Tag: Wikipedia

The real majority rules

It only lasted a moment.  An instant, perhaps.  But the spark grew into a happy realization: the U.S. House of Representatives can do something constructive after all, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary it has piled up since January 2023.  The headline on the email that popped in yesterday afternoon was “House approves $95 billion foreign aid bill” and it turns out that the speaker of the Republican-majority House accomplished it by working with Democrats to outvote the extreme MAGA wing of his own party.

It’s the sort of thing that almost never happens anymore.  Dating back to the mid-1990s, Republican speakers have rarely allowed full floor votes on bills that weren’t already supported by a majority of their own party.  Even in cases where a majority of the full House – Republicans and Democrats and independents – supports a proposal, no final vote is permitted; that keeps the opposition party from looking good by passing legislation with the help of a few renegades from the majority party.  In recent years it has also allowed smaller groups of GOP members with extreme views to prevent more moderate members – in concert with the hated Democrats – from passing legislation that the extremists oppose.  That has prevented a full House vote on, among many other things lately, a bill to send more American military assistance to Ukraine to support its war with Russia.

Part of the story here is what happened to change Speaker Mike Johnson’s mind on helping Ukraine.

When the House passed a $40 billion emergency funding bill for Ukraine in May 2022, support for Ukraine was largely still a bipartisan issue. But a little-known conservative congressman from Louisiana was one of the 57 Republicans to oppose it.

Now, just six months after his unlikely elevation to speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-La.) has pushed through a $60 billion effort to bolster’s Ukraine arsenal, along with funding for Israel and the Indo-Pacific.

The move marks a major victory and dramatic turnabout for the speaker who is trying to gain control of a bitterly divided Republican conference. The far right is fiercely against Ukraine aid — 112 Republicans, just over half of the conference, opposed it on the House floor Saturday and he had to rely on unanimous Democratic backing — and Johnson’s decision to greenlight a floor vote could come at great political cost. He could very well lose his job as speaker over it.

(snip)

“Look, history judges us for what we do,” said an emotional Johnson, holding back tears and with a quivering lip at a news conference last week in response to a question from The Washington Post. “This is a critical time right now, critical time on the world stage. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different, but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

The Washington Post story goes on to explain Johnson’s evolution, which seems to boil down to the fact that he learned more about the situation and the stakes.  Good on him, an extreme conservative and evangelical, for not turning Speaker Johnson (1)his back on real-world, secular evidence that he might have been wrong in May 2022; maybe there’s a bit of accepting the responsibility of being a leader at work here, too.  “One Republican House member recalls: “I’ll never forget Johnson one time said, ‘I’ve gone from representing my district only to representing the entire [House] and the country.’ For someone to go from where he was to where he is now as quickly as he did … is remarkable.”

The other part of the story is the happy realization that brightened my afternoon: the evidence that the MAGA wing can be defeated, that the ignorant and selfish isolationists will not win if the rest of us stand up to them.  When we have leaders who put the best interests of the whole country first, who are serious about supporting America’s role as a leader of the whole world, a rump faction cannot take control.  And I do mean “rump.”

I also take this as an example of what the founders of Axios wrote about recently, the idea that American society and politics are not as irretrievably broken as it seems.

Here’s a wild thought experiment: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional and more defeated than we actually are?

Why it matters: Well, there’s compelling evidence we’ve been trapped in a reality distortion bubble — social media, cable TV and tribal political wars — long enough to warp our view of the reality around us.

The big picture: Yes, deep divisions exist on some topics. But on almost every topic of monthly outrage, it’s a fringe view — or example — amplified by the loudest voices on social media and politicians driving it.

  • No, most Christians aren’t white Christian nationalists who see Donald Trump as a God-like figure. Most are ignoring politics and wrestling with their faith.
  • No, most college professors aren’t trying to silence conservatives or turn kids into liberal activists. Most are teaching math, or physics, or biology.
  • No, most kids don’t hate Israel and run around chanting, “From the river to the sea.” On most campuses, most of the time, students are doing what students have always done.
  • No, most Republicans don’t want to ban all abortions starting at conception. No, most Democrats don’t want to allow them until birth.
  • No, immigrants who are here illegally aren’t rushing to vote and commit crimes. Actual data show both rarely happen — even amid a genuine crisis at the border.
  • No, most people aren’t fighting on X. Turns out, the vast majority of Americans never tweet at all.
  • No, most people aren’t cheering insults on Fox News and MSNBC in the evening. Turns out, less than 2 percent of Americans are even watching.

Reality check: But our politics are hopelessly divided, Jim and Mike! You’re naive!

  • Yes, current politics, and particularly the House, seem hopelessly dysfunctional. But this flows in part from majorities so narrow that fringe figures can hijack institutions, again particularly the House, and render them dysfunctional.
  • The actual dysfunction runs much deeper for structural reasons, such as redistricting, low voter turnout in off-year elections and geographic sorting (Democrats in cities, Republicans in rural areas).

(snip)

This new poll by the AP and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows a striking amount of agreement on some very big topics. Roughly 90% or more of Americans — Republicans and Democrats — agree the following rights and freedoms are extremely or very important to a functioning America:

  • Right to vote.
  • Right to equal protection under the law.
  • Right to freedom of religion.
  • Right to freedom of speech.
  • Right to privacy.

Hell, almost 80% think the right to own a gun is important to protect.

The last Republican candidate for president to win a majority of the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004…barely, at 50.7%.  The last before that was the first George Bush, with more than 53% when he beat Michael Dukakis in 1988.  The guy at the top of the GOP ticket in the last two elections won less than 47% of the popular vote each time; in 2020 one-third of the voting age population didn’t vote at all, and almost 40% blew off the election of 2016.  Which means he was actually voted for by roughly 30% of Americans, at best: less than half of a bit more than half of the country.  Thirty percent is not close to a majority.  The MAGAs are loud and obnoxious, but they are not the voice of America.  It’s time we remember that, and promise to do the thing that they fear the most: vote them out!

No reservations on the crazy train

In the Unofficial Pat Ryan Register of All Things Known and Unknown, there is recent high concern that Donald Trump has dementia.  Or is just batshit crazy.  One or the other is used to explain some of demented and/or hallucinatory things he says at his rallies.  But such concerns aren’t new: in the 2016 campaign it even led to the development of an explanation of a candidate’s speech that you’d never expect to be considered positive: that one should take him seriously but not literally.

At a rally in Ohio earlierGJcwK0kaMAEBJeW this month, in a speech in which he referred to China and automaking, Trump said (amid a typical word salad) there would be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win this November; sounds pretty ominous, and the Biden campaign claimed he was threatening actual violence.  But maybe he meant to convey that one result of him losing would be the continuation of Biden policies that would be devastating for the American auto industry.  In February, he told the Black Conservative Federation Gala that Black Americans like him better lately due to the many criminal and civil court cases against him: “I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them. Does that make sense?”  (No, not really)

One way or another, the listener has to do a lot of work to try to figure out what the speaker really means.  It’s the speaker’s fault if he doesn’t make his message clear enough for the audience to understand it.  (I mean the audience of the general population; his MAGA followers seem to process the dog whistle messages just fine.)

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

But there is at least one constant message in Trump speeches lately that doesn’t need much interpretation: his promise to free those convicted of crimes in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  Jonathan Chait sets the eerie scene in a great piece in New York Magazine:

At a recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump stood at formal attention while an announcer instructed the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” As Trump saluted, the speakers played a version of the national anthem sung by imprisoned insurrectionists. “They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that, and everybody knows that,” Trump said at the outset of his speech. “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”

Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign. The J6 version of the national anthem has been playing at rallies since March 2023, and Trump has been referring to jailed insurrectionists as “hostages” since November. But the prospect of pardoning them, which he has floated for two years, has in recent days been made his highest priority. Trump’s promise to “save the country,” which before encompassed his array of domestic and international policies, now refers principally to vindicating the militia that tried to illegally install him in power and that more and more has come to resemble a classic paramilitary group in the Trump imaginarium, licensed to carry out extrajudicial violence on his authority alone.

Bad enough that Trump is promising he will ignore/overturn court cases that sent hundreds of domestic terrorists to jail; Chait finds a scarier reason for Trump’s using this new message, one that potentially drives away independents who might vote for him: his desire for a second term in the White House that is unrestrained by conventional politics or judgement.

But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.

Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.

This is also why Trump is reportedly bringing back Paul Manafort, who served a prison sentence for bank and tax fraud, and witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and whose business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, was assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort’s skills are hardly irreplaceable. The point of bringing him back, other than the familiar mob logic of rewarding an underling who took his pinch like a man and refused to rat out the boss, is to signal that loyalty to Trump matters more than any other possible consideration. Normal politicians would distance themselves from staffers who committed crimes, especially crimes on their behalf. Trump regards this as the highest qualification.

(snip)

While Trump touts his first term as a historic success, he and his closest allies view it as largely a failure. Trump, in this view, was manipulated by staffers loyal to the traditional party into letting figures like Robert Mueller and Anthony Fauci undermine him. Mike Pence’s refusal to cooperate in Trump’s plot to steal the election was the ultimate betrayal. Trump’s project is to ensure that a second term faces no sabotage.

An effective Trumpist government has difficulty functioning under the rule of law. If Trump’s staffers and allies believe that carrying out his orders, some of them plainly illegal, will lead to prison or other punishment, they will again hesitate to follow them. That belief is one he has to stamp out, especially as he faces multiple criminal charges for his attempts to steal the election in 2020.

Chait’s conclusion is that Trump’s new focus is meant to shed his movement of all but the true believers; he doesn’t want to build a coalition of various interests and beliefs, he wants only those loyal to the boss, who will support and assist any grift the boss wants.

Among the true-believing Trumpists, there’s no confusion about what Trump’s relentless demands of cultlike submission are trying to accomplish. “The Judas Iscariots of the American Right need to understand that their betrayal comes at a cost,” rails a recent column in American Greatness, one of the new pseudointellectual organs that have sprung up in the Trump era to meet conservative audience demand for sycophantic content. “Excommunication is not enough. Their treachery deserves relentless psychic pain.” It adds that Mike Pence, the New York Times columnist David French, and others “should never be allowed back into respectable conservative company under any circumstances.”

Measured in traditional political terms, January 6 martyrdom may be a disadvantageous message for Trump. The stolen-election lie polls terribly with persuadable voters, and his fixation with it is one reason why Biden’s catastrophic approval ratings have resulted in only a small Trump lead. But by Trumpian logic, it is the perfect campaign theme. It forces his internal critics to swallow their last objection against him. It sends a message to his allies that they can act with impunity. By November, the J6 national anthem will be burned into our brains as deeply as any campaign jingle.

It doesn’t require high-levelGJiBgcnXcAAa-K4 interpretive skills to see the threat posed by a future President Trump in an administration without the likes of John Kelly or Mark Esper around.  They are among 40 of Trump’s 44 one-time Cabinet members who do not support him.  Think about that: of all the people Trump put in positions to lead the government – “the best people” – 10 out of every 11 of them now say no way do they want him in power again.  They haven’t all told us exactly what they saw on the inside of the Trump White House, but it’s enough for them to warn us not to repeat the mistake that was made in 2016.

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Same song, next verse

When I was a college student in the capital city of Texas, the mayor once held his regular weekly news conference and was asked to comment on the fact that the state legislature was about to begin another biennial session under the big pink dome.  His immediate reaction was to say “Lock up the kids and dogs.”

America, your legislature is back in business: the House of Representatives has selected Mike Johnson of Louisiana as its new speaker.  Who is that, you ask, and what does he believe in?  Among other things, he

So, we got that going for us…which is not nice.  Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that any sense of relief you might be feeling that a well-known extremist like Jim Jordan was not elected by Republicans in Congress is misplaced.

For Jordan’s shirt sleeves demeanor and wrestler’s pugnacity, substitute a bespectacled, low-key presentation, a law degree and an unswerving commitment to conservative dogma and former president Donald Trump.

This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.

Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind aSpeaker Johnson Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

(snip)

The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors. “The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the brief argued.

(snip)

The Texas episode was of a piece with Johnson’s conservative worldview. Before being elected to Congress, he was a senior lawyer and national spokesman for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights.

Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”

We shall see how well Johnson does in leading the House, or at least its too-small-for-comfort Republican majority, in handling upcoming issues like a possible government shutdown in three weeks, or requests for more aid to Israel and Ukraine, or any of the other normal kinds of business which members of Congress are supposed to take care of on our behalf.  But given his still-declared support of Trump, it’s unlikely Johnson will be much of a leader when it comes to the reality of the need to work with Democrats to get things done: as David Frum wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, “The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it had to accept reality.  Reality is just too awkward.”

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. So [then-Speaker Kevin] McCarthy just had to press ahead, acting as if he commanded a majority when he did not; insulting and demeaning the minority, even though he had to know that he might need their help at any minute.

That minute came. McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness.

That proposition did not produce the desired results, and so here we are.

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.

“Delusion and fantasy” might well stand as a new motto for the remnants of a once proud GOP: in the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual American Values Survey, one-third of Republicans believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” almost half think we need a strong leader who is willing to break some rules to get things done, and 29% are strong believers in the QAnon conspiracy movement. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin writes:

Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.

In a related question, 75 percent of Republicans think the Founders wanted America to be a Christian nation with Western European values.

Rubin also identifies a “positive sign of public sanity” across the ideological spectrum.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”

Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.

(snip)

Taking a step back, the overall picture here is a country that is inclusive, respectful of religious differences, pro-democracy and supportive of women’s rights — except when it comes to the largely Republican, mostly White evangelical Christians who reject these fundamental ideas.

When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time.

Don’t let the bully win

If you’ve been having trouble believing that Vladimir Putin is an unhinged, authoritarian war criminal, I’d suggest you take a few minutes to check out this report from last week’s “60 Minutes” to learn more about the conditions in Ukraine today.  It’s a story about how the people of that country are dealing with Russia’s on-going assault on civilian targets: apartment buildings and schools, power plants and utility infrastructure, and the non-combatants who are suffering as “collateral damage” from attacks that violate global rules on the ethical conduct of war.  (Yeah, there are such things; crazy.)

They are heroic.  Inspiring.  To watch what they have to put up with – conditions they do not deserve, that they suffer as a result of an unprovoked invasion of their sovereign country – made me cry.  Made me wonder, what can we do about this?

The “we” in this case is the rest of the world, everybody outside of Putin’s borders.  The people who just assumed, one year ago when Russia illegally invaded its neighbor, that the global condemnation of this blatant aggression would lead in short order to a low-key pullback by Russian forces with attendant harrumphing about maintaining what he claims as the historical Russian Empire, and then some international back-and-forthing as this big thing faded into the background…so we could maintain our comfort level about life in general and go on to the next big thing.

(People inside of Putin’s borders, we could use your help, too.)

But that didn’t happen.  What I think those of us outside of the professionals in intelligence and diplomacy and history didn’t and maybe still don’t really understand, is that Putin is a criminal (no matter what George W. saw in his soul) and he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks or says about how he treats his neighbors.  He hasn’t won easily on the battlefield as he assumed he would, so on top of taking Ukraine’s land and its children he is launching terrorist attacks on the people in the hope that they will lose their resilience and force their government to give up the fight.

I wish I could think of something more “we” could do that would help those people.  Congress should be commended for joining much of the rest of the western world in continuing to provide military assistance to Ukraine so it can keeping fighting the fight. I get it that, when dealing with someone who has become as isolated as Putin, there are risks to us if he decides our support of Ukraine needs to be challenged, but we can’t abandon these people.  They are the latest victims of a megalomaniacal bully, one who can no more be counted on to stop bullying today than could the chancellor of Germany in 1938.

Listen for the right alarm

Even in the best of journalism, where the story is at once true and fair, not inflammatory or emotionally manipulative, you still want to catch the attention of the reader/listener/viewer/clicker so that they will read/hear/see your story (and be enriched by the experience).  So don’t think you know all there is to know when the headline on a Pew Research Center poll blares “45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’” because the truth is less alarming than that.

In the past couple of years I’ve written a few times about the concept of Christian nationalism, and not in an approving way.  By definition,

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future. Scholars like Samuel Huntington have made a similar argument: that America is defined by its “Anglo-Protestant” past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural inheritance.

Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. The term “Christian nationalism,” is relatively new, and its advocates generally do not use it of themselves, but it accurately describes American nationalists who believe American identity is inextricable from Christianity.

Most of the Founding Fathers did profess a belief in a Supreme Being. If they believed that the success of their new creation was inextricably linked to Christianity as it was understood in their day – even IF  that is true – that’s not what it says in the structure for government they wrote.  Historical scholarship has lauded the American experiment that protects the rights of citizens to worship freely while disconnecting the religions from having any governmental authority.  It’s been one step on the still-being-paved path to a free society willing to give everyone a chance to contribute and to reap the rewards of their work.

So the headline roaring that nearly half of us think we should be a “Christian nation” is concerning, but it turns out there’s not so much worry there as one might imagine since the survey also finds that we don’t agree what that phrase even means:

For instance, many supporters of Christian nationhood define the concept in broad terms, as the idea that the country is guided by Christian values. Those who say the United States should not be a Christian nation, on the other hand, are much more inclined to define a Christian nation as one where the laws explicitly enshrine religious teachings.

Overall, six-in-ten U.S. adults – including nearly seven-in-ten Christians – say they believe the founders “originally intended” for the U.S. to be a Christian nation. And 45% of U.S. adults – including about six-in-ten Christians – say they think the country “should be” a Christian nation. A third say the U.S. “is now” a Christian nation.

At the same time, a large majority of the public expresses some reservations about intermingling religion and government. For example, about three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) say that churches and other houses of worship should not endorse candidates for political offices. Two-thirds (67%) say that religious institutions should keep out of political matters rather than expressing their views on day-to-day social or political questions. And the new survey – along with other recent Center research – makes clear that there is far more support for the idea of separation of church and state than opposition to it among Americans overall.

A Washington Post analysis makes clear that this poll hasn’t found a burbling caldron of restive theocrats across the country; in fact, “comfortable majorities want daylight between politics and faith.”

Sixty-seven percent of all adults, for instance, say churches should stay out of politics, while 77% say they should not endorse candidates for elected office.

Among the 45% who want the United States to be a “Christian nation”:

  • 28% want the federal government to declare the country a Christian nation, while 52% say the government should never declare an official religion
  • 24% say the federal government should promote Christian values, while 52% say it should promote moral values shared by many faiths
  • 39% say the federal government should enforce separation of church and state, while 31% say it should stop enforcing it.

Among all United States adults, 15% want the federal government to declare the country a Christian nation (69% do not), 13% say the federal government should promote Christian values (63% favor values shared by many faiths), 54% say the government should enforce separation of church and state (19% say it should stop).

So, the percentage of Americans who don’t believe in the separation of their Christian church from state authority is small…but the success of Christian evangelicals in winning political office is undeniable: give them credit for playing the game on its own terms and taking control of the levers of power at a rate beyond their real numbers in the population.  Those people are the ones fighting to make secular society look more like their preferred variety of Christianity.  Here in Texas they are hard-charging to use public tax dollars to fund private religious education for their children and leave the rest of “the little skoolchirrun of Texas” to languish in an underfunded and second-rate (at best) public education system.

“Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things” is how Christopher Hooks started a May article in Texas Monthly that let Texas’ Republican leaders have it (no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994!) over their treatment of children and the public education system:

It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, like several years of political activity before it, was dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the protection of children and by a multifront war against long-neglected public schools. There were essentially no contested policy proposals in the GOP primary that would affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely are.) There was, however, ceaseless discussion about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.

The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, [Attorney General Ken] Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that gender-affirming care, such as the prescription of puberty blockers to trans kids, constituted child abuse. Shortly after, [Governor Greg] Abbott tasked the Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of trans kids for such abuse.

The more widespread crisis concerned books. This panic was conjured up by right-wing parents and elected officials in roughly equal measure. The first target was “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to agitate about “pornography” in schools, a category that included mostly literature featuring queer characters. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of pornography in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law” because, he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.
Public school teachers and children’s librarians—members of two professions that offer highly beneficial services to society, for little pay—became villains to activist parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and “pedophiles” on social media. In Granbury, near Fort Worth, two women lodged a criminal complaint in May against the local school’s libraries, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, one of the women opined that a committee assembled to review troublesome books comprised “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”

That’s right: no intersection in this Venn diagram of the universes of “librarians” and “people with good moral standards,” according to this woman.  She’s not alone in that kind of sentiment.  It’s so tiresome.

A year of manufactured outrage about the specter of loose morals in public education had the effect of making all of public education worse—which, for some, seemed to be the goal. Test scores have dropped. Even parents who strongly favor public schooling have begun to search for alternatives. State leaders, including Abbott, who have presided over an education system that spends about 20 percent less than the national average on each student, began to lay the framework for a renewed push to expand school choice and perhaps introduce a voucher system in which taxpayer dollars would be used to fund private schools.

Our right-wing lieutenant governor has been championing vouchers for years, and that came up in a terrific column by Chris Tomlinson in the Houston Chronicle this summer that highlighted the on-going effort by right-wing extremists and their rich Texas patrons to “gut Texas public education.”

Their top priority is helping Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pass a school voucher bill that allows parents to spend state money to send their kids to private, religious schools, effectively defunding public schools. To inspire support for their plan, Patrick and his allies have set public schools up for failure by cutting their budgets.

Texas lawmakers have shrunk state spending per student over the last 15 years. Occasionally, they’ll authorize an increase, only to cut it later. Texas spends $9,900 per student, while the national average is $13,185, the Education Data Initiative reported.

Political vilification, school shooters, and poor compensation have led two-thirds of teachers to consider leaving the profession, the Texas American Federation of Teachers found in polling its members.

Texas already ranks 35th in the nation for pre-K through 12 education, U.S. News and World Report determined. WalletHub ranked the quality of Texas’s education as 33rd in the country. An exodus of experienced teachers will only worsen matters.

Few Texans can afford the $30,000 or more that a top private school charges and most do not want their child enrolled in a fundamentalist indoctrination camp. If we want our children and state to prosper in a competitive global economy, we must defend our public schools from those who would destroy them.

Self-described “conservatives” who demonstrate with their actions (and their money) that they do not believe in the American ideal of a free public education for all, nor do they believe in the separation of church and state or in real freedom of religion.  I can’t say how many of them fall into the 15% of all American adults who want the federal government to declare America a “Christian nation,” but I find it alarming enough to say I will have that in mind on election day.