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Trump’s Aberrant Behavior is Getting Worse and More Dangerous

This past week Donald Trump suffered legal setbacks when a gag order was reinstated in the New York civil fraud case and Trump's insane claim of immunity was rejected by an appeals court in the Washington, DC, January 6th case.  Rather than being chastened the always megalomaniacal Trump again attacked the wife of the New York judge  and went on further unhinged rants on his Truth Social, which does anything but provide the truth on issues and/or Trump.   Meanwhile Trump cultists continue to rally to Trump's standard as he promises them retribution on those he/they deem as enemies and the larger public seemingly yawns and ignores the growing threat Trump poses to the nation and civil society.  Speaking with CBS News, Liz Cheney summarized the nation's sleepwalking towards a dictatorship should Trump regain the White House with the help of his GOP enablers:

“He’s told us what he will do. It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take. People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances,’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States. If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself. He has to have collaborators. And the story of Mike Johnson is a story of, of a collaborator and of someone who knew then – and knows now – that what he’s doing and saying is wrong, but he’s willing to do it in an effort to please Donald Trump. And that’s what makes it dangerous.”  

Perhaps even more disturbing is the view of many mental health specialists who seem Trump lurching toward even deeper mental illness and insanity - something much of the mainstream media continues to ignore or perhaps even normalize through the continued pretense that Trump is merely another political candidate.  A piece at Salon looks at the frightening conclusions of mental health experts and the extreme danger Trump poses.  Here are excepts: 

In evaluating his public and private behavior, America’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, and likely a sociopath — if not a psychopath. In even more direct terms, Trump has shown himself to apparently have a diseased mind, which in turn amplifies his already corrupt morality and ethics, attraction to violence, and overall capacity for evil. Ultimately, if he were to become president again, such an outcome would be a disaster for both the United States and the world.

In a new essay in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall consulted with mental health professionals from some of America’s most prestigious institutions about this emergency. Their conclusion: Donald Trump’s aberrant behavior is getting worse.

Once again, the American people and their leaders have been warned about the growing danger(s) and too few of them are responding with the appropriate energy and seriousness.

Leonard Class, who is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told Edsall that:

If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as "vermin" and "poisoning the blood of our country"), we have to wonder if he has crossed into "new terrain." That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is "the only one" and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.

Several mental health experts whom Edsall consulted highlighted the role that Trump’s aging brain and apparent cognitive decline are playing in his pathological behavior:

"Trump is an aging malignant narcissist," Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. "As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous."

Craig Malkin, who is a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, emphasized what he believes is Trump’s increasingly psychopathic behavior.

If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.

I have been very vocal in my criticism of the New York Times and other agenda-setting media about their failures to consistently engage in pro-democracy journalism — a type of journalistic practice that requires that the abnormal is not normalized and that the American people are repeatedly warned about Trumpism, neofascism, and the dangers embodied by other types of anti-democratic politics.

Edsall’s new essay, and his writing more generally, is an example of the type of bold public teaching and truth-telling that the New York Times and other elite media should be doing much more of. In fact, the future of American democracy depends on it.

And given how the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine is escalating its war on reality and truth as it shapes and prepares the information space to facilitate Trump’s return to power as America’s first dictator, the New York Times and other such elite media should be even more earnest in such a commitment.

Collectively, the small group of mental health professionals who followed through on their "duty to warn" the American people about Trump and his dangerousness were marginalized, harassed (including death threats) and in at least one example suffered sanctions and loss of employment. Their warnings about Trumpism and the ascendant neofascist movement and the type of widespread harm, including violence and mass death (as seen with the Trump regime’s negligent if not outright criminal response to the Covid pandemic) have proven to be prescient. Trump’s plans to become America’s first dictator are creating a cataclysmic synergy between his diseased mind, with its megalomania and God complex, and a fascist political party and movement that is eager to rubbleize democracy with the goal of creating an American apartheid Christofascist plutocracy.

To that point, Trump and his agents have publicly announced their plans to use the United States military to occupy Democratic-led cities and other "blue" parts of the country as part of a plan to impose martial law. Dictator Trump and his enforcers will attempt to legitimate this attack on the American people’s fundamental civil and human rights by claiming that they are actually cracking down on "crime" in the name of "public safety."

None of this is new. As seen in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, history shows that sick leaders attract sick followers who in turn combine to create sick mass movements that oppress (and do worse to) their fellow citizens as they destroy society. Ignoring these lessons and precedents is a choice – one that is usually fatal.

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Russia Declares the Gay Rights Movement as "Extremist"

As his military remains bogged down in Ukraine Vladimir Putin continues to demonize and attack individuals and groups within Russia to distract the populace from his Ukrainian quagmire. Much like in some of Donald Trump's recent deranged rants, Putin seeks to paint internal groups as a threat to society and in the process criminalizes individuals and groups.   Sadly, one of Putin's favored targets is the LGBT community within Russia.  This past week, Russia's puppet supreme court in a secret hearing - no doubt to the delight of the reactionaries within the Russian Orthodox Church - labeled LGBT groups as "extremist" and further opened the door for LGBT persecution in Russia. American LGBT individuals, especially the ever delusional Log Cabin Republicans and other gay Republicans who think their whiteness and relative affluence will protect them, should take note of what a second Trump regime filled with Christofascist homophobes could usher in. Other segments of society need to realize that once a fascist ruler is in power, the list of enemies and those painted as "other" always widens and those who through complacency or otherwise stood back and did nothing later find themselves on the enemies list.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing development.  Here are excerpts: 

Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday declared the international gay rights movement an “extremist organization,” another chilling crackdown on gay and transgender people whose rights have been scaled back drastically since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The court was acting on a lawsuit filed by the Ministry of Justice requesting the designation. When it filed the case on Nov. 17, the ministry said the activities of the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement had exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

The ruling escalates the threat for gay communities inside Russia. Gay rights activists and other experts say the ruling will put gay people and their organizations at risk of being criminally prosecuted for something as simple as displaying symbols like the rainbow flag or for endorsing the statement “Gay rights are human rights.”

Experts said the decision would make the work of all L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, as well as any political activity, untenable.

It could be used to mete out jail sentences of six to 10 years to gay rights activists, their lawyers or others involved in any kind of public effort.

That prospect has heightened angst and alarm in the country’s already beleaguered gay communities.

“It is not the first time we are being targeted, but at the same time, it is another blow,” said Alexander Kondakov, a Russian sociologist at University College Dublin, who studies the intersection of law and security for the L.G.B.T.Q. communities. “You are already marked as foreign, as bad, as a source of propaganda, and now you are labeled an extremist — and the next step is terrorist.”

President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to portray the troubled, protracted war that he started as a fight to maintain “Russian traditional values.” To that end, the gay communities are often portrayed as a potential Trojan horse for the West.

The court decision comes months before Mr. Putin is expected to use what he calls his defense of Russian values as a pillar of his campaign in the March 2024 presidential elections.

The four-hour court session on Thursday was held behind closed doors because the case was declared secret, according to Russian press reports. Although at least one gay rights organization outside Russia sought to oppose the case in court, no countering arguments were allowed, the reports said.

The judge ruled that the decision would take effect immediately.

Under the ruling, any news organization, blogger or even an individual posting some form of public message that mentions the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement without noting the extremist designation could face a stiff fine.

Soon after the decision, the official RIA Novosti news agency began referring to the movement as an extremist organization in its reports on the ruling.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation . . . said the decision was the opening shot in Mr. Putin’s presidential campaign and called it an example of an increasingly isolated Russia emulating the laws of its ally Iran.

“There will be a complete distraction from real problems, the creation of mythical enemies, discrimination of the population on various grounds, this is just the beginning,” Mr. Zhdanov wrote on the social messaging app X, formerly Twitter.

The way the Ministry of Justice wrote the proposed designation was ambiguous, so it could be exploited by virtually anyone to denounce a gay person as an extremist, such as a provincial law enforcement officer hostile toward gay people or neighbors who covet a gay couple’s apartment, experts said.

[T]he Kremlin has increasingly slapped the “extremist” label on organizations that it does not like. Aside from Mr. Navalny’s opposition movement, they include the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose presence in Russia is opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church; and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which the Russian government has accused of spreading Russophobia.

In Russia, measures targeting L.G.B.T.Q. groups started in earnest after 2012, when Mr. Putin returned to the presidency. In 2013, Russia passed a law banning “gay propaganda” directed toward minors and expanded that in 2022 to prohibit anything that, it said, smacked of endorsing “nontraditional relationships and pedophilia” among all Russians.

There is a long tradition of nations at war singling out minority groups, especially gay people, for prosecution, such as Nazi Germany. The effort to build support for the war inevitably involves identifying external and internal enemies, and in Russia the generally negative attitude toward gay people dovetails with this effort, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who studies the ripple effects of the war on Russian society.

Negative attitudes toward gays are especially prevalent among Russians older than 65, who are also Mr. Putin’s core supporters. They identify with his promise to return to the Russia of 1970, when the idea of gay rights and fluid sexuality did not exist publicly, she said.

Days before announcing the lawsuit, a deputy minister of justice, Andrei Loginov, testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that, in Russia, “the rights of L.G.B.T. people are protected,” saying that “restraining public demonstrations of nontraditional sexual relations or preferences is not a form a censure for them.”

Be very afraid of what could happen in America should Trump with his Christofascist/white supremacists base of support regain control of the White House. 

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Nikki Haley's "Reverse Robin Hood" Agenda

As the New York Times is reporting, the political network founded by the anti-tax billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch has endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential nominating contest.  The endorsement could help Haley climb ahead of Ron DeSantis in the nominating process, and the group says that Ms. Haley - who is talking out of both sides of her mouth and trying to appear "Moderate" -  would win “the key independent and moderate voters that Trump has no chance to win.”  Yet, when one looks at Haley's position on tax cuts and cuts to Social Security and Medicare, one discovers that she is fully onboard with the "Reverse Robin Hood" agenda so loved by the Kochs and their political allies.  Haley basically wants to take from the working and middle classes and give more tax breaks to the very wealthy.  In this, she is anything but the moderate she is trying to pretend to be.  A column in the New York Times looks at Haley's positions and rightly says she is no moderate.  Here are column highlights:

It feels like years ago, but actually only a few months have passed since many big Republican donors seemed to believe that Ron DeSantis could effectively challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. It has been an edifying spectacle — an object lesson in the reality that great wealth need not be associated with good judgment, about politics or anything else.

At this point, both conventional wisdom and prediction markets say that Trump has a virtual lock on the nomination. But Wall Street isn’t completely resigned to Trump’s inevitability; there has been a late surge in big-money support for Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina. And there is, to be fair, still a chance that Trump — who is facing many criminal charges and whose public rants have become utterly unhinged — will manage to crash and burn before securing the nomination.

So it seems worth looking at what Haley stands for.

From a political point of view, one answer might be: nothing. A recent Times profile described her as having “an ability to calibrate her message to the moment.” A less euphemistic way to put this is that she seems willing to say whatever might work to her political advantage. “Flip-flopping” doesn’t really convey the sheer cynicism with which she has shifted her rhetoric and changed her positions on everything from abortion rights to immigration to whether it’s OK to try to overturn a national election.

And anyone hoping that she would govern as a moderate if she should somehow make it to the White House is surely delusional. Haley has never really shown a willingness to stand up to Republican extremists — and at this point the whole G.O.P. has been taken over by extremists.

That said, Haley has shown some consistency on issues of economic and fiscal policy. And what you should know is that her positions on these issues are pretty far to the right. In particular, she seems exceptionally explicit, even among would-be Republican nominees, in calling for an increase in the age at which Americans become eligible for Social Security — a bad idea that seems to be experiencing a revival.

So let’s talk about Social Security.

The first thing you should know about Social Security is that the actual numbers don’t justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears, not just from the right but also from self-proclaimed centrists who want to sound serious. No, the exhaustion of the system’s trust fund, currently projected to occur in roughly a decade, wouldn’t mean that benefits disappear.

It would mean that the system would need additional revenue to continue paying scheduled benefits in full. But the extra revenue required would be smaller than you probably think.

It’s true that the budget office projects a much bigger rise in spending on Medicare and other major health programs. But much of this projected rise reflects the assumption that medical costs will rise much faster than economic growth, which has been true in the past but need not be true in the future. Indeed, since 2010, Medicare spending has been far less than expected. And there is every reason to believe that smart policies could further curb health care costs, given how much more America spends than other wealthy nations.

Still, Social Security does face a funding gap. How should it be closed?

Anyone who says, as Haley does, that the retirement age should rise in line with increasing life expectancy is being oblivious, perhaps willfully, to the grim inequality of modern America. Until Covid struck, average life expectancy at 65, the relevant number, was indeed rising. But these gains were concentrated among Americans with relatively high incomes. Less affluent Americans — those who depend most on Social Security — have seen little increase in life expectancy and, in some cases, declines.

So anyone invoking rising life expectancy as a reason to delay Social Security benefits is, in effect, saying that aging janitors must keep working (or be cast into extreme poverty) because bankers are living longer.

How, then, should the Social Security gap be closed? The obvious answer — which happens to be favored by a majority of voters — is to raise more revenue. Remember, America collects less revenue as a percentage of G.D.P. than almost any other advanced economy.

But Haley, of course, wants to cut income taxes.

My guess is that none of this will be relevant, that Trump will be the nominee. But if he stumbles, I would beg political reporters not to focus on Haley’s personal affect, which can seem moderate, but rather on her policies. On social issues and the fate of democracy, she appears to be a pure weather vane, turning with the political winds. On fiscal and economic policy, she’s a hard-right advocate of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the working class. If calling someone a populist has any meaning these days, she’s the exact opposite.

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The Frightening Things Trump Is Saying

 

If one looks at what history reveals about fascists and dictators of the past - or Vladimir Putin currently - is that time and time again they raise the specter of internal threats, usually by already disfavored groups, as a rationale to destroy democratic government and to dehumanize those they label as foes.  This manufactured is also used as a justification to dismantle an independent judiciary which might otherwise bar the autocrat's rise to power or hold them accountable under the law.  Increasingly, we are seeing Donald Trump in real time use the tactics of past and present would be dictators in his quest for power.  Anyone who opposes him is being labeled as a "traitor" and/or "vermin" even though he himself is the true traitor.   Frighteningly, far too many in today's Republican Party for whom power are happily going along with Trump's fascism and ignoring history's lesson that those who go along with dictators often find themselves eliminated down the road.  Once dehumanizing opponents becomes the accepted norm, descent into violence is all too easy.  Look no further than all the Russian oligarchs and military officers who have mysteriously fallen from windows or down staircases. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the frightening things Trump is saying that ought to have alarm bells ringing.  Here are highlights:

In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.

“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”

Ndahiro pointed out that in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, an influential political figure within the largest ethnic group in Rwanda, the Hutus, had openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi, the second-largest of Rwanda’s ethnic groups. Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

“The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun,” Ndahiro wrote. It culminated in a 100-day stretch in 1994 when an estimated 1 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Tutsi. “The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed,” Ndahiro wrote. “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.” . . . “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Trump’s comments came only a few weeks after he had been asked about immigration and the southern border in an interview with the host of a right-wing website. “Did you ever think you would see this level of American carnage?” Trump was asked.

The front-runner for the Republican nomination warned that immigrants pose an immediate threat. “We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. . . . It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

[I]t is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. . . . There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

At the Waco rally, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” He added, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has described 2024 as “our final battle.” He means it; so do tens of millions of his supporters.

TRUMP’S RHETORIC IS CLEARLY fascistic. These days, Trump is being “much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told PBS NewsHour. That doesn’t mean that if Trump were elected president in 2024, America would become a fascistic state. Our institutions may be strong enough to resist him, though it’s an open question. But Trump can do many things short of imposing fascism that can do grave harm to America.

Trump, after all, has been impeached twice, indicted four times on 91 counts, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Courts in New York have found that he or his companies have committed bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and charity fraud. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He was the catalyzing figure that led to a violent attack on the Capitol. And he has argued for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.” . . . This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP . . . .

White evangelical Protestants are among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies, and in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump, as had 81 percent of those who attend less frequently.. . . 81 percent hold a favorable view of him, according to a poll taken in June—after Trump was indicted for a second time.

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. . . . Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization . . . continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

When are more Americans going to wake up to the threat we all face to our freedoms and in some case our very lives?

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Americans Under 30 Don’t Trust Religion

A column in the New York Times looks at the exodus of younger generations from religion - estimates are that 40% of Generation Z are "nones" with no religious affiliation.  The reasons for leaving religion vary but tend to revolve around "conservative" Christianity's hostility to women's rights, including a woman's control over her own body, hostility to LGBT rights and the seemingly never ending scandals - usually involving sexual abuse and an abuse of power - that continue to put a spotlight on the hypocrisy, immorality and in some cases criminality of religious leaders.  The Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention sex abuse scandals are prime examples of this phenomenon, but not a week goes by when upwards of a dozen pastors and church youth ministers are arrested on sex abuse charges, usually involving minors.  The other factor I suspect has played a role in the growing exodus is the unavoidable reality that religion, especially "conservative" faiths are divisive and are better known for the hatred and prejudices they market than sincere sincere followers of Christ.  The irony is that the more evangelicals/Christofascist demand that everyone live in accordance with their ignorance embracing and cruel beliefs, the more individuals walk away from religion.  Here are column highlights:

When I wrote my series on why Americans are moving away from organized religion, I didn’t focus specifically on those under 30, even though I knew they were the least religiously affiliated. I wanted to tell the full story that included different age groups because in recent decades, all age groups have seen a decline in religious participation. The sociological term for the unaffiliated is “nones,” a catchall for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular.

I also thought that for the youngest adults, the move away from traditional worship was just an extension of the overall trend : a combination of fewer of them being raised by religious parents, a greater social acceptance of not identifying as a person of faith and a cultural association between conservative political beliefs and Christianity that started years before the first Zoomer was born.

But after more reading, rumination and reporting, I think there’s something slightly new happening for Gen Z and the youngest millennials. So I turned again to Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who is a pastor and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going.” He told me: “The estimates vary on this, but it’s empirically defensible to say that at least 40 percent of Gen Z are nones now.”

And while some of their disaffiliation is driven by the same reasons we’ve seen for older millennials and Gen X, what distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders . . .

A new report from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute calls this “formative distrust,” noting that older Americans had “greater confidence in political leaders during their childhood years.” If you grew up, as I did, during the relatively stable Clinton years, for example, you probably have a very different view of political institutions than someone turning 25 today, whose political consciousness may have been formed during the Trump era.

[F]or a long time most Americans generally respected society’s institutions and processes and expected that even if people had differing opinions, “the adults would kind of take care of things.” That’s changed.

What’s more, some religious institutions have had high-profile ethical failures around cases of sexual abuse — concealing rather than confronting allegations of wrongdoing among their leadership. “Instead of trying to redress these really incredibly painful problems, they made things worse in many instances,” Cox said. “So I think that’s a really different environment to come of age and to learn about how these institutions operate and who they operate for.”

When I talked to several readers under 30 about moving away from the faith traditions they were brought up in, more than one used the metaphor of a Jenga tower: When they lost faith in the religion they were raised in, it was as if load-bearing blocks were being removed and eventually the entire structure collapsed.

Elizabeth Hildreth, 29, grew up Southern Baptist and lives in Georgia. She said that for her, while there were shifts away from the faith tradition that she experienced over time, the first load-bearing block that pulled away represented abortion — she became more open-minded about the issue during the 2020 election. “Once there was a fracture that couldn’t reconcile,” she said, the whole worldview she was raised with “was subject to internal interrogation.”

George started to question whether his faith was meant to be about connecting with God and doing good for others or if it was, “in the more insidious version of it,” a way for powerful men “to give cover to themselves.”

Several under-30s whom I spoke to said their views on L.G.B.T.Q. acceptance and the role of women in their churches were also factors in their moves away from organized religion. Evan Moss, 29, who lives in Arkansas and was raised in Oklahoma, said that coming out as gay was inextricably tied to his move away from organized religion. While he knows that many churches are L.G.B.T.Q. affirming, he said, “It seems like almost all discrimination against queer people is really tied up in religious belief.”

When the congregation he grew up in cut ties with the United Methodist denomination because it was too open to L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Moss said that even though he had moved away from religion at that point, it still felt like “a slap in the face.”

Here’s one more interesting wrinkle: According to Burge, the “long-held trend” of women being more religious than men seems to be flipping for younger generations. His research has shown that “with those born in 2000 or later, women are clearly more likely to be nones than men.” The relationship between Christianity and conservative politics may be related here — as young women increasingly are more liberal than young men, they may be more inclined to move away from religion.

Even though being a none tends to be culturally accepted among younger Americans, that doesn’t mean that distancing oneself from religion is easy. Kevin Miller, who is 29 and lives in Tennessee, also used the Jenga analogy — after one block fell, it all collapsed pretty easily. . . . Building a fulfilling world back up took him years.

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Democracy Faces Two Dangerous Threats

Never in my  lifetime - to date myself, Truman was president when I was born - have I felt American democracy so threatened. Yes, in the first decade plus of my youth Jim Crow laws and black voter disenfranchisement abounded in the South and made democracy a farce for many Americans, but no political party was openly embracing a would be fascist dictator and closing its eyes to crimes and sexual predator behavior.  Sadly, the Republican Party which of old touted itself as the party of "American values" and "family values" has made it clear that the only value it has is staying in power at literally any cost, including jettisoning democracy if it poses an obstacle to that goal.  How we got to this place is a complex story, but in my views is due in large party to the evangelical/Christofascist and white supremacist take over of the Republican Party base.  For these people, the rights of others - especially the long list of people/communities they hate - mean nothing and it is all about maintaining dominance over the majority of the population, including voter disenfranchisement efforts that harken back to the Jim Crow era which they would happily restore.  A column in the Washington Post looks at these twin threats.  Here are excerpts:

Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.

The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.

Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”

[M]ost Republican politicians shy away from calling out the former president’s planned assaults on our constitutional democracy, but at least the issue is being joined outside the GOP’s cocoon.

We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.

This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.

Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less of an attack on democracy.

And the attack continues.

In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”

Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.

The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2.

This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote on the Election Law Blog website that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights, since “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act.

Preventing Trump from overthrowing liberal democracy is certainly a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. Renewing the fight for a new Voting Rights Act and the access-enhancing reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act is essential. But it’s also time to address one of the major flaws of our Constitution: It does not contain an explicit, affirmative guarantee of every citizen’s right to vote. Enacting a constitutional amendment that would do so, Hasen argues, would bring our voting wars to an inclusive conclusion.

A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.

Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.

Be very afraid of where we could be as a nation a year from now.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty