Remember that old song lyric, “What’s It all about, Alfie?”
Those of us who are appalled and confused by the administration’s daily abuses of the Constitution and rule of law can be forgiven for losing sight of “what it’s all about.” As usual, Heather Cox Richardson has provided context–and an answer. She points to the obvious: Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth to the already-obscenely-wealthy from the rest of us–then provides context: “From 1981 to 2021, American policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.”
But just enriching the already-rich is only one part of the overall goal. Richardson points to the administration’s gutting of a government that “regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights and to replace it with a government that permits a few wealthy men to rule.”
The CBO score for the Republicans’ omnibus bill projects that if it is enacted, 16 million people will lose access to healthcare insurance over the next decade in what is essentially an assault on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The bill also dramatically cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) benefits, clean energy credits, aid for student borrowers, benefits for federal workers, and consumer protection services, while requiring the sale of public natural resources.
It gets worse. (I know, you’re thinking “how much worse can it get?” Trust me.)
Richardson is only one of the observers who pinpoints the real “mover and shaker” behind this assault on constitutional government–Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. Vought is determined to decimate those parts of the government that are inconsistent with the Christian Nationalist goals outlined in Project 2025, the production of which he directed. As Richardson reminds us,
Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations.
Racism is, of course, an essential element of Christian Nationalism, which works to elevate the civic and social dominance of (certain) White Christian males. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which focuses on combating its (utterly phony) version of “critical race theory.” The organization’s affiliated issue advocacy group, American Restoration Action, has a similar mission: to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”. Both groups hope to provide the “ideological ammunition to sustain Trump’s political movement after his departure from the White House.”
It is worth noting that the administration’s war on education and empirical knowledge is an essential element of the Christian Nationalist plan to de-secularize America. The assaults on science, on research, on academic freedom are an indispensable part of the movement to substitute theocracy for a country that respects the intellectual liberties protected by the First Amendment. In service of that goal, Christian Nationalists have worked diligently to redefine “religious freedom” to mean the right of fundamentalist Christians to impose their beliefs on others, and to redefine “free speech” to mean privileging opposition to the “woke” values they abhor.
One of those “woke” values is education.
In my own Red state of Indiana, where performative “Christians” dominate the legislature and self-identified Christian Nationalists hold statewide offices, the assault on education has been unremitting. The voucher program that pretends to honor “parental choice” sends millions of Hoosier tax dollars to religious schools, in what is a dishonest work-around of the Establishment Clause while starving our public schools. More recently, steady assaults on Indiana University–a once-storied and highly respected academic institution–have ranged from political interference with its latest choice of a president–allowing the post to go to an less distinguished (but presumably more well-connected) “dark horse” candidate, to legislation threatening curriculum considered “liberal,” to the more recent and appalling substitution of far-right political operatives (including the odious Jim Bopp) for the choices of alumni on the university’s board of trustees.
Thanks to those assaults–and Indiana’s ban on abortion–Indiana University is losing many of the students who formerly enriched intellectual life on campus.
America is at an inflection point. What is at stake isn’t simply our global dominance (which Trump has already discarded), but our essential domestic identity. America hasn’t been seen as the “City on the Hill” because we embraced fundamentalist religion, but because we aspired to protect individual liberty and civic equality.
We didn’t always live up to those aspirations, but we can ill-afford to replace them with a Taliban-like theocracy.
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