In yesterday’s testimony in a New York City courtroom, Donald Trump did his usual thing on the stand, doing his insult-laden woe-is-me routine in between non-answers that seemed to support Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump operated like Mafia Don (or like Adolf Hitler), who gave his minions an outline of what he wanted done and they did what they thought would “please” him without implicating him directly.
Hitler himself almost never put policy to paper with his signature, and likewise this is the reason why for a long time Mafia dons were almost never indicted for the crimes that their minions committed, until the RICO Act was passed. Trump had a habit of making blustering claims that he had no actual knowledge of their validity, and his minions (including his brain-dead sons) were required to turn fantasy into reality (or rather, vice-versa) to suit both his whims and financial transactions.
But back to the “real” world. So far, Mike Johnson’s tenure as speaker has proved one thing: that lawmakers from far-right, “culture war” districts are not the stuff true common sense leaders are made from. Johnson’s “chummy” personality may be “disarming” to some, but no one should be fooled: like all of the far-right, white nationalist culture warriors, he is far outside the “mainstream” and has this arrogant, egotistical view that he has some moral “superiority” over the generality, based on his religious “principles.”
Yet the far-right and evangelical Christians like Johnson seem to think that isolated incidences of “Christian” behavior (we have heard about his "adoption" of a 16-year-old homeless black teenager) will atone for an overall worldview that dehumanizes and discriminates against other peoples and groups, denies natural science, denies the right of others to believe in what is “right” as they choose, and supports agendas that makes life more miserable for a population already mired in massive wealth inequality.
I suppose that many Republican voters believe that the far-right’s proposals to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is just a rhetorical stunt and not serious. Well, if it isn’t “serious” then why is Johnson even proposing such cuts instead of trying to find serious ways of keeping them solvent? How about the most obvious and easiest way—simply raising the taxable income limit from the current $160,000? But Republicans call that “raising taxes,” and they will never do that to their paymasters.
Johnson and the far-right is also proposing to slash most of Amtrak’s budget—which for some House Republicans in the northeast is causing some bellyache because of the regions' high usage in their population-congested districts. And then the far-right wants to cut the Education Department, which critics say will cut 100,000 teaching positions if it is implemented; Make America Dumb Again seems to be the message there. And of course there is slashing the FBI and Justice Department budgets—or at least while there is a Democrat in the White House.
Johnson, of course, is a “darling” of the far-right because he was at the forefront of Congressional voter fraud conspiracies after the 2020 election, and supports of voter suppression laws that directly impacts Democratic-leaning minority voters, and thus seeks to silence them and insure Republican supremacy. He calls himself a “Christian,” but holds unChristian-like views on people whose names he says he can’t pronounce. He is a xenophobe who the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed as having ties with anti-immigrant hate groups and uses their dehumanizing language.
Naturally people like him only see "vermin" on the border, not actual human beings. Like nearly everyone in this country and in the media as well, he chooses to be completely clueless about the circumstances that brings people--escaping "deported" U.S.-bred gang violence in Central America and shrinking safe havens for Mexicans who just want to live free of fear of cartels who are battling each other to relieve the insatiable thirst for illegal drugs in this country. Johnson has been adamant about shutting down all asylum and pathways to legal immigration for anyone from this hemisphere that his ancestors never asked permission to occupy themselves.
But why quibble? Johnson has made it no secret that his real “beef” about the border is his belief that Democrats are “importing” voters for “their” side. Note that Johnson, like all Republicans, don’t question why these people supposedly wouldn’t vote for them. In the meantime, Lindsey Graham is proposing yet another despicable, racist immigration “reform” package tied to aid to Ukraine. Every immigration “reform” bill since 1965 has made it more and more difficult for Latin Americans to immigrate legally, apply for asylum or obtain work visas. Just plain stupid and racist; as written about before, U.S. temporary work policy restricting entry and natural cross-border movement is the real trouble with the “border.”
We are told, however, that Johnson’s ascension is a “victory” for the Evangelical Christian far-right, backed by the usual clown show types that proves that the far-right is a direct threat to democratic government and ignorant of the Constitution:
Now, some people will question how people who call themselves “Christians” can support someone who is as morally and ethically corrupt as Trump, exposing themselves as hypocrites. Well, the answer is actually rather easy. In their book The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry tell us that they and the Republican far-right share a core set of beliefs, and that “These are beliefs that, we argue, reflect a desire to restore and privilege the myths, values, identity, and authority of a particular ethnocultural tribe. These beliefs add up to a political vision that privileges the tribe. And they seek to put other tribes in their proper place.” They also point out that what these groups call a “color-blind” society is in fact an attempt to distract and deflect from the white supremacy core of white nationalism, Christian or otherwise.
That is to say, of course, an invented world of make-believe that this country was founded as a “Christian” nation and this was the Founding Fathers desire to have this country ruled by the Bible, which of course was not true and the separation of church and state is enshrined in the Constitution. In fact the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance, was not in the original form written in 1892, and was only added in 1954 by Congress in response to the “atheist” Red Scare. Is there any allusion to religion in the national anthem? No. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli states emphatically that the United States government “is not, in any sense, founded on Christian religion.”
Yet here we are today. In an interview in New York Magazine, Perry notes that
So in Christian nationalism, as a religion that venerates Christianity’s place in America and America’s place generally, we see socialism as this all-encompassing catchall boogeyman of a threat, this composite of everything that is anti-American. It’s the anti-nation, which is historically what communism was. But now I think you don’t have any genuine communists to rail against. So you call the enemy the ultimate other, socialists, and you associate everything that’s wrong with socialism. I think certainly Christian nationalists or people who subscribe to Christian nationalism would be threatened by atheism and Islam. But more than anything, they’re threatened by leftism — leftism in all forms, whether that is economic, whether that is racial, whether that is religious.
But then again, what does this have to with causing pain to retirees and the poor, which “Christian” nationalists don’t seem to mind? Well, of course entitlement programs like Social Security are seen as “socialist,” but in truth what has happened is that beginning with Ronald Reagan, who wasn’t much of a “Christian” himself, found that by speaking to the narrow-minded culture war values of white Evangelical Christians, rather than to religion or the Bible itself, the Republican far-right and the Christian right found “common cause.” Anthea Butler in THINK also told us that
Trump appeals to these evangelicals because of his focus on declension, decline and destruction, which fits into evangelical beliefs about the end times. When Trump used the term “American carnage” in his inaugural address, evangelicals listened; they too, believed America is in decline. Their imagined powerlessness, and the need for a strong authoritarian leader to protect them, is at the root of their racial and social animus. Their persecution complex is a heady mix of their fear of “socialists,” Muslims, independent women, LGBT people and immigration. Their feelings of fragility, despite positions of power, make them vote for people like Donald Trump — and morally suspect candidates like Roy Moore. Rhetoric, not morality, drives their voting habits.
All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. Moral issues once drove white evangelical votes but, first when Obama was elected and then when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same sex marriage in June of 2015, what remained was their fear. Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to him is firm. Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group; they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party.
But what we also see is that some people simply don’t believe that everyone should have the same the same things that they do because they are “ungodly,” and if someone reinforces that notion, it doesn’t matter if they are ungodly or not. Thus it doesn’t matter if Trump—or any other Republican politician—isn’t exactly outspoken on the abortion issue or gay rights for or against; as long as they appeal to such “fears” as the country being “overrun” by “ungodly” nonwhite “vermin,” thus the virulent anti-immigrant (or at least anti-Hispanic immigrant) of the Christian right, it appears to be enough for them to see Trump as the second coming of Christ, or failing that, at least “ordained” by “God” if the latter actually saw fit to make them vote for someone as contemptuous of religion and Christian “principles” as Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment