Autocracy, theocracy, and antidemocracy join hands
Finding boldfaced italics in a column in a major newspaper is highly unusual. But these are unusual times. A former U.S. president faces a jury verdict in a criminal trial for the first time in our history. His flag-draped followers believe themselves the apex of patriotism even as the self-styled Real Americans™ dedicate their lives to a man starstruck by dictators, who incites mobs to violence, who derides the sacrifices of soldiers, who flaunts flouts the law and is prepared to void the country’s constitution if it serves personal ambition.
His acolytes around the country are not as lazy as he, no. They are putting plans in motion to destroy the country. Patriotically, of course. Inspired by Dear Leader, they mean to shoot America in the middle of Fifth Avenue and expect no blowback.
The bolded text that grabs my attention is in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin commenting on the Ken Burns commencement address mentioned here on Sunday. Burns dropped his accustomed political neutrality to raise an alarm about the 2024 presidential election.
Rubin writes:
The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.
She continues, bolded in italics, with her own admonition to the press:
The media should collectively recognize that the pretense that “an unequal equation is equal” amounts to an in-kind gift to authoritarians who crave the appearance of normalcy and respectability. Sharp contrasts and moral judgment are kryptonite to MAGA forces, who would love nothing better than months more of fantasy politics (“What if Biden backed out?”) and poll obsession (that only now begin to reflect the views of likely voters).
The media would do well to focus on the authoritarian threat. A candidate such as Trump, who lies about his crowd size, the results of past elections and the sentiments of certain voters, intends to convey inevitability, strength and the futility of resistance. Trump assiduously follows the totalitarian playbook to demoralize opponents and condition the public to believe only he can possibly win. (He also sets the stage for election denial: How could I lose with such big crowds?). The false premise that President Biden is destined to lose (because Trump says so? because of premature, irrelevant polling?) is not news; it’s Trumpian propaganda. The press can avoid Trump’s manipulation by explaining the playbook and refusing to present his braggadocio as fact.
But Trump is not the author of the totalitarianism he teases. The resentments he stokes and the zombie Lost Cause he’s reanimated long predate his emotionally stunted childhood. Trump recognizes seething insecurity when he sees it. Like a tent revivalist, he skillfully manipulates people into giving themselves over a higher power— Himself — with the promise of Christian-nationalist salvation.
In Texas, Republicans plan on taking “one of the worst provisions in our Constitution, and bring it to the state level, then supercharge it” to guarantee permanent, Christianity-infused, one-party rule, writes Paul Waldman:
The state Republican Party has put together its new platform, which is an amalgam of right-wing ideas including declaring abortion to be “homicide” and demanding that public schools “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance.” And it proposes a truly incredible kind of Electoral College, in which statewide elections would be won by whoever got a majority in a majority of those 254 counties. Here’s how it’s worded:
“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.”
With so many near-vacant, very red, rural Texas counties, what it would mean at its worst, Waldman explains, is “that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote. ” Goodbye popular sovereignty. Hello minority rule. Hell, superminority rule.
Florida, another laboratory of autocracy, has already moved toward public instruction in Christian “self-governance,” reports Judd Legum:
Training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education direct middle and high school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism, a right-wing effort to merge Christian and American identities. Thousands of Florida teachers, lured by cash stipends, have attended trainings featuring these materials.
A three-day training course on civic education, conducted throughout Florida in the summer of 2023, included a presentation on the “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” on the founding of the United States. According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that “Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state,” and the same hierarchy is reflected in America’s founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that “[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God.” Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
[…]
Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and an expert in Christian nationalism, reviewed the entire presentation at Popular Information’s request. Tyler said that the “focus on the mythological founding of the country as a Christian nation, this use of cherry-picked history… is very much a marker of Christian nationalism.” According to Tyler, the aim of the presentation is “to solidify this ideology that equates being American to being Christian.” Tyler noted that the presentation does not address why, if religion was so essential to the structure of the government, the Constitution does not mention God at all.
My Catholic grade school nuns never taught this nonsense. But Florida is promoting it in its public schools?
Tyler adds that Christian nationalism underlies “the false idea that the country was founded by Christians to privilege Christianity in law and policy.”
Equating being American with being Christian means to second-class-citizenize anyone not part of the fringiest of Christianity. For this faction, that means even most other Christians.
Jenny Cohn posted this clip yesterday from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Perkins believes liberals mean to convince “Bible-believing Christians” that they are “out of step with the rest of America.” He then concedes that only 9% of Christians share his worldview:
What’s forming under our noses is a Republican-Christianist axis intent on writing everyone not of their liking out of the American experiment. Kind of a Christian nationalist version of the Confederacy-adjacent license tags that are all but collectors’ items on eBay, rewritten as “Put Your Heart In Jesusland Or Get Your Ass Out.”
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