Trump's Trade War Leaves Mid-West Farmers Reeling

The unkind part of me struggles to have much sympathy for Mid_West farmers who helped put Trump in the White House as they watch their führer pushing trade tariff policies that are wreaking havoc on their financial survival. They are, after all reaping what they sowed, motivated by racism and a war against modernity itself. The kinder side of me, feels sympathy for the children and youth who are suffering as a result of their parents' bigotry and overall idiocy.  Frighteningly, rather than admit his tariffs have been a failure, Trump wants to give a bailout to farmers and shift the costs of his failure to the rest of the American taxpayers.  One can only hope that the Democrat controlled House of Representatives rejects any such handout to farmers and that they are left to live with the consequences of their voting for an unfit candidate.  Actions do need to have consequences. NBC News looks at the growing plight of Trump supporting farmers.  Here are article highlights:

WATERLOO, Ill. — As Tim Bardole surveyed his farmland, the soil too wet to plant corn or soybeans because of a recent downpour, he remarked that there are few rays of hope for most American farmers these days. While the weather continues to hamper the planting season, the news over the weekend that the United States and China had only moved further away from a trade deal was seen by the farmers as another blow.

Bardole runs a 2,400-acre farm near Rippey, Iowa, with his father, brother and son. This time last year, they figured the trade dispute between China and the U.S., which had already created an economic nightmare for farmers, would be over by harvest time in the fall. Now, it appears there is no end in sight.

"We just keep hunkering down and doing what we can to reduce costs as much as possible, and digging into reserves, and borrowing more money and using up equity," Bardole said over the phone, adding that the entire industry is doing the same.

China announced Monday that, beginning June 1, it would impose tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. That caused stock markets in the U.S. to tumble, and left farmers to face a future that looks financially bleaker than the historically tough years they have recently faced.

Because of the Trump administration’s trade tactics, the Congressional Research Service concluded in a report published in December that national net farm income dropped by more than $9 billion, or 12 percent, in 2018.

Things looks like they could get much worse as the trade dispute continues.

With the most recent news of the intensifying tensions between the U.S. and China, the price of soybeans has dropped below $8 a bushel for the first time since 2008, which comes as many Midwest farmers are facing rampant flooding on their land during the planting season.

Despite the financial strain that farmers have been enduring while the White House’s trade war continues, many had remained committed to the president and his negotiating tactics. Most farmers tend to agree that China is not an equal trading partner, so the common refrain is that they are willing to suffer short-term pain for long-term benefits.

But after years of hardship, confidence in Trump’s negotiating tactics has begun to waver among some of his most ardent supporters.

Kenneth Hartman, a fifth-generation farmer in Waterloo, Illinois, said he’s long been a Trump supporter . . . But, he added, farmers also need free trade and open markets or else the agriculture community will continue to erode. More than 160,000 farms in the U.S. disappeared from 2007 to 2017, according to the USDA Agriculture Census released in April.

Whether falling confidence in this particular trade negotiation will diminish Trump’s very solid backing among farmers overall, however, remains unclear.

Benedict XVI Ignores the Facts of the Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis

In a prior post I vented on former Pope Benedict XVI's misguided and factually out of touch missive condemning the sexual revolution of the 1960's - and of course gays - for all of the sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church.  Indeed, Benedict's version of the history of sex abuse within the Church is about as fact free as Fox News coverage of Donald Trump.  Facts and the truth simply do not matter with Benedict's main agenda being an attack of modernity and any theologians who do not embrace the Church's 12th century, ignorance based dogma on sex and human sexuality.  A piece in Religion News Service likewise focuses on Benedict's refusal to face factual reality.  Here are excerpts:

The recent essay on clergy sexual abuse by Benedict XVI shows why it was such a good idea for him to resign as pope. In the letter released last week, he shows how out of touch he is with the causes of the abuse crisis.

Fundamentally, Benedict lives in a Platonic world of ideas where facts don’t matter. . . . . sexual abuse was occurring prior to the 1960s [and Vatican II]. The church and America were just better at covering it up.

But Benedict also wants to blame sex abuse on contemporary moral theologians who challenged the church’s traditional, natural law ethics, especially as it applied to sexual ethics. Contemporary moral theology is less rule-based and, rather, takes a more personalistic and relational approach. Challenging the church’s opposition to birth control, as did most theologians, opened the floodgates to all sorts of sexual sins, including child abuse, in his view.

While he was prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005, scores of Catholic theologians were fired from seminaries, reprimanded or silenced. Others practiced self-censorship in order to avoid the wrath of Rome.

It is flabbergasting to hear him in his letter complain that respect for due process kept him from dealing with this infestation. Too many scholars bear the scars of his inquisitional approach to dissent in the church. CDF’s procedures — where it acted as accuser, judge and jury — had no concept of contemporary ideas of due process.

It does not matter that no moral theologian can be found who condoned the sexual assault and rape of children. Facts don’t matter.

It does not matter that abusers came not just from the ranks of liberals like Theodore McCarrick but also from conservatives like Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ.

It does not matter that most of the priests who abused in the 1970s were products of an old seminary system that existed before Vatican II, which isolated seminarians from the very men and women with whom they would work and serve. Benedict still considers this the ideal way of preparing priests. Alas, he still wants to blame post-Vatican II theology for all the ills of the contemporary church.

Most importantly, he passes over in silence the truly scandalous failure of the hierarchy to remove abusive priests from ministry where they could abuse again and again. The crisis is not just about the abuse; it is also about the coverup.

Benedict would have done well to keep silent or to have shared his views only with Pope Francis. His message is being used by those who oppose Francis to show what a real pope thinks about sex abuse.

First, you cannot muzzle former popes any more than you can muzzle theologians. All one can do is urge them to exercise prudence in what they say and then let the debate begin.

Second, the church needs to make clear that there is only one pope. A resigned pope should revert to his baptismal name and put aside the white cassock for a black one. He should not be called pope or pope emeritus. Ratzinger has a right to express his opinions, but they have no more magisterial weight than those of any other retired bishop.

Finally, since even dead popes are becoming rallying points for different factions in the church, we should stop canonizing popes so soon after their deaths, lest the canonization be politicized. Perhaps a good rule would be to delay consideration of canonization of a pope until after all the cardinals and bishops he appointed are dead.

John Paul II was hurriedly canonized despite his horrific record in dealing with sexual predators.  Indeed, he protected Marcial Maciel for many years despite volumes of reports on his sexual abuse of both males and females.  John Paul II was hardly saintly. 

Economic Change Rattles America and Europe

One constant throughout history is that change over time is guaranteed and that changes in technology and industry are constant, often at the expense of many classes of people who find their economic world turned upside down as industries and economic ways of life they thought unchangeable begin to die and wither away.  The resulting angst and financial distress are causing convulsions across the developed world, especially in rural areas that have not embraced and/or been able to change see their social and economic reality crumble.  The first glimpse of the danger posed by the phenomenon was the British Brexit vote that was sold to many on the deliberate lie that the exit from the European Union would allow the recapture of a glorious past.  The reality is that Brexit will constitute a form of economic suicide for many Britons, especially those in rural areas.  Next we saw the convulsion in the United States that put the thoroughly corrupt and unfit Donald Trump in the White House.  Now, we are seeing convulsions in France where those left out of the new economic model are violently protesting.  I totally understand the fear and anxiety of those reacting to change, but trying to resist the inevitable is not the answer and, indeed, threatens long term economic and political stability - and sets the stage for dangerous demagogues - as a column in the New York Times notes.  Here are excerpts:

Ever since World War II, the liberal global order that has spread more freedom and prosperity around the world than at any other time in history has been held up by two pillars: the United States of America and the United Nations of Europe, now known as the European Union.

Both of these centers of free markets, free people and free ideas are being shaken today by rural and beyond-the-suburbs insurgencies of largely white working-poor and anxious middle classes, which have not generally benefited from the surges in globalization, immigration and technology that have lifted superstar cities like London, Paris and San Francisco and their multicultural populations.

Having just seen the shocking sight of Parisian stores boarded up right before Christmas to protect against rioting along the Champs-Élysées by some of France’s yellow-vested protesters; after being told in Rome a few days earlier that Italy, a founding member of the E.U., could conceivably shuck off both the E.U. and the euro one day under its new bizarre far-left/far-right governing coalition; after watching Britain become paralyzed over how to commit economic suicide by leaving the E.U.; and after watching President Trump actually cheer for the breakup of the E.U. rather than for its good health, it is obvious to me that we’re at a critical hinge of history.

The core challenge for both the U.S. and the E.U. is the same: These rapid accelerations in technology and globalization have brought many more immigrants into many more remote corners of their societies — public housing in Paris today is dominated by immigrants — at the same time as many long-frozen social mores have changed — like acceptance of gay marriage and transgender rights — and as average work no longer returns an average wage that can sustain an average middle-class lifestyle.

The middle classes that powered the growth of the U.S. and the E.U. in the 20th century were built on something called a “high-wage, middle-skilled job.” But robotics and artificial intelligence and outsourcing and Chinese imports have wiped out a lot of middle-skilled routine white-collar and blue-collar work.

Now there are high-wage, high-skilled jobs and low-wage, low-skilled jobs. But high-wage, middle-skilled jobs are vanishing, leaving a considerable cohort of people with stagnant incomes and burning resentments at the globalized city slickers who they think look down at them and have mastered the nonroutine skills required for a high-wage job today.

When you simultaneously challenge all these things that anchor people — their sense of home, their job security, their prospects for growth and the social norms that, for better or worse, defined their lives — and then amp it all up with social networks, you can get a really ferocious blowback, as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, saw across his country.

It is going to take extraordinary leadership for the U.S., Britain and the E.U. to come up with a strategy for these grievances.

It has to balance the need for economic growth and redistribution, the need to take care of those who have been left behind without burdening future generations, the need for free-flowing borders to attract new talent and ideas, and the need to prevent people from feeling like strangers in their own homes.

But that leadership is not present. I get why a slim majority of U.K. citizens voted for Brexit — as it was sold to them. They were told they could curb all the stuff they didn’t like — such as a flood of 2.2 million foreign E.U. workers — and still keep all the stuff they liked — mainly Britain’s free access to the E.U. market — and give up nothing. But it was all a lie.

And to now watch the Conservative Party hacks who pushed that lie, led by Boris Johnson, continue to demand that their prime minister deliver this fantasy Brexit in the face of the reality that it’s impossible — and in the face of how bad even the second-best option will be — is to watch a once-sane country write a suicide note in a moment of irrationality and then argue endlessly over how to carry it out — death by hanging, poison or a gunshot to the head. They’ve got to reconsider. Disconnecting in a connected world is nuts.

Macron, by contrast, dared to do the right things to unlock growth in France, at the right time, “but he did not understand the difference between being right and doing it right,” a French economist, Ludovic Subran, told me. And he did not understand how his policies differently affected “the beer drinkers and the wine drinkers.”

Macron pushed through four vital structural fixes that fostered growth: pro-investment tax reforms, reduced pensions for the bloated railway union, relaxed labor rules to make it easier to fire and hire workers, and big new public investments in skills and education for the most disadvantaged.

To save his presidency, a shellshocked Macron busted his budget and canceled the fuel tax hike, raised the minimum wage by 100 euros ($114) a month and scrapped a planned tax on pensions under 2,000 euro ($2,272) per month. But because the Yellow Vests have no leader, no one knows what happens next.

“France today has a leader with no followers and an opposition with no leader,” said U.S. foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

And the reason that matters is France and Germany were always the two adults whose partnership and adherence to the E.U. budgets and standards were the cement that held the whole E.U. pillar together.

I think the countries that will thrive in this era are the ones that have the most nimble cities, with the most nimble local leaders, who build adaptive coalitions of businesses, educators and social entrepreneurs, who can compete locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

In this world, highly centralized countries will fare much worse than decentralized ones. That’s the real shift France has to make, and, if it can’t, watch out for falling pillars. France matters.

Dominique Moïsi, one of France’s top foreign policy analysts, put it to me like this: At a time when America, which was always the European Union’s life insurance policy against predatory threats from the East and was the world champion of democracy, begins to withdraw from the world; when Russia returns with a vengeance to global politics; when Germany turns inward and Italy rebels against E.U. spending limits and moves closer to autocratic Russia; when so many roads now lead to Beijing; and when the U.K. is hellbent on suicide, “suddenly what happens in France goes beyond France. We are the last barrier protecting the European idea. If Macron fails, it can bring the end of Europe.”

Frighteningly, lurking among those feeling dispossessed is the same sort of nationalism and xenophobia that gave rise to WWI and WWII.  All that is lacking for now is a dangerous demagogue ready to light the fuse. 

Fear of the Rainbow Flag: Cynical Scapegoating of Gays in Egypt.

Last week in a post I noted the rising tide of homophobia around the world, including here in America under the regime of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the latter of whom is a Christofascist himself.   Now a piece in the New York Times looks specifically at the growing anti-LGBT zealotry in Egypt, a country where technically homosexuality isn't illegal, but where thuggish rulers and religious fanatics are scapegoating gays as  (i) a means to distract the populous form the failures of both groups to bring prosperity and freedom to the country, and (ii) a way to fabricate an external enemy - western tolerance - to rally support for leaders who could care less about the best interests of the populace.  Ironically, these are  similar to the tactics Der Trumpenführer is employing to bolster his support among evangelical Christians and outright Christofascists here in America. Stated another way, America's would be strong man is mimicking the tactics of real life strong men.  Here are highlights from the article:

On Oct. 21, militants fired rockets and detonated explosives in the desert southwest of Cairo, killing at least 59 Egyptian police officers and security officials in the worst assault on security forces since 2015. The shocking attack is the latest reminder of the very real threat that armed militants pose to Egypt’s security forces.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seems incapable of quelling this menace. . . . So with such a real and present danger, why would Mr. Sisi’s government, aided by a team of media personalities and religious authorities, spend the past month whipping up a frenzy over another kind of “threat” altogether?

As part of what can best be described as hysterical homophobia, more than 65 people, mostly gay men, have been arrested in the crackdown against L.G.B.T. Egyptians. At least 20 people have received prison sentences, ranging from six months to six years.

This wave of arrests and raids began after gay-pride rainbow flags were flown at a concert by a Lebanese indie-rock band, Mashrou’ Leila, whose lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay. It was not the first time fans displayed rainbow flags at a Mashrou’ Leila concert, a gay friend who has attended some of the band’s previous concerts in Cairo reminds me. He also reminds me that rainbow flags were flown in Tahrir Square during the 18 days of protest that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Same-sex relationships are not illegal in Egypt, but gay men are arrested under “debauchery” laws. So why now? Why the parade of men “confessing” to being gay and “repenting” on TV talk shows, and the psychiatrists touting “conversion therapy”?

It would be easy to label the crackdown a distraction. There is much that Egyptians need distracting from: disastrous economic austerity policies, the insurgency in Sinai, 60,000 political prisoners.

And it does make for a convenient topic. Egypt’s political parties might disagree on how to remedy any or all of those issues — but homophobia cuts across disagreement. . . . . my friend told me. “Some people think gay people should be stoned, others recommend burning them after stoning, while some sheikhs are saying their hands and legs should be cut on opposite sides of their bodies, and ask in the softest of voices for their imprisonment or deportation.”

But there is more than just distraction at play. A talk-show host who suggested that both terrorism and homosexuality were being used to “ruin our youth” by a nameless external enemy offered perhaps the most honest explanation for this vicious round of homophobia in Egypt: the conflation of a security threat with a “moral” threat.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, increasingly bold expressions of sexual freedom are clearly unsettling regimes accustomed to being guardians not just of “national security” but also of our bodies and sexualities. Mr. Sinno is unapologetically “brown, queer and from a Muslim family” by his own description. . . . . Armed with social media and audacity, more people are questioning taboos around religion and sexuality.

Egypt, of course, is far from alone in its witch hunt. From Chechnya to Azerbaijan and from Tanzania to Indonesia there are similar crackdowns by governments obsessed with policing people’s sexuality. (And let’s not forget that President Sisi’s booster, President Trump, is no friend to L.G.B.T. rights.)

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike. Mr. Sisi, a former army general who became president after forcing out Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, understands the potency of connecting the catchall “national security” to “inciting debauchery” as a deliberate reminder that the Islamists do not hold the copyright on piety.

On Oct. 19 — a day of global solidarity with L.G.B.T. Egyptians — I saw Mashrou’ Leila in concert in Montreal. That day, a protest had been held outside the Egyptian Consulate there. Some concertgoers flew an Egyptian flag alongside a rainbow flag. Mr. Sinno told the audience that the best way to fight the crackdown in Egypt was to keep up international pressure. He understands the importance of visibility — for safety and for solidarity.

 Human rights around the world used to be a concern for America. Now, under Trump/Pence, not so much.  Indeed, America voted against a United Nations resolution that condemned the death penalty for gays due to their involvement in consenting relationships between adults.  America has indeed fallen and will likely only increase in ugliness under the current misrule. 

Evangelical Christians Love Trump Because They Don’t Trust Facts

As regular readers know, I am particularly harsh on evangelical/fundamentalist Christians who go to church every Sunday (if not more often) and act all pious and sanctimonious even as they act in ways that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Their hypocrisy and dishonesty is stunning. Thus, it is not surprising that the most loyal supporters of Donald Trump, an amoral, vulgar, sexual predator who equates having money with class, breeding and social standing.   Most importantly, Trump ignores or derides any facts and information that conflicts with his own fantasies and narcissism - just as the evangelical Christians do. A piece in Salon focuses on this denial of fakes and knowledge that motivates both Trump and his evangelical supporters.  It makes the case that the moral bankruptcy of Trump is all too like that of the evangelical Christians. Here are highlights: 

Donald Trump is a man of many notable qualities. He is ignorant and a brute. He has bragged about sexually assaulting women by grabbing them by their genitals. He is a serial womanizer and has been divorced several times. He has also admitted to finding his own daughter sexually attractive. He is a serial liar who adores autocrats and dictators. He may even have gone so far as to collude with Russia and Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 presidential election. Trump is also violent, moody, vain and impulsive. He does not read and is proudly ignorant.

Why would anyone support such a leader? More specifically, why would any supposed “Christian” support Donald Trump, who appears to represent the antithesis of Christian virtues in so many ways?

Writing at Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall offers the following insights:

I puzzled over this for some time. Eventually I sensed that Trump wasn’t inducing people’s self-destruction so much as he was acting like a divining rod, revealing rot that existed already but was not apparent. … The rot was there but hidden. Trump is the moonlight. Perhaps better to say, to invert our metaphor, Trump is the darkness. …This seems most palpably the case with the political evangelical community with which Trump has maintained, since early in his campaign, a profound and profoundly cynical mutual embrace. Here I use the term advisedly: I don’t mean evangelical Christians or even conservative evangelical Christians but the evangelical right political faction, which is distinct and different. Nothing I have seen before has more clearly revealed this group’s moral rot than the adoration of Trump, an unchurched hedonist with the moral compass of a predator who is lauded and almost worshipped purely and entirely because he produces political deliverables.

Marshall does not go far enough. Christian evangelicals (“Dominionists” and Christian nationalists especially) support Trump because he shares their most important values.

Trump and the Republican Party are waging a crusade to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms.

Trump and the Republican Party want to remove constitutional and other legal barriers that limit the ability of churches and other religious organizations to engage in overt political lobbying while retaining their tax-exempt status.

Trump and the Republican Party want to destroy the social safety net and believe that wealth and money are indicators of human worth and value. A belief in the “prosperity gospel” and a crude form of Calvinism where money and wealth are signs of being among “the elect” and of God’s blessing has been endorsed by many Christian evangelical leaders.

Trump and the Republican Party embrace racism and white supremacy. Southern Baptists and other white Christian evangelical faith communities have a long and deep history of racism against people of color — especially African-Americans.

There is another factor, rooted in emotion and irrationality, that also helps explain evangelical Christians’ support for Donald Trump.

New research published in the Journal of Religion and Health explains it this way:

The studies, based on surveys of more than 900 people, also found some similarities between religious and non-religious people. In both groups the most dogmatic are less adept at analytical thinking, and also less likely to look at issues from other’s perspectives. … The results showed religious participants as a whole had a higher level of dogmatism, empathetic concern and prosocial intentions, while the nonreligious performed better on the measure of analytic reasoning. Decreasing empathy among the nonreligious corresponded to increasing dogmatism.

Jared Friedman, a co-author of this new research, concludes, “It suggests that religious individuals may cling to certain beliefs, especially those which seem at odds with analytic reasoning, because those beliefs resonate with their moral sentiments.”

Christian evangelicals’ rejection of empirical reality and their habituation into believing the absurd and the fantastical mates perfectly with the zealotry of the broader American right, which views politics as a form of religious fundamentalism.

Faith, after all, is a matter of believing in that which cannot be proven by normal or empirical means. This definition is a perfect description of both movement conservatism and the Christian right.

Ultimately, Christian evangelicals and Donald Trump are united in an imperfect marriage because they share mutual goals. This is an unholy alliance and, as such, a perfect emblem of today’s Republican Party.

The Growing Reactionary Trend Can No Longer Be Ignored

In a very lengthy piece in New York Magazine Andrew Sullivan looks head on at the growing forces of reaction that are asserting themselves not only in America but also in Europe and other parts of the world.  His message is that this trend must be resisted because of the threat it poses to humanity and democracy in particular.  One must never forget that a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire was Christianity - as well as military over extension which America is seemingly replicating - and we see signs of this battle against modernity and knowledge most markedly among the conservative Christians (and their Muslim counterparts embodied by the Taliban and ISIS).  As a piece in the Washington Post, right wing Republicans and self-styled leaders of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians - Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and hate group leader Brian Brown are but examples - are increasingly enamored with Vladimir Putin and Russia's autocratic government.  And then, of course, we have Der Trumpenführer himself who may have colluded with Putin to win the 2016 presidential election.  None of this bodes well for humankind or America in the long run. Rejecting science and knowledge while embracing racism, xenophobia and authoritarian rule cannot end well for most people.  Here are highlights from Sullivan's piece:

Look around you. Donald Trump is now president of the United States, having won on a campaign that trashed liberal democracy itself, and is now presiding over an administration staffed, in part, with adherents of a political philosophy largely alien to mainstream American politics. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has driven his country from postcommunist capitalism to a new and popular czardom, empowered by nationalism and blessed by a resurgent Orthodox Church. Britain, where the idea of free trade was born, is withdrawing from the largest free market on the planet because of fears that national identity and sovereignty are under threat. In France, a reconstructed neofascist, Marine Le Pen, has just won a place in the final round of the presidential election. In the Netherlands, the anti-immigrant right became the second-most-popular vote-getter — a new high-water mark for illiberalism in that once famously liberal country. Austria narrowly avoided installing a neo-reactionary president in last year’s two elections. Japan is led by a government attempting to rehabilitate its imperial, nationalist past. Poland is now run by an illiberal Catholic government that is dismembering key liberal institutions. Turkey has morphed from a resolutely secular state to one run by an Islamic strongman, whose powers were just ominously increased by a referendum. Israel has shifted from secular socialism to a raw ethno-nationalism.

We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. And yes, there’s racism and xenophobia mixed into it. But what we are also seeing, it seems to me, is the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots: reactionism.

Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.

The reactionary impulse is, of course, not new in human history. . . . Its darkest American incarnation took place after Reconstruction, as a backlash to the Civil War victory of the North; a full century later, following the success of the civil-rights movement, it bubbled up among the white voters of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”

What are this generation’s reactionaries reacting to? They’re reacting, as they have always done, to modernity. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity.

This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism. In the case of Britain, the question of race is framed within a euphemism used by the British government itself: a “visible minority” versus an “invisible one.” “Since 2001, Britain’s ‘visible minority’ population has nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 14 percent today,” Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of The American Conservative, noted last year. “It is projected to rise to about 38 percent by mid-century.” Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Things didn’t start going wrong in the 1960s or under the Progressives. Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs.

And is it any wonder that reactionaries are gaining strength? Within the space of 50 years, America has gone from segregation to dizzying multiculturalism; from traditional family structures to widespread divorce, cohabitation, and sexual liberty; from a few respected sources of information to an endless stream of peer-to-peer media; from careers in one company for life to an ever-accelerating need to retrain and regroup; from a patriarchy to (incomplete) gender equality; from homosexuality as a sin to homophobia as a taboo; from Christianity being the common culture to a secularism no society has ever sustained before ours.

This, of course, is not to defend the neo-reactionary response. Their veiled racism is disturbing, and their pessimism a solipsistic pathology. . . . how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past. Compare the racial integration of today, incomplete as it may be, with Jim Crow. Observe the historically low levels of crime compared with the recent past — and the absence of any world wars since 1945.

Reaction can be clarifying if it helps us better understand the huge challenges we now face. But reaction by itself cannot help us manage the world we live in today — which is the only place that matters. You start with where you are, not where you were or where you want to be. There are no utopias in the future or Gardens of Eden in our past. There is just now — in all its incoherent, groaning, volatile messiness. Our job, like everyone before us, is to keep our nerve and make the best of it.

Sullivan diagnoses the ultimate root of reactionary politics and society: being self-centered.  This applies to whites how oppose racial equality.  They want to forever maintain their white privilege at the expense of racial minorities.  The Christofascists similarly ultimately seek to hang on to their age old habit of persecuting and harming those who hold to different beliefs or threaten to make them think about the myth and legend basis for the house of cards religious beliefs. They perhaps more than anyone save perhaps Islamic extremists are at war with modernity and The Enlightenment's values.  In their rush to restore a supposedly mythical, wonderful era, they utterly overlook the horrors that era wrought on so many.  Self-centered doesn't adequately describe the selfishness and - if one still believes - un-Christian conduct.