Tag Archives: Republican Party

His Future and Ours

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Salon interviewed George Conway, a Republican lawyer married to the infamous Kellyanne Conway (press secretary in the former administration) and who became known as an ex-Republican critic of the ex-president. I had a reaction to his closing comments.

How do we balance political expediency versus legal necessity? The law takes time, but [the former president] is an imminent danger to American society right now. Something needs to be done, and we are running out of time. 

At the end of the day, we have to follow the legal system and apply it evenhandedly — but that should be done as expeditiously as possible. The Justice Department has clearly come around to that understanding. They are now expanding their investigations of Jan. 6, [his] other alleged crimes and related matters at the highest levels. I don’t think it’s going to take them very long to put together a case on the classified documents. And I don’t think they have a choice, even if they wanted to resist prosecuting him. It’s going to be sooner rather than later. [He] could easily be under both federal and state indictment at some point between Election Day [Nov. 8] and New Year’s Day.

What do you think is going to happen with these criminal cases? Does he take a plea bargain? There’s this fantasy among some liberal folks that [he] does a perp walk and goes to prison. I don’t see that happening. If anything, [he] pays fines and takes a plea deal. Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice will not put a former president in prison. 

I don’t believe that [he] is going to plea bargain. I think he could go to prison, but it is more likely that he will serve home confinement. In all likelihood, he will be convicted of multiple felonies. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a perp walk, but I don’t think it’s a fantasy either. There’s a good chance that [he] will end up with a felony conviction. I know he has cut deals in civil cases, but that’s just writing checks. To reiterate, I do not believe that [he] will plead out. This all goes so much to the core of [his] identity that he will try to tear the country apart before he settles one of these criminal cases.

That is a powerful statement. 

[He] will incite violence on his behalf. He will try to pretend it is something spontaneous. Does [he] have enough power and influence over his followers to threaten the republic? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s enough to be dangerous.

What are you most concerned about? And what, if anything, are you hopeful about, regarding the country’s future?

What keeps me up at night is the violence that [he] could potentially cause. The danger of violence will increase as the 2024 election approaches. What gives me hope is that the legal reckoning is coming…. I am hopeful that the American people will be so exhausted by this whole saga that they will be drawn toward all the things that tie us together as a nation and people. Of course we may disagree with one another, and do so passionately. But in the end we are all Americans, and we have more in common than divides us. I hope we can get back to that and heal….

First, nothing keeps me up at night except the desire to stay up.

More importantly, when the former president is finally indicted somewhere, the authorities will let him show up with his lawyers and hear the charges. He won’t ever be in handcuffs or a cell. If he accepts a deal or is convicted, he’ll get house arrest, not prison, and then may leave the country.

Right-wing violence is always a threat (much more than left-wing or Islamic violence) but my biggest short-term concern is that Republicans will do well-enough in upcoming elections, either legally or illegally (by ignoring the results), that — with the help of radical reactionaries on the Supreme Court — they’ll consolidate minority rule. They’ll change the laws in enough states to make it very hard for them to lose (and the laws to be changed back). Add that to their built-in advantages in the Senate and Electoral College and elections won’t matter much.

The only hope I have is that once enough members of my generation die off, fewer voters will watch network or cable TV and be misled by right-wing and corporate propaganda or local news that “leads with what bleeds”.

My longer-term concern (although it becomes shorter all the time) is the climate crisis and the many ways a warmer climate will affect life on Earth. But it doesn’t keep me up at night.

On that subject, however, here’s an article from the MIT Press called “How to Fix Climate Change (A Sneaky Policy Guide)”:

We may already have a “miracle” fix for climate change. [It’s] a planetary emergency. We have to do something now — but what? Saul Griffith, an inventor and renewable electricity advocate (and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant), has a plan. In his book “Electrify,” Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: Electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future….
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Understanding the Plague of Christian Nationalism

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The political ideology known as “Christian nationalism” has little to do with Christianity. Journalist Sarah Posner explains it for Talking Points Memo:

Christian nationalism has been all over the news lately, but it is neither a new term nor a new phenomenon in American politics. The label gained greater usage during [the former administration] because of [that president’s] mobilization of the Christian right around his strongman politics. Interest in the ideology — and the term — grew even more following the January 6 insurrection, where Christian nationalist rhetoric and symbols were on full display, sometimes violently. …Its threat to democracy has never been more vividly apparent.

Many on the Christian right have long rejected the term, but Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has embraced it, and even started selling “Proud Christian Nationalist” t-shirts. “I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist,” she tweeted in response to criticism. “They hate America, they hate God, and they hate us [no, but we do hate you].

Although Greene made it more popular, not all Christian nationalists wear the label on their sleeve, or a t-shirt. So how can you tell who is a Christian nationalist?

The Christian Founding Mythology

Christian nationalists believe that God had a “providential hand” in America’s founding. They contend that, carrying out God’s will, the founders intended America to be a “Christian nation.” They insist, falsely, that the founding documents prove both this intent and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” God also intended government to play a limited role in people’s lives, they assert — but to the extent government carries out its functions, it should be done from a “biblical worldview”….

The leading proponent of this revisionist history undergirding contemporary Christian nationalism is David Barton, a prolific writer and energetic speaker whose false and misleading claims about this history have been thoroughly debunked by historians and researchers. Nonetheless, his extensive writings and lectures maintain a kind of doctrinal status within the religious right. Barton first made national headlines in 2004 when the Republican National Committee hired him as a political consultant during the presidential campaign to mobilize evangelical pastors and their flocks. Today, he remains an influential fixture in Christian right circles through his extensive writings, lectures, radio show, and other programs produced by his WallBuilders organization.

The impact of the perpetuation of this ideology is clear. A recent poll by the University of Maryland found that 61 percent of Republicans support officially declaring the United States a Christian nation. That number is far higher — 78 percent — among Republicans who identify as evangelical or born-again.

Restoration and Dominionism

A corollary of the Christian nation founding myth is that if the founders were carrying out God’s will, then any erosion of America’s “Christian heritage” must be fought by patriotic Christians who seek to rescue America from ungodly forces and “restore” it to its Christian foundation. Based on claims that the Bible calls on Christians to “take dominion” over earthly institutions, Christian nationalists contend that it is the duty of Christians to run for office and seek political and judicial appointments to ensure the government crafts law and policy from a [supposed “biblical” perspective].

In nearly two decades of reporting on the Christian right, I have seen this directive manifest itself in myriad ways: activists engaging in “spiritual warfare” and vetting political candidates, evangelical pastors mobilizing “to restore America to her Judeo-Christian heritage”, candidates running for president to Christianize government, governors holding mega-prayer rallies in professional basketball stadiums — all building toward the movement attempting to foment a coup. Greene’s call for the GOP to “lean into biblical principles” showed how the decades-long quest to elect “biblical worldview” representatives continues to bear fruit, and in increasingly radical ways.

Persecution

A key element of this dominionist vision is the claim that Christians are persecuted by social, cultural, political, and legal changes that they claim have undermined the Christian nation. Much of the supposed subversion of Christian heritage and values, and the attendant claimed persecution, stems from both conspiratorial thinking about political adversaries and apocalyptic claims about their ambitions. From the Cold War to the present, perceived enemies of the Christian nation have included Communism, Marxism, socialism, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., mainline Protestantism, atheism, secular humanism, feminism, abortion rights, the “homosexual agenda,” Islam, political correctness, President Barack Obama, “gender ideology,” COVID mitigation policies, the “deep state,” critical race theory, and “wokeness.” Many of these figures, beliefs, and policies might ostensibly have little in common, but they are imagined as conspiring to form a single movement to undermine America — as Greene put it in her tweet, the “godless left.”

In practical legal and political terms, these persecution claims, litigated in the courts and in the court of public opinion by well-funded lawyers and activists, have led tocataclysmic erosions of church-state separation, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, ongoing assaults on LGBTQ rights, and the accompanying elevation of religious freedom rights — for right-wing Christians. 

Anti-Democracy

Subversions of church-state separation, and the imposition of fundamentalist religion to deprive others of their civil and constitutional rights, are in and of themselves signs of a democracy in danger. But since the 2020 election, the Christian right’s embrace of [the] stolen election lie — fueled by the belief that [the unreligious, con man president] is a savior of the Christian nation — has contributed to direct threats to the electoral process itself….

The QAnon movement, which claims that a deep state cabal of satanic pedophiles is running a secret sex trafficking ring inside the government … is not just a conspiracy theory. It is another means of energizing right-wing white Christian voters, who have been steeped in this kind of conspiracism for decades, to take extreme steps to “save” the Christian nation that (they believe) [the ex-president] has so ardently defended. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute has found that QAnon adherents “express strong Christian nationalist beliefs,” with 71 percent agreeing with the statement that “God has granted America a special role in human history,” and 55 percent saying they believe being a Christian is “at least somewhat important to being a ‘true American.’”

Finally: Is [You Know Who] A Christian Nationalist?

The Bible is just a prop for [him], and, like autocrats throughout history, he uses religion and religious leaders to consolidate the support of enraptured followers. It doesn’t really matter whether [he] himself is a Christian nationalist, since he is a salvific figure to Christian nationalists, one who can achieve their long-sought goals by crushing the “godless left” and giving them more power. One of the leading contenders to be [the former president’s] successor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is abusing his current office to engage in fascistic crackdowns on migrants, public education, and LGBTQ kids while making direct Christian nationalist appeals. In recent political speeches, DeSantis has been using a verse from Ephesians 6 (“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”), but with a notable substitution: instead of “the devil’s,” he has said “the left’s.” The meaning is not lost on evangelical audiences, who are well familiar with the actual words of the verse….

One More Comment from Prof. Zimmer on the Pathetic Circus We Call American Politics

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Untitled

That’s Florida’s thuggish Republican governor Ronald DeSantis using his own state’s funds to gather up immigrants in Texas and put them on a plane to Massachusetts (where the arrivals were greeted warmly by local residents). History professor Thomas Zimmer had a reaction:

Leading Republican elected officials: “Let’s round up human beings under false pretenses and treat them like cargo in order to use them as props in an illegal stunt to trigger the Libs and rile up the base!”   New York Times: “Here’s a new political tactic we haven’t seen…”

Untitled

There is almost nothing so vile, so inhumane, so outrageous that the mainstream media can’t press it into the established politics-as-horse-race framework, thereby sanitizing it and presenting it as just the latest development in the struggle between Team Red and Team Blue.

Since mainstream journalism is predicated on the idea that politics is a game between two teams that are essentially the same and journalists aspire to “neutrality,” which they define as equidistance from either side, whatever comes from the [Republican Party] has to be elevated to credibility.

Sometimes that happens by presenting bad-faith nonsense as serious policy proposals – that’s what we get after every mass shooting, when Republicans claim the answer to gun violence is more guns or maybe school buildings with just one entry point, remember that one?

If that doesn’t work, then the sanitizing effect is achieved by simply ignoring the actual substance of what Republicans have done and focusing solely on the “playing politics” part, the horse race and how it may or may not be affected by these actions.

It’s one of the most bizarre features of the American political discourse that it demands we pretend these are serious political actions, coming from serious political actors, instead of denouncing them as the extremist culture warriors they so clearly are.

In a healthy political culture, anyone involved in such a deranged scheme would be shunned and ostracized, the party that elevated them would have to pay a hefty political price. In the U.S., that’s evidently not the case. And until that changes, nothing changes.

Unquote. 

There’s more to this story coming out. According to a lawyer representing the immigrants, officials from the Department of Homeland Security participated in this fiasco and falsified government documents, filling in random addresses around the US as the immigrants’ mailing addresses. If this actually happened, there needs to be serious jailtime.

Understanding the MAGA Political Project

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Last night, Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon took another step toward legal immortality by turning down the Department of Justice’s offer to act somewhat judicially and allow the government to proceed with its criminal investigation of her political patron (the one referred to by the actual president as “the last guy”). When she became a judge, she swore an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons … faithfully and impartially”, yet she announced in her ruling that “principles of equity” required her to consider “the position formerly held by Plaintiff”. In other words, Loose gave her patron everything he asked for because he’s a very special person.

Now, more senior judges will be forced to remind a human monster that equality before the law is still a thing nd he’s just another plaintiff. Which will make him very, very mad.

On that note, I’m going to step away from this blog for a while, but leave you with historian Thomas Zimmer’s thoughts on what Loose Cannon and her ilk are trying to accomplish:

[The MAGA movement’s] assault on democracy [is] animated not by nihilism, but by conviction – by the idea that America must forever remain a land where a traditional white Christian patriarchal order is upheld.

This isn’t just a matter of semantics. The idea that we are dealing with nihilists and opportunists underestimates or ignores the Right’s ideological vision for how U.S. society should be structured and the deliberate, systematic way in which the Right attempts to realize it.

I appreciate [Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic] pushing back against the narrative that MAGA Americans are simply motivated by economic anxiety, for which there is very little empirical basis; and he’s right to reject the idea the conflict could be solved by compromise or persuasion.

[MAGAs] are indeed not interested in debate, or a different perspective, or building bridges, or compromise. The only thing they would accept from “the Left” (which is everyone in the pro-democracy camp) is compliance, submission. There is no truce to be had.

But the key question is: Why is “normal” political deliberation not an option, why are [they] so clearly willing to tear constitutional government down? Nichols has a clear answer: Because they are “anti-American nihilists,” purely driven by anger and resentment.

Leaving it there, however, is a little bit like parachuting into an ongoing conflict, seeing people with torches and pitchforks in their hands, and simply concluding that “Ah well, I guess these guys just want to burn stuff down” …

All this resentment, anger, and lust for revenge is not aimless: It is directed against certain traditionally marginalized groups of people who are claiming equality and respect, and against the institutions that are supposedly doing their bidding to destroy “real America.”

Nichols himself rightfully diagnoses “fears about social status” as an animating force behind the [MAGA] project – and all the evidence we have points to the fact that those are racialized, gendered fears about the “wrong” kind of people getting ahead in America.

This is absolutely key: It’s not a coincidence that all this anger and resentment is targeting people who have traditionally not been allowed a seat at the table of power, right at the moment when they are threatening to claim their seat….

These numbers … are indicative of a very clear rightwing vision for the country: The supposed victimization of white Christians has to be reversed, their rightful status at the top needs to be restored.

Among [Republican] voters 90% say Christianity is under assault; 3/4 say bias toward whites equals bias toward minorities; 70% say immigrants are undermining US values & traditions; ~3/5 say white men the most persecuted group; ~3/5 say men are now punished for acting like men.

This is why the president was right to tie the “MAGA Republican” assault on the political system to the broader reactionary struggle to roll back the post-1960s civil rights regime in his “Soul of the Nation” speech in Philadelphia….

The “nihilism” interpretation falls short of explaining what it is that holds the American Right together – [the defeated president] and his disciples, the Republican establishment, rising white Christian nationalist extremists, the reactionary intellectual sphere, rightwing militant groups.

All of these different factions on the Right are ultimately united behind the same political project of fighting back against the “Un-American” leftist forces that are out to turn the country into something it must never become: an egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic order….

Yes, they want to tear down and destroy, but only those institutions that are supposedly captured by this “Un-American” enemy within.

This is not at all an aberration from long-standing rightwing attitudes towards the state and civic institutions, which conservatives have only ever defended if they perceived them to be allies in the struggle to entrench traditional hierarchies. Whenever the government or the institutions acted as an engine of racial and social progress, conservatives saw it as the enemy. Conservative support for state authority and establishment institutions has always been contingent on them working to uphold reactionary rule….

At its core, the politics of “law and order” has always been a promise (and a threat) to mobilize all the tools available to the modern state to keep insubordinate groups in check and uphold a certain racial, social, and cultural order: traditional white Christian rule.

It is therefore not at all surprising that the January 6 insurrectionists were viciously attacking police officers while displaying the Thin Blue Line flag, or that this symbol is regularly displayed by those who embrace political violence against state authority in general.

The Thin Blue Line flag doesn’t say “We stand with the police” – it says “We stand with the police as long as they’re working to uphold the kind of ‘law and order’ that allows us to dominate with impunity while subduing those who dare to oppose our rule.”

… [It is crucial] to see how all of this is connected, all part of a multi-pronged, multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization that has a judicial arm, a political arm, an intellectual arm, and a paramilitary arm, all flanked by a massive, highly effective propaganda machine.

In this context, the supposedly mindless, nihilistic, anarchist raging has a specific role to play: to spread violent chaos and intimidation, in a direct assault on the foundations of democratic society. The MAGA raging is inherently political. Democracy depends on people feeling safe in the public square. If they don’t, because it’s ruled by intimidation and threats of violence, they won’t be able to participate as citizens. It’s what these extremists want: Rule and dominate through violence and harassment….

The “nihilism” approach completely isolates MAGA from the context and continuity of the long struggle over democracy and the fact that those who oppose it have often been willing to embrace violence, have often opted to tear the system down rather than accept defeat….

The fact that the Right in general is deliberately pursuing a reactionary political project, one that is animated by ideology and conviction rather than blind, nihilistic rage, makes the threat to American democracy more, not less acute.