Republicans have revealed their true colors in the ugliest fashion â and too many liberals want to look away
Tucker Carlson should stop pretending he cares about the women and men in uniform
Brian Stelter of CNN notes that Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channelâs top-rated host, has become the ânew Donald Trumpâ as the leading outrage generator on the populist right. Every night Carlson says something false and obscene: Itâs his business model.
Last week, Carlson trained his insult machine on the U.S. military. He flashed a picture of a flight suit for pregnant women (actually developed during the Trump administration) and complained, âItâs a mockery of the U.S. military.â He went on to pontificate that âwhile Chinaâs military becomes more masculine,â our military is becoming âmore feminine, whatever feminine means anymore since men and women no longer exist. ⌠Itâs out of control, and the Pentagon is going along with this.â
This earned Carlson, who has never served a day in uniform, a well-deserved upbraiding from the Defense Department. There are 232,000 women serving on active duty, constituting 16.5 percent of the total force, and they routinely go into harmâs way. Indeed, recruiting and retaining women is essential to maintaining the U.S. militaryâs edge over China and other potential adversaries. Carlsonâs sexist comments make that harder given how many troops watch Fox News. (It is routinely on in military gyms and chow halls.)
Defense Department spokesman John Kirby pledged that âwe absolutely wonât ⌠take personnel advice from a talk show host.â The Pentagon news site carried an article headlined: âPress Secretary Smites Fox Host That Dissed Diversity in U.S. Military.â
Many individual service members echoed Kirbyâs outrage. My favorite example was a tweet from a Marine Corps veteran:
Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, brother of whistleblower Alexander Vindman, suggested that Fox News be taken off the American Forces Network and TV sets in military common areas. âThis is bad for morale, good order and discipline,â he tweeted.
Carlson can dish out criticism but not take it. He spent the next night whining about how the Defense Department shouldnât attack him â which he described as declaring âwar on a domestic news operation.â (Wonder where he was when President Donald Trump was calling the media the âenemy of the people.â)
Has Carlson finally gone too far by taking on an institution revered by the country? It would be nice to think so. Sen. Joe McCarthy, after all, famously crashed and burned after he accused the U.S. Army of being a hotbed of subversives. âHave you no sense of decency?" demanded the Armyâs lawyer, and McCarthy was finished.
Sadly, I donât see that happening in this instance. The populist right has already made clear that its supposed devotion to the armed forces is entirely transactional: They will claim to be supporting the men and women who keep us safe if by doing so they can score points against the âlibs.â But if the armed forces are an obstacle to their ruthless quest for total power, then they have no compunctions about turning on the troops.
Trump shows how the game is played. âI will always protect our great warfighters,â he claimed, yet he routinely insulted them. He accused troops in Iraq of stealing money, denied that John McCain was a war hero because he was captured, allegedly described soldiers who died in combat as âsuckers and losers,â and reportedly called senior generals and admirals âa bunch of dopes and babies.â
The worst offenses that Trump committed against the armed forces were to pardon war criminals and to send troops to attack peaceful protesters. Those actions subvert the core professionalism of the military, which sees itself as an apolitical institution that follows the rule of law. Little wonder that public faith in the military eroded under Trump.
Of course, Trump knows nothing of the military or its ethos. He viewed the armed forces as if they were a MAGA militia. âI have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump â I have the tough people, but they donât play it tough â until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad," Trump threatened his critics in 2019.
Yet there has been no backlash on the right against Trump despite all the ways that he and his followers have abused the armed forces. Likewise, there is no evidence of any right-wing backlash against Carlson for turning the military into collateral damage in the cultural wars.
Instead, right-wing author J.D. Vance, of âHillbilly Elegyâ fame, attacked military leaders for being too âwokeâ â a ludicrous charge to make against an overwhelmingly conservative officer corps. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) are defending Carlson and attacking the military. Expect to see more anti-military sentiment on the right now that the Defense Department is under a Democratic administration.
Tucker and Trump should stop pretending that they give a damn about the men and women who serve America. All they care about is self-promotion. They will happily sacrifice the troops on the altar of their own ambition â and their followers wonât care.
Dropping in valueâŚthe Trump empireâŚboo hoo
Trumpâs Ailing Empire
His Fortune Slips to $2.3 Billion as Covid and Riot Take a Toll
Donald Trump upended the American presidency after stepping away from the company that made him rich and famous. Four years later, returning to his empire after losing the White House, what he finds may upend him.
Trumpâs net worth is down to $2.3 billion from $3 billion when he became president, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The pandemic he promised would disappear is walloping his company, and the riot that got him impeached for a second time is wounding his brand.
More information hereâŚbut you need to pass thru the "Are you a Robot?â test.
Why arenât we calling the Capitol attack an act of treason?
There has been little public discussion of the term as the framework for understanding what happened on 6 January, experts say
During Donald Trumpâs presidency, the UC Davis law professor Carlton Larson spent a lot of time on the phone telling journalists: âItâs not treason.â
Trumpâs behavior towards Russia: not treason. All the FBI investigations Trump labeled as treason: also not treason. Then came the 6 January attack on the Capitol by hundreds of Trump supporters. That was treason according to the founding fathers, Larson wrote in an op-ed the next day.
But in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of âtreasonâ as the framework for understanding what happened, Larson said. âEverything was âTreason, treason, treason,â when it wasnât, and now you have an event that is closer to the original 18th-century definition of treason than anything thatâs happened, and itâs almost silent. Nobody is using the term at all,â he said.
Federal prosecutors have brought cases against more than 300 people allegedly involved in the Capitol insurrection. So far, many of the rioters have been charged with lower-level offenses, like âdisorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted buildingâ. A few members of extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are facing more serious conspiracy charges.
There has been some public discussion of whether some rioters should face âseditionâ charges, including an early comment by then president-elect Joe Biden that the rioting at the Capitol was an âunprecedented assaultâ on democracy that âborders on seditionâ.
A federal prosecutor who had been working on the Capitol cases told 60 Minutes in late March that he personally believed âthe facts do supportâ sedition charges against some suspects. Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor, was publicly criticized by a federal judge for the media appearance, and is now the subject of an internal review over whether he spoke out inappropriately.
Treason is defined in the US constitution as âlevying warâ against the United States, or âadheringâ to the enemies of the United States and âgiving them aid and comfortâ. The framers had in mind âmen gathering with guns, forming an army, and marching on the seat of governmentâ, Larson said.
Sedition, in contrast, is âa broader term for disloyal behaviorâ against the government, Larson said.
There are two main types of sedition in US law: one is sedition associated with speech, or âseditious libelâ, a charge which has been repeatedly used in the US to target anti-war and leftist activists, particularly during wartime, according to Jenny Carroll, a professor at the University of Alabama school of law. The other is âseditious conspiracyâ, defined under federal law as taking action either to âoverthrowâ the US government, to use force âto prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United Statesâ or âto seize, take, or possess any property of the United Statesâ.
While treason is a crime still punishable by death in the United States, the maximum penalty for seditious conspiracy is 20 years.
âIf thatâs not seditious conspiracy, I donât know what isâ
In his book On Treason: A Citizenâs Guide to the Law, Larson argued that Americans were unlikely to mount an internal rebellion against the United States in modern times. Then the Capitol attack proved him wrong.
What was distinctive about the Capitol riot, he said, was the use of force, which is necessary for something to count as âlevying warâ against the United States.
He compared the insurrection to the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which was forcefully put down by George Washington, and resulted in multiple indictments for treason.
âIf you asked a lawyer in 1790 if [6 January] was an act of treason or levying war against the United States, they would have almost certainly said yes,â Larson said.
Yet Larson said he did not expect prosecutors would file treason charges in the 6 January cases, because the charge would probably add too many legal complications. A legal precedent from 1851 set a higher bar for the definition of treason, he wrote, defining it only as an attempt to overthrow the government itself, not simply the obstruction of one particular law.
The definition of âseditious conspiracyâ, in contrast, seems like a much easier match, Larson and Carroll agreed, particularly because it includes conspiracies âto prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any lawâ, which the Capitol invaders appear to have accomplished by forcing lawmakers to hide and delaying the certification of the 2020 election results.
âSeditious conspiracy captures the flavor of January 6,â said Steve Vladeck, a federal courts expert at the University of Texas school of law. âYou had a whole lot of people â who may not have had exactly the same motive, or may not have committed the exact same acts â who were in a very large degree involved in a common plan, the goal of which was to somehow, in some way, keep President Trump in office.â
âIf thatâs not seditious conspiracy, I donât know what is.â
Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US history
It remains unlikely that the majority of the rioters will face seditious conspiracy charges, experts said.
The crime of âseditious conspiracyâ requires proof, not just of the action, but of agreement, Carroll said. âThe global chatter among US attorneys is that there has been a lot of work to trace electronic communications individuals engaged in to figure out who was talking to who,â she added.
âTo the extent that there are charges for seditious conspiracy, it would be against particular little cells of people,â Larson said. âIt would be impossible to show that all of those people [at the Capitol] had some type of prior agreement with each other.â
Sherwin, the federal prosecutor, told 60 Minutes in late March that there were âover 400 criminal casesâ in total, but that only 10% of cases were âthe more complex conspiracy casesâ involving militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who âdid have a planâ.
Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US history. Thatâs largely because seditious conspiracy itself âdoesnât happen that muchâ, Larson said.
In 1995, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and several followers were convicted of seditious conspiracy in a case related to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Oscar LĂłpez Rivera, the leader of a Puerto Rican independence group, served 35 years in prison for seditious conspiracy before Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017.
Some previous attempts by federal prosectors to convict far-right extremists for seditious conspiracy have failed.
In 2012, a Michigan judge dismissed sedition charges against the five members of the Hutaree militia, a Christian militia group, ruling that the governmentâs case had relied too much on âcircumstantial evidenceâ. Members of the group pleaded guilty to lesser weapons charges and were sentenced to time served.
In 1988, an all-white jury acquitted 13 white supremacists of sedition charges in a high-profile trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
More recently, Trumpâs attorney general, William Barr, called last summer for prosecutors to file seditious conspiracy charges against demonstrators against police violence in the wake of George Floydâs killing by police. Barr was particularly focused on protesters in Portland, where there had been property damage to a federal building, Carroll said.
This was âentirely inconsistent with how previous protest movementsâ had been treated, Carroll said, and prompted concern and outrage from legal experts.
The US government, Carroll said, âhas not been great about being consistent about how it treats different types of dissentersâ.
âDissenters calling for change in social conditions or racial conditions or class conditions tend to be much more heavily prosecuted than folks who do things like engage in voter intimidation or engage in acts of white-based maintenance of power.â
Sedition laws in the early 20th century, including the Sedition Act of 1918, was ânot only focused on World War Iâ, but âreally focused on shutting down socialists and communists, who the government thought were going to be a threat to democracyâ, said Roy Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University.
The supreme court at the time upheld convictions of âsmall groups of dissidentsâ who were âdistributing fliers speaking out against the US governmentâ, Gutterman said. That included socialists passing out flyers advocating that Americans peacefully resist the draft, which the supreme court at the time ruled was not protected as free speech.
When a law originally designed to crack down on leftist and labor organizers were used to prosecute a Ku Klux Klan leader after a cross burning in the 1960s, the supreme court set a new standard, concluding that the law violated the Klan leaderâs free speech rights.
Two articles:
The GOP canât be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump this year, recently told the Atlantic why he remains committed to the party: âIâm a Republican because Iâve been a Republican far longer than Donald Trump has. Heâs a Republican usurper.⌠Iâm not going to let him take the party. So I will fight. I will fight like hell.â
I admire Kinzingerâs fighting spirit. I once shared it. I recall saying something very similar in 2016 when Trump was marching through the Republican primaries: Itâs my party, and I wonât leave it. My hope was that a decisive win for Hillary Clinton would bring the GOP to its senses. That obviously did not happen, so the day after the 2016 election, I re-registered as an independent after a lifetime as a Republican.
It is a decision I have not for a moment regretted, because the GOP has become even more of a horror show than I anticipated. As former House speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) notes in a new memoir, the âcraziesâ have taken over. There are vanishingly few John McCain-style Republicans left; Kinzinger (a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard) is one of the few. The partyâs center of gravity has shifted to kooks such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who blamed Jewish space lasers for wildfires) and low-rent hucksters such as Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (who reportedly shared nude photos of his sexual conquests with his colleagues and is under investigation for possible sex trafficking).
Most Republicans donât care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack âwas led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.â
This is a portrait of a party that canât be saved â at least in the foreseeable future. The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history. It has become a bastion of irrationality, conspiracy mongering, racism, nativism and anti-scientific prejudices.
So what should a sane, center-right voter â someone who might have voted for the GOP in the past â do under those circumstances?
There has been talk of forming a third party, but itâs not likely to succeed in our winner-take-all political system. Smaller parties flourish only in countries with proportional representation. There hasnât been a successful third party in the United States since the 1850s, when the GOP arose out of the wreckage of the Whig Party. We can and should undermine the political duopoly with reforms such as multi-member congressional districts, ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries. Such steps, which are being pushed by Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), would make moderate candidates and even third-party candidates more viable.
But we wonât transform our political system anytime soon. In the meantime, centrists have a binary choice: Support either an increasingly extremist and obstructionist Republican Party or a Democratic Party that, under President Biden, is working to solve our most pressing problems.
Biden has turbocharged vaccinations with better management: The seven-day average of new vaccination doses has gone from 892,399 on Inauguration Day to almost 3 million today. He has boosted the economic recovery with a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill; the unemployment rate is down to 6 percent. Now he is pushing a $2 trillion plan to rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure â something that Trump only talked about doing.
Itâs possible to oppose Bidenâs plans on fiscal conservative grounds, but Republicans have no standing left on that issue after supporting Trumpâs $1.9 trillion tax cut during an economic expansion. Likewise, Republicans have lost all credibility on free trade by supporting Trumpâs trade wars and on foreign policy by backing Trumpâs neo-isolationism. What do they have left? Scare-mongering rhetoric (every Democratic initiative is a sign of âsocialismâ) and culture wars (Dr. Seuss, Major League Baseball) to distract their base.
But while Biden hasnât gotten any GOP votes in Congress for his agenda yet, he has won broad approval from the country at large. At 53.1 percent, Bidenâs approval rating is higher than Trumpâs ever was. Polls show that 73 percent approve of Bidenâs handling of the coronavirus and 60 percent of his handling of the economy. There is also broad support for his infrastructure plan, with 64 percent backing tax hikes on corporations to pay for it.
Biden is governing from the ânew center,â while Republicans are increasingly catering to the far right with shrill, divisive rhetoric and antidemocratic actions such as bills to restrict voting. Under those circumstances, those of us on the center-right canât afford a third-party flirtation. We need to become Biden Republicans.
New GOP Panic as âBiden Republicansâ Upend Trumpâs Alliance
President Biden is boasting about Mitch McConnellâs voters supporting his policies. In this special report, MSNBCâs Ari Melber examines how republican voters are supporting Pres. Bidenâs agenda from the popular Covid Relief Bill to a $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs package. Melber reports on how democrats are using the âReagan Playbookâ â working on a wave of âBiden Republicansâ similar to the âReagan Democrats.â
We see all the undercurrents going on with the Republican party and their desire to call out the legitimately won election for Biden - The Big Lie. The push is for them to continue with keeping this false idea out there, igniting their base and poisoning the democracy.
It is a terrifying prospect to have this party create a blind trust to 1/3 or the population to continue to believe in their lies. 2022 is not that far off for lots more changes in the House/Senate and swinging it back to the Râs.
Thomas L. Friedman
Trumpâs Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy
May 4, 2021
Opinion Columnist
President Bidenâs early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But itâs also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trumpâs Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade away and everything would return to normal. It hasnât.
We are not OK. Americaâs democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war â more than at any other time in our modern history. Todayâs seeming political calm is actually resting on a false bottom that weâre at risk of crashing through at any moment.
Because, instead of Trumpâs Big Lie fading away, just the opposite is happening â first slowly and now quickly.
Under Trumpâs command and control from Mar-a-Largo, and with the complicity of most of his partyâs leaders, that Big Lie â that the greatest election in our history, when more Republicans and Democrats voted than ever before, in the midst of a pandemic , must have been rigged because Trump lost â has metastasized. Itâs being embraced by a solid majority of elected Republicans and ordinary party members â local, state and national.
âDenying the legitimacy of our last election is becoming a prerequisite for being elected as a Republican in 2022,â observed Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaqâs âWorld Reimaginedâ podcast and author of the book âIndispensable: When Leaders Really Mattered.â
âThis is creating a filter that over time will block out anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.â It will leave us with âa Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.â
This is not an exaggeration. Here is what Representative Anthony Gonzalez, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told The Hill about the campaign within the party to oust Representative Liz Cheney from her House G.O.P. leadership position, because of her refusal to go along with the Big Lie:
âIf a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit. Liz isnât going to lie to people. ⌠Sheâs going to stand on principle.â
Think about that for a second. To be a leader in todayâs G.O.P. you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our Republic: the integrity of our election. You have to accept everything that Trump has said about the election â without a shred of evidence â and ignore everything his own attorney general, F.B.I. director and election security director said â based on the evidence â that there was no substantive fraud.
What kind of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that.
There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.
Rep Liz Cheney fights backâŚR-WY.
Liz Cheney, a Republican, represents Wyomingâs at-large congressional district in the U.S. House.
In public statements again this week, former president Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trumpâs language can provoke violence again . Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work â confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.
The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. In the immediate wake of the violence of Jan. 6, almost all of us knew the gravity and the cause of what had just happened â we had witnessed it firsthand.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) left no doubt in his public remarks. On the floor of the House on Jan. 13, McCarthy said: âThe president bears responsibility for Wednesdayâs attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.â Now, McCarthy has changed his story.
I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. Each of us swears an oath before God to uphold our Constitution. The electoral college has spoken. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple Trump-appointed judges, have rejected the former presidentâs arguments, and refused to overturn election results. That is the rule of law; that is our constitutional system for resolving claims of election fraud.
The question before us now is whether we will join Trumpâs crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval. America is exceptional because our constitutional system guards against that. At the heart of our republic is a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power among political rivals in accordance with law. President Ronald Reagan described this as our American âmiracle.â
While embracing or ignoring Trumpâs statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country. Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful, especially as we now compete on the world stage against Communist China and its claims that democracy is a failed system.
For Republicans, the path forward is clear.
First, support the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigations of the Jan. 6 attack. Those investigations must be comprehensive and objective; neither the White House nor any member of Congress should interfere.
Second, we must support a parallel bipartisan review by a commission with subpoena power to seek and find facts; it will describe for all Americans what happened. This is critical to defeat the misinformation and nonsense circulating in the press and on social media. No currently serving member of Congress â with an eye to the upcoming election cycle â should participate. We should appoint former officials, members of the judiciary and other prominent Americans who can be objective , just as we did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The commission should be focused on the Jan. 6 attacks. The Black Lives Matter and antifa violence of last summer was illegal and reprehensible, but it is a different problem with a different solution.
Finally, we Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality. In our hearts, we are devoted to the American miracle. We believe in the rule of law, in limited government, in a strong national defense, and in prosperity and opportunity brought by low taxes and fiscally conservative policies.
There is much at stake now, including the ridiculous wokeness of our political rivals, the irrational policies at the border and runaway spending that threatens a return to the catastrophic inflation of the 1970s. Reagan formed a broad coalition from across the political spectrum to return America to sanity, and we need to do the same now. We know how. But this will not happen if Republicans choose to abandon the rule of law and join Trumpâs crusade to undermine the foundation of our democracy and reverse the legal outcome of the last election.
History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.
The long tail of Trumpâs Big Lie: 9 ways it continues to affect American politics
Donald Trump isnât moving on. Neither is his party.
More than six months after his defeat, Trump continues to declare that the 2020 presidential election was âstolenâ from him. And this lie, sometimes called âthe Big Lie,â continues to have a major impact on American politics.
The lie would matter, as a matter of principle, even if it wasnât having much of a practical effect. But it matters even more when it is fueling a national Republican push to make elections laws more restrictive, playing a significant role in who wins GOP nominations and leadership positions, motivating a partisan push to âauditâ the 2020 results, causing another partisan fight in Congress, aiding the QAnon conspiracy movement, and affecting public perceptions of the current president.
Here are nine ways the Big Lie continues to reverberate.
Fuel for restrictive voting laws
Perhaps the most consequential result of Trumpâs lies about what happened in 2020 is the slew of 2021 efforts by Republican state legislators to make it more difficult to vote.
Among other things, Republican proposals would reduce the availability of ballot drop boxes, shorten early voting periods and absentee voting periods, make it harder for voters to obtain mail-in ballots, increase voter identification requirements, prohibit 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, eliminate Election Day voter registration, limit who is allowed to return someone elseâs absentee ballot and more aggressively purge voter rolls.
In many cases, itâs not clear whether Republican legislators actually believe the 2020 election was fraudulent or whether they are cynically using votersâ own misapprehensions about the election as political cover. The distinction is irrelevant in practice, since the lies are turning into suppressive bills no matter what the real reason is.
A career problem for Republicans who stood for truth
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood firm against election lies, now faces a primary challenger who has Trumpâs powerful endorsement: Congressman Jody Hice, who began his campaign by uttering election lies (and last week made a misleading claim about the Capitol riot on January 6). And Raffensperger has already had some of his power stripped by the Republican governor and state legislature.
Another Georgia Republican who stood up for facts about what happened in 2020, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, announced this week that he would not seek reelection. Like Raffensperger, Duncan has made Republican enemies by declining to humor Trumpâs nonsense.
It isnât just Georgia officials on the hot seat for speaking truth. Nevadaâs Republican Party Central Committee voted in April to censure Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske for refusing to investigate (baseless allegations of) election fraud and being too âdismissiveâ of (baseless) concerns about âelection integrity.â
A rationale for a crackdown on elections officials
Republicans have not only targeted particular state elections chiefs. Lies about how particular counties conducted the 2020 election have provided a rationale for a broad Republican effort to restrict local elections officials.
A new Georgia law gives a state board the power to appoint someone to temporarily take over local elections boards. A new Florida law says a county elections chief can be penalized up to $25,000 if any drop box is made available in a way that violates the lawâs requirements. An Iowa law signed in March allows local elections officials to be fined up to $10,000 for a âtechnical infractionâ and charged with a felony for failing to implement guidance from the Iowa secretary of state.
And Republicans around the country have or are trying to forbid local officials, among others, from sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not specifically requested them.
An impetus for a change in House Republican leadership
Last week, Republicans removed Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the third-ranking spot in the partyâs House leadership because of her vocal criticism of election lies â and replaced her with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has repeatedly promoted those lies and who tried to get the election overturned.
A factor in open primary races
Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer who is now running in the Republican primary for the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Rob Portman, has turned the Big Lie into an applause line in his speeches â proclaiming that he, unlike his âestablishmentâ rivals, is willing to flatly declare that the election was stolen from Trump.
In Virginia, the just-concluded Republican gubernatorial primary featured a candidate, state Sen. Amanda Chase, who also emphasized her baseless position that the election was stolen.
Chase finished third in a seven-candidate field. But she wasnât really alone: the winner, businessman Glenn Youngkin, made âelection integrityâ one of his campaign issues and declined for weeks to say that Biden had been legitimately elected, changing his tune only after he secured the Republican nomination last week.
The basis for an Arizona âauditâ â and pushes for other audits
The Big Lie underpinned the decision of Arizonaâs Republican-controlled state Senate to commission a so-called âauditâ of the 2020 election in the stateâs most populous county, Maricopa, after the county had already conducted an audit that found no problems.
The state Senate hired an obscure, inexperienced firm that is run by someone who has promoted election lies; the firmâs Maricopa processes have been widely criticized by actual elections experts. But Republicans in other states, from Georgia to Michigan and California, are now pushing for similar âaudits.â
Another fight in Congress
The Big Lie led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Now, instead of working together on any number of other issues, Congress is spending time fighting over whether to create an independent commission to investigate what happened.
Of course, the two sides arenât equivalent here: It is Republicans in particular who have turned what could be a moment of quick and easy bipartisan unity into yet another partisan scrap.
Ammunition for conspiracy theorists
As CNNâs Donie OâSullivan has reported, the Arizona âauditâ that is based on the Big Lie has become a fixation in QAnon conspiracy circles â a basis, albeit a ludicrous basis, to continue to believe that a series of states will somehow overturn President Joe Bidenâs already-certified victories and that Trump will soon be returned to office.
Granted, QAnon adherents always manage to find some nonsensical reason or another to justify their nonsensical beliefs. But thereâs no doubt that the continued prevalence of election lies has given the movement some ammunition.
An (unknown) effect on the public
Polling evidence suggests that there is a widespread perception among Republican voters that Biden was not legitimately elected. For example, a CNN poll in late April found that 70% of Republican respondents said they did not think Biden legitimately won enough votes to be president.
Itâs impossible to say with certainty how this false belief is affecting these votersâ broader perceptions of Bidenâs presidency. But it seems highly likely that it contributes to the polarization of the public, limiting the Presidentâs capacity for earning the support of people who voted for Trump â and even limiting average Americansâ ability to have productive political conversations with each other.
The rising cost of being in the National Guard: Reservists and guardsmen are twice as likely to be hungry as other American groups
Civil unrest and pandemic deployments have led to extreme food insecurity among National Guard and Reserves
National Guard and reserve soldiers are having trouble feeding their families due to a year of record deployments.
Hunger among Guard members and reservists is more than double the national rate, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from mid-April through early June.
They report more food insecurity than nearly any other group, regardless of household income, education, age or race. Nearly one in five Guard members report sometimes or often not having enough to eat. And a third of those with a spouse serving in the National Guard or reserves report not having enough to eat. The numbers are even more troubling for National Guard and reserve families with children.
In an ordinary year, when theyâre not activated or deployed, most reservists and Guard members spend one weekend a month running drills and two weeks a year, often during the summer, training. This schedule allows most of them to work civilian jobs or get an education as well. Itâs a similar work schedule for reservists, who work for different branches of the military.
Over the pandemic the National Guard has faced longer deployments and periods of activation. Theyâve overseen coronavirus testing, distributed food at the nationâs food banks, quelled civil unrest and more recently helped to administer vaccines, said John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, an advocacy group. This is in addition to responding to more natural disasters such as wildfires and flood.
The National Guard has declared 2020 âthe Year of the Guard.â Last year, the National Guard was activated for 11 million âman days,â the highest number since World War II, Goheen said. By comparison, in 2019 there were only 2 million man days.
Wayne Hall, a spokesman for the National Guard, said he is skeptical about the food insecurity census data. He said that between the Army and Air National Guard and the different branches of the reserves, there are 1.2 million service members but the census data only accounts for under 400,000 of them. He said he has not encountered service members who have complained of household hunger.
âThese figures are an underrepresentation of the full force,â Hall said. âAnd almost a quarter surveyed didnât report.â
Yet several military advocacy groups said they are seeing rising problems with food insecurity, and suggest such problems might be invisible to military leadership. Jennifer Davis, lobbyist for the National Military Family Association, said hungry Guard members and reservists are motivated to seem âfine" and are hesitant to seek help or reveal financial hardship.
âA service member has to consider promotability and clearances: You canât afford to struggle too badly; you have to keep your bills paid,â she said. âYou can lose your clearance if your finances are in a shambles, weâre talking even a bounced check. If it comes between paying the bills and keeping food on the table, thereâs pressure to pay those bills. And there are concerns about sharing with your leadership that youâre struggling to take care of your family, because you never want that to come back and haunt you when youâre up for promotion.â
One National Guard member in Georgia said he lost his job as a schoolteacher last spring, as the pandemic began, because of his stepped-up Guard schedule. He asked to speak anonymously, because his termination is under investigation.
âWhy are we activating more National Guard troops than at the height of the war in Afghanistan?â the guard member said. âYouâre taking these people away from their families, and for what reason? There is no reason. This is becoming a problem for civilian employers.â
After nearly five months on the Hill, National Guard winds down Capitol deployment
Another National Guard officer who has spent seven months in uniform since the start of the pandemic, who also asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job, said a full 25 percent of the National Guard was on active duty last June, dealing with the pandemic and civil unrest.
âThe shadow issue that affects Guard troops right now is the ludicrous tempo at which theyâve been activated over the past year. Itâs hard to find Guard members who have not been told to report in the past year, everyone has been pulled away from their regular lives,â he said.
If called up to active duty, low-ranking Guard members and reservists make a base pay of around $3,000 per month. When not on active duty, Guard members get around $200 for a weekend of drills, which is why most have other civilian jobs.
The spike in days worked takes Guard members and reservists away from their jobs, with many soldiers not drawing that income if theyâre away on military duty.
Even in normal times, military spouses have higher levels of unemployment or underemployment than civilian populations, citing factors like job scarcity near military bases and frequent moves. Moving around can leave military families far from their extended families and increase a nonmilitary partnerâs child care burden. Before the pandemic, 22 percent of military spouses reported being unemployed, according to a large Pentagon survey.
Advocacy groups, including the National Military Family Association and Blue Star Families, said they are seeing larger numbers of unemployment among military spouses due to the pandemic.
In some cases military families donât take advantage of food assistance programs. Even before the pandemic, perceived stigma deterred military families who qualified for free or reduced-price school meals from taking advantage of such programs, said Josh Protas, vice president of public policy for MAZON, a Jewish hunger organization that works with military families. The past year exacerbated the problem, he said, with many low-income military families not availing themselves of, or even aware of, Pandemic EBT, a debit card system that replaced school meals when schools went remote.
Another problem involves housing costs, said Matt Pelak, a Guard member in New York City. Usually, a basic allowance for housing doesnât kick in until a deployment is more than 30 days. Many of these deployments are fewer than 30 days, so the military doesnât have to pay the housing allowance, putting an additional financial burden on low-wage soldiers. That means soldiers are paying for their rent or mortgage back home, plus wherever they are living while deployed.
Medical insurance often works the same way, adding to the financial squeeze, Goheen said. When guard members are mobilized or deployed at home, the only time they have medical coverage is if their order is 31 days or longer, he said. Guard members and reservists would then be eligible for the same medical coverage as active-duty troops. But those service members activated for less than a month have fewer options, and must obtain their own health care coverage.
Many Guard members and reservistsâ military pay is not commensurate with their civilian salary, according to Protas, and many civilian jobs are not required to pay Guard members their wages during absences or even to keep the civilian jobs open for their return.
For the teacher in Georgia, the protracted nature of deployments in 2020 took a toll on his standing at work. He said the current level of financial instability and food insecurity had âeverything to do with civilian employers and underpaid Guard members.â
He said things seemed to be going well at his school, but something changed. He said the administration began asking him to persuade his unit to change his drill dates and bombarding him with âquestions that werenât appropriate.â His teaching contract was not renewed.
The irony, according to Goheen, is that many of the covid missions for the Guard were working at American food banks, helping to feed the needy. And while the nation is increasingly vaccinated and signs point to economic recovery, Guard members and reservists continue to struggle.
Some of Guard members and reservistsâ financial precariousness is because employers are tired of giving them the time off. All those absences put extra pressure on other workers and bosses, said the Guard officer who spent seven months in uniform.
âBack in the spring of 2020, employers were saying, âYes, go, fight the pandemic. But as time goes on theyâre less enthusiastic,â he said. âThe cracks take time to show with these kinds of things.â
Trump wasnât just an abnormal figure â psychiatrists say his rhetoric caused real trauma
Donald Trump was an unprecedented president in many ways. He was the first president to lack any previous political or military experience, one of only five presidents to win an election without the popular vote (and the first to also later get impeached) and the only president to reject an election loss outright in order to promote a Nazi-esque Big Lie.
For millions of Americans, the end of Trumpâs presidency came as a relief â but for some, the break from normalcy has lasted far longer than they anticipated. Several psychiatrists who spoke with Salon used the word âtraumaâ to describe the lingering impact the last four years have had on many Americans, particularly those from marginalized communities most at risk from Trumpâs rhetoric.
Dr. David Reiss, a psychiatrist who contributed to the book âThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,â told Salon that although many of Trumpâs policies could be characterized as traumatizing, there were two areas which âcrossed partisan boundaries.â
First, he pointed to Trumpâs intentionally divisive rhetoric (policy-wise he was not that different from other recent Republican presidents) and noted that it has traumatized his supporters as well as his opponents.
âThis is different from ânormalâ pre-Trump politics wherein using anger strategically is not uncommon, but is typically not a personal attack and at least on the surface, it is couched in âmatureâ language and focused on policies or specific behaviors regarding policies rather than being personal attacks,â Reiss wrote via email. âTrump seems always willing to attack anyone who disagrees with him, or whom he does not see as sufficiently supportive of him. His attacks in very direct, personal, immature ways (name-calling/childish nicknames; stating overtly that opponents are horrible people, etc.), as well as Trumpâs using occasions that are typically at least superficially non-partisan (holidays, tragedies, etc.) to almost always include an attack on some person or persons, is far outside of what is normal.â
These actions traumatize supporters by triggering their anger in emotionally damaging ways, and, more importantly, make his opponents targets for very real-life abuse from Trumpâs supporters, Reiss said. His political opponents, meanwhile, have to endure an unusual amount of verbal abuse â even for contemporary politics.
Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NY Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine, also noted Trumpâs extreme and cruel rhetoric as abnormal in American politics.
âPresident Trump used deprecating, extreme, cruel language to discuss anyone or groups he did not agree with,â Saltz told Salon via email. âHe often included an indictment of the person or group with verbally aggressive language, even suggesting at times for others who agreed with him to rise up and âdefeatâ any who would oppose him. He ridiculed and shamed others around him and constantly threatened others with being treated aggressively should they fail to support him.â
Even worse, Trumpâs actions âgave permission to many people to treat other people and groups the same way. As a result, it had a ripple effect, where targeted groups (due to immigration status, race, religion, sexuality, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) were being treated badly through being shamed, threatened with violence, and threatened with loss (money, inclusion, a home to live in, shunning from their society, etc.).â
When Trump wasnât abusing people with his juvenile insults, he was altering their sense of reality to meet his own political purposes. This occurred most infamously, of course, with his refusal to accept the science behind COVID-19 or the objective reality that he lost the 2020 election.
âSimilarly, although with somewhat different content, Trumpâs constant âredefining of realityâ to meet his needs of the moment, often with minimal connection with objective reality or in direct contradiction of facts, and not infrequently even internally inconsistent (Just last week: From âNo one knows more about taxes than meâ to âNo one really knows about taxesâ) is traumatizing,â Reiss said. âAgain, agree or disagree, these statements are at best discombobulating, if not overtly traumatizing (i.e., âgaslightingâ). Even if a person supports Trump, the constant fluctuations of his definition of reality is disorganizing and anxiety-provoking â and then ties into triggering anger at others who do not support whichever point of view you adopt.â
Saltz had a similar observation, explaining that âwhen a leader makes statements that deny reality, enforce that only news they agree with is real news and all else is fake news can further the trauma for those people who are living with the difficult consequences of their reality. So to be in terrible struggle and then have the leader, the person in charge, say it is not your reality can only add to trauma.â
She compared Trump to other world leaders who have traumatized people â including Iraqâs Saddam Hussein, Cubaâs Fidel Castro, the Soviet Unionâs Joseph Stalin and Spainâs Francisco Franco â arguing that âthe very essence of trauma is believing that your life or future life has been put at real risk, that you experience living through an utterly frightening and dangerous time that is not typical for the human experience of feeling safe and having some security.â
She added, âThis type of fearful loss of the ability to say âI am okay, I will be okayâ can generate ongoing psychological symptoms of anxiety, depression, intrusive frightening thoughts, flashback reoccurrences of terrible moments, trouble concentrating, sleep disruption and avoidance of anything that reminds you of the traumatic time.â
Olivia James, a London-based therapist who specializes in trauma, recalled that roughly one-third of her practice reported unanticipated physical responses when Trump began smearing then-candidate Joe Biden on the campaign trail.
âSeveral people reported they found themselves breathing deeply from their bellies,â James wrote to Salon. âTheir shoulders dropped. And they didnât even realize they were holding four years of tension in their shoulders or diaphragm. Four others spontaneously started to weep. They found they were grieving the past four years.â
James elaborated on how Trump is so effective at hurting people.
âTrump is widely regarded as a malignant narcissist; twisting the truth, gaslighting and bullying,â James explained. âTrump uses DARVO - a blame-shifting strategy used by abusers including narcissists: 1. Deny 2. Attack 3. Reverse Victim & Offender. He used it against 20 women who accused him of sexual assault. Heâs also used it to claim the Democrats were trying to steal the election he won by a landslide.â
James later added, âThe fact that so many Republicans backed him even after he showed what he was capable of will also add to the trauma and anxiety. Thereâs also the real fear that he may come back, so the hyper-vigilance will continue.â
Yet she said people should not feel embarrassed or believe they are powerless at Trumpâs hands.
âIf you feel traumatised by Trump, this means your empathy and moral compass are still functioning,â James said. âFind your tribe so you donât feel so isolated and powerless. Weâve got to hold onto our hope and our shared humanity. Focus on what you can do, individually and collectively. Even micro actions will help you feel like you have agency.â
An American Kingdom
A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under Godâs authority, and is central to Donald Trumpâs GOP
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/11/mercy-culture-church/
FORT WORTH â The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.
Greed , the map read over the west side. Competition , it said over the east side. Rebellion , it said over the north part of the city. Lust , it said over the south.
It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, âFather, we declare America is yours.â
Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four âhigh-ranking demonic forces.â That all of America was in the grip of âan anti-Christ spirit.â That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the âYear of the Supernatural,â a time when believers would rise up and wage âspiritual warfareâ to advance Godâs Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown â a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.
âSay, âCleanse me,â â the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. âSay, âSpeak, Lord, your servants are listening.â â
The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trumpâs Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of Godâs Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.
This is the world of Trumpâs spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent âheavenly strikeâ and âa Christian populist uprising,â leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.
Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America â vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the âseven mountainsâ of life â family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government â after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.
None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.
What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as Godâs chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term âevangelical voterâ refers to â not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.
That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting.
It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a âspiritual fatherâ of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was âspiritual authority,â he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas.
Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born.
âMercyâ for undeserved grace.
âCultureâ for the world they wanted to create.
That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services.
In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs.
In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs.
On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through â two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: âWhen we start, I want you to wait to build it â then I want you to do those drum rolls as weâre building it.â He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer.
The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named âgood greenâ and âgood red.â Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit â not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it â a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it â golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.
That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black âMC,â in through an entrance where the words âFear Goâ were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee.
âWelcome to Mercy,â the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the âsexual confusionâ of being gay, queer or transgender. They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon âMercyâ sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary.
Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs.
What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing.
A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new.
âThe Holy Spirit is in this room,â he said.
Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. Another video began playing â this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation:
America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the âseductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control Godâs people.â Beware of âfreedom that is actually just rebellion against God.â Beware of confusion. Beware of ârogue leaders.â Beware of a world that âpreaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,â and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation.
âJust say, âHoly Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,â â he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday.
People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the churchâs website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet.
When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags.
âWelcome to Mercy,â the greeters said again.
By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin.
One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was âraising up an army of influential leadersâ across Fort Worth.
Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine âoperationsâ around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worthâs sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was âthe demonic battle of our lifetimeâ and told those gathered that âyou are the warriors in that battle.â
Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers.
A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries.
A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, âPlease, just bless my life.â
A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: âJesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,â she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord.
âGod wants to tell you that youâre so beautiful,â she said into one window.
âI feel God is saying that youâve done a good job for your family,â she said into another.
âI feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,â she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. âWhen God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,â she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. âI feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?â she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. âAnd I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, âJesus, I give you my shame.â Say, âJesus, I give you my regret,â â the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. â âYou know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,â â the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, âWelcome to the family.â
Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Womenâs Night.
âI feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,â a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun.
âEvery time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,â her friend said.
âYeah, that happens to me all the time, too,â said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to âprophesy over the landâ in anticipation of a revival.
âI donât understand it; I just know itâs God,â Autumn said.
âSo many miracles,â said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding.
They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastorâs wife, during which she referred to the women as âvesselsâ and described âthe Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.â
Another day â Election Day in Fort Worth â hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding.
âSupernatural,â said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers whoâd knocked on thousands of doors around the city.
A candidate for the 2022 governorâs race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that âthis is the beginning of a righteous movement.â
âWe are not just going after the mayorship â weâre going after every seat,â he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray.
âJesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,â his campaign adviser said. âWe stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. God, this is only the beginning.â
Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, âGod, Iâll go anywhere; God, Iâll do anything,â hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love.
âEveryone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, âBy this we know love,â â he said. âJesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.â
He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, âJesus, Jesus,â trancelike, until the blond man said, âItâs about that time.â
He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth.
One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before.
Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed.
Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door.
It wasnât the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable.
âMaybe someone is struggling with their identity,â Ryan said.
He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void.
âI never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,â he said. âWe all take care of each other, right, Tom?â
âOh, yeah,â said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called âmisfitsâ into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken.
âItâs all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,â Tom said. âThatâs what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that itâs all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. Thatâs my testimony.â
That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces.
âThe sheep will know the shepherdâs voice,â he repeated to himself to calm his nerves.
âHey, Jesus loves yâall,â he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by.
âHe does, he does,â the woman said, and he pressed on.
âIs anything bothering you?â he said to a man holding a shopping bag.
âNo, Iâm good,â the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk.
It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by.
He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest.
âDo you talk to God?â Nick asked him.
âEvery day â I died twice,â the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident.
âWhat happened when you died?â Nick asked.
âDidnât see any white lights,â the man said. âNothing.â
âWell, Jesus loves you,â Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red.
âHi, Iâm Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?â
âKind of you to ask,â the man said. âMy uncle killed himself yesterday.â
âOh,â said Nick, pausing for a moment. âIâm sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesnât feel like it all the time.â
He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time.
âThe singer said if youâre struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, âOkay, God, I guess I give it to you,â and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, âI have you.â I heard God say, âI love you. I made you for a purpose.â When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.â
The man with red eyes listened.
âThanks for saying that,â he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test.
âIf I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,â said Nick. âJohn the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? Iâm ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off â it doesnât matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.â
Ready for what, though, is the lingering question.
Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus.
To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, âThereâs a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldnât be involved in politics. Itâs just loving the city. Being engaged. Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who donât align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.â
Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: âCan you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.â
That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come.
The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in.
â Submission ,â he said.
âWeâve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,â he continued.
âGod makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,â he continued.
âWhen you submit, God fights for you,â he concluded.
He cued the band. The drums began to pound again, and he told people to âbreathe in the presence of God,â and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them.
âI declare beautiful, supernatural submission,â they said.
Conservatives and capitalists are getting a divorce â and itâs going to get really, really ugly
On May 18, a pro-Trump think tank called the Claremont Institute hosted a conference at a Ritz Carlton not far from the Pentagon. It featured talks by a small but influential faction of American conservatives including former Trump national-security advisor Michael Anton, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, and âHillbilly Elegyâ author and US Senate hopeful J.D. Vance. The event was billed as a response to a growing threat facing the American right, the latest and most urgent battle in the culture wars. It was titled simply âWhat to Do About Woke Capital.â
For several years now, the conservative movement has been fretting about its fraying alliance with corporate America, which has increasingly sided with progressive causes. In 2015 and 2016, boycotts by American Airlines, Eli Lilly, and Intel helped block anti-LGBT âreligious-freedom lawsâ in Indiana, Arkansas, and Arizona. In 2017, pressure from PayPal, Deutsche Bank, and the NBA led North Carolina to repeal its anti-trans bathroom bill. In 2019, Disney, Netflix , and Warner Media moved business out of Georgia after the state enacted severe limits on abortion access. Last summer, dozens of major brands signaled support for Black Lives Matter. And in April, corporations from Coca-Cola to Major League Baseball denounced Georgia over its attempt to restrict voting and to hand control of the stateâs elections to pro-Trump forces.
There is, of course, a simple explanation for these decisions: Corporations are seeking to align their public image with the values of their customers, shareholders, and employees. The positions considered âwokeâ by conservative ideologues â that police should kill fewer Black people, that abortion should be legal, that gay and trans people should not be subject to discrimination, that voting should be easier for everyone â are increasingly considered sensible by a majority of Americans.
âCorporations have awakened â to their duties,â said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale School of Management who has convened a series of high-profile Zoom calls with top CEOs to strategize political interventions. âAnd itâs a good thing. Using the term âwokeâ disparagingly is odd to me. Itâs hard to understand how the opposite â being asleep on the job â is preferable.â
But for conservatives the shift in corporate loyalties represents a deep betrayal. For the past half century, big business has been a reliable ally and major funder of the right. Corporations didnât stay out of politics â they actively sided with conservative Christians to promote an âawakeningâ in American politics, defending traditional notions of family, church, and neighborhood against the threat of communism, civil rights, and labor unions. To ensure the survival of âour American way of life and our enterprise system,â beer magnate and conservative megadonor Joseph Coors said in 1975, âthe whole business community is going to have to get involved in political activities.â
Now, the conservative political class is reacting to so-called woke capital with the anguish of a lover scorned. Sen. Tom Cotton has denounced giant corporations using their âwealth and power to force liberal dogma on an unwilling people.â Sen. Josh Hawley bemoans an âalliance of leftists and woke capitalistsâ hoping to âregulate the innermost thoughts of every American, from school age to retirement.â And Sen. Ted Cruz ostentatiously swore off corporate PAC money in a Wall Street Journal missive entitled âYour Woke Money Is No Good Here.â
At the Woke Capital conference in May, the Claremont set went even further. The organization, which has a strong relationship with the Christian right, has positioned itself as the vanguard of a conservative realignment â shifting from market fundamentalism and toward a more militant right-wing nationalism. To Claremont thinkers, who have long worked to provide the intellectual scaffolding for Trumpâs haphazard agenda, the enemy is not only the left, but the inherent decadence of Americaâs corporate elites.
âIn just three generations,â said Arthur Milikh, executive director of Claremontâs new Center for the American Way of Life, âAmericaâs most powerful corporations went from being more or less patrioticâ to being âglobalistâ enablers of a âwoke oligarchic state.â
As Milikh sees it, the right gave American corporations everything they wanted â tax breaks, free trade, open immigration â naively believing that capitalists would defend conservative values. But instead, he lamented, âmuch of the conservative establishment came to view the pinnacle of human life as private consumption and personal license, defining national health by GDP growth.â The result has been not only âspiritual enervationâ and âthe weakening of patriotic sentimentâ but âthe creation of a new oligarchic elite openly hostile to the nation.â
This new theme of the Trumpist right â that American corporations are, in essence, no longer American â represents a profound fissure in the conservative movement. The campaign against woke capital is driving a wedge between social conservatives and big business, fracturing the long-standing coalition that helped drive American politics to the right. As Tucker Carlson summed it up in the title of his keynote address at a 2019 conference on conservative nationalism, âBig Business Doesnât Care About Your Family.â What distinguishes these new populists from the old guard of mainstream conservatism is their explicit aspiration to replace the current elite with a new one â a strategy intended to extend the MAGA rightâs vision of minority rule long into the future.
From the outside, the long, enduring marriage of Christian traditionalism and capitalist free enterprise looked remarkably stable and mutually beneficial. From inside the conservative movement, though, it was always more a marriage of convenience than of philosophical affinity.
On one side of the alliance were traditionalists â communitarian Christians, agrarian nostalgics, neo-confederates â who sought a theologically informed moral order. They were ambivalent about capitalism, which views liberal individualism as the building block of political and social life. On the other side of the alliance were libertarians and free-market evangelists, who saw the state as the primary threat to human freedom.
What brought the two sides together, and gave birth to the modern conservative movement, was Communism. During the Cold War, William F. Buckleyâs National Review brokered an uneasy peace between these competing tendencies. American liberals, the Review set reasoned, would never be sufficiently committed to Christian virtue or to free enterprise to resist the onslaught of Communism. The answer was âfusionism,â a political coalition of Christians and capitalists whose shared goal â defending Western civilization from its enemies within and without â was sufficient to solidify an alliance.
"Fusionism," the uneasy coalition of Christian traditionalism and capitalist free enterprise, was brokered by the National Review, under William F. Buckley. - Mark Harris for Insider
But for those at the Claremont conference, who see themselves as the inheritors of the traditionalist position, fusionism turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Wealthy elites got their way, basking in unrivaled wealth and personal liberty, while traditionalists got the short end of the stick: a disenchanted, amoral society where abortion is legal, conspicuous consumption has replaced spiritual fulfillment, and individual self-expression trumps virtue.
âEveryone on the right has basically been fed this Adam Smith fairy tale about economic and political history, in which all the good things should go together,â Julius Krein, the editor of the right-wing journal American Affairs, told me. âThatâs fusionism: free markets plus moral virtue. Itâs all a nice, big, happy combination.â Seeing big business âat least rhetoricallyâ embrace progressive causes has been, Krein added, âa huge threat to that whole fairy tale. Even if it doesnât provoke resistance per se, it provokes a lot of consternation and panic because you have your origin myth directly threatened.â
In a sense, the rightâs hand-wringing over corporate progressivism is just sour grapes â the whining of a political movement hoisted by its own petard. After all, it was the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that maximized the power of corporate leaders to impose their values on the public. First, in Citizens United they allowed corporate money to dominate the electoral process. Then in Hobby Lobby they empowered private companies to engage in religious activism, observing that nothing in the law requires âfor-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything elseâ
But in a perverse twist, conservatives canât quite bring themselves to blame big business itself for the outbreak of wokeness. Theyâve preached for so long that God favors capital, they have to find another explanation for why some of the worldâs richest and most powerful corporations are abandoning them. So those at the Claremont conference blamed not the owners, but the managers they believe have usurped control of American capitalism.
This critique of managerialism draws on the theories of James Burnham, a founding editor of the National Review, who has enjoyed a renaissance in right-wing circles in recent years. His 1941 book âManagerial Revolutionâ argued that the corporate economy had become so complex that owners were forced to enlist technocratic managers to run their companies. Over time, Burnham thought, this new managerial elite would assume control of capital, reduce the owning class to mere shareholders, and proceed to âexploit the rest of society.â
For those at the Claremont event, Burnhamâs concept of a middle strata between capital and labor serves as a way to exonerate wealthy owners, placing the blame for woke capital on a younger, inferior generation of mid-level bureaucrats. âWhat weâve seen over the past several decades is the creation of this new bureaucratic and administrative layer within the corporate world, which is far less talented and far less productive,â Daniel McCarthy, editor of right-wing journal Modern Age, told attendees. âWoke young people coming to corporate America end up specializing in a kind of moral extortion over the people who are actually more talented and experienced than they are.â
For conservatives, the term âwokeâ â which originated among Black activists and artists back in Burnhamâs day â remains closely associated with âidentity politics.â In his opening remarks at the conference, Milikh defined the term as âthe doctrine that so-called oppressors, identified by the color of their skin, must be humiliated, punished, and made to perpetually apologize for the sins of their fathers.â Such fantasies of racial vengeance, unmoored from the actual goals of todayâs social movements, pervaded nearly every speech at the Claremont event.
What the woke want, said Azerrad, who teaches at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school, âis to redistribute power and honor to their preferred victim groups â you know the list â and to punish the oppressors: straight white men.â In a revealing aside, Azerrad recommended âa very amusing but also quite insightfulâ Twitter account called @WokeCapital, which documents examples of âcorporate woke propaganda.â The account is also explicitly racist, referring to the NBA as "Apehoop League, " and captioning a picture of a mixed-race military couple with the words âSwirler Occupied Government.â
The MAGA crowd is particularly incensed that corporate brands have signaled support for Black Lives Matter. - Mark Harris for Insider
Presenters were particularly incensed by corporate brands that signaled support for the George Floyd protests last June. âNo moment illustrated what woke capital meant for our country than the riots last summer tied to the Black Lives Matter movement,â J.D. Vance declared in his keynote address. Wearing a beard and evidently workshopping a bellicose stump speech for his Senate campaign, Vance accused Amazonâs Jeff Bezos of deliberately funding riots to undermine his competitors. âWho benefits most when small business on Main Street are destroyed?â he asked. Bezos, Vance said, is âgetting rich from destroying America.â
The racist undercurrents of the Claremont conference are not incidental â theyâre central to the emerging conservative realignment. Burnham, who was repeatedly cited at the event, believed that âWestern civilization, thus Western man, is both different from and superior in quality to other civilizations and non-civilizations.â
The way to protect Western culture, Burnham argued, is not a democratic assault on the decadent oligarchy. Rather, the liberal managerial elite must be replaced with a new conservative elite, one that appreciates the threat posed by immigration and racial egalitarianism. Samuel Francis, a leading disciple of Burnham and a prescient theorist of Trumpism, argued in 1992 that âMiddle American radicalsâ must âdisplace the incumbent elite, dismantle its apparatus of power, and itself constitute a new elite and re-constitute American society.â Only by doing so, he argued, could Middle America âpreserve itself from destruction and extend its present moment in the political sun into an enduring epoch of civilization.â
Francis, not coincidentally, was a virulent racist, hailed by white supremacists as the âpremier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time.â In 2000, after the Chamber of Commerce supported calls to take down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol, Francis argued that big business was no friend of the right. âCapitalism, an economic system driven only, according to its own theory, by the accumulation of profit, is at least as much an enemy of tradition as the NAACP or communism,â he said. At base, todayâs right populist war on so-called woke capital is a battle for power â by displaced elites â to shape the national consensus and define its most cherished symbols.
Nowhere is this clearer than in American Moment, another pro-Trump outgrowth of the Claremont Institute. Founded by a trio of 20-something conservatives â Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim, Jake Mercier â the organization describes itself as âdedicated to identifying, educating, and credentialing young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all.â
Translation: The group plans to recruit a new generation pro-Trump conservatives to replace the existing political and economic elite with ⌠well, themselves. âIf we donât form our own elite,â the founders write, âone that is patriotic and acts as a champion for the great middle of our nation, the old regime will continue to win, and America will continue to lose.â
Trump failed, Sharma told me, in no small part because there werenât enough âtrue believersâ across the federal bureaucracy to implement his nationalist agenda. Sharma wants to change that. âWe built up American Moment to create a pipeline of staff, essentially, that will go into congressional offices, future presidential administrations, public-policy organizations,â he said. âPeople that think like this, that are willing to devote serious parts of their lives to doing this sort of work.â
Where previous generations of conservatives dreamed of dismantling the entire administrative state, Sharma sees seizing and deploying political power as a necessity for making America great again. âPeople on the right are broadly shut out of culture,â he said. âAnd more and more so shut out of capital. So if weâre quickly approaching an America where the only thing the right can do is occasionally win elections, we better use whatever tools we have at hand to rebalance power in the other domains, and defend the interests of our voters.â To do otherwise, he suggested in the coded language long employed by far-right elites, would be to engage in âcivilizational malfeasance.â
As for woke corporations, Sharma envisions a future Trump administration, staffed by ideologues âcredentializedâ by American Moment, that is willing to use a variety of carrots and sticks â from tax hikes to antitrust enforcement â to discipline corporate leaders who engage in virtue signaling. âI think thereâs a lot of interesting stuff to be done there,â Sharma said. âBut it would require the complete takeover of the bureaucracies that implement this sort of policy.â
As an example, Sharma pointed to the decision last year by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to open a âformal investigationâ into Princeton University, after the school said that âracism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton.â Sharma imagines using antidiscrimination laws to âcall the bluffâ of businesses that admit to histories of racism. âLetâs use the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a hammer to bash every corporation that decides to virtue signal about this stuff, and see if they really mean it,â he said.
Sharmaâs vision of a far-right administration using the levers of government to punish corporate elites hasnât exactly taken over Washington yet. But throughout history, many a conservative revolution has begun with tiny groups of disgruntled ideologues gathered in hotel conference rooms. Just as the eggheads of Buckleyâs era helped lay the groundwork for the Reagan revolution, todayâs Claremont brain trust is working to set the stage for a regime that is far more nativist and nationalistic. Their plan, like so many Republican efforts these days, has little concern for democracy as such. They understand that if right-wing populism is to credibly embody the will of the people, a lot of people must be written out of the social contract.
âRe-establishing Americaâs ancient principlesâ would require âa sort of counter-revolution,â Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at Claremont, said in a recent essay. Seizing power, he goes on to explain, is âthe only road forward.â Itâs fine for conservatives to ignore or even sabotage the outcome of elections, he implies, because only Trump voters are âauthentic Americans.â
And what of the majority who elected Joe Biden? What will become of them in the new, anti-woke America governed by a conservative elite?
âIt is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans,â Ellmers concludes. âBut they are something else.â
The dark future of far-right Trumpist politics is coming into view
The anti-immigrant politics of a certain swath of Republican politicians and Donald Trump loyalists have taken a particularly virulent and ugly turn of late â and if you look closely, you can catch a glimpse of the future direction that U.S. far-right Trumpist political aspirations might take.
This unsettling hint of whatâs to come emerges, surprisingly, from the confluence of two big developments in our politics that arenât linked in any obvious sense: the surge in covid-19 cases, and the battle over the coming resettlement of Afghan refugees in the United States.
Right now, the Republican Party is deeply split over the refugees created by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as a new report from the New York Times details. While some Republicans recognize an obligation to admit them here, as many worked alongside the United States, many are aligning with Trump and demagoguing them in the most despicable terms imaginable.
Meanwhile, with covid cases on the rise, GOP governors in states seeing the worst outbreaks are escalating efforts to blame this on migrants who, fleeing their own horrors, are attempting to cross our southern border. The right-wing media disinformation apparatus has pushed this message with lockstep unity and unfathomably disgusting vitriol.
These two developments together bode ill for whatâs to come. They suggest that U.S. reactionary right-wing movements may be characterized by a very particular form of rising nativist and ethnonationalist cruelty at exactly the time when increasingly pressing global challenges will require a diametrically different approach.
The future of authoritarian populism
A new book helps us make sense of this. Called âThe End of the End of History,â it projects the future of global politics at a moment when Western liberal democracyâs future no longer seems assured, as the allusion to Francis Fukuyamaâs famous (and misrepresented) thesis suggests.
This sort of increasingly virulent reactionary politics forms one of the âideologies of the future,â imagined by co-authors Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe. They posit a future authoritarian populism fusing a longing for âstrongmanâ leaders with a âMalthusian narrative.â
This narrative sees pressing global challenges as an opening to build up a zero-sum ideology that emphasizes âlimited resourcesâ and a âneed to reduce surplus populationsâ by âremoving outsiders and other elementsâ that corrupt the âindigenousâ population, as the Real Answer to those challenges.
Whatâs relevant for us here is the bookâs argument that covid has provided this form of politics with a new reason for being, a moment it will seize by telling a ânationalistâ story of the global pandemic:
A nationalist interpretation would see a forceful rejection of globalization and cosmopolitanism: the organic body of the indigenous nation is threatened by deleterious outside influences, and limits on resources necessitate their exclusion.
I think something like this may be developing in the U.S. right now. Thereâs a peculiarly ominous signal in the way GOP governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida are fusing their rejection of collective public health solutions with demagoguery about migrants.
Covid and migrants: A joint infestation
Abbott and DeSantis, each in their own way, declare that covid-bearing migrants are crossing our border en masse. This has been widely debunked, but the story is what matters: covid and migrants as joint infestation. Meanwhile, they have converted their public positions into platforms to speak to the Trump Rump, the shriveled national minority who sees mask mandates as collectivism run amok.
Itâs the fomenting of hysterical opposition to local officials enabling communities to collectively protect themselves, combined with the aggressive redirecting of blame toward migrants instead , that makes this mix so combustible. Why take sensible collective action for the public good when calling for higher walls to keep out the joint infestation carries so much more force?
This conflation is everywhere. Right-wing media propagandists are relentlessly combining fearmongering about vaccines with scapegoating of migrants, positioning nativist, ethnonationalist cruelty as a kind of higher answer than science and collective action. Watch this extraordinary montage, and you cannot miss the centrality of that synergy:
Something similar is happening with Afghanistan refugees. Here our direct responsibility for their plight, and our reliance on them during the war, is absolutely undeniable. Indeed, as the Times reports, this is why some Republicans support resettling them here.
But this has only been met with an even more vehement denial of the very idea that this places a peculiar obligation on us. Indeed, as former Trump official Olivia Troye has revealed, Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trumpâs ethnonationalist agenda, expressly worked to undermine our programs for resettling Afghan refugees even as we were relying on them in real time.
Miller is now ubiquitous in shouting down the idea that we owe them anything, positioning them as the invaders, as the threat to us . And Miller is an active spokesman for the future direction of this sort of ethnonationalist politics.
âAvocado politicsâ
This, too, bodes ill, particularly when you factor in climate change and the looming climate refugee problem. Climate is another area where our outsize contribution is undeniable. But this future reactionary right may well see this as an occasion to double down on that exclusionary âMalthusianâ narrative.
Nils Gilman has coined the term âavocado politicsâ to describe this: green on the outside and brown (as in brown-shirted) on the inside. As Gilman suggests, this reactionary right-wing response will acknowledge the âclimate emergency,â but primarily as a way to justify even higher âborder walls to hold back the flood of those fleeing the consequences.â
Itâs not a fun exercise to imagine what this might mean â in the right-wing imagination, anyway â for future militarization of our already hyper-militarized border. Unfortunately, this ugly convergence of covid and refugee politics should prompt us to start preparing for that future right now.
While I tend to feel there are parts that could have been handled better, itâs clear Biden was playing with a sabotaged deck when it came to Afghanistan, and given that, whatâs been done there with the evacuation is miraculous, even as I am saddened by what is left behind, and what the Afghan people will lose.
Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan
Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks.
Americaâs longest war has been by any measure a costly failure, and the errors in managing the conflict deserve scrutiny in the years to come. But Joe Biden doesnât âownâ the mayhem on the ground right now. What weâre seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame.
Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end Americaâs involvement. Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of Americaâs withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history. By the time the last American plane lifts off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 31, the total number of Americans and Afghan allies extricated from the country may exceed 120,000.
In the days following the fall of Kabul earlier this monthâan event that triggered a period of chaos, fear, and griefâcritics castigated the Biden administration for its failure to properly coordinate the departure of the last Americans and allies from the country. The White House was indeed surprised by how quickly the Taliban took control, and those early days could have been handled better. But the critics argued that more planning both would have been able to stop the Taliban victory and might have made Americaâs departure somehow tidier, more like a win or perhaps even a draw. The chaos, many said, was symptomatic of a bigger error. They argued that the United States should stay in Afghanistan, that the cost of remaining was worth the benefits a small force might bring.
Former military officers and intelligence operatives, as well as commentators who had long been advocates of extending Americaâs presence in Afghanistan, railed against Bidenâs artificial deadline. Some critics were former Bush-administration officials or supporters who had gotten the U.S. into the mess in the first place, setting us on the impossible path toward nation building and, effectively, a mission without a clear exit or metric for success. Some were Obama-administration officials or supporters who had doubled down on the investment of personnel in the country and later, when the futility of the war was clear, lacked the political courage to withdraw. Some were Trump-administration officials or supporters who had negotiated with and helped strengthen the Taliban with their concessions in the peace deal and then had punted the ultimate exit from the country to the next administration.
They all conveniently forgot that they were responsible for some of Americaâs biggest errors in this war and instead were incandescently self-righteous in their invective against the Biden administration. Never mind the fact that the Taliban had been gaining ground since it resumed its military campaign in 2004 and, according to U.S. estimates even four years ago, controlled or contested about a third of Afghanistan. Never mind that the previous administrationâs deal with the Taliban included the release of 5,000 fighters from prison and favored an even earlier departure date than the one that Biden embraced. Never mind that Trump had drawn down U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500 during his last year in office and had failed to repatriate Americaâs equipment on the ground. Never mind the delay caused by Trump and his adviser Stephen Millerâs active obstruction of special visas for Afghans who helped us.
Never mind the facts. Never mind the losses. Never mind the lessons. Biden, they felt, was in the wrong.
Despite the criticism, Biden, who had argued unsuccessfully when he was Barack Obamaâs vice president to seriously reduce Americaâs presence in Afghanistan, remained resolute. Rather than view the heartbreaking scenes in Afghanistan in a political light as his opponents did, Biden effectively said, âPolitics be damnedâweâre going to do whatâs rightâ and ordered his team to stick with the deadline and find a way to make the best of the difficult situation in Kabul.
The Biden administration nimbly adapted its plans, ramping up the airlift and sending additional troops into the country to aid crisis teams and to enhance security. Around-the-clock flights came into and went out of Afghanistan. Giant cargo planes departed, a number of them packed with as many as 600 occupants. Senior administration officials convened regular meetings with U.S. allies to find destinations for those planes to land and places for the refugees to stay. The State Department tracked down Americans in the country, as well as Afghans who had worked with the U.S., to arrange their passage to the airport. The Special Immigrant Visa program that the Trump administration had slowed down was kicked into high gear. Despite years of fighting, the administration and the military spoke with the Taliban many times to coordinate passage of those seeking to depart to the airport, to mitigate risks as best as possible, to discuss their shared interest in meeting the August 31 deadline.
The process was relentless and imperfect and, as we all have seen in the most horrific way, not without huge risks for those staying behind to help. On August 26, a suicide bomber associated with ISIS-K killed more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members who were gathered outside the airport. However, even that heinous act didnât deter the military. In a 24-hour period from Thursday to Friday, 12,500 people were airlifted out of the country and the president recommitted to meeting the August 31 deadline. And he did so even as his critics again sought to capitalize on tragedy for their own political gain: Republicans called for the impeachment of Biden and of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Within hours of the attack at the airport, America struck back, killing two terrorists and injuring another with a missile launched from a drone. A separate drone strike targeted a vehicle full of explosives on Sunday. In doing so, Biden countered the argument that America might lack the intelligence or military resources we would need to defend ourselves against violent extremists now that our troops are leaving.
The very last chapter of Americaâs benighted stay in Afghanistan should be seen as one of accomplishment on the part of the military and its civilian leadership. Once again the courage and unique capabilities of the U.S. armed services have been made clear. And, in a stark change from recent years, an American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both Americaâs interests and values first.
Hillary Clintonâs âdeplorablesâ speech shocked voters five years ago â but some feel it was prescient
Letâs start with the obvious: âBasket of deplorablesâ is a weird turn of phrase. There are baskets and there are deplorable people, but pairing the two is the oddest of linguistic odd couples.
Hillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called âracist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobicâ â her âbasket of deplorables.â
Trump â the same man who announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants ârapistsâ â clutched his proverbial pearls, aghast that his opponent had uttered such a shocking slander. His campaign turned that insult into an asset; supporters wore hats and shirts proudly declaring themselves deplorable. Pundits seized on the phrase, debating who does and doesnât deserve to be called that. Five years later, many believe âdeplorablesâ â figuratively and literally â are here to stay.
This is not a cautionary tale: Clinton probably didnât lose the White House because of a figure of speech. But itâs a lesson in how politicians make unforced errors. And, in a nation where half the country thinks the other half is wrong and possibly even deplorable, itâs about how we talk about each other.
On Sept. 9, 2016, Clinton was the opening act for Barbra Streisand at a glitzy fundraiser in New York City. A group of LGBTQ supporters were gathered at Cipriani restaurant, and the Democratic candidate had one job: to fire up her donors.
âI am all that stands between you and the apocalypse,â Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found âdeplorableâ about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks â all things she found âso personally offensive.â
She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldnât be elected anyway. âJust be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trumpâs supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?â There was laughter and applause.
The people in this basket, emboldened by Trumpâs tweets, were âirredeemable,â she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change â and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters.
âBasket of deplorablesâ was not in Clintonâs prepared remarks. She often improvised in speeches. Reporters jumped on it, as did the Trump campaign, which immediately slammed Clinton for not running âa positive campaign.â
Clinton apologized the next day in a very Clintonesque manner: âI regret saying âhalfâ â that was wrong,â she said in a statement. What was the magic number? She didnât say. She did, however, double down on calling out Trumpâs bigotry and racism.
âItâs very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables,â said Jonathan Allen, author of âShattered,â a study of Clintonâs 2016 campaign. âThat is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together â that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country.â
Itâs easy to get careless at fundraisers: The crowd is pumped up, the mood hopeful. In April 2008, Barack Obama told a San Francisco donor audience that working-class voters in the Rust Belt âcling to guns or religionâ as a way to express their frustrations. (Clinton, in the last days of her failed bid for the Democratic nomination, said she was âtaken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.â)
Mitt Romney got into trouble for his â47 percentâ slip, which was secretly taped during a 2012 fundraiser that was closed to the media. The Republican nominee explained to wealthy donors that almost half of American voters would pick Obama because they were dependent on government handouts. âIâll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,â he told the crowd.
Clinton made the classic campaign mistake of playing pundit by explaining strategy to donors. She wasnât writing off all Trump supporters; those who were scared and jobless might be won over. It was a delicate rhetorical dance: Have compassion for some , be afraid of others.
Trump repeatedly mocked Clinton voters, but his fans never worried it would hurt him. In fact, they loved him for it, as well as his attacks on the media, the candidates in his own party, John McCainâs war record and the judge in one of his lawsuits. âThe more offensive and insulting he could be, the happier he was with it,â Allen said.
That was Trump being Trump. Clintonâs deplorables comment, Allen said, seemed to reveal a private thought that she had never dared state in public. In that way, it âended up being symbolic of one of the things that her critics said they hated about her, which is that they believed that sheâs inauthentic. And oddly, I think that was a pretty authentic moment.â
When asked about âdeplorables,â Nick Merrill, Clintonâs spokesman, said she was never afraid to denounce racism â just two weeks earlier, she gave a significant speech deconstructing the alt-right and the âquest to preserve white malenessâ in America. âThe deplorable comment may have been politically less than ideal, but it has been proven right again and again over the last five years.â
More sophisticated than âdisgusting,â more biting than âunforgivable,â âdeplorableâ carries judgment with a side of self-righteousness. It comes from Latin, then reemerged in 17th-century France, where throwing shade is a national sport.
Clinton would use âdeplorableâ in statements when she was secretary of state, but as an adjective, not a noun. Washington jargon traditionally puts things in âbuckets,â Clinton shifted that to âbasketsâ in the month leading up to the Sept. 9 fundraiser.
She used âdeplorablesâ the day before her speech, in an interview with Israeli TV: âYou can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I would call the deplorables â you know, the racists and the haters.â
âItâs worth remembering that when Hillary Clinton comes up with a phrase she likes, she tends to repeat it a lot and she can be very biting and she can be quippy,â Allen said. âIt would have been different if she had said, âHalf the Trump voters are behaving deplorably.â Itâs a small thing, but itâs a big thing.â
In Slate, linguist Ben Zimmer speculated that âbaskets of deplorablesâ was inspired by a âparade of horriblesâ â a legal term that Clinton would be familiar with, referring to the negative consequences of a judicial decision. Several weeks later, Clinton joked about it at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner: âI just want to put you all in a basket of adorables.â
But the damage was done.
âI knew the first time I heard that phrase that she was very, very stupid for using it,â Republican strategist Frank Luntz said. âIt is as insulting as any word in the English language. To be deplorable means you have no excuse as a human being. If youâre a deplorable person, it is saying that there is no redeeming quality to you whatsoever.â
Luntz knew it would be an opportunity for Trump to galvanize his base. âI thought she had committed a potentially fatal error: Insult your opponent, attack your opponent, criticize your opponent, even condemn your opponent, but never, ever, ever condemn your opponentâs supporters because you need their votes.â
Luntz tested âdeplorableâ in focus groups and found that it didnât make voters more pro-Trump. âBut it hardened opposition to her instantly as someone who had no heart, who was too ideological and dismissive of people who disagreed with her.â
A consultant to Clintonâs campaign agreed. Writing in the Boston Globe shortly after the election, Diane Hessan said that she tracked undecided voters and their reaction to âdeplorableâ was stronger than the controversy over Clintonâs emails or FBI Director James B. Comeyâs comments about them. âThere was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice,â she wrote.
In âWhat Happened,â Clintonâs memoir of the campaign, she acknowledged that generalizing was almost always unwise and wrote that she regretted handing Trump âa political giftâ by insulting well-intentioned people. âBut too many of Trumpâs core supporters do hold views that I find â thereâs no other word for it â deplorable.â
Of course, voters are notoriously harder on female politicians, regardless of what they say. As Rebecca Traister stated in a 2017 New York magazine profile of Clinton, âA competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America. To acknowledge the role sexism played in 2016 is not to make excuses for the very real failings of Clinton and her campaign; it is to try to paint a more complete picture.â
In hindsight, how did âdeplorablesâ play into all this? âIt is impossible to say, âPeople reacted this way because of sexism,â â Traister said this week. âThatâs not how it works. But you also cannot take sexism out of the equation whenever youâre talking about Hillary Clinton.â
And Trump? The Republican nominee, always looking for an applause line, said he was offended on behalf of all his supporters. âWhile my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hard-working American patriots who love your country,â he told his audience at an Iowa rally. The campaign rushed out an ad in battleground states: âYou know whatâs deplorable? Hillary Clinton viciously demonizing hard working people like you.â
Mike Pence jumped into the fray: âFor Hillary Clinton to express such disdain for millions of Americans is one more reason that disqualifies her to serve in the highest office,â he told reporters. During an interview with CNNâs Wolf Blitzer, Pence condemned Clinton but, when pressed, declined to call any Trump supporter deplorable, even, say, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who endorsed Trump. âNo,â answered Pence. âI am not in the name-calling business, Wolf.â
MAGA fans could buy official âdeplorableâ merchandise from Team Trump â and they did happily. The term was âso mean that the only way for them to respond was to actually embrace it,â Luntz said. âAnd thatâs how I realized she was in real trouble: If your strongest attack against your opponent is embraced by your opponents, that removes the sting.â
Five years later, you can purchase hats, T-shirts, hoodies and other gifts for the deplorables in your life. Patriot Depot, one of several online stores selling to Trump fans, offers a âDeplorables Club â Lifetime Memberâ cap for $19.95, The sales blurb explains: âBeing a Deplorable is now a mark of pride among God-fearing, gun-loving, hard-working Americans.â
Clintonâs unusual turn of phrase foreshadowed an increasingly polarized America. Weâre not just divided along ideological lines â we donât even like each other very much.
The Pew Research Center found that from December 2016 to September 2019, the shares of both parties that viewed members of the other âsomewhatâ coldly or âveryâ coldly increased, as did the percentage that viewed them as âimmoral.â
Those assessments were undoubtedly influenced by the 2017 Charlottesville rally and have been hardened by pandemic restrictions, Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
âIâm proud that Secretary Clinton called out racism and bigotry in 2016, especially when that wasnât the politically safe thing to do,â campaign speechwriter Dan Schwerin said.
Now, many of her fans believe she was prescient about âhalfâ of Trumpâs base.
âAfter four years of President Trump,â Allen said. âI think that there are a lot of Democrats and some Republicans who would say that was an undercount.â
Another powerful piece from Charles Blow about the hypocrisy of white Evangelicals and their utter abandonment of the âhigher moralityâ they have long claimed they represent.
White Evangelicals Shun Morality for Power
Evangelical Christians castigated Bill Clinton in wake of his âimproper relationshipâ with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He had sinned. He would be stoned.
Franklin Graham, the evangelical minister, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1998 that Clintonâs âextramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family,â and that âprivate conduct does have public consequences.â
He concluded:
âMr. Clintonâs sin can be forgiven, but he must start by admitting to it and refraining from legalistic doublespeak. According to the Scripture, the president did not have an âinappropriate relationshipâ with Monica Lewinsky â he committed adultery. He didnât âmisleadâ his wife and us â he lied. Acknowledgment must be coupled with genuine remorse. A repentant spirit that says, âIâm sorry. I was wrong. I wonât do it again. I ask for your forgiveness,â would go a long way toward personal and national healing.â
But Mr. Graham never demanded the same of Donald Trump. To the contrary, he became one of Trumpâs biggest defenders.
When a tape was released during the 2016 campaign of Trump bragging years earlier about sexually assaulting women, Graham revealed his true motives: It wasnât religious piety, but rather raw politics.
He wrote on Facebook that Trumpâs âcrude commentsâ could not be defended, âbut the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended.â He continued, âThe most important issue of this election is the Supreme Court.â
The Supreme Court represents a more lasting power than the presidency, a way to lock in an ideology beyond the reach of election cycles and changing demographics at least for a generation.
In an interview with Axios on HBO in 2018, Graham said of his support of Trump, âI never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.â
The courts are central to that supposed defense, in Grahamâs calculation.
Case in point, his rigid defense of Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of cornering her in a bedroom at a 1982 house party. Graham dismissed the allegations as ânot relevantâ and said of the episode:
Well, there wasnât a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers, and itâs obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away â if thatâs the case, but he says he didnât do it. He just flat out says thatâs just not true. Regardless if it was true, these are two teenagers and she said no and he respected that, so I donât know what the issue is. This is just an attempt to smear his name, thatâs all.
The hypocrisy of white evangelicals, taken into full context, shouldnât have been shocking, I suppose, but as a person who grew up in the church (although Iâm not a religious person anymore), it was still disappointing.
I had grown up hearing from pulpits that it was the world that changed, not Godâs word. The word was like a rock. A lie was a lie, yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter who told it.
I had hoped that there were more white evangelicals who embraced the same teachings, who would not abide by the message the Grahams of the world were advancing, who would stand on principle.
But I was wrong. A report for the Pew Research Center published last week found that, contrary to an onslaught of press coverage about evangelicals who had left the church, disgusted by its embrace of the president, âThere is solid evidence that white Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than white Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.â
Thatâs right, the lying, philandering, thrice-married Trump, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct or assault, may actually have grown the ranks of white evangelicals rather than shrunk them.
To get some perspective on this, I reached out to an expert, Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and Africana studies and the chair of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the author of the recently released book âWhite Evangelical Racism.â
As Professor Butler told me, the reason that some people might be surprised by these findings is that âthey believed the hype.â For years, evangelicals had claimed that they were upholding morality and fighting injustice. But what the movement has really been since the 1970s, said Butler, is âa political arm of the Republican Party.â As Butler put it, evangelicals now âuse moral issues as a wedge to get political power.â
Butler concluded, âWe need to quit coddling evangelicals and allowing them to use these moral issues to hide behind, because itâs very clear that thatâs not what the issue is. The issue is that they believe in anti-vaxxing, they believe in racism, they believe in anti-immigration, they believe that only Republicans should run the country and they believe in white supremacy.â
Many in the nation, including medical providers, are suffering from compassion fatigue toward vaccine refusers for placing themselves unnecessarily in danger.
I donât believe anybody should be refused treatment, but understand this burnout.
Vaccine Refusers Risk Compassion Fatigue
After the horrors that health-care workers have endured during the pandemic, many are struggling to sympathize with people who wonât protect themselves.
On social media, Iâve been seeing sentiments that I never thought Iâd see anyone express in a public forum. People who choose to be unvaccinated should not be offered lung transplants . What if people with COVID-19 who didnât get the vaccine have to wait in the Emergency Department until everyone else is seen? Should unvaccinated patients just be turned away?
These are harsh, angry feelings. And some of the people giving voice to them are doctors.
I am an obstetrician in New York. I have been working with pregnant COVID-19 patients from the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, in a medical institution and city that have cared for thousands of patients with the disease. Health-care workers have suffered through a terrible year and a halfâa period first defined by a lack of masks and gloves, and throughout by the very real fear of personal sickness and death. We have been afraid of bringing the disease home, of infecting our spouses, of leaving our children parentless. For about three months, I didnât kiss my children.
Read: When keeping your distance is the best way to show you care
Every day, my colleagues and I trudged past the temporary morgues in our hospital parking lots and the ICUs set up in the auditoriums and operating rooms and hallways; we signed too many death certificates; we washed our hands until they blistered before we let our families near us. We did that, every day, because we were trained to care for humans who needed us.
A lot of us went to work every day because the world needs to keep turning, and in that time, we were the ones turning it. Many others left medicine. One reason I didnât was that humans needed help and I could provide it. But I also kept working because I needed to believe that, if I was ever in danger, other humans would come help me. Our comparative advantage as humans is that we can take care of one another and overcome adversity together. I did my part week after week, month after month.
Finally, in the depths of winter, during the week of my birthday, I received my first vaccine shot. Science had brought us a solution, and we could finally see the end of all those months of fear, exhaustion, and sacrifice.
But thatâs not what happened. COVID-19 hasnât ended. Instead, infection rates are going up. The Delta variant has taken hold, and hospitals are filling up again. But this time the suffering seems different, because it is avoidable. Optional. A choice.
The main reason the pandemic in the United States is not over is because people are not getting vaccinated. Some people may have good reasons for not getting a shot, but most people who refuse vaccination do not seem to be acting based on data or evidence. The refusals that we read every day seem more rooted in a general mistrust of government, or in a strong identity as ânot that kind of people.â And those vaccine refusals mean people are getting sick, and will need care, and may die needlessly.
This is a fact that many of us in health careâall exhausted, all having given too much alreadyâare having a hard time ignoring as we head into a new wave of COVID-19 patients.
Read: How did it come to this?
When people make their personal decision about whether to get vaccinated, they are not thinking about the trauma their health-care providers have experienced since early last year. And I am not asking them to consider it. Professionalism mandates that physicians focus on the disease in front of them, not the behavior that may have contributed to it. When my colleagues diagnose chlamydia in a patient, their first priority is administering antibiotics, not delivering a lecture about asshole boyfriends. But once those antibiotics are prescribed, that same professionalism must include making sure that the patient knows how chlamydia is transmitted, and how to avoid ending up in this situation again.
That person may or may not listen to a doctor, and thatâs understandable. However, the population-level rejection of COVID-19 vaccines is a different phenomenonâand one thatâs much more personally threatening to my colleagues and me. By refusing the most effective intervention, people are risking not only their own life but the lives of many around them. That includes those who cannot get vaccinatedâmy children among them. Because of the choice that vaccine refusers are making, my job may again force me to avoid embracing my children.
âWhat makes me the maddest,â one of my doctor friends told me, âis that these people will reject science right until the second they need everything I have to keep them alive, and then they feel that they can come to our door and be entitled to that help and that hard work.â This friend is characterizing the inconsistency in the behavior she sees in people declining a vaccine but then demanding medical care based on the same science. That inconsistency feels, to her and to other dedicated medical professionals trying to survive this pandemic, very much like dishonesty.
Unlike during the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, the current upsurge of suffering isnât one that humanity has to go through. People are choosing it. And intent matters. Intent is the difference between a child who goes hungry because their parent canât afford dinner and the one who goes hungry because their parent wonât buy them dinner. Having the ability to provide relief but not do so is cruel. To many medical providers working today, the rejection of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines feels like a giant âFuck youâ from 29 percent of American adults. We will keep providing the best care possible, but they are making our job much harder.
Not all health-care workers agree, of course. Plenty of hospital workers remain unvaccinated, and some have even staged protests against hospital-wide vaccine mandates. But most of us got vaccinated, and weâll go to work tomorrow and the next day, no matter what. We will start IVs and give medicines and intubate patients no matter what bumper sticker is on their car. We are holding up our end of a bargain with society. But is society fulfilling its end?
The pandemic has taken away so much: millions of jobs, more than a year of education for tens of millions of children, more than 600,000 American lives. Amid this new, largely preventable wave of infections, some health-care providers are losing something else: the belief that all of us can come together as a people to solve a problem. Doing the work of curing human bodies is harder when some of oneâs faith in humanity is lost.
What comes next? Future waves of COVID-19, probably; a widespread return to masking, perhaps; vaccine mandates in some limited settings, eventually. With time and common sense, the United States may get to a point at which infections subside. But it may not. I would argue that even if we do, Americans will have wasted time, energy, and lives. A year ago, we worried about dwindling N95-mask supplies and a limited ventilator inventory. Now we are burning through our most irreplaceable health-care resource: hope.
The Washington Post: Our constitutional crisis is already here
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"Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.â
â James Madison
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trumpâs charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the amateurish âstop the stealâ efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to âfindâ more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may ârevoke the secretary of stateâs issuance or certification of a presidential electorâs certificate of electionâ by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed âtechnical infractions,â including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been â where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded â navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesnât have.
Todayâs arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans â and all but a handful of politicians â have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way â if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republicâs vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. âPettyâ demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the presidentâs actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive â except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom â such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.
What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback â Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington â were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being âsoftâ on the Soviet Union.
Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak â âlosers,â to use Trumpâs word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the âMitch McConnell Republicans.â His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trumpâs critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.
There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to âdeliverâ for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the âelites,â his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trumpâs enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didnât go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didnât want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. âIâm not going to add to the numbers,â he told a reporter.
Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sandersâs supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people âendure error in the interest of social peace.â Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling partyâs errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressivesâ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.
For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the âerrorâ is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the partyâs mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trumpâs grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is âa territory controlled by enemy tribes,â writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, âis monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it." If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become âunited and armed to take care of themselves as they think bestâ?
The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: âWe werenât there to steal things. We werenât there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.â
The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trumpâs supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.
Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although jealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.
As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by ârepublican virtue,â a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was âchimericalâ to believe that any form of government could âsecure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.â Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Courtâs judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justicesâ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)
The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a âlandslide,â that the âradical left Democrat communist partyâ stole the presidency in the âmost corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our countryâ and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment â or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. âYou and your family will be killed very slowly,â the wife of Georgiaâs top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists âthere is no way they win elections without cheating. Thereâs no way.â So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trumpâs supporters will know what to do. Just as âgenerations of patriotsâ gave âtheir sweat, their blood and even their very livesâ to build America, Trump tells them, so today âwe have no choice. We have to fightâ to restore âour American birthright.â
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trumpâs coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trumpâs triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movementâs passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trumpâs election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trumpâs appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trumpâs excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the partyâs interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of âadultsâ would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the countryâs interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trumpâs grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the âadultsâ resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party â the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reaganâs day; the progressives in todayâs Democratic Party â disappeared from Trumpâs Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the partyâs viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences â and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trumpâs defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to âconservative nationalismâ and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trumpâs coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trumpâs triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movementâs passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trumpâs election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trumpâs appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trumpâs excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the partyâs interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of âadultsâ would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the countryâs interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trumpâs grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the âadultsâ resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party â the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reaganâs day; the progressives in todayâs Democratic Party â disappeared from Trumpâs Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the partyâs viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences â and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trumpâs defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to âconservative nationalismâ and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldnât try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trumpâs intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trumpâs influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.
The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.
But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes â Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislaturesâ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
It canât be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They canât be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trumpâs disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials â the only official, legal response to his actions â practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.
It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party â former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nationâs continued viability.
Romney & Co. donât have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.
It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating todayâs Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although todayâs Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.
Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislaturesâ electoral power grab. Other battles â such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering â might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldnât it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
Posting this as it is hugely pertinent today as your government seeks to pass financial legislation but is being stymied by one or two individuals who could be doing better.
Financial records detailed by reporter Alex Kotch for the Center for Media and Democracy and published in the Guardian show that Manchin makes roughly half a million dollars a year in dividends from millions of dollars of coal company stock he owns. The stock is held in Enersystems, Inc, a company Manchin started in 1988 and later gave to his son, Joseph, to run.