The medical staffer was out of view yesterday, but not out of earshot. He told a colleague that he really likes American Marxism. WTF? He liked it so much he said he had bought extra copies for friends. Ah, a book titled “American Marxism.” New, from Mark Levin. God help us.
The hysteria loosed regularly by the right in buzzwords like communism, socialism, Marxism, etc., feels like so much chaff thrown into the air to obscure the right’s own dark leanings. A kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy. Not terribly sophisticated, but effective with their political base. See Fox News’ ratings.
Jeff Sharlet listened to Officer Daniel Hodges describe on Tuesday the religious tone of Donald Trump’s “white nationalist insurrection” on Jan. 6. But it was also Christian nationalism, Sharlet argues in Vanity Fair:
“It was clear the terrorists perceive themselves to be Christians,” he said in a testimony acutely sensitive to the symbolic language of the mob. “I saw the Christian flag directly to my front. Another read, ‘Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president’”—a staple at Trump rallies—“Another, ‘Jesus is king.’” From early on, insurrectionists mistook themselves for missionaries. “Some of them would try to recruit me,” said Officer Hodges. “One of them came up to me and said, ‘Are you my brother?’” When it was Hodges’s turn at the front—in the “meat grinder” where an insurrectionist literally tried to rip his head off—they still attempted to evangelize: “Even during this intense contest of wills, they sought to convert us to their cult. One man shouted, ‘We all just want to make our voices heard, and I think you feel the same. I really think you feel the same.’”
Those who breached the Senate chambers offered a prayer of thanks to Jesus “for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.” Others blew ram’s horns during the assault in echoes of the Book of Joshua.
Sharlet writes:
The Christian nationalism described by Hodges. It’s the religion of the lost cause, whether that of the Confederacy, Donald Trump, or the mammoth Southern Baptist Convention that has recently declared critical race theory—by which they mean the whole history of race—a main theological foe, a sin somehow not listed in scripture. Christian identity, in the vaguest of senses, as euphemism for the idea of an American one that is white in biological fact or ideological essence.
But like the scare words — communism, socialism, Marxism — ram’s horns, prayers, and Christian flags are more chaff meant to obscure the mob’s darker motives and to justify the violent actions. Peter Manseau, the National Museum of American History’s curator of American religious history describes it as part of the “shared the psychological safety net” the terrorists brought with them. “How can a righteous mob be wrong?” Manseau asked rhetorically.
The New York Times separates fact from the myth the new Lost Cause is manufacturing in real time in an attempt to make us unsee what we all saw on Jan. 6. Those attempts to redefine what was will continue just as the Lost Cause has persisted for over a century and a half.
The goal, Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer writes, is not American in the American sense:
The battle over government is not about the size of government, but the role of government. Republicans want the government to serve as a bulwark against the growing political and economic power of a diversifying America that they view as an existential threat to their primarily White, Christian base.
But just as Lee Atwater knew better than to express aloud the racist underpinnings of the Southern Strategy, Republicans until Trump knew better than to wash their dirty linen in public. For the most part, they still attempt to disguise it with symbols of American righteousness and by casting their foes as the real anti-Americans.
The quote below from the middle of the last century demonstrates how, as Officer Harry Dunn lamented on Tuesday, “Everything is different, but nothing has changed.”
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity .…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” — Vice President Henry A. Wallace, April 9, 1944.
Pfeifer resurfaces a pithy Frank (not Francis) Wilhoit quote that distills Wallace’s assessment to just over 20 words: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Among the former are the Wall Street banker boys who brought the world economy to its knees, who devasted millions of lives during the Great Recession, and threw millions into the streets, some fraudulently. That in-group walks free today. Among the latter are George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland.
Republicans’ White Christian base sees in that latter group and others an existential threat to its cultural and political dominance, one that justifies unmaking the republic in order to preserve its status.
Today, they are the party of the mob, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argued last night, and cruelty is still the point.
They are in fact the party of Donald Trump, born again in his image, a movement led by a cruel, corrupt, needy, insecure and emotionally stunted child in a 70-something body eaten up with grievance. This his acolytes take as their model for mature, adult, and Christian behavior. Theirs is a lost cause and they are lost souls. Pity them.
(h/t JB)