stable means, on some level, that we need to have at least two political parties that are committed to democracy, that are committed to the rules of the game. And so if we want our democracy to be stable, our parties need to figure out how to sideline that now persistent part of our political culture.

... TOMASKY: Final question. What if, after watching all this and possibly more unfold, the people just don’t care?

LEVITSKY: That’s always a challenge when it comes to democratic backsliding. I don’t think the problem is merely apathy. A combination of factors—fear for some, exhaustion for others, resignation for others—may push many activists to the sidelines, limiting our capacity to slow down and eventually defeat Trumpism. Apathy would play a role in that. The reality is that life will go on as usual for most people during the Trump administration. Most people won’t be targeted by DOJ, the FBI, or the IRS. The economy may remain relatively healthy, so many people may continue to live good lives. So the combination of some people moving to the sidelines out of fear or exhaustion and others remaining on the sidelines because they don’t feel a compelling reason to join the fight—that could easily deplete the ranks of the opposition. It’s something I worry a lot about.

I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar under the second Trump administration.

ZIBLATT: I guess I don’t accept the premise. I think overwhelming majorities of Americans are committed to democracy. We may just take it for granted. But when citizens lose their democracy around the world, the record is pretty clear: They clamor to get it back, and they begin to appreciate it. I only hope we all have the collective imagination to realize what’s at stake before we lose it ourselves. 

Kevin Mahnken writes for a non-profit education news organization, The 74 [million], named for the number of young people undergoing that education. In The New Republic, he offers an interesting effort to situate Trump's re-election in the history of political parties and federal government. 

Constant Change: The Global Anti-Incumbent Bias Is Real. But America’s Is Worse.

... Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.

This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide.

While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.

The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.

You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections.

The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms.

The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years.

The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s.

The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. ...

But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class. ...

I think Mahnken is onto something in that those of us shaped in the long 20th century experience did tend to assume that incumbent presidents get re-elected. We projected that onto Biden until it became completely obvious that he could no longer cut it as a candidate. (I assume his incapacity was also true of him as a President and his post-election behavior seems to confirm that. But the two roles are different, a main driver of much political dysfunction.)

What this country needs to get out of this cycle is some inspirational politicians with a uniting vision. Obama once offered that, however shallow it proved in practice. Is inspiration that grips a majority still possible in a time of imperial uncertainty and the collapse of trust in any media to communicate truth? We don't know. But humans have a strong desire to be inspired, so such a turn seems possible, even if we currently don't see it. The USofA-- to be continued ...

Queers for the win

I have a counterintuitive opinion to share today.

All the visibility currently wreaking suffering on many trans people is going to be the prelude to eventual normalization of the underlying reality that a rigid gender binary simply isn't true of the human species. (Or, actually, many species.)

We're going to get there. Radical as this seems, we know how this works: first they try to kill you, then they kick you, then they meet you, then they let you live off in a corner, eventually you are just you. 

There are heroes along the way whose lives are teaching our society that trans folk exist and thrive. In the last month, I think of Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride who, for pure grandstanding spite, has been denied access by Republicans to the Congressional bathroom that agrees with her gender presentation. There is lawyer and advocate Chase Strangio who argued a doomed case for transgender adolescents and their parents before our regressive Supremes this month. 

But perhaps even more important in this process of trans and gender fluidity are the little local victories all over the country, when nonstandard people meet their neighbors and prevail. 

Here's a recent instance by way of The Advocate: 

It didn't pay off to neglect garbage pickup while campaigning on fear.

Craig Stoker, the executive director for Meals on Wheels in Odessa, won his November election for at-large City Council member with 56 percent of the vote — in the same county President-elect Donald Trump won 76 percent of the vote.

Stoker beat Denise Swanner by campaigning on infrastructure — specifically roads and garbage pickup — in contrast to the incumbent, whose campaign sent out mailers comparing the two's opposite positions by listing their only similarity as the fact that they are both in relationships with men.

... The Odessa City Council banned transgender individuals from using bathrooms, locker rooms, changing areas, showers, and similar public facilities that align with their gender identity after a contentious open meeting in October. Those who violate the ban could be convicted of a class C misdemeanor and receive a fine of up to $500, also giving legal standing to alleged victims to sue for damages up to $10,000 in civil court.

... “None of it was truly about me. It was their fear of losing a seat, losing an election, losing the title," Stoker continued. "I came into this campaign with the mindset that I'm going to have to rely on the work I've done in the community and the reputation I've built preceding me. That's all I got.”

When we fight, we win. Even in Texas.

We cannot cower; Mangi does not

Too often, the best Americans -- the people who best embody the aspirations of this terrible, conflicted country -- are the relative newcomers rather than the old timers like me (a Mayflower descendant through and through.)

Adeel Mangi is a distinguished Pakistani-American New Jersey litigator, both in private practice and in pro bono civil rights cases. Joe Biden nominated him to an appellate court judgeship. At confirmation hearings, Mangi endured repeated, ignorant, and abusive interrogations from Republican senators. LawDork explains:

Mangi would have been the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge, and the attacks against him never stopped. After Republicans questioned him at his confirmation hearing largely with anti-Muslim guilt-by-association attacks, the opposition later expanded to include baseless claims of terrorism and anti-law enforcement connections. ...

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer cut a deal with the Republican senators to give up on confirming Mangi and other appellate nominees in order to advance lower federal court Biden appointees. This may have been a necessary deal -- it's hard for outsiders to know. I'm not surprised by betrayal of Mangi by Joe Manchin; he's a preening popinjay masquerading for decades as a man of the people.

But it is hard to learn that two Democratic Senators who I worked in Nevada to elect dissented from Mangi's nomination. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen choosing to torpedo Mangi is really bad. 

What follows is my speculation; it is neither kind nor generous. 

Presumably Rosen was running scared in last fall's re-election bid; her status as a visibly Jewish leader in national politics presumably made it seem simple to sign on with the reactionary strain in Jewish politics in a state with few Jews, but some loud and well-funded right wing Jewish advocates. It looked an easy cave to the MAGAs. (As it turned out, she delegitimated her opponent early on and won easily.) Cortez Masto is gunning to rise in the Dem Senate leadership; sticking with and covering for her sister Nevada Senator made for a cheap date. So Mangi becomes a scalp claimed by Republican Islamophobes. The two Senators' choices sicken me.

Mangi has written a heartfelt public letter denouncing the process he, and by extension his faith, were put through. 

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, spoke at the inauguration of a mosque in Washington, D.C. He said: “And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.”... 

It was that vision of America that led me, 25 years ago, to make it my home. ... 

When my nomination then came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was prepared to answer any questions about my qualifications, philosophy, or legal issues. I received none.

Instead, I was asked questions about Israel, whether I supported Hamas, and whether I celebrated the anniversary of 9-11. Even more revealing, however, was the tone. The underlying premise appeared to be that because I am Muslim, surely I support terrorism and celebrate 9-11. When I made clear that all these claims are false — that I condemn the Hamas attacks and all forms of terrorism, and indeed that it was my city that was attacked on 9-11 — the next Republican Senators up just repeated their performative outrage. There were children in the audience. ...

... advertisements were run deeming me an antisemite, a radical, and a terrorist sympathizer. Horrifying images were published with the Hamas flag substituted for my eyes or interspersing my face with footage of the twin towers on fire. And all of this, even while major Jewish organizations across the country condemned these attacks, ranging from the National Council of Jewish Women to the Anti-Defamation League, and over a dozen more. One of the largest Jewish groups put it this way: “Adeel Mangi, was questioned aggressively on thin pretext about his views on Israel, terrorism, and antisemitism, turning these serious issues into a tool of partisan attack. … American Jewish Committee (AJC) has joined several U.S. Supreme Court briefs led by Mangi and find him to be an able jurist, a person of integrity, champion of pluralism, and adversary of discrimination against any group.”

...What can explain all of this? One commentator recounted my professional accomplishments and then observed: “But he also successfully fought efforts by two New Jersey communities to prevent the construction of mosques. He has served on the board of directors of the Muslim Bar Association and Muslims for Progressive Values. Clearly, he’s both an accomplished attorney and a proud representative of his religion. That’s what his Republican critics can’t tolerate. They will never accept someone who is so prominently associated with Islam.” 

Mangi is even less sparing of Rosen and Cortez Masto then I am. (And that's not very.)

Two allied Senators from a state far from the Third Circuit announced their opposition ostensibly based on the attacks claiming I am against law enforcement. I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle. One reportedly made the decision based on fear of an attack ad—and apparently not for the first time.

He concludes:

Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless. They can be defeated only by those who lead voters with courage, not those who sacrifice principles for votes. But courage can be found outside of politics. 

American Muslims are part of this nation’s fabric and will not cower. This campaign was intended to make it intolerable for Muslims proud of their identity to serve this nation. It will fail. Our Constitution forbids religious tests for any Office of the United States and American Muslims will cherish that fundamental American value, even if others apply it only selectively. And let me be clear: I will always be immensely proud of my faith as well as my pro bono legal work to challenge both denials of freedom of worship and the alleged killing of an incarcerated Black man. I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me.

... To return to President Eisenhower’s words, Americans must now look at the story of this nomination, and ask themselves: is this who we are now? For my children, I hope America one day lives up to President Eisenhower’s promise, even if not today. For my part, I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim. I exit it the same way, unbowed.

This is the spirit the country will need in the difficult times ahead.

A threat to religious liberty on the ballot

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. And she is the author of a bestselling account of rightwing evangelical Christian religiosity, Jesus and John Wayne. (Link is to my review.)

Currently on her substack, Du Mez Connections, she tries to figure out how to talk to and with evangelical Christians who are attracted by Donald Trump's promises.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

... Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves.

Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Talk about folks who are hard to reach! This author is close enough to them to have more chance than most people I know. Of course, from their point of view, I know the wrong people.

Lovely ladies with their minds set on freedom

 

Renee Bracey Sherman (l) was in town yesterday, promoting her new book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. The author was joined by Lateefah Simon (r), the next Congressperson from California's District 12, the East Bay seat from which Barbara Lee is retiring. 

There was plenty of wisdom, plenty of determination, plenty of delight, and plenty of laughs to share.

South African democracy still being born

Democracy is not only elections. Voting only one way, though important, that we, often poorly but also often earnestly, try to turn our hopes and desires into government by the people.

This month, the number of countries conducting electoral contests is staggering. I focus on the domestic antics, Mr Trump the unstable criminal v. President Biden the wounded healer. But India, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the European Union are also up in the current moment.

I have no expertise on any of these but our own, but I'm fascinated by developments in South Africa.

Hung on a Cape Town lamp post, 1990

Way back, in 1990, together with Erudite Partner, I had the privilege of working to provide technical assistance to tiny South African newspapers which were promoting the African National Congress (ANC) message of post-apartheid non-racial justice and freedom. 

This was a strange in-between time; a month before we arrived, ANC leader Nelson Mandela had been released from 27 years imprisonment by the whites-only government, signaling that its system for repression of the non-white majority could not last. Cape Town was alive with excitement, hope, and more than a little trepidation.

But nobody yet knew what would come next. Could a democratic system for all South Africans be made out of the aspirations of the freedom struggle? That vision would have to overcome not only racial categories but also rural poverty and yawning educational and economic inequality if South Africans were to forge a multiracial democracy. And very obviously, this wasn't going to be a smooth process. Pure energy couldn't substitute for learning to work together in new ways.

One anecdote: a member of the staff of a newspaper in Cape Town came to us with a personal request. In this moment of liberation, the ANC was forming local branch committees around town; mass organization that had -- of necessity -- worked hidden and underground was going to come out in the open. She was excited; she needed a flyer to post inviting her neighbors to a meeting. Her radical headline was "Come Elect Your Leaders!"

Of course, we helped her. And then a few days later, she brought the flyer back. There must be a different headline: "Come Meet Your Leaders!" We helped with that too. Evidently the local ANC didn't feel entirely ready for an entirely open process.

That small episode came to capture for me the thousands of such difficult transitions that very ordinary people were attempting while moving toward majority rule. Good people who had suffered horrible oppression were trying to build something altogether new and brave -- this would not be smooth and simple.

And it still isn't.

The first universal, free, and non-racial election in South Africa took place in 1994. Nelson Mandela and the ANC completely dominated the new democracy. And until this week, the ANC remained the overwhelmingly dominant party in free South Africa. Sometimes it governed well; sometimes its leaders succumbed to national and world capitalism, grabbed for personal wealth, and became high-handed, forgetting the masses who put them there.

Lynsey Chutel reports on the election last week:

For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the party once led by Nelson Mandela failed to win an outright majority of the votes in a national election. ...

While the African National Congress, or A.N.C., remains the leading party in the May 29 election, the latest tally is widely viewed as a political defeat and a rebuke from voters ... who have become exasperated with the only party they have known since the end of apartheid. In the last election, in 2019, the A.N.C. took nearly 58 percent of the vote. The drop to about 40 percent in this election has cost the party its majority in Parliament, which elects the country’s president.

Voting-aged South Africans born after apartheid, in 1994, have some of the lowest registration numbers, while those who endured the worst of the apartheid regime are aging. Instead, a generation who experienced the euphoria and economic growth of post-apartheid South Africa, and then the decline and despondency that followed, have soured on the A.N.C.

“Maybe they had a plan to fight apartheid, but not a plan for the economy,” Ms. Mathivha [in northern Johannesburg] said.

... “More than anything,” she said, “the A.N.C. has been humbled.”

The humbled ANC will have to try to form a coalition government with other parties. The Guardian has a very clear discussion of the parties involved and how this might work.

Lydia Polgreen, who served as the New York Times Southern Africa reporter in the last decade, muses reflectively from the Cape Town region:

That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere “politicians,” hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome. The A.N.C. could be forced for the first time into an unwieldy coalition government with smaller parties that might not make for ideal allies.

... there are no miracles here, and that is a good thing. Because miracles cannot be repeated. But what can be repeated is the hard, sometimes ugly, always unglamorous work of compromise and negotiation, and the working through of the inevitable consequences of those compromises. It is only through this process of improvisation and invention that true self-determination comes.

The business of ending apartheid as a form of government in South Africa is over. It is never coming back. But if this election tells us anything, it is that the work of building a true multiracial democracy has really just begun.

South Africa is a beautiful place full of brave people. If, under the constraints of a terrible history, a grossly unequal world economic order, and escalating climate emergencies, any nation can construct something new, democratic, and more humane, this land still has a good a chance.

It's a mystery ...

 Kevin Drum points out:

Compared to a year ago, eggs are down 9%! Apples are down 13%. Seafood is down 3%. Coffee is down. Citrus fruits are down. White bread is down. Peanut butter is down. Lunchmeat is down.

And this has all been happening while average wages have gone up 4% in the past year. You'd think all of this would be of some interest to news consumers ...

 

It's certainly of interest to me. I was looking to buy eggs and encountered this in the supermarket. But noting how well things are going in the economy seems out of reach to too many of us much of the time.

On the one hand, there are all kinds of signs, like the egg prices, that inflation is controlled. Pretty much anyone who wants a job can find one judging by the "HIRING" signs in storefronts. And the stock market is booming; that's not everyone's preoccupation, but for those who benefit, this signals good times.

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Yet people's confidence in being able to maintain their standard of living is not much higher than it was in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008.

The political implications of these mixed experiences and feeling are truly weird:

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In all the states where the choices for president will likely determine who wins, most voters think their local state economy is doing fine. And at the same time, they believe that the American economy, the whole country's economy, is doing poorly. This seems schizophrenic, but I don't doubt the survey research.

And it seems too simple to assume, as I've heard some say, this is just prosperous Republicans whining because they don't like Joe Biden. Sure, researchers find plenty of GOP folks who are happily jamming flights to go on vacations and buying boats while complaining about this president.

But the intense sense of economic precariousness isn't entirely politically partisan. The best explanation I can come up with is that we're still living a hangover from the pandemic. It turned out that we could not assume that our lives would just chug along uninterrupted; we, whatever our politics, could find ourselves thrown off by a microbe. What a shock! We're shaken and our feeling of expected safety will take a long time to recover, if ever.

On the well organized perversion of Christian attachments

For too long now America's Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.

Five years ago, Katherine Stewart published her exploration of the movement infrastructure of Christian nationalist right, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

The book is a tour of that infrastructure, built, in Stewart's telling, by power hungry political entrepreneurs out of a culturally narrow -- and very white -- religiosity.

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but it is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small number of people -- quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area -- harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. ... From the perspective of the movement's leadership, vast numbers of America's conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party ...

Stewart seems to have had little difficulty infiltrating and observing the components of the movement. She reports on clergy trainings where Protestant pastors are taught how to mobilize their flocks to vote and work for the most wackadoodle Republicans, those who seek to repel "the humanists" and "the homosexual agenda."  

She visits megachurch leaders who make a very good living out of preaching intolerance and organizing for their own power. 

She adopts Randall Balmer's thesis that outlawing abortion became a central issue for Christian nationalists because their real beef -- racially segregated schools denied federal funding -- didn't sell as well.

Stewart reports her own experience of heavy bleeding while pregnant with a wanted child, being transported to a Catholic hospital, being left to hemorrhage alone on a gurney until she went into shock, and only being given a necessary abortion to save her life when she had lost 40 percent of her blood. This was long before Dobbs -- Catholic doctrine has long readily dictated what became a pillar of a broader Christian nationalism.
 
She introduces readers to disciples of the fascist monarchist R.J. Rushdoony who gave the movement a pseudo-intellectual gloss.

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate. Like Rushdoony the man, members of the movement are often kind in person. They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships -- and then they seek to punish those who are different.

The Christian nationalist movement has made up and adopted a dense false story of the United States, propagated by an unqualified charlatan of history named David Barton. This fanciful hash undergirds their anti-democratic aspirations. Most likely our crackpot Supreme Court justices get their "originalist" notions of the American past from this current.

This is all convincingly reported, fluidly written journalism about some of the scariest people now in the MAGA fascist base.

I had issues with some of Stewart's framing. She treats the mechanics of how Christian nationalist leaders activate their followers as a kind of conspiracy. Trainings in messaging and how-tos for activism are always the stuff of getting groups of people moving for collective power. This is very American. As a community and electoral organizer myself, I see movement techniques as simply how you get a lot of people engaged and effectual. But for Stewart, as perhaps for most Americans, the process is novel. Since she loathes and fears Christian nationalist ends, she slides easily into seeing organizing methods as simply evil plots.

Some of this book feels a little dated after only five hard years of MAGA. But it is still a smart window into white Christian nationalism and we only need more such understanding today.

Chronicles from our rickety democratic experiment

Carlos Lozada has made a career of reading and dissecting the print output of our political system, first at the Washington Post, now at the New York Times. Whenever I see his byline, I'll jump to take a look. I find his work almost invariably interesting. In The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, he assembles a collection he considers enduringly relevant to his readers.

I'm a Washington journalist, but I don't interview politicians or cover foreign policy. I don't report on Congress or break news about government agencies. I don't dig up classified documents, and I certainly don't meet secret sources in parking garages.

Instead, I read.

He explains why he thinks there is value in the exercise:

... here's the real reason to read these books no matter how carefully these politicians sanitize their experiences and positions and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest most electable or confirmable light -- they almost always end up revealing themselves. Whether they mean to or not, in their books, they tell us who they really are.

Well, at least they do to Lozada, their diligent reader, who extracts a picture of who they really might be. He has a wonderful knack for the telling detail -- or excision -- from self-aggrandizing narrative. He shares his methods:

When you're reading a Washington book, you must look for the go-to lines, the rhetorical crutches that politicians lean on. ...

... Remember, it's only when life is wretched that presidents reach for Lincoln. In good times, no one gives a damn about our better angels.

... always read the acknowledgments section. That is where politicians disclose their debts, scratch backs, suck up, and snub. ...

Lozada follows this with an example of the fruits of such careful reading which also reveals what makes this volume so occasionally delicious; he excels at snark.

By far my favorite acknowledgments moment in a political book comes in American Dreams, the 2015 memoir by Sen. Marco Rubio. The first person that Rubio thanks by name is "my Lord, Jesus Christ, whose willingness to suffer and die for my sins will allow me to enjoy eternal life."

The second person Rubio thanks? "My very wise lawyer Bob Barnett."

But, more seriously, take this bit discussing the Congressional January 6 report:

That Trump would rile people up and then sit back and watch the outcome on television was the least surprising part of the day. It was how he spent his presidency. ...

Or this:

In retrospect, the Mueller Report was a cry for help. ...

Having actually made myself read that long volume, I could not agree more.

More of 2024, there's this which calls for believing what pols tell us:

The contrast between Biden saying America is still a democracy and Trump vowing to make it great again is more than a quirk of speechwriting. What presidents say -- especially what they grow comfortable repeating -- can reveal their underlying beliefs and impulses, shaping their administrations in ways that are concrete, not just rhetorical. Biden's "still" stresses durability; Trump's "again" revels in discontinuity. "Still" is about holding on to something good that may be slipping away; "again"  is about bringing back something better that was wrested away. ...

I would not suggest reading this volume the way I did, under the pressure of a library deadline. The episodic essays deserve to be savored. You won't like all of them, but Lozada has invented a fascinating role for a journalist. He's a lapidary stylist. Enjoy.

An unexpected source of support for US aid to Ukraine

How about some elements of the religious right?

Most of us who don't live their world miss nuances and small fissures in evangelical support for Trumpism. These aren't our people and their information diet is not ours.

But informed observers think that Republican Congressional Speaker Mike Johnson's willingness to allow a majority vote for aid to Ukraine derived, in part, from rightwing Christians' awareness that Russian invaders are persecuting their kind. Russia wants to impose a Russian flavor of Orthodox Christianity under the Moscow Patriarch. 

Historian of Christian religion Diana Butler Bass has flagged the resulting conflict:

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson pushed through aid to Ukraine ..., it did more than green-light funds to support the Ukrainians. In recent weeks, he changed from hard-core opposition to supporting Ukraine to championing its cause. His actions were, of course, political and personal, but they also signal a genuine conflict within American evangelicalism, one that could come to have ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections.

... While 77% of evangelicals supported Ukraine when Russia invaded, that enthusiasm eroded over the next two years. ... In general, American evangelical public opinion became clouded. It appears that in the last two years, the more evangelicals committed to Christian nationalism as a political movement, the more they began to back away from Ukraine and re-embrace Vladimir Putin. As a result, evangelical opposition to Ukraine and support for Russia essentially took over the issue. ... By November 2023, however, pro-Ukraine groups figured out the key to American aid in their war was swaying evangelicals. ...

The number of stories about Russian persecution of evangelicals appearing in the religion press increased. A good example of this can be found in The Baptist Press — their Ukraine coverage increased in its political content, urgency, and frequency beginning in the autumn of 2023 through this spring.

 Sarah Posner is a leading student of America's religious right. She sees Mike Johnson shoring up his base against purer nihilists like Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Greene and her fellow ideologues may want to tread carefully. There is a growing backlash on the Christian right against the move to oust Johnson. While Greene’s MAGA influencer antics garner significant media attention, people with longtime clout in the evangelical political trenches, including Johnson himself, have been waging a quiet but scathing war against her in Christian media. The GOP’s evangelical base — vital to Republican hopes in the fall — is hearing that Greene is groundlessly attacking a godly man and imperiling the party’s election chances, thus bringing (in Johnson’s words) the Democrats’ “crazy woke agenda” closer to fruition. 

Worship in a Baptist congregation in the village of Gat in Ukraine. (Photo: European Baptist Federation)

Meanwhile, divisions over Russian persecution of Ukrainian Baptists and others have come to the American home front. Catherine Wanner, a professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, explains:

I'm a professor at Penn State ... so I live in rural central Pennsylvania, where there happens to be a Baptist mega church. It used to be called the Russian Baptist Church – they changed their name after 2022. They are now the Salvation Baptist Church. The majority of members are either Ukrainians, Russians, or Russian speakers, and this community itself has fractured; it has divided in two. While there was universal agreement that the war should be condemned in no uncertain terms and that Russia is the aggressor in this case, the issue that prompted this community to split was over how one should pray for suffering co-religionists.

The Russians and the Russian speakers argued that the restrictive atmosphere in Russia was such that there was immense suffering among Russian Baptists in Russia, and so the suffering of Russian Baptist should be equated with Ukrainian Baptists, and the two should be prayed for on equal terms. The Ukrainians, those from Ukraine, said no. The suffering of Ukrainians is primarily at the hands of their Russian brethren, who are waging war and shelling Ukrainians every day and destroying Baptist communities throughout Ukraine.

And so, it was over the issue of how to recognize the suffering of both Baptists in Russia and Baptists in Ukraine that prompted this community to experience conflicts such that they split. This is my way of saying that these conflicts are not limited to the occupied territories in Ukraine where they are most acutely experienced, but they reverberate in communities in rural central Pennsylvania, which has a significant number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and specifically from Ukraine – as does our neighboring state, Ohio, and Michigan beyond it. 

The U.S. religious right is paying attention to such divisions, to the benefit of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. Can the rest of us listen up as well?

Department of strange bedfellows

When you are up against the threat of fascism, you have to be willing to inhabit, always uncomfortably, a big tent. 

So these days, I find myself listening to and cheering on Never Trump folks at The Bulwark and elsewhere. They are stalwart at working to defeat Trump and MAGA and they have suffered for their determination. They have lost their tribe; that is a terrible human injury.

Yet they believe so many things I find appalling ... They think Ronald Reagan was a hero of human freedom; I think he was the butcher of Central American aspirations for justice and democracy. They think it's somehow morally wrong to forgive student debt; I think this policy is simply making whole people who've been victims of a con. They applaud Joe Biden's support for Israel's war on Palestinians; I think he's lost the moral thread.

And perhaps most counter-factually in my view, they think the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder-by-cop was mass violence unleashed. That's just hooey. According to the international Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), researchers concluded that these events, largely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, were "overwhelmingly peaceful."

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Sure, there were a few places where there was considerable violence -- in addition to a few blocks of Portland, Kenosha comes to mind. 

And there were quite a few locations where polices forces, angry at seeing their free use of excessive force challenged, reacted to protesters with violence of their own. Remember Martin Gugino, the 76-year-old white protester who had his skull cracked by Buffalo police? After video of the incident went viral, two officers were suspended, but eventually returned to duties as if nothing had happened. 

Via El Tecolote

All this is preface for a bit of unfinished business that's become current business here in the Mission. 

A hilltop San Francisco intersection will soon bear the name of Sean Monterrosa to honor the legacy and contributions of the 22-year-old man killed in 2020 by a Vallejo police officer. 

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to honor Monterrosa with a commemorative street name at Park Street and Holly Park Circle in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Several neighbors and residents wrote to the board to express their support. 

“Sean Monterrosa had a bright, beautiful, and limitless life ahead of him,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a co-sponsor of the resolution. “The passing of this item will help the community heal, serve as a positive beacon for Black and brown youth for whom Sean was a mentor, and remind our city of his great contributions.” 

Monterrosa was killed in a Walgreens parking lot in Vallejo on June 2, 2020, by Det. Jarrett Tonn, who fired five rounds from a Colt M4 Commando rifle from the backseat of an unmarked police truck, records show. A single bullet struck Monterrosa in the back of the head. Tonn told investigators that he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt for a gun.

The Vallejo police fired Tonn; he was later reinstated. No charges were filed against Tonn; evidence surrounding the killing did not survive handling by Vallejo Police Department.

That this killing happened in Vallejo should be little surprise according to KQED: 

Between 2010 and late 2020, Vallejo police officers killed 19 people, the second-highest rate among America’s 100 largest police forces.

Can I be excused for knowing with certainty that most of the violence of the summer of 2020 was not done by the supporters of Black Lives Matter? 

Can I work on the same team with people who've imbibed a completely different reality in which mobs trashed America? Faced with the danger to us all, I have to.

A completely normal human system

This year for Holy Week, the annual Christian ritual marking of events around Jesus's execution, my book group is reading The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan. The two scholars set the story, as told by the evangelist Mark, "against the background of Jewish high-priestly collaboration with Roman imperial control." Credible history of first century Palestine, secular as well as religious, affirms that a Jesus existed. Just what he said and did is more up for grabs, but it is possible to describe the context in which whatever happened, happened.

Because this is basically a political blog, I thought to share what Borg and Crossan assert about Jesus' political context:

The phrase "domination system" is shorthand for the most common form of social system -- a way of organizing a society -- in ancient and premodern times, that is, in preindustrial agrarian societies. It names a social system marked by three major features:

1) Political oppression. In such societies the many were ruled by the few, the powerful and wealthy elites: the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, and their associates. Ordinary people had no voice in the shaping of the society.

2) Economic exploitation. a high percentage of the society's wealth, which came primarily from agricultural production in preindustrial societies, went into the coffers of the wealthy and powerful -- between one half and two thirds of it. How did they manage to do this? By the way they set the system up, through the structures and laws about land ownership, taxation, indenture of labor through debt, and so forth.

3) Religious legitimation. In ancient societies, these systems were legitimized, or justified, with religious language. The people were told the king ruled by divine right, the king was the Son of God, the social order reflected the will of God, and the powers that be were ordained by God. Of course, religion sometimes became the source of protest against these claims. But in most premodern societies known to us, religion has been used to legitimate the place of the wealthy and powerful in the social order over which they preside.

There is nothing unusual about this form of society. Monarchical and aristocratic rule by the wealthy few began about five thousand years ago and was the most common form of social system in the ancient world. With various permutations, it persisted through the medieval and early modern periods until the democratic revolutions of the last few hundred years. And one could make a good case that in somewhat different form it remains with us today.

In this sense "domination systems" are normal, not abnormal, and thus can be called the "normalcy of civilization." Thus we will use both phrases to name the socio-economic-political order in which ancient Israel, Jesus, and early Christianity lived. "Domination system" calls attention to its central dynamic: the political and economic domination of the many by the few and the use of religious claims to justify it. The religious version is that God has set society up this way; the secular version is that "this is the way things are" and the best they can be for everybody. "Normalcy of civilization" calls attention to how common it is. There is nothing unusual or abnormal about this state of affairs. It is what most commonly happens.

If domination is the norm for human social organization, no wonder we have to struggle so hard. We will struggle to invent, nurture, and protect polities built instead to aim for justice, compassion, and truth. Our efforts will be imperfect and incomplete. That, too, is just the way it is.

Edgy and interesting

Every once in a while, one of the best things about a book are its footnotes. That's how I felt about Tina Nguyen's The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out). Rather than burden her text with explications of the catalogue of right-wing think-tanks, conferences, and media outlets that she wandered through in her early career, she simply footnotes explanations. She knows most readers don't keep this map of right infrastructure in our heads.

(Okay -- to a considerable extent I do carry this stuff in my head, because I was employed when Nguyen was still a small child by a left think-tank that tracked those rabbit holes. Many are still the same outfits, but with new names. The personnel migrate. But such familiarity is rare where I come from.)

Nguyen explains the purpose of writing a memoir in her early 30s:

... if you are a liberal wondering why all this nativist populism seemed to come out of nowhere, to the point that it is on the precipice of subsuming American civic life, this book is for you. If you're a Republican who thought the GOP looked like a Mitt Romney paradise in 2012, believed that Trump was an aberration in 2016 and 2020, and have no idea why he's still a presence in 2024, this book is for you. ...

She disappointed her immigrant mother, Thanh Nguyen, by not getting into Harvard. A less than diligent student in high school at the private Milton Academy, she ended up following a boyfriend to Claremont McKenna in California with no idea she'd put herself on a conservative fast track that was invisible to world from which she came.

I'll give everyone else a pass on not knowing about the sheer scale of the right inside American civic life, because when I was a young conservative activist, I didn't know what they were trying to do either. Between 2008 and 2012 -- from college until my early twenties -- I was simply a politics nerd with an unnerving obsession with the US Constitution and American history, who dated an odd but highly ambitious conservative boy in high school and followed him to Claremont McKenna College, a renowned college with a notoriously conservative government department, and a deep affiliation with a right-wing think tank whose scholars and papers formed the backbone of the Trump doctrine.

From there I found some interesting internships through a local think tank, got involved in some weird ghoulish groups in Washington, DC, met Tucker Carlson, wanted to be Tucker Carlson, went to work for Tucker Carlson, experienced an identity crisis (as one does in their early twenties), and then left the movement to pursue a career in normal journalism (assisted by a nice favor from Tucker Carlson). In a bizarre twist, it brought me back to covering the movement ... when Donald Trump was elected. ...To the rest of the world, the things I'd taken for granted were actually obscure, esoteric, and hidden knowledge.

It's a convoluted story, but eventually she escaped the conservative news arena and has reported for Vanity Fair, Politico, and Puck, often covering Trump and the right wing boys emerging from the same swamp where she'd been nurtured. She writes it all with lingering amazement: these people are both formidable and a bit pathetic. She knows many of them are truly nuts; she's not convinced they won't someday take over America.

The warmest notes in the book are the descriptions of her mother, who pushed but also encouraged this strange American daughter to make a success of herself. When she was briefly hired by Tucker Carlson, her mother wondered:

"Oh, he's on television?" Mom asked. "You should ask him to help you get on TV. I think you'd be good on TV, like Connie Chung."

By the end of the book, her encouraging mother has died. Nguyen's book and still rising career seem a kind of memorial from a not very dutiful daughter who, perhaps, has made it in American journalism.

Another entry on the Democratic bench

It often feels as if this country's old political leaders are just holding on by fingernails, waiting for a new generation of political leaders to rise up and carry on American democracy. 

Whenever a promising fresh face shows up, I like to highlight them here. Last week I pointed to Arizona legislator, Eva Burch, who shared her experience of getting a needed abortion.

Today, given my fascination with combating Christian nationalism, take a gander at Texas State Senator James Talarico: 

There's plenty of speculation that this 35 year old legislator and Presbyterian seminarian from the Austin area has a bright future.

“Loving thy neighbor is exhausting, especially in a place like the Texas legislature,” Talarico told me in the campus chapel, as the morning sun streamed through stained glass windows.

... “Seminary,” Talarico told me later after class in his basement office at the Texas capitol, “helped me crystalize the project we’ve been working on.” Through a series of legislation, Talarico has been developing a policy program that he’s billed as The Friendship Agenda. Based on Texas’ 1930 motto of “Friendship,” his agenda promises to promote everything from “economic friendship” (think medical debt forgiveness, baby bonds and subsidized marriage counseling) to “political friendship” (ranked choice voting and digital literacy, among others) and “social friendship” (“Medicaid for Y’All,” as he calls it).

“We progressives do ourselves a disservice when we discard those central stories,” Talarico said. “In my reading of history, the most successful progressives — whether it’s in the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, farm workers’ movement — they embed themselves in those stories, and then use those stories to propel their movement forward.”

Can a Democrat with Talarico's background break the Republican statewide monopoly on power in Texas? To be determined. He's likely to give it a shot ...

Where is Christian nationalism?

The title here is really a secondary question. I should probably start from the framing question: "what is Christian nationalism?" 

The progressive side of our culture is amply supplied with sociological punditry,  historians of religion, and political scientists offering definitions of what has become a signal feature of our American times.

For today's purposes, I think I can go with a succinct definitoin from the (relatively) broad-minded U.S. evangelical publication, Christianity Today.

What is Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.

With that in mind,  I can go to the related question here: Where is Christian nationalism?

Click to enlarge.

The Public Religion Research Institute came up with some answers recently, mapped here. Yes, the darker greens look a lot like one of those red state/blue state maps, though with slight nuances -- who'd have thought New Mexico had more Christian nationalists than Utah? Still the general picture is familiar.

But Pastor Daniel Schultz -- a United Church of Christ minister -- who has been trying to explain religious peoples' engagement with politics for a couple of decades, has some interesting takes on this map: 

Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of the population that embraces it is punching above its weight. Two states—Mississippi and North Dakota—reach 50% support, and only a handful land in the 40s. The rest of the nation ranges from the teens to the mid-30s. That’s a significant minority, to be sure, but a minority all the same. ...

That Christian nationalists are in a solid minority in places like Ohio, Texas, or Florida also demonstrates the perilous position of hard-right regimes in such states. Were it not for gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics, their agenda would be firmly rejected. To put things another way: there are a lot more places that could be opened up as swing states on the basis of rejecting Christian nationalism than the other way around.

... it may be the case that, much as it was before the Civil War, Americans are facing a theological reckoning as much as a political crisis. 

On the one side is an aging, dwindling group that asserts that its understanding of God blesses and endorses a traditionalist social order. 

On the other is a more diverse, more secular group suspicious of authoritarian faith and the ways in which invocations of religious values privilege inequality and repression.

The 2024 campaign will be finally [?] a decision about which of these views should dominate and which candidate gives the best expression to authentic American values.

Dan has always been in the optimism business. I find it hard to share his vision that a defeat for Christian nationalism in the 2024 campaign will get us over some kind of hump, but he's right to remind us we're up against a force that is dwindling.