Tag Wikipedia

Same song, next verse

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

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

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

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

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

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.

How P.J. O’Rourke helped me understand life, one week after he died

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It’s been a particularly busy time for me lately.  I don’t know if it’s an increased rate of work-related nonsense, or the pounds of mail I’m sorting through each day from friendly, helpful folks who just want to make sure I’m aware of the value of their particular Medicare supplement plan, but it feels like I’m never getting in front of things.  Not even on top of them, really; more just hoping to hold on and be dragged along.  It was already midday today, after a morning physical at the doctor’s and a trip to the office to refresh my memory of how to get there, when I got to the morning paper and found this essay by Christopher Buckley on his friend, the conservative writer, satirist and commentator P.J. O’Rourke, who passed away last week.

I recall first noticing the name P.J. O’Rourke in the masthead and bylines in National Lampoon of the mid 1970s.  Among that group of friends, we believed NatLamp in this time to be the funniest thing alive, or National_Lampoon_(magazine)_cover_–_January_1973perhaps ever to have lived, and certainly that ever would live, and any of the persons who was writing what we were reading there was a gift from the cosmos.  Because it was always funny, and because its targets were everyone and everything, no sacred cows allowed, I assumed that all those people writing those things must surely believe in all the things I believed in.  It was at first a great surprise to me years later (the 80s or 90s) when I read something by O’Rourke and realized he had been a conservative all those years before; according to his Wikipedia entry, “Many of O’Rourke’s essays recount that during his student days he was a leftist, anti-war hippie, but that in the 1970s his political views underwent a volte-face. He emerged as a political observer and humorist rooted in libertarian conservatism.”

O’Rourke’s political philosophies weren’t in lockstep with either of the major political parties in this country.  Clearly not a Democrat, but he did not offer non-critical obeisance to the Republicans, either: as Buckley notes, O’Rourke believed Hillary Clinton was “wrong ‘about absolutely everything,’ except in one regard: She wasn’t Donald Trump.”  That’s pretty much why I voted for her in 2016, too, and have felt like I’ve been dogged by Joe Btfsplk’s cloud ever since when it comes to questions of politics and government.

Buckley says “P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a particular and an essential sensibility. He found humor everywhere and in everything, especially in his PJORourke-tributes-newsfellow Republicans,” and he makes a good case for today’s Republicans having no sense of humor at all.  I agree: how could anyone who takes Donald Trump seriously see the humor in anything else?  But it was this line from Buckley that really caught me: “The Trump era could have been one great big enormous sandbox for P.J. to play in. Instead, he found it dispiriting, a pageant of stupidity, boorishness and coarseness.”

Dispiriting.  A pageant of stupidity, boorishness and coarseness.  Gawd, how on the nose.  Thank you, P.J. O’Rourke, for inspiring your friend Christopher Buckley to put into words the feelings I’ve been fighting for years now.

Know your enemy

Pat Ryan 4 Comments

On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.

It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.

One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.

Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.

Last week in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg worried about the future of our American democracy.  Like thousands/millions of others, I share her concern, and so should you.

The problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes.

(snip)

What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House.

(snip)

Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again.

(snip)

I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us.

Here’s a hopeful sign: two long-time contributors to Fox News giving a thorough and public explanation of why they just can’t take it any more.

…there are still responsible conservatives [at Fox News] providing valuable opinion and analysis. But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible.

A case in point: Patriot Purge, a three-part series hosted by Tucker Carlson.

The special—which ran on Fox’s subscription streaming service earlier this month and was promoted on Fox News—is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda.

(snip)

This is not happening. And we think it’s dangerous to pretend it is. If a person with such a platform shares such misinformation loud enough and long enough, there are Americans who will believe—and act upon—it.

This isn’t theoretical. This is what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

Over the past five years, some of Fox’s top opinion hosts amplified the false claims and bizarre narratives of Donald Trump or offered up their own in his service. In this sense, the release of Patriot Purge wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend. Patriot Purge creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself.

There are still many real conservatives who recognize that the Orange Emperor has no clothes, and who have not drunk the toxic brew that has let so many Republicans (and others) show true feelings they have always keep secret, until now.  Jennifer Rubin is one.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Never Trumpers (now largely ex-Republicans) warned that he would corrupt the party in every way imaginable. His misogyny would morph in the party’s toxic masculinity and degradation of women, they cautioned. His infatuation with brutality and violence (boasting he would kill terrorists’ families, exhorting his supporters to slug protesters) would metastasize to the party as a whole. Boy, did those predictions pan out.

You only have to look at the vicious imagery showing the murder of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) deployed by Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), the verbal attack on her from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) last year — and Republicans’ defense of both — to understand that their refusal to dump Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape came to light was merely the prelude to an era of normalizing violence (especially against women), culminating in the Jan. 6 violent insurrection, which many Republicans, including Trump, tried to paint as nonviolent.

Threats and portrayals of violence against women have turned into a badge of honor for a party in which traditional notions about gender (back to the 1950s!) have become a key predictor of Republican support. Casting men (even a Supreme Court nominee) as victims of aggressive, “nasty” or unhinged women accusing them of wrongdoing has become standard fare in the Trump party.

Rubin cites Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, who is willing to lay the blame for the violence we’re seeing now at the core of Republican party voters: White evangelicals.

Today, for an alarming number of white conservative Christians, the mark of Christian faithfulness is not a love that inspires them to lay down their lives for their friends, but a defensiveness that lures them to take the lives of their fellow citizens.

The anti-democratic and white supremacist core of this worldview snaps into focus as soon as we ask just one question: What is the “America” they are saving? This question is at the heart of the MAGA ideology that has now fully overtaken one of our two major political parties.

That second “A,” for “again,” is the hermeneutical key that unlocks the obfuscation.  This nostalgia for a White Christian America has become the weapon of choice in the culture wars. In that vision of the country, white law and order reign, and with refreshments and pats on the back, white vigilantes are informally deputized as partners. And Black people protesting in the streets or even shopping in the local CVS are seen as suspect for not playing their properly deferential roles or staying in their assigned subservient places.

If Trump has done anything for us, he has peeled back a thin veneer of patriotic- and Christian-sounding words to reveal the core claim underneath it all: That God intended America to be a white Christian nation. That claim has literally generated—for those among the chosen— a license to kill anyone who threatens that norm and the confidence that those actions will not only be free of negative consequences, but be rewarded both here on earth and in heaven.

“Christian nationalism” is the threat.  Let’s start by defining the terms, thanks to Paul D. Miller at Christianity Today.

There are many definitions of nationalism and an active debate about how best to define it. I reviewed the standard academic literature on nationalism and found several recurring themes. Most scholars agree that nationalism starts with the belief that humanity is divisible into mutually distinct, internally coherent cultural groups defined by shared traits like language, religion, ethnicity, or culture. From there, scholars say, nationalists believe that these groups should each have their own governments; that governments should promote and protect a nation’s cultural identity; and that sovereign national groups provide meaning and purpose for human beings.

What is Christian nationalism?

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.

What is the problem with nationalism?

Humanity is not easily divisible into mutually distinct cultural units. Cultures overlap and their borders are fuzzy. Since cultural units are fuzzy, they make a poor fit as the foundation for political order. Cultural identities are fluid and hard to draw boundaries around, but political boundaries are hard and semipermanent. Attempting to found political legitimacy on cultural likeness means political order will constantly be in danger of being felt as illegitimate by some group or other. Cultural pluralism is essentially inevitable in every nation.

Is that really a problem, or just an abstract worry?

It is a serious problem. When nationalists go about constructing their nation, they have to define who is, and who is not, part of the nation. But there are always dissidents and minorities who do not or cannot conform to the nationalists’ preferred cultural template. In the absence of moral authority, nationalists can only establish themselves by force. Scholars are almost unanimous that nationalist governments tend to become authoritarian and oppressive in practice. For example, in past generations, to the extent that the United States had a quasi-established official religion of Protestantism, it did not respect true religious freedom. Worse, the United States and many individual states used Christianity as a prop to support slavery and segregation.

There is much more here you should read.  Know your enemy, while there is still time to win the fight.

This is not about all Christians, or even all Christian evangelicals.  But those who think “freedom of religion” means everyone is free to practice their particular strain of Christian faith in their houses of worship and through the imposition of their religious beliefs in secular law, those who harbor a “nostalgia for White Christian America,” and who have been succeeding politically at achieving their goals since at least the days of the Moral Majority, those are the political enemies we need to get serious about defeating.  Right now, political despair be damned.