The Iowa Caucuses Have Become Ridiculous

As one would expect, much of the so often worthless mainstream media is bloviating about Trump's "landslide victory" in Iowa ad nausea,  What one isn't hearing and seeing is who the voters attending the caucuses represent a tiny sliver of the registered Republican voters in that state who themselves make up slightly more than a third of the total registered state electorate.  The Republicans who participated in the caucuses totaled 15.34% of that roughly one-third of voters who are registered Republicans with Trump only receiving 56,000 votes out of the states over 2 million registered voters.  In short, the caucuses results are not a fair sampling of Iowa voters or even necessarily Iowa Republican voters.  Caucuses and nominating conventions - the latter especially so at least here in Virginia - always favor the more extreme candidates who have the most rabid and insane followers and never capture the more expanded vote one gets in a primary election.   One can only wonder when the Iowa caucuses will cease being blown out of importance.   One other thing came out of the actions in Iowa yesterday evening:  evangelicals continued to sell their souls to Trump.  A piece at Salon looks at the real message from the Iowa vote:

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to portray the Republican Iowa caucus as a real competition between Donald Trump, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the result was exactly what anyone reading the polls expected: A massive win for Trump. It usually takes at least an hour to call the Iowa caucus, but the state was called by the Associated Press in fewer than 40 minutes after the caucuses began. Despite all the hype about Haley's last-minute gains, or the possibility that the weather might tilt the outcome (Monday's was the coldest caucus ever), the result was what all statistical odds showed: Trump walked away with it. 

Much of the "maybe someone else will win" hype was driven by capitalism, of course. As with sports, the uncertainty of outcome drives cable news ratings and news site clicks, creating financial pressure on journalists to sell the Iowa caucus as a nail-biter instead of a preordained outcome. But in truth, I think a lot of journalists half-convinced themselves that voters would break to a non-Trump alternative at the last minute for a simple reason: The Republican Party in Iowa is controlled, more than in most states, by evangelical voters. 

Over the past 8 years, we've all watched as evangelicals have grown ever more fanatical in their love of Trump, a thrice-married adulterer who bragged about committing sexual assault. Still, many pundits cling to this fantasy that American evangelicals are morally upright people who actually mean all that talk about chastity, charity, and Christian values. It was always a silly notion, of course, as the evangelical movement has long shown itself more interested in right-wing politics than in feeding the poor and healing the sick.

Iowa does have a long history of choosing Republican candidates who offer a snapshot of how conservative Christianity sees itself at the time. In 2000, George W. Bush won with a "compassionate conservative" message that papered over the sadism that fuels anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ politics with paternalism. In 2008, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won with his aw-shucks persona barely concealing the malice that fuels him. By 2012, evangelicals were done pretending there was kindness in their authoritarian worldview. They granted former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who couldn't conceal his enmity if he tried — the victory. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz beat Trump in 2016. Both men are hateful trolls, but Cruz doesn't cheat on his wife, and in 2016, evangelicals were still wary of being accused of hypocrisy. 

Just like every Republican winner of the Iowa caucus for over two decades, Trump is an avatar for the current mood of white evangelicals. They are done pretending to be "compassionate." The mask is entirely off. Evangelicals are not the salt-of-the-earth types idealized by centrist pundits. They are what feminists, anti-racists, and pro-LGBTQ activists have always said: authoritarians who may use Jesus as cover for their ugly urges, but have no interest in the "love thy neighbor" teachings of their purported savior.

Forget Jesus. The real lord of the evangelical movement has shown his grimacing orange face to the world, and it is a nasty one. There's a temptation among pundits, who want to retain their view of the humble Iowa evangelical, to write this alliance between Trump and the Christian right as purely transactional . . . . But this image of evangelicals as reluctant Trump supporters doesn't comport with reality. Trump often gets a rapturous reception with evangelical audiences and is frequently memorialized in fan art that depicts him in a near-messianic light.

For years, progressive academics and activists have argued that the "evangelical" identity in white America was constructed less around spirituality and more around a very racist, sexist set of political preferences. It's why evangelicals are rabidly anti-abortion and hostile to birth control and sex education, even though the Bible doesn't even mention those topics. It's why they center homophobia in their theology, even though same-sex relations are treated as roughly as sinful as getting a tattoo in the Bible. It's why they hype patriarchal marriage as the end-all, be-all of their faith, even though Jesus explicitly regarded it as a secondary concern to salvation. 

Trump may not believe in faith or salvation, but he sure believes in racism and sexism. That Iowa evangelicals turned out to back Trump isn't a betrayal of their values. It reveals the values that always fueled their movement. It's just the last bit of plausible deniability has faded away.