Monday, April 03, 2023
Sunday, April 02, 2023
The GOP's Self-Made Conundrum
The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.
In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.
Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.
“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist . . . . “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”
That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments.
“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.
The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment . . . The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.
Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction. . . .
The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.
But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.
In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.
[I]t’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.
Is It Already Too Late for Ron DeSantis?
The Republican establishment thought it could have Donald Trump’s political appeal without Donald Trump himself.
That’s why many of the most prominent voices in conservative politics and media have lined up behind Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, as the presumptive leader of the Republican Party in the 2024 presidential race. He combines traditional, elite credentials and orthodox conservative views with a pugilistic, Trumpish affect. DeSantis, goes the thinking, could hold Trump’s working-class supporters and reclaim suburban Republicans who decamped for bluer pastures in the 2020 presidential election.
To be the nominee, of course, DeSantis has to win the nomination. And to win the nomination, he has to topple Trump . . . . Trump’s pull is so powerful — his influence is so great — that he basically compelled much of the Republican Party, including would-be rivals, to defend him in the wake of his indictment by a Manhattan jury.
Besting Trump, in other words, will require a certain amount of skill, finesse and political daring.
He has to somehow persuade Trump supporters that he could do a better job — more effective and less chaotic — without disparaging Trump to the point where he, DeSantis, is no longer viable. And he has to do all of this before Trump can build steam and roll over him like he did his rivals in the 2016 Republican primary.
The problem for DeSantis is that it might already be too late.
According to a recent Fox News poll, more than 50 percent of Republican voters support Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, compared with 24 percent for Gov. DeSantis. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 51 percent of Republican voters support Trump, compared with 40 percent for DeSantis. And according to a recent Morning Consult poll, 52 percent of Republicans support Trump, compared with 26 percent for DeSantis.
The weakest Trump has ever been among Republican voters was in the wake of Jan. 6, when it seemed as if the entire political class, Republicans included, was ready to cut him loose. But they didn’t. Prominent Republican leaders kept him in the fold. Conservative media defended his actions. He was vulnerable, yes. But he remained the dominant figure in Republican politics.
DeSantis could have struck when the former president was weak. He didn’t. And now the most likely outcome is that Trump takes the crown again, tossing his rivals aside like a collection of old dolls.
What’s clear in all of this is that the Republican establishment — DeSantis included, it seems — is as clueless about its situation now as it was when Trump came down the escalator in 2015. They seem to think that they can harness Trump’s energy without submitting to Trump himself. But Republican voters want Trump, and they won’t take any substitutes.
The draw of Trump is that he is an entertainer and a showman who will turn those skills against their political enemies. DeSantis might be more competent, but Republican voters don’t want a manager, they want a performer. If Trump’s opponents can outperform him, then, maybe, they have a chance. But in a fight for attention between a seasoned celebrity and a conservative apparatchik, I know where I would place my bet.
Saturday, April 01, 2023
Christian Nationalists: the Opposite of True Christians
Some scoff at the idea, but I continue to believe one of the major causations for the Republican Party's descent into something hideous where anti-democracy sentiments, racism and religous extremism flourish is the rise of evangelicals and Christofascists within the GOP and the lockhold they now hold on GOP primary voters. Many evangelicals come from traditions that supported slavery and then segregation and little of that mindset has really changed. Many also want a Christian theocracy - something Trump seemingly promised them in June 2016 - and seek to stamp out anyone and anything that challenges their ignorance and myth-like beliefs. And then there is their unique selfishness where they wear their false religiosity on their selves while opposing policies that would be a furtherance of Christ's social gospel message. Before I left the GOP, I saw a number of people first hand as they infiltrated the party base and local city and county committees. In truth, they care little for Christianity except for the label and they hate and despise today's society where racial minorities and gays have gained acceptance - things they view as challenging their privilege and misplaced sense of superiority. A piece in The New Yorker looks at these dangerous, un-Christian people. Here are excerpts:
Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. . . . . He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”
By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his relationship with evangelical Christians was one of the most powerful alliances in American politics. (According to one survey, he won eighty-four per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020.) On January 6th, when his supporters gathered in Washington to protest the election results, one person brought along a placard depicting Jesus wearing a MAGA hat
The events of January 6th bolstered a growing belief that the alliance between Trump and his Christian supporters had become something more like a movement, a pro-Trump uprising with a distinctive ideology. This ideology is sometimes called “Christian nationalism,” a description that often functions as a diagnosis. . . . . seventy per cent of Christian nationalists don’t know that they’re Christian nationalists,” he said. “They’re just, like, ‘This is normal Christianity, from the time of Jesus.’ ”
In contemporary America, though, the practice of Christianity is starting to seem abnormal. Measures of religious observance in America have shown a steep decrease over the past quarter century. In 1999, Gallup found that seventy per cent of Americans belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. In 2020, the number was forty-seven per cent—for the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling, worshippers were the minority.
There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions . . . . Whitehead and Perry published the results in a book called “Taking America Back for God,” in which they predicted a growing schism. “Christian nationalism gives divine sanction to ethnocentrism and nativism,” they wrote, noting that a number of respondents doubted that immigrants or non-English speakers could ever be “truly American.” Christian nationalism was, they argued, a divisive creed; its adherents were more likely than other groups to believe “that Muslims and Atheists hold morally inferior values.”
Gorski and Perry argue that in American politics Christian nationalism has often served as a white-identity movement. They note, for instance, that white Americans who support Christian nationalism are likelier to evince disapproval of immigration and concern about anti-white discrimination. And they worry that “white Christian nationalism is working just beneath the surface” of American politics, ready to trigger an outburst, as it did on January 6th. “There will be another eruption—and soon,” they write.
Gorski and Perry warn that a second Trump Administration might lead to “Jim Crow 2.0,” with “non-white, undocumented immigrants” singled out for “mass deportations on an unprecedented scale.” But they also note that the white Christian nationalists in their survey expressed the most hostility not toward immigrants or toward Muslims but toward socialists.
Africans and their descendants were sometimes held to be heathens of a peculiar sort, because they were considered to be both a Biblical people and a cursed one: descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah. In the Bible, Ham has an ambiguous encounter with a drunk and naked Noah, and is punished with a generational affliction: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Judging from church-membership figures, the nineteen-fifties may have been the most pious period in American history; it was the decade when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), and when “In God we trust” was adopted as the country’s official motto (1956). By then, politicians were talking less about heathenism and more about a new adversary . . . a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity.” In America, Christianity works best as an organizing principle when there is a strong non-Christian force to organize against.
In “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” Stephen Wolfe, a political philosopher and faithful Presbyterian, advances a series of syllogisms . . . He has firm opinions on whether non-Christians are “entitled to political equality” (no), whether “political atheism” should be excluded from the bounds of “acceptable opinion” (yes), and whether “arch-heretics” can justifiably be put to death (yes). In Wolfe’s view, Christians are too quick to dismiss the virtue of tribalism—the notion that people are drawn to others who share their “ethnicity,” . . . Wolfe’s book avoids explicit claims about race, but after its publication, in November, a shadow was cast over it by an investigation that Alastair Roberts, an English theologian, conducted into the public writing of one of Wolfe’s close friends and collaborators, Thomas Achord.
Achord, under a pseudonym, had been posting online in support of what he called “robust race realist white nationalism.” Roberts pointed to a Twitter account that had responded to a post from the American Jewish Committee by writing, “OK jew,” and referred to Representative Cori Bush, of Missouri, as a “Ngress.” In response to a discussion of white supremacy by Jemar Tisby, a prominent Black historian of Christianity, the account posted, “Please leave soon. —Sincerely, All White Peoples.”
The presidency of George W. Bush was a high-water mark for Christian politics. Bush launched initiatives to support “faith-based organizations,” and brought a missionary’s fervor to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and, much more successfully, AIDS treatment in Africa. By contrast, Trump was perhaps the least Christian President in modern times; although he kept his promise to anti-abortion Christian voters by appointing three Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he seemed to view this not as a moral triumph but as a favor for a special interest.
America may now be following the trajectory of Europe, where Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, talks about the importance of “Christian roots,” even though fewer than twenty per cent of Hungarians attend church regularly. If the rise of Christian nationalism in America reflects the decline of Christianity, that is bittersweet news for secular liberals, because it means that they might expect to see more and more of it as the country grows less pious.
How did this decline happen? No one seems to know. Sociologists such as Gorski and Perry can tell us that Christian-nationalist beliefs reflect a tribal or partisan identity, but they can’t tell us why so many self-identified Christians seem uninterested in the religion itself.
The strangest thing about the debate over Christian nationalism is the assumption shared by many of the participants. The sociologists see a fearful tribe, resentful of a country that won’t stop changing. . . . the underlying idea is that recent trends will continue: that churches will keep emptying out, and that Christianity will become an ever more tribal identity. The secular country that emerges might be increasingly free, anxious, and unpredictable—less prayer in schools, more shamans in the Capitol.
Republicans' False Claims of Protecting About Children
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas signed a bill this month rolling back the state’s child labor protections, making it easier for employers to hire children under 16. Elsewhere, bills to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work in meatpacking plants and other dangerous jobs in Iowa as part of training programs and 16- and 17-year-olds to take jobs at construction sites in Minnesota are under consideration.
These enacted and potential rollbacks are happening just when the country is experiencing a surge of child labor violations on a scale and of a type that we hadn’t heard about for many years. Laws in the United States prohibit certain very dangerous work for minors, but recent investigative reporting by The New York Times and Reuters has exposed migrant children as young as 12 working at car factories, meat processors and construction sites; household-name companies generally avoid liability through the use of sometimes sketchy subcontractors and staffing agencies.
And when child labor violations come to light, especially horrifying ones, shouldn’t elected officials strengthen laws and fund enforcement rather than allow more children to be exploited?
[I]t appears that some business interests and lawmakers would prefer to expand the pool of exploitable workers to vulnerable children rather than improve working conditions to attract age-appropriate employees.
The labor market shortfall also results in part from a decline in immigration and an increase in out-migration, predictable results of anti-immigrant attitudes and policies. . . . The shortage, then, is mostly of our own making. Facing this situation, employers could lure people back to the work force by offering better conditions.
But raising wages for workers, providing benefits and giving signing bonuses would mean slimmer profits, representing concessions to workers’ slightly increased bargaining power during our current tight labor market. Instead, some employers and some business interests are turning to the most vulnerable and exploitable work force around: children.
Even arguing about whether 14-year-olds should work in meatpacking plants, as though it were an appropriate subject for legitimate political debate, runs the risk of normalizing a practice that should be totally out of bounds.
The second column looks at the wider hypocrisy and dishonesty of Republicans pretending to care about protecting children:
Here are a few of the things the Republican Party is prepared to do to protect children.
The Republican Party — in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky — is prepared to ban or strictly limit the public performance of drag and other gender-nonconforming behavior.
The Republican Party is prepared to ban or strictly limit discussion of L.G.B.T.Q. people and identities in public schools, as well as transgender health care for minors, to protect them from what they say is manipulation and abuse.
The Republican Party is prepared to extend this circle of protection to discussions of race and American history in public schools — so-called critical race theory — to protect students from guilt, shame, discomfort and any other negative emotion.
And the Republican Party is prepared to strictly limit or even ban social media, over concern that platforms like TikTok and Instagram may harm the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.
There is a lot, in other words, that the Republican Party is prepared to do to protect children from the world at large. But there are limits. There are lines the Republican Party won’t cross.
The Republican Party will not, for example, support universal school lunch to protect children from hunger. When Minnesota Democrats pushed the measure in the most recent session of the state’s Legislature, for example, one of their Republican colleagues strenuously objected. “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat,” Steve Drazkowski, a state senator, said. He, like most Republicans in the Legislature, voted against the bill.
In the United States Congress, most Republicans will not support a child allowance to keep children, and their families, out of poverty. On the question of health care, there are 10 states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Wyoming — where Republicans have refused the Medicaid expansion passed under the Affordable Care Act, depriving millions of Americans, including many children, of access to regular medical care.
And in the wake of yet another school massacre — in Nashville, where a shooter killed three adults and three children at a private Christian school — Republicans refuse to do anything that might reduce the odds of another shooting or make it less likely that a child dies of gun violence. . . . In 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms were the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States.
When you put all of this together, the picture is clear. The Republican Party will use the law and the state to shield as many children as possible from the knowledge, cultural influences and technologies deemed divisive or controversial or subversive by the voters, activists and apparatchiks that shape and guide its priorities. When Tucker Carlson, Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty say jump, their only question is: How high?
But when it comes to actual threats to the lives of American children — from poverty, from hunger, from sickness and from guns — then, well, the Republican Party wants us to slow down and consider the costs and consequences and even possible futility of taking any action to help.
What sounds like due consideration for parents as the most important adults in the lives of most children is in fact a rallying cry for a subset of the most conservative and reactionary parents, who want a state-sanctioned heckler’s veto over the education of all the children in the community. It is a Trojan horse for the slow destruction of public schools.
Something similar is true of the constant calls to protect children. The way they talk about them, these children are not real, living, vulnerable kids. They are a symbol, and the calls to protect them are an excuse, a pretext for wielding the state against the perceived cultural enemies of the American right. These champions of children aren’t all that interested in young people as citizens with rights and entitlements of their own.
The dark irony in all this is that as the Republican Party turns the idea of the children against gay people as well as trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans, it becomes more likely that actual kids will try to harm themselves, out of fear or despair or a sense of isolation or all of the above.
Not all children, it seems, are worthy of protection.
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