How To Beat Cross-Bearing Fascists
Mailbag: Christian nationalism ... Mike Johnson ... Warfare
Thanks again for your questions, readers. Have a question for next Thursday’s mailbag? Leave it in the comments below.
<PowerOfOne>: Brian, in your response to Nancy you said:
"In the inner-most ring are the true diehards. Maybe 20-30 percent of the population. Basically the fascist rump of the country."
and you said
"Perhaps a quarter of the country will never leave him—they’d rather rule an impoverished, fascist America than participate in a prosperous American democracy."
One thought that seems to be a third rail in the analysis of Trump's success is the impact of Christian nationalism. Personally, I think a huge portion of the one quarter you mention are Christian Nationalists. In fact, that second quote comes close to the essence of CN thinking. I'd be curious as to your thoughts on that and what Dems (and all of us) must do to address it?
When I look around the world, and through our history, for insight into this moment—to what extent is it novel, to what extent is it distinctly American, to what extent does it resemble episodes in international history?—I find myself drawn to three comparators: the Jim Crow south; the early 20th century (the red scare, the Palmer raids, J. Edgar Hoover); and the Franco regime after the Spanish civil war. (I’m no historian, there are surely other analogs.)
So we have a lot of experience with authoritarian movements and regimes that drape themselves in the mantle of Christ. The question is whether that means we ought to oppose them in distinct ways, or whether we should rely on the same techniques that have defeated godless fascism or other non-religious despotisms. I suspect the answer is the latter.
If you look around the democratic world today, you’ll find that (speaking very loosely) a fifth to a third of all societies are pretty fascistic. It’s just that fascist blocs in Europe aren’t necessarily controlled by religious extremists, and in most cases they aren’t able to take over their governments.
How that happened here is…almost too complicated to fathom. Factors include a poisoned information environment, a long-run culture of militance on the American right, corruption, Lost Cause-ism, Trump’s unique and shameless celebrity, historical contingencies (his minoritarian victory in 2016, COVID, Joe Biden), and aspects of the constitutional design.
But neither his movement, nor its desire to dominate, are terribly unique. There’s nothing uniquely Christian or religious about the dictatorial temptation to rule over rubble when the alternative is treating strangers as equals. Long before Fox News and James Comey and the Biden administration, we had an old adage of unknown provenance: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” We knew!
Given broader similarities, I suspect the character of optimal resistance doesn’t turn much on the fact that American fascism contains a large element of religious extremism. In either case you want people in the streets, protesting peacefully, drawing buy-in from civil society and other powerful institutions, sowing division within the ranks of ruling functionaries.
To look ahead a bit, if we wanted to insure against a fascist revival, where Christian nationalists make further inroads into mainline Christianity, and then come back bigger and harder to defeat, it might behoove the next Democratic presidential nominee to use the godlessness of the actual fascist regime as a wedge to pull mainline Christians and liberal Christians firmly on to the pro-democracy side.
Some of this might happen on its own—see Trump fantasizing about becoming pope, and drawing bitter backlash from New York’s Catholic bishops.
But all recent Democratic presidents have been practicing Christians who deployed their faiths in various ways.
In his breakout 2004 Democratic convention speech, Barack Obama tried to seize the center with this memorable line: “We worship an awesome god in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”
Joe Biden let his devout Catholicism speak for itself in its contrast to Trump, and used it to subtle but I think mostly positive effect after Dobbs: The right is for crackdowns, the left is for everybody else, including religious people like me who have misgivings about abortion.
The next Democratic nominee could try something a little more frontal, particularly if he or she happens to be a Christian. I would love to hear prominent religious liberals co-opt religious revivalism from the far right. There’s this bloc of Americans, and a set of conservative elites providing them intellectual cover, who lament that church attendance and religious practice are in decline, but then make common political cause with the least Christ-like man in America. It would be interesting, and perhaps politically effective, for the party to say: We welcome a new dawn of spirituality in America, but it can’t and won’t be led by bad-faith actors who’d bargain with the devil for the power to control others. Only an American Christianity of loving thy neighbor has the potential to grow. An American Christianity of rendering thy neighbor to a foreign labor camp or swindling him out of his retirement savings with meme coin scams is destined to fail.
Jonathan Rabinowitz: How will we first know if the Rs can't pass a budget because they can't agree on Medicaid cuts? It seems to me that [House Speaker Mike] Johnson is very careful to avoid mentioning any progress on the budget whatsoever. What signs will there be for the astute observer that they can't get to Yes?
Good timing on this question, as Johnson may have tipped his hand that some of the most extreme and partisan Medicaid cut ideas won’t be able to pass the House. The problem is, congressional Republicans are deeply dishonest, and also, their whip methods are purely coercive at this point. So I’m not sure we can take this concession to the bank, let alone know whether it means they’re going to bail on Medicaid cuts altogether.
As Matt noted on this week’s podcast, it seems highly likely that they’ll be able to add a work requirement to Medicaid, even though the cost-savings of a work-requirement are minimal.
But whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t think I’ll be able to make a bold claim that this GOP enterprise is doomed until Republicans release real bill text at a minimum. If their reconciliation bill contains no cuts or de minimis cuts, it’s probably safe to assume they’ve given up. They could also release a bill with draconian cuts and try to strong arm all their members into voting yes. Then we’ll just have to wait and see what blue-district House Republicans and Medicaid-state Senate Republicans do about it. Something along those lines could absolutely fail on the floor, 2017 style.
Congressional Budget Office guidance already indicates that cutting Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade will leave millions of people uninsured. This won’t be an easy lift for them.
Peter Basso: I think you hit the nail on the head with the pecuniary interest *seeming* valid when the real harm will be an erosion of freedom. But I do think we need to figure out how to message that [Gretchen] Whitmer made the wrong trade off in a way that doesn’t come off as condescending to her supporters. Sort of reminds me of a similar quandary of convincing MAGA voters that they voted against their interests. Shortly after the election, Democratic Missouri Senate candidate Lucas Kunce wrote that the premise of the question “why did you vote against your interests?” was elitist and that those who asked it were just further alienating these voters by insulting their intelligence and claiming to know their interests better than they do. There are no easy answers here, but I’d value your thoughts (and if you wrote on this and I missed it, please point me to your article. Thanks!)
It’s hard to grasp the similarity between these quandaries unless you start with the question of who’s being condescending, and to whom.
I suspect Kunce was referring to a familiar style of liberal political analysis, which begins with the premise that people should and generally do vote in their economic self-interest, and that when they vote against their economic self-interest, something must have gone wrong. Thomas Frank endeavored to explain how this kind of thinking elides the power of cultural appeals so many years ago in What’s The Matter With Kansas, which was a bit off point when it came out (the class divide between the parties was starker then) but looks pretty good now. Yet to this day a large number of liberals continue to insist that the “right” way to approach politics is to treat voters as market participants angling for best deal they can. If and when Democrats lose elections, people who see the world this way will either assume that Democrats didn’t make their economic appeals clearly enough, or that there’s something the matter with Kansas. But just as I vote against my economic self-interest all the time (because I have strong ideological commitments) I totally understand why a downwardly mobile white community might vote Republican. And Kunce is right: if you just assume that the only way to win those people over is with the right kinds of promises to fatten their wallets, you’re being condescending to them.
The key with the latest Whitmer imbroglio is that she did the very thing Kunce warned against: condescended and pandered to a set of supporters (the Trump-Whitmer voters in and around Selfridge) whom she treats as motivated by pure economic self-interest. And to make matters worse, she’s done this at the expense of her more dependable supporters in, say, Ann Arbor who deserve a governor who will defend them from extortion. My whole theory of politics in the Trump era is that this is a bad approach. The right approach (politically and morally) is to fight for the interests and liberties of all—to refuse Trump’s demand that she pit her citizens against one another; and then, if he seeks to punish her by harming a subset of Michiganders, to make the case to his victims that they and all Americans deserve better than the cynicism and cruelty of a tyrant.
Takebacktheflag: Can you provide some details on the “tax cuts for billionaires” we keep referencing? Is this just continuing the 2017 tax rates or are there new cuts specifically aimed at wealthy individuals or corporations that are in the Republicans’ budget?
The devil will be in the details, which we don’t have yet. In any case, at least $4.5 trillion will stem from renewing the 2017 tax cuts. But Trump also wants to exempt Social Security, overtime pay, and tipped income from federal taxation, and those provisions would balloon the deficit even further, potentially by a lot. Depending on how it’s structured, a tax exclusion for tipped income could create a huge loophole for ultrawealthy earners like fund managers (and even Substackers!), allowing them to characterize regular income from fees as tips for services rendered. We need to see language and possibly implementation to know how ripe provisions like that would be for abuse.
<PowerOfOne>: I got a mailer from Public Citizen looking for support of a Democracy for All constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United. The mailer included a map of states with the number of US senators, US representatives and local govt resolutions supporting the amendment. A quick scan seemed to show blue states uniformly for and red states uniformly against. How could this push be leveraged to Dems advantage?
I am not uniformly opposed to Democrats and progressives mounting constitutional amendment campaigns. I wrote the case for a campaign to amend the pardon power just last week; and I think the nature of the ongoing crisis might militate for a broader campaign to rein in out of control presidential power. These campaigns probably won’t “work,” because amending the Constitution is very hard, but they will draw attention to the acute emergency we face. And, hey! Who knows?
Campaign finance is different. Reform is popular in the abstract, but not a particularly high priority, which is a poor fit for a movement to amend the Constitution. You just never get out of that 50-50 rut, when you need to be closer to 75-25. Plus, unlike the pardon power, Citizens United isn’t in the Constitution. It’s just some bullshit Republican Supreme Court justices made up. We don’t need a constitutional amendment to overturn it, just majorities in Congress willing to expand the Supreme Court, and a president willing to nominate faithful jurists.
If you’re a Dem office seeker, that means taking worthy opportunities to rail against Citizens United and the out of control court that imposed it on the country, perhaps alongside some vague gestures toward “overturning” it. Then court expansion becomes the means of fulfilling the promise to overturn Citizens United.
Nate: Ok, since you mentioned movies, I’ll ask - have you seen Warfare? And what did you think of it? I saw it a few days ago and have been turning it over in my head since. I can understand the critics who think it glorifies the Americans and elides the damage and suffering our involvement in Iraq caused, but I thought it’s single-minded focus on the actual minutia of war really highlighted in an understated way the pointlessness of the war and our involvement there. It also made me think about what the war did to our society - both for the veterans who suffered through this (and perpetrated the suffering of others), and for our society at large observing (or ignoring) this happening in a far-away country. Would be curious to hear your thoughts!
Circling back to this now that I’ve seen Warfare: I agree with your take. Perhaps this is colored by the fact that I really like the way Alex Garland makes movies. Even when the underlying ideas have some flaws, as in Civil War, it’s still just great filmmaking.
But here I think critics are just preening. Perhaps they’d have a point if the political and cultural consensus in the United States was that the Iraq War was good or justified. But I think that question has been resolved the other way, which means almost nobody who sees the movie is going to be radicalized against Iraq or Islam or mistake it for Iraq War apologism. Instead it’s a worthy reminder that we wasted many lives for, generously, a mistake. And many of the survivors, like the Iraqi family held captive throughout the film, were left homeless and traumatized.
I can’t recall a war movie quite like it, with no real character development or protagonist or plot. Just: We begin this war already in progress, capture one debacle among many, and then cut. In that 90ish minutes, there’s no pro-war propaganda. There’s barely even pro-warrior propaganda—we see basic competency, developed over years of specialized training, collapse into amateurism the moment men lose the upper hand, because the truth is you can’t really train large groups of humans to compartmentalize death and gore and mortal danger.
At the end of the movie, they do of course pay homage to the real-life men depicted in the movie, and I think that was appropriate. It would have been fine to just cut to credits, too. Or to pay similar homage to displaced Iraqis. But it would have been a very strange decision, as a matter of either cultural expression or capitalism to end the movie with an ostentatious statement of the obvious—the war was bad—by painting the troops as the bad guys. I know that view is out there, but apart from being normatively wrong (most of the bad guys were in Washington) its also something a self-satisfied ideologue would do, not a good artist or critic, let alone someone who hoped their movie would make money.