I have said over and over again that the Republican Party's descent into lunacy and unbridled hatred of others tracks directly to the rise of the Christofascists within the party. The more the near fanatical Christofascist influence increased, the more sane and rational individuals fled the GOP. If nothing else, Donald Trump recognized the desperation of the Christofascists - who love authoritarianism - for a leader in their rear guard fight against a changing nation and modernity itself. Trump quickly courted the white supremacist crowd into the mix (although there is a huge overlap between Christofascists and white supremacists) and the two groups, combined with lazy Republicans who failed to educated themselves as to Trump's full agenda, gave Trump his winning results in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A column in the New York Times looks at the rage of the Christofascists which Trump so skillfully and cynically co-opted. Here are highlights:
Between Barack Obama’s 2008 election and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent).But on Election Day, paradoxically, this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to “make America great again” and warned that he was its “last chance” to turn back the tide of cultural and economic change.
One clue to the power of this racial and religious identity can be seen in the striking similarity of a map of white Christian population density by state to the red and blue election night map. While the similarity of those maps in Kentucky and West Virginia might not be a surprise, the same similarity in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania goes a long way to explaining why Hillary Clinton’s Midwestern firewall did not hold on election night.
The choice before the country was starkly clear. Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party looked back wistfully to a monochromatic vision of 1950s America, while the major party fronting the first female presidential candidate celebrated the pluralistic future of 2050, when the Census Bureau first projected the United States would become a majority nonwhite nation.
No other group believes things have changed for the worse since the 1950s more than white evangelical Protestants (74 percent), who turned out strongly and gave Mr. Trump 81 percent of their votes, according to the early exit polls. And here’s a finding that signals why Mrs. Clinton came up short: a majority (55 percent) of independents also agreed that American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s.
Hillary Clinton’s final campaign ad featured Katy Perry’s song “Roar,” but the loudest voices of this election turned out to be not the “new America” demographic groups of Latinos, African-Americans and millennials, but Mr. Trump’s aging and raging white Christian supporters.
The waning numbers of white Christians in the country today may not have time on their side, but as the sun is slowly setting on the cultural world of white Christian America, they’ve managed, at least in this election, to rage against the dying of the light.
I have consistently said that evangelical Christians pose a clear and present danger to America's constitutional government. In their election of Donald Trump, who I suspect does intend to destroy our constitutional republic in his quest to satiate his sick ego, the Christofascists will end up fulfilling my prediction. The irony is that these same people love to cite homosexuality as the root cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire, when in fact Christianity was a major force that undermined that Empire. If America falls thanks to their ignorance embracing, fairy tale beliefs, it will be the second time that the top world power was done in by religious based ignorance and selfishness.
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