Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Republican Acquiescence and Cowardice Threaten Democracy

Racism, white supremacist tendencies and evangelical Christian hatred toward others are not new phenomenon in the right wing political universe.  Indeed, when I ran for public office (as a Republican) over a quarter of a century ago, the Christian Coalition was a very real presence in local politics, especially low turnout local elections.  Back then, however, the leadership of the Republican Party constrained the insanity of the extremists and, equally importantly, extremists were not allowed to secure leadership positions within the party and concerted efforts were made to ensure that extremists - think Marjorie Taylor Greene - did not win nominations to run as candidates.  Since that time, extremists (especially Christofascists) have been welcomed into all levels of the Republican Party and the party leadership - the elites, if you will - have surrendered to the extremists and open racism, far right Christian extremism, and outright misogyny now runs rampant to a point that America's democracy could well end within the next four (4) years.  The issue is how do wake the majority of Americans to the reality of the threat.  A column in the New York Times looks at the frightening place we find ourselves in.  Here are highlights:

America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end. That’s not hyperbole; it’s obvious to anyone following the political scene. Republicans might take power legitimately; they might win through pervasive voter suppression; G.O.P. legislators might simply refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes and declare Donald Trump or his political heir the winner. However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.

But how did we get here? We read every day about the rage of the Republican base, which overwhelmingly believes, based on nothing, that the 2020 election was stolen, and extremists in Congress, who insist that being required to wear a face mask is the equivalent of the Holocaust

Conspiracy theorizing is hardly a new thing in our national life; Richard Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” back in 1964. White rage has been a powerful force at least since the civil rights movement.

What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.

[T]he fundamental problem lies less with the crazies than with the careerists; not with the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but with the spinelessness of Kevin McCarthy. And this spinelessness has deep institutional roots.

Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. . . . . the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.

All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net . . . .in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.

Of course, the easy life of a professional Republican wasn’t appealing to everyone. The G.O.P. has long been an uncomfortable place for people with genuine policy expertise and real external reputations, who might find themselves expected to endorse claims they knew to be false.

The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. . . . . But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.

Matters may be even worse for politicians who actually care about policy, still have principles and have personal constituencies separate from their party affiliation. There’s no room in today’s G.O.P. for the equivalent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, unless you count the extremely sui generis Mitt Romney.

And the predominance of craven careerists is what made the Republican Party so vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

Surely a great majority of Republicans in Congress know that the election wasn’t stolen. Very few really believe that the storming of the Capitol was a false-flag antifa operation or simply a crowd of harmless tourists. But decades as a monolithic, top-down enterprise have filled the G.O.P. with people who will follow the party line wherever it goes.

So if Trump or a Trump-like figure declares that we have always been at war with East Asia, well, his party will say that we’ve always been at war with East Asia. If he says he won a presidential election in a landslide, never mind the facts, they’ll say he won the election in a landslide.

The point is that neither megalomania at the top nor rage at the bottom explains why American democracy is hanging by a thread. Cowardice, not craziness, is the reason government by the people may soon perish from the earth.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Southern Baptist Convention Suffers Historic Loses in Membership

A number of articles have opined that evangelical Christianity has become a political identity rather than a spiritual identity.  That political identity has focused on backing the Republican Party but even more so in engaging in the cult of the personality demanded by Donald Trump, an individual who is the antithesis of Christian principles.  Those who actually hold true to endeavoring to follow Christ's principles find themselves increasingly unwelcome within evangelical circles including the Southern Baptist convention which saw the largest loss of membership in its history last year as well as new baptism plummet by 50%.  While the Covid-19 pandemic may have fueled some of the numbers - older members literally died off and church closed to service did not conduct baptisms - signs suggest the SBA's doubling down on its political agenda may be driving members away as well, a case in point being Russell Moore who announced last Tuesday that he will be leaving the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention where he has been the president of its policy arm since 2013.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Moore's departure which appears motivated by his opposition to Trump.  Here are article excerpts:

Prominent Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore, who blasted former president Donald Trump and his evangelical fans, announced Tuesday that he will be leaving the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention where he has been the president of its policy arm since 2013.

Moore’s departure from the convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) follows other high-profile exits from the denomination, including popular Bible teacher Beth Moore (no relation) and Black pastors. Some evangelicals are wondering what their departures signal about the direction of the convention, which has included louder voices on the far right in recent years.

Russell Moore will be joining the staff of Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine . . .

Moore was an early critic of Trump and accused other evangelical leaders of “normalizing an awful candidate.” When other Southern Baptist leaders met with the then-presidential candidate at Trump Tower in 2016, Moore suggested they had “drunk the Kool-Aid.”

During his time at the ERLC, Moore led the charge on key issues for Southern Baptists, including abortion and religious freedom, but he also befriended several Black Christian artists, openly advocated for immigration reform and led the convention’s response to allegations of sexual abuse within the denomination. In recent months, he has urged evangelicals to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. . . . but after Trump won in 2016, Moore became quiet on many hot-button political topics. On Jan. 6, however, he called on Trump to resign over the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“It was 2016 and the evangelical world was turning upside down and he had the guts — or the gall, depending on how you saw it — to [call out Trump],” she said.

Beth Moore, who received her own backlash for speaking against Trump, said they were both “reeling from what appeared to us a profoundly compromised witness playing out on a global stage. The backlash Russell received for speaking out was swift, severe and unrelenting.”

“If he would not bow — and he wouldn’t — there were some who’d do their best to cut his legs out from under him,” she said.

Many younger evangelicals are trying to find ways to move forward in a modern world, where LGBT issues and the Black Lives Matter movement have been at the forefront of social conversations and can make them feel uncomfortable. Many young leaders in the SBC are attempting to chart a modern path but remain conservative theologically, and Moore gave them an example.

Thomas’s SBC church closed permanently during the pandemic, and he no longer affiliates with the denomination. “It’s given us great respite to know we’re not in the SBC anymore. If there isn’t a place for Dr. Moore in the SBC, I don’t think there’s a place for me as a person of color.” Thomas subscribed to CT on Tuesday night after he saw Moore’s announcement.

During Moore’s tenure, the SBC, like the GOP and evangelicalism, has seen the “mainstream” shift to the right, Hankins said. But the Trump years escalated things. Moore, he said, is the public face of the younger faction of the convention, people who don’t want the SBC to be essentially a wing of the GOP.

A piece in Christianity Today also looks at the denomination's shrinking - which is a postive thing, in my view - and the decline in new baptisms.  Here are excerpts:

[O]verall, the denomination experienced another year of decline, with the pandemic accelerating historically steep drops in membership and baptism.

The country’s largest Protestant denomination has been getting smaller for 14 years in a row, down to 14 million after losing 436,000 members last year, according to the Annual Church Profile released Thursday by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Baptisms dunked by nearly half year-over-year.

“COVID-19’s effect on 2020 stats is undeniable. Yet 2020 is only the latest year of continued decline in major categories,” tweeted Mike Stone, a pastor in Georgia who is in the upcoming race for SBC president.

Researcher Ryan Burge wrote last year that the generational shift will be the biggest factor accelerating losses in the SBC, as the denomination ages and members die off.

Losing more of its older members due to COVID-19 is likely one factor in the 2020 drop, according to Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. Membership declined by 2 percent in 2019, the SBC’s biggest drop in a century. Last year—as congregations winnowed inactive members from their rolls and saw fewer people join during shutdowns—the decline was 3 percent.

The annual report comes less than a month before Southern Baptists are scheduled to meet in Nashville in June for their annual meeting, the first since the pandemic. Leaders are expected to address the downward trends in the denomination as well as recent debates over their approach to politics, race, women, and abuse.

“A convention perpetually at war with itself cannot do what God has called it to—pursue the Great Commission,” said outgoing SBC president J. D. Greear in a statement. “There are voices calling us [to] come to Nashville to divide even further over things beyond the scope of our statement of faith and therefore best left to the autonomy of churches. This will surely send us even further into decline.”

May the decline accelerate!

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Threat of Violence Now Defines the GOP

Some supporters of Donald Trump and his Republican apologists and enablers now use the open threat of violence much as Hitler's brown shirts did in the lead up to Nazi Germany.  Heavily armed "militias" don't just wear combat and tactical gear to show their worship of guns, but rather to instill fear in political opponents. The underlying threat of the use of violence is now an underlying element of the Republican Party's mode of operation.  In addition to trying to rig elections through changes in voting laws to make it harder for perceived Democrat voting populations to vote many of those same voters facing a growing threat of intimidation at the polls. The irony is that by doubling down on voter intimidation and voter disenfranchisement, the GOP is driving more suburban voters into the arms of Democrats as the GOP becomes increasingly made up of scary extremists and religious fanatics.   A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at the dangerous place we find ourselves.  Here are excerpts:

American politics is being conducted under the threat of violence.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has a talent for constructive bluntness, describes a political atmosphere within the GOP heavy with fear. “If you look at the vote to impeach,” she said recently, “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” The events of Jan. 6 have only intensified the alarm. When Donald Trump insists he is “still the rightful president,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed for The Post, he “repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.” And there’s good reason, Cheney argued, “to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again.”

Sometimes political events force us to step back in awe, or horror, or both. The (former) third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives has accused a former president of her party of employing the threat of violence as a tool of intimidation. And election officials around the country — Republican and Democratic — can attest to the results: Death threats. Racist harassment. Armed protesters at their homes.

From one perspective, this is not new. Trump has made a point of encouraging violence against protesters at his rallies (“knock the crap out of them”), excusing violence by his supporters (people "with tremendous passion and love for their country”) and generally acting like a two-bit mob boss.

If Trump has a political philosophy, one of its main tenets is toxic masculinity — the use of menace and swagger to cover his mental and moral impotence. And the mini-Trumps have taken their master’s lead. When Trump operative Stephen K. Bannon proposed that Anthony S. Fauci should be beheaded, when Trump ally Joseph diGenova said a federal cybersecurity official should be “taken out at dawn and shot,” when Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani urged Trump supporters to engage in “trial by combat,” all of this was more than paunchy, pathetic, aging White men talking smack they could never back up. It exemplified a type of politics where cruelty is the evidence of commitment, brutality is the measure of loyalty and violence is equated with power.

This approach to politics is disturbing at any time. But now it has fastened itself upon an object, a project. Rather than trying to win future elections by attracting new voters, Trump Republicans wish to reshape the electoral system to produce more favorable results. Instead of using the 2020 presidential loss as a guide for additional outreach, Trump Republicans want to ensure they can claim and enforce a victory in 2024 with essentially the same vote total as 2020 — probably the high-water mark of the Trump coalition.

In some ways, the Trump movement of authoritarian populism is forward-looking. It eternally relitigates the 2020 election as preparation for the next. Compared with the utter chaos of previous efforts, this time there seems to be a strategy at work. First, undermine Republican confidence in the electoral system and stoke the party’s sense of grievance. Second, modify state election laws to try to discourage Democratic (and particularly minority) turnout. Third, replace or intimidate state election officials who show any hints of independence or integrity.

The first goal has been achieved: In a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Republicans denied the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president. Results on the second goal (so far) have been mixed. Republican “reforms” have made the system marginally less fair than the status quo, but not quite as bad as some feared.

The third goal is where the threat of violence has mattered most. Officials who held the line against electoral corruption in 2020 have been worn down by threats. Some have retired or been forced out of office. State legislators who didn’t act as reliable partisans have been targeted and intimidated. All who resist Trump’s will know they will be singled out by name. They will be exposed to political jeopardy and physical peril, particularly from activists who view the right to bear arms as the right to make armed threats.

This is not a joke. This is not a myth. This is not a drill. According to a survey last year, a majority of Republicans agreed with the statement: “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

Ultimately, it is not enough for political figures to ritually denounce the use of violence while amplifying the lies that lead to violence. The only way to defuse this bomb is to embrace the truth.

Be very, very afraid.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Former Virginia Republicans Seek to End Trumpism

I have often said that one cannot support Donald Trump and at the same time be a decent, moral person.  The two are simply mutually exclusive.  It seems several former GOP members of Congress have reached the same conclusion and now seek to either (i) reform the GOP away from Trumpism and a cult of the personality akin to what China witnessed under Mao Zedong, a/k/a Chairman Mao, or (ii) possible found a new political party.  The latter approach would hopefully siphon enough votes from the GOP candidates to make Republican victories fewer and allow the anti-Trump moderates to wield enough power to force reform if the party was serious about winning elections as opposed to worship a foul, morally bankrupt sociopath.  Interestingly, some no longer identify themselves as Republicans give what the party brand has come to connotate.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Scott Rigell had no hard feelings when he resigned from the Virginia Beach GOP in 2016 after becoming the first Republican member of Congress to endorse Libertarian Gary Johnson over Donald Trump. He said he was still a “proud member” of the Republican Party.

Over the next four years, however, that pride dwindled. And after the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, Rigell became a political independent. He said he couldn’t stomach seeing his former colleagues “hold on to the proven falsehood that the election was stolen.”

“I am still to this day stunned that the Republican Party elevated, embraced — and continues to, to this day — a man I think is a complete moral wasteland, not only personally but in the public square,” he said.

Rigell is one of three former Republican members of Congress from Virginia to join a national open call this month to reform the GOP and steer it away from Trumpian politics after the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the House GOP conference chair. The others are former representatives Barbara Comstock and Denver Riggleman.

The group — dubbed “A Call for American Renewal” — also includes Marylanders Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor, and Wayne Gilchrest and Connie Morella, both former members of Congress (Gilchrest announced in 2019 that he had become a Democrat). Its organizers stopped short of calling for a new party but seemed to flirt with the possibility.

While in Congress, Comstock, Rigell and Riggleman were reliable conservative votes on a wide range of issues including border security and deregulation, making their evolution into GOP critics a stark example of the schism Trump has created within the traditional political right.

Riggleman, who also no longer calls himself a Republican, was a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus.

But they have drawn the line at echoing Trump’s false claims about a rigged 2020 election. In contrast, all four of Virginia’s current Republican members of Congress objected to President Biden’s electoral victory during the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

“Some want to have a new party, but I’m in the category of wanting to have a much healthier two-party system and center-right Republican Party that embraces the rule of law,” said Comstock, . . . . “Pushing back against January 6 was a dividing line. You cannot support the big lie and be a constitutional conservative.”

Trump’s falsehoods and divisive style drove centrist voters away from the GOP, nationally and in Virginia, political analysts say, ultimately speeding the commonwealth’s shift from swing-state purple to Democratic blue.

Virginia Republicans who oppose or criticize Trump are being shunned or sidelined within the party, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, while those who embrace him struggle to win statewide elections or suburban swing districts.

“At the moment, these three former members of Congress are more like voices crying in a Republican wilderness,” Farnsworth said. “Will the party come around to their way of thinking? I think a lot depends on the success or failure of Republican candidates who are all in in their support of former president Trump. If Republicans get swept again in statewide elections, the arguments offered by Riggleman and Comstock and Rigell may make more sense to some of the die-hard activists.”

Comstock views detaching Republican candidates from Trump as key to winning swing states and taking back the House majority — a view echoed by many critics of the former president but forcefully rejected by the GOP caucus when it replaced Cheney with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). That rejection, Comstock said, is what made signing onto the call for GOP reform feel so urgent.

“We’ve never had this cult of personality where you had to pick a person over issues. It’s just juvenile,” she said. “As Liz said, if you don’t stand up to the liar, it’s going to continue. ... [Trump] has a burn-it-down mentality; if he can’t win, he doesn’t care if Republicans win or not.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

CNN Dumps Rick Santorum Over Racist Remarks

I have long despised Rick Santorum who, in my view, is a closeted self-loathing gay man who cannot let go of his warped Roman Catholic upbringing - like Santorum, I was raised Catholic and know too well what it does to a young gay's mind and the self-hatred it engenders - who has consistently sought to harm normal, well adjusted LGBT Americans. (Ken Cuccinelli is another such Catholic raised individual who has still not figured out that fathering seven children - like Santorum - did not magically make him heterosexual).  But Santorum's bigotry doesn't extend just to gays as demonstrated by his recent comments on Native Americans that smacked of white supremacy and seemingly supported the horrific genocide committed against the original inhabitants of America. Thankfully, CNN is belatedly ditching Santorum as a political commentator - something that should have happened years ago.  A piece in Politico looks at Santorum being shown the door.  Here are excerpts:

CNN is cutting ties with former Republican senator and current TV analyst Rick Santorum over disparaging comments he made about Native American culture.

On CNN, Santorum was a senior political commentator who was often tasked with giving the Republican point of view during campaign coverage. His parting ways with the network was confirmed Saturday by Alison Rudnick, vice president of HLN Communications and CNN Diversity and Inclusion.

He sparked controversy in an April 23 speech before the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization. Santorum said immigrants created a nation based on the Judeo-Christian ethic from a blank slate.

“We birthed a nation from nothing,” he said. “Yes, there were Native Americans, but there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

The comment prompted Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, to call him “an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform.”

“To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign tribal nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” she wrote in a statement.

Santorum later said on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show that he “misspoke” in the sense that it wasn’t clear that he was speaking in the context of the founding of the United States government.

Santorum's comments have garnered blowback before, especially his views on gay marriage and homosexuality. In 2003, he infuriated gay rights advocates by appearing to compare homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. 

 Santorum also knows little history, since the U.S. Constitution borrowed from the organization structure of the Iroquois Confederacy.