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.

More good calls, this time into Pennsylvania

Alongside workers in the hospitality industries -- hotels, airports, etc. -- organized by their union UniteHERE, volunteers have been calling the battlegound state of Pennsylvania this week. Specifically, the state capital Harrisburg. It's a learning experience.

Obviously, our main aim is supporting VP Kamala Harris, but there's more at stake here. Such as, the state's Congressional District 10.

That race is between far right Republican Scott Perry, the sitting Congressman, and Democratic newscaster Janelle Stelson, whose 38 years on TV give her a lot of recognition. The candidates are attracting national attention for good reason: their differences tell us so much about what this election is about.

The Los Angeles Times' David Lauter highlighted this contest in a column entitled "All politics local? Not in this election". 

... The former head of the House Freedom Caucus, Perry is one of the few members of that far-right group to represent a closely divided district, rather than one that is solidly Republican.

Since first being elected in 2012, Perry has won five times, but in recent years, his district has grown more Democratic. Republicans have lost ground in the suburbs of Harrisburg, the state capital, and across the Susquehanna River to the west, where the growing population of Cumberland County is increasingly Democratic.

As the district has changed, Perry has become an increasingly uncomfortable fit.

According to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot, he took a prominent part in meetings with Trump advisors on efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In 2022, FBI agents seized his cellphone as part of the investigation into the election plot. In 2023, after Republicans took control of the House, he was one of the 20 far-right lawmakers who repeatedly held up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker.

His opponent, Stelson, worked for 38 years as a television reporter and anchor for stations in the area. That’s given her wide, favorable name recognition.

“The viewers have gotten to know me as a trusted, nonpartisan voice,” she said during the debate, contrasting her pragmatism with Perry, whom she characterized as “the chief obstructionist” in a Congress that has accomplished little.

A former registered Republican, Stelson says she decided to run for office after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights.

Stelson repeatedly hit Perry for his past backing of a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions.

The decision over ending a pregnancy should be left to women and their doctors, she said.

“There’s no reason why Scott Perry knows better than they do what to do with their own bodies in their most intimate decisions.” ...

It's hard to knock off a sitting Congressperson, but just maybe, thanks to women rebelling against being told what to do and support like the national phonebank, Stelson may pull an upset. 

Phone banking isn't glamorous or even always fun, though often interesting. But when enough of us work together, we win.

Not quite my take

It feels petty and even a little silly to wish that an author had written a different book. It is, after all, his book. But I found John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s a surprisingly unsatisfying account of its time.

His subjects -- David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and their tiresome intellectual mentors and apologists like Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis -- remain just repulsive clowns, part of the long tradition of right wing grifters who've played on racism and grievance to assume an unmerited central role in our lives. Rick Perlstein has chronicled earlier incarnations in Goldwater's and Reagan's eras. These guys and their movements fight the full realization of the country's egalitarian potential. They will do so as long as doing so remains profitable, and beyond. So does Trump today. I see no point in dignifying them; they are unserious figures as a contemporary politician has observed.

Taking them seriously means more than telling their stories for drama; what in American society makes us suckers for these characters? That's the difficult subject.

I lived the early '90s as a politically active progressive. There were plenty of countervailing events and trends that find no significance in Ganz's telling. In particular, the international campaign against apartheid came to fruition with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the beginning of democratic majority, African, rule. The GOP's St. Ronnie had opposed the South African freedom struggle -- with plaudits from Pat Buchanan.

Those years were also a pivotal time for the emergence of LGBTQ+ full participation in American life. A decade of Republican neglect of the toll of AIDS on the community helped launch gays as a political force and we've never stopped since. Though gays sang "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" on Castro Street when Clinton was elected, we did not look to national Dems for our progress. The same day, we elected an Asian American lesbian to the San Francisco school board, one tiny step in a long march through the institutions of democracy. We understood, as marginalized people always must, that we had to make our own path forward. Establishment pols will follow.

Many of the themes of that era arose from Black demands for full human dignity in American society. Right wingers thrived on pointing to the riots after a southern California jury acquitted Los Angeles police thugs who beat up Rodney King. But a combination of subsequent community organizing and prudential reforms encouraged by big business actually laid the ground work for a Black president 15 years later. Though racial atmospherics of the time were awful, the movement was forward.

Little as I liked this book, I find Ganz's substack, Unpopular Front, vital reading. I'm curious where he goes next.

Time to push this guy into our past

Trump is crumbling. What he speaks to, the id of our society, is going strong.* But Kamala Harris unmasked his increasing personal weakness. 

Some of my favorite summations of what happened to that whining man on Tuesday: 

Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times:  

What struck me most about Trump was how tired he looked — and acted. Seriously. Not being snarky here. I’ve been noticing this when watching his campaign stops.

Something of the raging fire that helped ignite the Jan. 6 insurrection is just gone. Yes, he’s got his well-worked lines and his delivery retains his huckster polish. But he seems deflated, almost like he’s bored with it. Like the only time he really cared was when it turned personal.

Tuesday night, he was hunched over, scowling, easily led into traps by Harris that devolved into rants when he felt slighted.

At one point, after she baited him that world leaders were laughing at him, he came back with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban (who has cracked down on freedom of the press, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration) as proof that wasn’t true.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

It wasn’t a dumpster fire performance. But it seemed sad, a refreshing change from scary.

Charlie Warzel, tech and media reporter, The Atlantic:

What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.

David French, New York Times columnist on Xitter:

It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, "J6." She's debating Catturd.

Josh Marshall called it before the debate even began:

... I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. ...

•  The DOJ has indicted a fly-by-night "media company" for funneling millions in Russian money to right wing media personalities to stir up that American id.

"An attack on liberty for the sake of power ..."

For those of us unmoved by the supposed attractions of the MAGA movement and its felonious leader, it's all too easy to keep coming back to the question: what's wrong with these people? Why do they recoil from the possibility of a more humane, more just, more diverse country for all of us in order to latch on to a con man?

As in most broad movements, there are certainly multiple individual answers. Greed is not the only one. I think conservative New York Times pundit David French, who has been ejected from that set for rejecting MAGA, sees an additional explanation all too clearly:

... So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty. Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights. Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power. An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) — of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control. It’s not just that Catholics and Protestants have equal rights (a relatively recent development), it’s that Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

That last seems a fine, uncomfortable, contribution from a right wing Christian to Pride month! 

It's all too easy for me to see in French's description all too many local mid-American elites (like the kind I grew up around) who find MAGA so attractive.

Looking for their strong man

There has always been a cohort of highbrow Americans who were certain they are too smart, too important, too well educated to have to accommodate themselves to a messy, noisy, sometimes smelly democratic and popular system of government. Jacob Heilbrunn offers a survey of the type in America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Yes, Donald Trump's admiring Putin apologists and intellectual sycophants are nothing new.

In fact, autocrats and fascists have long been attractive to some Americans. As we lurched toward engaging in the Great War (World War I, 1917-18) on the side of the Brits and French, plenty of intellectuals thought we'd do better siding with the German Kaiser.

... intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad. In the 1920s and 1930s, this set of beliefs or habit of mind, became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American devotees, including the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the aviator Charles Lindbergh ... Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet ... Today, a Hungarian strongman who is peddling volkisch ethnonational thought as a replacement pan-European ideology ... is the latest object of the Right's dictator worship ...

... they denounce "cancel culture," but are busily canceling anything that nettles them, from books to beer. They define freedom as the ability to suppress the views and beliefs, ranging from transgender rights to an independent media, that they revile. At bottom, they are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.

As Heilbronn points out, it has usually been the Left which has been charged in this country with admiring foreign authoritarian autocracies -- and sometimes we have. But we did so in the belief and hope that a different, anti-capitalist, organization of society would more completely promote the general welfare, in the words of the preamble to our country's Constitution. Sometimes we've been quite wrong in the foreign movements in which we located hope. But unlike these sad and despicable Right figures that Heilbrunn chronicles, we mostly didn't err out of snobbery, bigotry, racism, and injured self-importance. We wanted the greatest good for the greatest number. The Right wingers seem to me to have just wanted more goods and unearned respect for themselves.

America Last is not a book for everyone, but it sure captures a slice of our intellectual and political history that a lot of conservatives would prefer to see swept under a rug. This is one bit of a necessary history of the U.S. in the twentieth century.

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?

Tender feelings among phony "conservatives" underlie assault on democracy

The right wing Heritage Foundation has undertaken to mobilize a broad swath of conservative academics and a goodly number of cranks to write a blueprint for a prospective Trump administration. They call it Project 2025. The document has been widely reported on; if you are a real glutton for punishment, you can download it yourself, though I doubt anyone else is much up for 900 pages of this stuff. 

European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, who is a visiting prof at Georgetown University, is closely observing the U.S. scene. He provides this commentary on the plan:

There is a nervous energy on the Right. A volatile mix of desperation and enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur and a feeling of impending doom – all of it being channeled into a feverish effort to devise detailed plans and strategies, policy agendas, personnel databases, and emergency “playbooks” for a return to power.

... reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. ...

This tendency to embrace the coercive powers of the state as long as they were deployed in service of the rightwing agenda has escalated in the more recent past, as the sense of being under siege as a persecuted minority in their own country has radicalized on the Right. Conservative elites have always cultivated a sense of (self-)victimization, have displayed a remarkable persecution complex even while holding disproportionate power, at least politically and economically, often focused on the cultural sphere they didn’t manage to dominate.

Until quite recently, this overall feeling among conservatives of being victimized was accompanied by a sense of representing the majority will of the people – of having the infamous “silent majority” on their side. The “silent majority” idea was obviously based on a racialized conception of America’s true volk. It was the majority of only those who *really* counted the Right claimed or cared to represent – a group that was predominantly white, Christian, and espoused certain conservative values and sensibilities that were coded as authentically American. And yet, the “silent majority” chimera at least paid lip service to some notion of majoritarian government and therefore, at least rhetorically, recognized democratic principles. That’s completely gone, in theory and practice.

Conservatives have basically moved from criticizing “big government” and “activist judges” for going against the will of the “silent majority” to declaring the majority illegitimate and accusing it of assaulting the natural order as justification for their attempts to entrench minoritarian rule by whatever means.

... this would not be the same Right that came to power in 2017. That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right more generally has significantly radicalized. The idea that more drastic action is urgently needed has been spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response. This radicalization has found its manifestation in the Republican Party.

... The best approach to understanding the Right has always been to take seriously and actually grapple with their vision for American society. In that sense, “Project 2025” is tremendously helpful. Rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country. They are telling us that they do not accept this egalitarian, pluralistic idea of a society in which the individual’s status is no longer determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. They feel justified in taking truly radical, extreme measures to prevent that society from ever becoming a reality because they believe they are defending “real America” in service of a higher purpose: To restore and entrench what they see as the natural order and divine will, as it manifests in strict, discriminatory hierarchies.

The reactionary mobilization against democratic multiracial pluralism won’t stop because the people behind it have some sort of epiphany that they shouldn’t go *that* far. It will either *be stopped* or succeed in entrenching white Christian patriarchal rule – and install a system in which only they and those who reflect their image back at them are entitled to rule and be recognized as equal.

Scary stuff. As is usual when previously unchallenged dominant men let themselves be governed by fear. Also, all too much like the BS that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was peddling the other day in the arguments over whether a president should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts aiming to stay in power.

Demagogues, ideologues, racists, and grifters past

The dire prospect of yet another Trump campaign season brings out historical-political observers who remind us that destructive populist energy run amuck in the Republican Party is nothing new.

Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society... -- Robert Kagan 

• • •

The fact is that for a very long time—longer than I’ve been alive—the Republican Party has been motivated by the drive to tap into and mobilize populist energy bubbling up from the “grassroots” and then ride it to power. Populism in this sense is a revolutionary impulse—a drive to rise up in rage-filled rebellion against entrenched, established powers, allies against enemies, us against them. Barry Goldwater was the first to attempt it. -- Damon Linker

Looking back from our moment, Rick Perlstein's 2001 history, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, fills in the record of one episode in the GOP's long course of replacing most policy goals with rage-driven rebellion against modern American life.  

In 1964, right wing operatives -- John Birch Society and other fringe-ish cranks -- needed a standard bearer if they were going to break into the mainstream. Senator Goldwater was a far right libertarian out of phase with the eastern, capitalist, urban leadership of the Republican Party. He looked strong and was seriously ambitious, but also was determined to do things his own way. 

The election was always going to be tough for Republicans -- the incumbent Lyndon Johnson had inherited the presidency from the assassinated John Kennedy. People were still reeling from the shock. But the war in Vietnam was heating up and the non-violent movement for African American rights and dignity had escaped the South, leading to urban unrest. There might have been an opening for a less divisive Republican, Johnson was a master of turning social unease to his advantage (and in many respects was a pretty darn good president for most citizens).

According to Perlstein, the right wing outsiders organized highly competently to get Goldwater nominated at a populist GOP convention. But they never managed to entirely take over the campaign apparatus. So during the run up to the vote, it was often as if the populist grassroots were running in parallel to, rather than pushing from behind, their champion. There was plenty of venting of white rage and fear, but Johnson was able to use this energy against the Republican, defining Goldwater as a war-mongering menace.

The numbers were spectacular: 43,126,218 votes for Johnson to 27,174,898 for Goldwater, who won only six states -- one of them, Arizona, by half a percent.

Democrats cleaned up down ballot as well, winning overwhelming advantages in Congress. In consequence, in 1965, they passed Medicare and the Voting Rights Act which enabled Black suffrage (until the current Supreme Court killed it off).

Perlstein writes a very detailed narrative of these events, fascinating if the nuts and bolts of political campaigns interest the reader. In reading such history, I'm always reminded that though the technology of campaigning changes, its essence -- harnessing mass political energies into effective action -- remains the same. 

Where and how might you work to defeat Trump's current right wing threat this fall? (I'm still figuring it out.)

• • •

In 1964, when the radical right John Birch Society was near the peak of its influence, renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had launched her career covering the Spanish civil war three decades earlier, wrote a friend: “Unless there’s a Johnson landslide, the country and world will know how many incipient and energetic home-grown Fascists we have. I never for a moment feared Communism in the US but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait. -- via Karen Tumulty

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.

What's wrong with these people? -- part the nth

Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism is yet another stab at a question I can't seem to let go of -- what's wrong with the subset of U.S. Christians who make up the base of Donald Trump's ugly cult following?

I wrote about Diana Butler Bass' theological insights on the matter in a previous post and that holds up.

But Alberta's exploration of the conundrum is more intimate: Bass left evangelical Christianity a long time ago; Alberta comes from deep within the evangelical culture. His admired, recently deceased father was a successful megachurch builder and pastor. Yet the son can't square the sort of Christianity that has taken over American evangelicalism with his own faith, let along his observations as a journalist. So he uses his professional journalistic acumen and personal connections to draw a detailed, nuanced picture of a white American evangelical Christianity which has gone off the rails and rushed headlong into a Trumpist swamp.

As Alberta explained in The Atlantic (his employer) during his book launch:

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model servanthood and self-sacrifice; I believe he commanded us to love our neighbor, to turn the other cheek toward those who wish us harm, to show grace toward outsiders and let our light shine so they might glorify our heavenly Father.  

Not all professing Christians bother adhering to these biblical precepts, but many millions of American believers still do. It is incumbent upon them to stand up to this extremism in the Church.

Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray it might be so.

Alberta begins his book with interviews with Chris Winans, the religious leader who succeeded his father at what had been his childhood congregation. Winans tells of elders that young Tim had known all his life drifting away to aggressively MAGA churches. He sadly concludes that he knows what has become of his former members:

"Too many of them worship America. ...  At its root, we're talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. ... If you believe that God is in covenant with with America, then you believe -- and I've heard lots of people say this explicitly -- that we're a new Israel. ... you view America as a covenant that has to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we are called to be."

Alberta used his professional journalistic access to observe and describe evangelical churches across the country and also MAGA movement para-religious formations like Turning Point USA and Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition. Mostly he is appalled; repeatedly he is able to get evangelical pastors who know better to confess that they must stifle their convictions for fear of losing their people. 

In wide ranging interviews with ordinary churchgoers, he finds a dangerous underlying crevasse:

To be sure, plenty of those evangelicals had always cared more about power than principle ... But there was something deeper at work. What I'd personally encountered during those five years wasn't just an increased appetite for power. It was a sudden onset of dread. ...

There's a reason scripture warns us so often and so forcefully against fear. It's just as powerful as faith. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal, fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the here and now. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood ... No one should be surprised to see politicians and political hacks utilizing something so powerful in the name of winning an election. ...

Simply put, American evangelicals cannot let go. They cannot detach themselves from national identity or abandon the notion that fighting for America is fighting for God. Hence the creeping allure of "Christian nationalism."... Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.

Of course individuals are ultimately responsible for their own choices, but Alberta blames Donald Trump for exploiting the weaknesses of evangelical faith formation and practice to turn many churches into outposts of his political cult.

... his legacy in the sweep of western Christendom was already secure. More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement. ... Speaking only for myself, Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing.

[Trump's] imprint on evangelicalism would endure. The forty-fifth president had foundationally altered the expectations and incentive structures within American Christendom. He had persuaded the churchgoing class that it was better to win with vice than to lose with virtue. He had blinded believers to the means and fixed their eyes on the ends. Most significantly, he had shown evangelicals that their movement need not be led by an evangelical.

... The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry -- long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism -- were destroying the evangelical church. I had seen it for myself, over the past six years, in every corner of the country. Pastors had walked away from the ministry. Congregations had been shuttered by infighting. Collective faith communities and individual relationships had been wrecked. ... [Trumpist political operatives like Charlie Kirk] did not concern themselves with the credibility of the Christian witness. Churches were not a bride to be loved, but a battlefield to be conquered.

This was nothing less than a war for the soul of American Christianity. And church by church, believer by believer, it appeared that Kirk and his allies were winning. This wasn't just because their side had more resources to deploy and fewer ethical guidelines to observe. It was because they were encountering no resistance. ...

This committed evangelical author tries to find hope for a more Biblical sort of Christian belief and practice. He finds push back on the margins; see also Russell Moore at Christianity Today and some sad pastors. He can see a small remnant:

Having spent Trump's presidency traveling the country, I knew how many sane, serious evangelicals were still out there. ...They are reasonable and realistic, making prudential political judgements that often reveal something quite limited about their core values, their commitments to others, their complex set of religious convictions. ... Their character deserves respect and the crackup of the evangelical Church is not their doing.

But this is not a hopeful book.

• • •

A couple of brief observations: what a world! -- there don't seem to be hardly any women in it, and that's not going to fly. 

And though Alberta is well aware his subject matter is white evangelicalism, he doesn't draw any implications from that. Yet despite limitations, this is a convincing, grimly fascinating picture of a subculture that deserves to dwindle.

The recurring question: what's wrong with these people?

What do so many of our fellow citizens see in a crazy, sociopathic old uncle? I mean Donald Trump of course. A majority of us just don't get it. We've got a perfectly good president who is trying to turn the unwieldy ship of state in the direction of uplifting us, materially and democratically. And yet, so many continue to be attached to this incompetent greedy huckster.

Religion historian Diana Butler Bass took a stab at that question which bears repeating:

What I suddenly recognized is that once I too wanted everything to be broken, everyone to be miserable. When I became an evangelical. You know evangelicals — especially white ones — the religious people who love Donald Trump, stick with him no matter what, and vote for him in massive numbers.

They also love making people miserable. Indeed, it is a central tenet of evangelical faith, the entry ritual into community.

In evangelicalism, the first step to salvation is making you miserable. Sermons point out your misery, your sad state of existence, the hopelessness of the human condition. If you aren’t an evangelical and seem happy, your evangelical friends are convinced you are pretending, hiding something, are in denial, or are deluded by Satan. If you ever reveal a doubt or sorrow, they are waiting to pounce — to point out your misery and remedy it through conversation. You must see that you have led a miserable life, made miserable choices, are a deeply miserable person. Misery is the doorway to being saved.

The core of evangelicalism is theological — it reveals a deep, inescapable human problem (we are locked in misery by sin) and salvation from the problem (surrender to Jesus through conversion). The only real happiness is eternal life, the heavenly realm. You cannot be happy or go to heaven without profound sorrow over the misery of your soul. You must be broken before you can be saved. Only a strong Savior can fix you. And, once you have experienced this, you have to tell everyone. Point out all the brokenness, bleakness, corruption, and carnage. Yes, soul carnage. That’s our true state. American carnage. Global carnage.

I’ve heard that sermon a thousand times. Carnage is hope. Brokenness is healing. Blood dripping from the cross, flowing in the streets, saves.

Misery means more people in heaven.

Pundits, historians, journalists — all of them recognize that Trumpism is essentially religious. But religion is more than a set of predictable voting patterns or boxes on a survey. It is a deeply held vision of the world, a shaping narrative in the soul. And this one is utterly clear and simple. No mystery really. To be broken — and to break things — is what comes first. It is the core of American evangelicalism — "You must be born again" — the ritual, the sawdust trail, the mourning bench — translated and encoded into a political movement, a political party, and American nationalism.

You can blame evangelical support for Trump on racism or misogyny. You can come up with a smart, historically informed analysis that makes sense. Those books help. But, ultimately, it is hard to understand because it is about something more subtle, more pervasive, less graspable. It is an orientation, a whisper in the wind, a stern Presbyterian minister explaining how God predestines millions to eternal torment, a half-buried memory of your grandmother singing a blood-soaked hymn over your crib.

... We’re all the South now. Even in a culture where people are turning their back on Christianity and fleeing church (she remarks ironically: Maybe these two things are related?).

There’s no escaping it. We all live in the tormented and ghostly shadow of a bloody, misery-laden story drawn from a particular interpretation of the Bible, reified by generations of prayers and sermons and songs. Now enshrined in politics. The road to heaven is lined with carnage.

They aren’t trying to be racists or misogynists or fascists. They just want you to get saved. They want America to be saved.

Sick, huh? 

Of course, in addition to the prompts from this diseased form of religiosity, this vision also serves our economic system -- one that depends on making winners and losers. Many of us are taught to blame our intrinsic inner failings for whatever lack of success we experience. This is usually bullbleep, but maybe a strong man will save us?

Follow-up on MAGA cloud cuckooland: coming after your brain

Apparently if you live in the media bubble that Simon Rosenberg so eloquently described yesterday, you get to claim that Officer Derek Chauvin didn't murder George Floyd. Wingers are making the story their concoctions versus your lying eyes. After all, the world saw the video ... and a jury sent Chauvin away for a long time.

Radley Balko, libertarian researcher into criminal justice and injustice, has the goods. The right wing infotainment system has seceded from consensus reality:

For a few precious days after the death of George Floyd, there was at least a clear consensus across the political spectrum — there was near-unanimity that what Darnella Frazier captured on her cell phone was a crime. An outrage. A thing to be denounced.

As Floyd lay handcuffed on his stomach, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s back for nine minutes as Floyd became unresponsive, then went limp, then died. Even the most vocal police supporters condemned Chauvin’s actions, though with obligatory disclaimers that Chauvin was a rogue, aberrant bad apple, and that no one should judge all law enforcement officers by his actions.

The consensus wouldn’t last. As protests heated up around the country, far-right pundits began to break away. They pointed to Floyd’s criminal record, the violence at some of the protests, and the allegedly radical positions of the organizers. Dennis Prager, the radio host and founder of a fake university, marveled to his audience how “decent” MPD officers had been to Floyd....

With Tucker Carlson and dingbat Bari Weiss on the case for MAGA nonsense, can reality hold out?

How the evangelicals won

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by U.C. Berkeley professor emeritus of history David A. Hollinger is one of the most intriguing books I've read in a long time. Hollinger's premise here is that

What counts as "Christian" is always achieved, never given. It all depends on who gets control of the local franchise.

He offers an explanation of how "evangelicalism" won out in U.S. society in the late 20th century. In ordinary speech, "Christian" has come to mean "evangelical."  But this strain of Christianity is itself losing out to cultural secularism which is strengthened by the winners' anti-science and right wing politics.

Once upon an American time, the United States was something like a "Christian nation," in the sense that early white settlers lived in reference to British and European Christianity, even if they belonged to separate tribes or, sometimes, no religious tribe at all. Christian denominations divided, as did the nation, over the continuation of Black slavery in the mid-19th century. Some of them reunited after the Civil War, some didn't. Hollinger uses "ecumenical"  to describe the once dominant northern Protestant denominations -- Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, United Church of Christ, etc. They were the public face of Christianity for much of the country, but, as has always been the case, not for everyone.

Hollinger contends that hegemonic ecumenical Protestant supremacy unraveled in the 20th century for many reasons. One was education:

Differences in education contributed to a division between two families of Protestants that persisted throughout the twentieth century and became even more in the twenty-first. In what historian Martin E. Marty called American Protestantism's informal "two-party system," one cluster of Protestants focused on individual salvation and morality, while another "lost faith in revivalism and worked instead for some transformation of the world." ... After World War II, the two-party system become the ecumenical-evangelical divide ...

He highlights two factors in the divide which I have not seen explicated elsewhere.

1) Educated Jewish migrants escaping European fascism brought world views of equivalent depth and moral seriousness from non-Christian roots. Ecumenical Protestantism recognized equals; pretty soon the culturally dominant parts of the United States came to talk and think in terms of "Judeo-Christian civilization."

2) Meanwhile, ecumenical Protestants who had followed the call to spread the gospel to all nations returned changed.

The rest of humanity was more than a needy expanse, awaiting the benevolence and supervision of American Protestants. ... Within the churches, the missionary witness to the scope of humankind and the integrity of many cultures threatened the old habit of speaking of non-Christians as "heathens."

In Hollinger's telling, just as ecumenical Protestantism achieved its zenith in the anti-Communist, culturally conservative 1950s, it was sowing seeds of its long popular decline.

[It undertook] a multidecade campaign to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. ... The liberalizers called on the faithful to renounce a number of inherited ideas and practices which the ecumenical elite decided were racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, unscientific, and chauvinistic, and thus inconsistent with the gospel as it should apply to American society. But these ideas and practices remained popular with much of the white population, within and beyond the churches ... Opposing these relatively cosmopolitan views -- and defined in large part by reaction against them -- were the fundamentalists. ..

... the more control white evangelicals achieved over the Christian franchise and the more they allowed it to weaken democracy and to discredit science, the more comfortable other Americans came to feel in one another's spirituality and and ethnoracially diverse company. ...The secular emerged less as a threat than the sectarians to an inclusive national community committed to democracy ...

Evangelicals seized the Christian franchise; Donald Trump grabbed up the evangelicals; organized Christianity continued on its course of discrediting itself.

Stating my own biases: it's not hard for me to believe that the kind of hegemonic, white, broad-minded, mainline Protestantism that I was raised in was not a Good Thing. It certainly was uninspiring. 

Hollinger lays out how it lost out. There's plenty missing from his account. Catholic religion is not well incorporated in this telling. Nor does he believably recount the attractiveness to many in this country of various other non-Christian spiritual paths.

But this is a very good, challenging book for those of us in a U.S. context who cling to a Christian understanding of the moral universe -- and also to those of us who just want to know where these crazy right wing evangelicals came from.

Undernews breaks through

This is just delicious. The right wing media sphere has got itself in a panty-soiling tizzy over a dance performance of the Nutcracker in the White House about which Jill Biden tweeted. You can watch the performance at that link.

Apparently none of the right wing media opinion makers ever saw a production of Hoffman's 1816 fable, such a corny staple of Christmas delight.

Ron DeSantis thinks he's onto something according to a fund appeal using a picture of the production:

Jill and Joe Biden are taking your tax dollars and throwing them at radical activist groups to parade through the halls that leaders like Ronald Reagan used to march through. There is truly no clearer picture of our country's decline than the dereliction of duty by our President. ...

Such confidence that his supporters must be narrow minded morons. Now we know Ron is one ... but all of them? 

Catherine Rampell [gift article-enjoy] has the story:

Hide your children, hide your wives. A radical force is sweeping the nation, threatening to destroy everything that God-fearing Americans hold dear.

That threat, according to Fox News? Tap-dancing, one of the most quintessentially American art forms there is.

Last week, first lady Jill Biden shared a festive holiday video of tap troupe Dorrance Dance performing their swingin’ spin on “The Nutcracker,” set to a jazz arrangement by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. ...

More seriously, David Frum [gift article] has described how MAGA acolytes become confirmed in believing so much nonsense in the concept he calls "undernews". 

During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.

Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.

In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.

This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans. ...

That's the point. We don't hear it, but millions of our sibling citizens marinate in this stuff -- and end up scared of a tap dance performance.

Pernicious priests

San Francisco's Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is a major character in Mary Jo McConahay's Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right. Her considerable discussion of this monarchical figure does not mention what many of us in this city know him best for: setting his cathedral's timing on its sprinkler system to deluge homeless people seeking cover under its eaves. (Yes, on public exposure, the cathedral had to decency to turn off the the spigots.) Across the Bay in Oakland, Bishop Michael Barber is also a major character. He's best known at present for seeking to declare his diocese bankrupt in order to evade responsibility for 330 pending child sexual abuse claims against former priests.

This sort of clerical cruelty drives some faithful Catholics from their church and leaves the remainder keeping their heads down while quietly participating in the rites and good works that fly under the ecclesial radar. Bless 'em.

McConahay records how right wing operatives built the infrastructure -- political and organizational -- to take advantage of clerical backlash against the modernizing thrust of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) which aimed to bring Catholicism into the modern world. A couple of backward looking popes -- John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- appointed most of the current American bishops; the resulting American hierarchy is an outlier in the Catholic world, hidebound, uncharitable, and unable to come to terms with the lives of the faithful. These clerical princes loath Pope Francis; they cannot abide or survive openness to the world as it is. In particular, in this country, they are enemies of democracy and the separation of church and state, assured that they represent all morality and truth. As the wise Sister Joan Chichester laments: "Nothing really changed after Vatican II. ..."

This book is professional investigative journalism that seeks out connections that many of its actors would prefer to keep under cover. McConahay has explored the nooks and byways of Roman Catholic reaction, following the money from Catholic billionaires into a plethora of institutions, including of course the Supreme Court. She has earned a blurb from that essential secular expert on following the right wing money, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer.

McConahay explains how she relates to her painfilled project:

I have no animus toward the Catholic Church or its bishops. As a lifelong Catholic, including years reporting from Latin America, I have seen the extent to which my coreligionists, including bishops, have gone, even to the point of martyrdom, on behalf of other people and of justice. At the same time, I have always believed that the institution of the Church was worth investigation and critique.

Like other Americans, I was shaken by the events of January 6, 2021. I saw those hours through the eyes and ears of a reporter who has covered war, religion, and politics, both at home and in autocracies abroad. Now, in my own nation's capital, I watched in horror and disbelief at one man's exhortation to loyalists to rise up and march with him to upturn the law. I saw crosses and Bibles side by side with Confederate flags ... [I saw] how the extremists among my coreligionists exuded a sense of embattled Christianity, expressed in comparisons of supposedly repressed U.S. believers with Jews killed by Hitler.

As a reporter, indeed as a Catholic, I felt it was time to look at the U.S. Church as a key instrument playing an outsize role in the current, dangerous political moment.

If you can stomach delving into the moral sewer which is much of the U.S. Roman Catholic episcopate, McConahay offers the goods -- and that's not even dwelling on their misogyny and sexual abuse. Jesus, save us from your priests.

Shards from the embattled republic

Things to think about ...

• Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur started 2023 off right. Congress has not covered itself with glory since but ...

As we approach the new year with hope and optimism in our hearts, let’s heed the timeless words of Daniel Webster etched in the U.S. House of Representatives: “Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests and see whether we also in our day and generation may not perform something to be remembered."

• GOPer dysfunction as evidenced by the Speaker election has many pundits trying to figure out what's wrong with rightwing politicians. Here's David Lauter in the LA Times:

What the voters on the right and their representatives have demanded is a return to the 1950s, if not earlier — an era when government was smaller, the social safety net weaker and traditional gender and racial hierarchies far more solid. That’s not achievable by democratic means: A large majority of the country rejects that agenda. So they’ve turned to anti-democratic tactics to try to push toward their goal. McCarthy and other Republican figures — one can’t truly call them leaders — have tried to indulge that faction to maintain their hold on power.

But their flirtation with anti-democratic practices has clearly hurt the GOP, especially with the swing voters who decide close elections.

That has brought the GOP to its current dead end: Without the far right, they would forfeit their current majority. With it, they may lose their legitimacy with a generation of voters.

• Meanwhile GOPers continue to try to completely ban abortion despite a strong national majority that supports comprehensive reproductive health care. NPR created an useful quiz which you can use to test your own basic understanding of abortion; many of us haven't had to know all about it for many years. Now we do.

• We're finding there's a lot of history, and a lot of heroes, whose work we need to retrieve.

• Jill Filipovic asks: "What's the matter with (rightwing) Men?"

In the US, men commit roughly 90% of homicides, 85% of non-parental murders of children under five, 99% of rapes, 88% of robberies, 85% of burglaries, and 78% of aggravated assaults. Most men who are murdered are killed by other men; most women who are murdered are killed by men, too. ...

The men who enact mass violence do have particular afflictions that separate them out from the Republican voter who may also be xenophobic and misogynist, most notably their misfit-ness — their isolation. But of course many women and girls are misfits, too, and they are far less likely than men to hurt others because of it.

It’s the entitlement, the hewing to narrow gender roles, the sense that one isn’t being allowed to be a true man (and that’s someone else’s fault), and the desire to make other people listen and pay attention and bow down — that’s what seems to drive so much violence from this particular demographic.

And it’s those same dangerous sensibilities that the Republican Party is stoking.

• Jamelle Bouie reflects on what makes bad cops.

With great power should come greater responsibility and accountability. The more authority you hold in your hands, the tighter the restraints should be on your wrists. 

To give power and authority without responsibility or accountability — to give an institution and its agents the right and the ability to do violence without restraint or consequence — is to cultivate the worst qualities imaginable, among them arrogance, sadism and contempt for the lives of others. It is, in short, to cultivate the attitudes and beliefs and habits of mind that lead too many American police officers to beat and choke and shock and shoot at a moment’s notice, with no regard for either the citizens or the communities we’re told they’re here to serve and protect.

• A former Sheriff of King County, Seattle WA, Sue Rahr, describes what often motivates officers:

Though the vest, the gun, the training, and the equipment all lessen the physical danger of the job, nothing assuages the fear of rejection from one’s group.

• Esau McCaulley on Black history in this disunited country:

What makes America a wonder is that this is the land upon which my ancestors, despite the odds, fought for and often made a life for themselves. We are great because this land housed the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, the advocacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the urgency of Nina Simone’s music, and the faith-inspired demand for change in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons. This way of telling the story allows us to speak of American ideals even if the norm is failure rather than accomplishment. It allows our history to chronicle progress without diminishing the suffering necessary to bring it about.

• Ezra Klein waxes philosophical, even if many of us can't afford to: 

... many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. ...

Meanwhile, innovators and entrepreneurs work toward a more climate friendly future.

• Chris Choo is a planning manager for Marin County, California. She tries to look ahead:

“People still tend to think of these things [wildfire and flood] as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.”

• The 2024 presidential election comes closer. And feels familiar. Josh Marshall notes:

If the GOP were ready to move on from Trump they would be having a campaign that wasn’t entirely about him. But that is just what they’re doing.

• Sarah Longwell conducts focus groups: 

While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party—economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues—remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.

• Katherine Stewart studies Christian nationalism:

The lessons to be drawn from the rise of DeSantis in the wake of his reelection in Florida are stark. The descent of the Republican Party into a uniquely American form of authoritarianism has not stopped. The second coming of the “anointed one” will not be any better for America than a return of the first. We may be spared Melania and Roger Stone, but we won’t be spared the politics of division, demonization, and domination. DeSantis is simply promising to do demagoguery better. No wonder Trump has started calling him names.

• Former Federal prosecutor Joyce Vance isn't giving up.

I hear a lot of people who say, often apologetically, that they just can’t take it anymore. That they have to unplug from the news for the sake of their sanity. I understand that. Truly, I do. But bad things happen when good people look away. We are still in too fragile of a position to be able to afford that luxury. It is often said that every generation has to secure democracy for itself. Our fight is not over yet.

What's with these people?

I think that, as the Republican Party has reconstituted itself (or been revealed?) as a vehicle for outright American semi-fascism in the years of Donald Trump, the rest of us can't stop taking an occasional pause to try to understand. What's with these people? Fruitful communication between those who are appalled and the adherents of the Orange God-King is usually impossible. The major media resorted to sending bemused reporters to diners to attempt to have the conversation. And there is a genre of books that take a stab at explanations, especially of this right wing plague's Christian component, such as Sarah Posner's Unholy and Robert P. Jones' White Too Long.

Angela Denker's Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump is a worthy contribution on this group. Her perspective is not what we get through the big media. She's a white, married, midwestern, middle-of-the-road Lutheran pastor who resides in Minnesota. She's got plenty of connections including family who have been Trump voters. And she's a former sportswriter who presents her travels to and among various Trump-sympathetic churches and venues as she might have written profiles of teams and athletes.

The book is a kind of pilgrimage between Christian institutions from Florida, through Orange County, on to Missouri, Appalachia, New England, with a smidgen of Texas thrown in, all to listen and attempt empathy with people whose sort of Christianity and whose politics are not hers, but whom she seeks to treat with respect.

Some of what she records we have gotten used to over the last six years. An awful lot of Trump-voting Christians simply found Hillary Clinton repulsive, not only because of her support for abortion, but in some deeper sense which remains opaque to me. (I'm no Hillary fan, but I never got the Hillary-hate.) Many of these folks feel that American culture has pushed them aside and they feel dissed by elites. We know that. And we know that there's plenty of racism behind the American authoritarian phenomenon. But just when I would think there's nothing new here, Denker would offer an observation I found thoughtful and broadening.

For example, at the anti-abortion DC March for Life in 2017, she mingled with the crowd as they listened to Trump orate on the Jumbotron:

Trump had the fortune of looking like a sheepish little boy in need of love, and even at his most offensive, I wondered if the women and mothers in the crowd who'd managed to vote for him had done so in the same way we excused our husbands and sons, think of grown men as petulant, overgrown little boys.

In Florida, she attended River at Tampa Bay Church whose worship leaders ostentatiously carry guns and preach fear of immanent attack ... by someone or something. This is worship shaped by paranoia. Denker has a very Lutheran take and writes:

Lost at the River [Church] is the biblical idea that we aren't the ones who are called to earn or defend our salvation. We are called instead to gratitude for life rather than ultimate fear of death, for Easter follows Good Friday, and eternal life follows death. But grace is unsatisfying in the winner-takes-all world of the River ....

Few of this author's red state Christians are this bellicose. But they are very much attuned to their respective American cultures.

Trump, with his own combination of bombast and celebrity, would not have appealed to conservative American Christians had they not first been warmed up bo the idea by conservative celebrity preachers, many of whom had their genesis in Orange County and Southern California. ... It's not surprising that American Evangelicals, thus desensitized, were willing to sacrifice purity for popularity. They'd already done so in the largest and most profitable and influential churches.

In the midwest and Appalachia, she delves into the feelings among white Christians of being left behind, perhaps as retribution for ancestral crimes which they could not bring themselves to recognize.

They had felt chastened by President Obama and by Democrats. They did not want to be called racist, but they hesitated to confront past instances of racism and injustice. ... The rural midwestern Americans I met carried a mix of pride and a sense of shame, a hesitation to admit America's original sins because their identity was tied so strongly to being an American and the pride that went along with it.

At ultra-conservative Roman Catholic Thomas More College in New Hampshire, where this Lutheran pastor felt herself very much an anomaly,

they fear their culture is being threatened. For the conservative Catholic families that send their children to Thomas More, the truths that have sustained their power are changing and they are losing their grip on Western society. Much of that fear is about changes in acceptable family structures and increased racial diversity, about the loss of absolute truth and what that means for a church that has been dependent on hierarchy and obedience.

Denker ends her odyssey among midwestern family, certain that what endures are the bonds we preserve, rather than those we sever. She is undoubtedly correct, and also aware that this stance may be easier for her than for others who enjoy less security,

This isn't a great book, but I found it a broadly helpful response for my question: What's with these people?