Category Archives: Random Blogging

That John Wayne Worldview…

Paul Krugman recently commented on Tucker Carlson’s residence in a tough White male alternate  reality.

On Aug. 29 Tucker Carlson of Fox News attacked President Biden’s policy on Ukraine, asserting among other things: “By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine.” Carlson went on, by the way, to assert that Biden is supporting Ukraine only because he wants to destroy the West.

Carlson’s timing was impeccable. Just a few days later, a large section of the Russian front near Kharkiv was overrun by a Ukrainian attack. It’s important to note that Putin’s forces weren’t just pushed back; they appear to have been routed. As the independent Institute for the Study of War reported, the Russians were driven into a “panicked and disorderly retreat,” leaving behind “large amounts of equipment and supplies that Ukrainian forces can use.”

Krugman’s column went on to analyze/deconstruct the worldview of those who–like Carlson–clearly prefer Putin’s Russia to Zelensky’s Ukraine.

He noted that there’s “a whole school of self-styled ‘realists'” who keep insisting that Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion is futile, and who continue to call on Ukraine to make big concessions in order to end the war.  He then proceeds to investigate the worldview that leads so many on the political Right to laud Putin’s brand of leadership–a worldview that, as he writes, mistakes tough-guy swagger for effectiveness.

This worldview has warped the right’s perception not just of the Russian Army but also of how to deal with many other issues. And it’s worth asking where it comes from…

After providing some relevant quotes from Rudy Giuliani and Trump, he says

it’s not hard to see where the MAGA right’s admiration for Putinism comes from. After all, Putin’s Russia is autocratic, brutal and homophobic, with a personality cult built around its ruler. What’s not to like?

Yet admiring a regime’s values needn’t mean having faith in its military prowess. As a center-left advocate of a strong social safety net — or, as Republicans would say, a Marxist (which, of course, I’m not) — I think highly of Nordic welfare states like Denmark. But I have no opinion whatsoever about the effectiveness of Denmark’s army (yes, it has one).

The conflation of Right-wing values with strength can be seen in the Right’s transformation of Jesus into a MAGA Republican–a change so dramatic it now prompts satirical “GOP ads,” like this one.

Back in March, I wrote about a book I’d just finished–Jesus and John Wayne, written by a religion scholar at Calvin College who traced how the Jesus of Evangelical imagination had morphed from the “wimpy, feminine” prophet my  Christian friends continue to worship into a “manly, dominant” John-Wayne-like warrior. The book documented the degree to which misogyny and male dominance have become central to the Christian Nationalism that is today’s Evangelical belief system.

For a stunning number of conservative White Evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian Nationalism, all anchored in white racial grievance.

The background provided by that book helps to explain the disdain of  MAGA Republicans like Ted Cruz (who has criticized  America’s armed forces for being feminized and “woke”) for Ukraine. That criticism, of course, is quite unlike their admiration for the Russian army which–as Krugman points out– is nothing if not brutal.

It is notable that –among its other “woke” features–women make up more than a fifth of Ukraine’s military.

Krugman points to what should be obvious: despite the Right’s celebration of brute strength, modern wars aren’t won by looking tough.

Courage — which the Ukrainians have shown in almost inconceivable abundance — is essential, but it doesn’t have much to do with bulging biceps. And bravery must go hand in hand with being smart and flexible, qualities the Russian Army evidently lacks.

Jesus and John Wayne added evidence to the arguments in Robert P. Jones’ book The End of White Christian America. Read together, the two books explain the transformation of Evangelical Christianity into the distinctly un-Christian worldview advanced by Tucker Carlson and other MAGA Republicans. Both books–together with a veritable mountain of social science research–document the morphing of a significant number of White Christian Americans into a very un-Christian cult.

The members of that cult frantically resist the inexorable progress of cultural and demographic change; they continue to reside mentally and emotionally in eras long past–in times when brute strength (epitomized by John Wayne) was more important than skill and smarts.

The obsolescence of that worldview is just one of the lessons we’re learning from Russia’s tragic and brutal war on Ukraine.

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Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

A casual conversation following a recent meeting triggered my most recent epiphany. (I think it was an epiphany, although it may have been heartburn…)

We were discussing the comparatively swift change of American popular opinion on the rights of  LGBTQ citizens, and the extent to which “coming out” had accelerated that change. Political scientists have attributed much of the success of the gay rights movement to the profoundly political act of emerging from the closet. As the friend with whom I was talking put it, “Most people knew gay people–they just didn’t know that they knew gay people.”

So true.

When your family realized that Shirley wasn’t just elderly Aunt Gladys’ longtime roommate, but something more–when your doctor introduced you to his significant other–when cousin Johnny explained his lack of interest in finding a girlfriend…attitudes changed. Granted, a lot of people who exited the closet suffered rejection and worse, but their exit changed society dramatically and for the better.

As I was driving home from that meeting. I reflected on something that Joey Mayer told me about her experience going door-to-door in Indiana House District 24. She shared her surprise at the number of people she’d talked to who said something along the lines of  “I thought I was one of the few Democrats in the county.” In a comment to that post, Paul Ogden wrote that he was baffled as to why people would say that.

The Democratic candidate in 2020 got nearly 41.9% of the vote in HD #24, which followed 41.6% in 2018. In 2014 and 2016, the Democrats did not even bother to field a candidate . You’ve seen a dramatic shift to Democratic Party in that district (and Hamilton County as a whole), which trend was accelerated by one Donald J. Trump.

Bottom line: in both cases, there are more of “us” (however defined) than we realize when people stay closeted.

When the first few people muster the courage to “come out,” it gives permission to their more timid compatriots to do the same. And that changes perceptions.

I’ve had emails from people in deep-Red rural areas of Indiana who share their discomfort with what they perceive to be their lonely political affiliation. Unlike residents of America’s obviously changing suburbia, I’m willing to concede that they live in areas where Democrats and pro-choice Republicans are relatively rare–but there’s really no way to tell, because many of the people who actually agree with those correspondents don’t vote. They don’t display yard signs. They don’t speak up. They stay in the closet, because the closet protects them from being criticized, attacked or cold-shouldered.

I can’t believe that “coming out” as a Democrat, or as a disaffected Republican, requires anything like the courage that coming out as gay required 25 years ago. I do believe that–if enough residents of Red areas came out against  MAGA Republicans –it would change the political calculus and generate votes from people who have previously been too dispirited to cast ballots.

I am convinced that there are more people than we realize looking at the GOP’s assaults on democracy and fundamental rights while wringing their hands and asking “what can I do about it?” The usual answer (it has certainly been mine) is: vote. But after the epiphany triggered by my recent conversation, I’ll add: “you can come out.”

Here’s my advice to all of you who–despite tending to agree with the opinions expressed on this blog–have kept quiet out of fear of evoking hostile reactions: Put out an unexpected yard sign. Post support for a Democrat or two on Facebook. Disagree (politely, of course) when your neighbor makes a nasty crack about the “libtards.”

Be authentically who you are. Leave the closet. You won’t just be liberating yourself; you’ll be sending a very important message to more people than you think.

The following paragraph was originally written for LGBTQ folks, but I’ve changed the language so that it applies to political rather than sexual orientation:

Coming out is often an important psychological step for liberal and moderate people. Research has shown that feeling positively about one’s political orientation and integrating it into one’s life fosters greater well-being and mental health. This integration often involves disclosing one’s identity to others; it may also entail participating in Democratic politics.  Being able to discuss one’s politics with others also increases the availability of social support, which is crucial to mental health and psychological well-being.

Come on, you timid Democrats and pro-choice, still-sane Republicans. You can do this! You’ll feel better and–even more significantly– you’ll be offering important encouragement to others!

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Can We Talk?

A reader of this blog recently shared a column from the Washington Post.   It warned that the most significant threats to democracy come from the internal inconsistencies of democratic ideology.

At least, I think that is a fair summary of the argument/analysis being put forward.

America’s democratic structure is indeed shuddering — but it is shuddering under its own weight. The threat to democracy isn’t (for now) a usurper system, but democratic ideology itself. At least that’s one way to read a significant new study on democratic attitudes published in the American Political Science Review by Danish academic Suthan Krishnarajan.

Talk of the “defense of democracy” in the United States evokes a conveniently sharp division between citizens who favor democracy and those who don’t. Krishnarajan takes a more subtle approach. He shows that citizens who self-consciously support democracy can simultaneously support undemocratic actions on a large scale when it suits their political interests — and not recognize the contradiction.

The author was disturbed to discover that foolish consistency isn’t the hobgoblin of American minds….

Partisanship, unsurprisingly, tended to distort respondents’ views of what is and isn’t “democratic.”

Democracy, of course, is a process defined by elements such as fair elections and free speech. Liberal or conservative outcomes — more or less immigration, or more or less social spending — can both emerge from the democratic process. In 2020 and 2021, Krishnarajan used a carefully constructed survey with “vignettes” designed to tease out how Americans’ views on democracy interacted with their partisanship. The result: Most people conflate the democratic process with their favored political outcomes.

Respondents “tend to delegitimize opposing views by perceiving them as undemocratic — even when they are not,” Krishnarajan found. “When confronted with a perfectly regular left-wing behavior” — such as implementing Obamacare — “48% of the right-wing citizens consider it to make the country ‘much less democratic,’ ” the paper says. “Conversely, when confronted with regular right-wing behavior” — such as repealing Obamacare — “46% of the left-wing citizens consider it to make the country ‘much less democratic.’ ”

There is considerably more, and if you find this “analysis” (note quotation marks) illuminating, click through and read the entire essay.  My own opinion is that it belongs with the very large pile of irrelevancies regularly produced by what Molly Ivins called the “chattering classes”–and that pile contains an embarrassing number of supposedly scholarly publications. 

Here’s my (admittedly crabby) complaint.
 
 We Americans misuse and abuse terminology in ways that make it difficult to talk to each other. (There’s a great Facebook meme to the effect that “most people wouldn’t recognize socialism if it deposited a monthly Social Security check in their bank accounts.”) The imprecision of language–both “liberal” and “conservative” mean very different things to those employing the labels–makes “studies” of the sort reported in this column considerably less than useful.

What the respondents to the survey meant by “democracy” undoubtedly varied widely, but most of them probably use the term to mean the structure of America’s governance—including constitutional principles and democratic norms. Technically, of course, democracy simply means majority rule, although in the US, democratic processes are restrained /limited by the anti-majoritarian Bill of Rights.

It’s pretty clear from the examples in the column that the survey respondents didn’t limit their understanding of the term to its dictionary meaning.

The following paragraph is an example:

 Norm-breaking behavior, in other words, gets justified within a democratic frame, not outside it. That finding is consistent with how U.S. politics is practiced today: To take one example, presidents of both parties tend to claim the mantle of popular authorization when they sideline Congress and expand executive power.

Is the expanded use of executive power “anti-democratic”? Yes, when it falls outside longstanding constitutional constraints imposed by separation of powers, no when it doesn’t. Yes, when executive power is used to impose a rule with which a majority of Americans disagree; no when it is employed to further the clearly expressed preferences of that majority. 

 Americans are fighting over competing visions of democratic governance. It’s an epiphany!

So the fight in America right now isn’t between democracy and non-democracy, but between two opposing visions of popular sovereignty. The concept of democracy, broadly agreed upon but fiercely contested in its particulars, never came with fixed guardrails. And the higher the perceived stakes rise, the more tempting the invitation to destroy political norms — and to rationalize their destruction as necessary for democracy.

In other words, it depends–and it’s both simpler and far more complicated than the author of the essay (and presumably, of the study he references) wants to acknowledge. Does the  realization that Americans have different ideas about what democracy looks like really merit an anguished disquisition in the Washington Post?

But then, I told you I was crabby…..

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But What About….?

When my children were little, it wasn’t unusual to hear a quarrel where the one accused of some wrongdoing would yell at another “Well, you were just as bad! You did [thus and so]!” The kids eventually grew out of that very childish behavior.

Unfortunately, our polarized politics has brought an adult version roaring back.

The Hedgehog Review recently considered inconsistency– the less pejorative version of whataboutism. Assume, for example,  someone expresses anger about the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs, but not about [choose your outrage].

The online term for this move is whataboutism… in which someone who is outraged by one thing but not visibly outraged by another is called a hypocrite, a bad faith interlocutor, even if no real mismatch between values and actions is present. If you are angered by the treatment of the Uyghurs in China, do you really have standing to be angry, given the treatment of migrants at the United States border or the detainees in Guantánamo? If you think Vladimir Putin suppresses dissent, where is your anger when Twitter or Facebook refuses to allow actors on their platforms whom they believe to spread “misinformation”?

What about whataboutism? Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen. Many people are inclined to give somebody they trust a pass; behavior that might attract loud condemnation of a stranger might be ignored if done by a friend. Sometimes, such inconsistencies, added up, indicate that somebody is untrustworthy, that her commitments are insincere, and that there is something manipulative about her public persona. But most of the time, I would hazard, they indicate that people do not live their lives striving for perfect consistency.

The author excuses much of this selective attention by pointing out that voicing  disapproval of X doesn’t mean that the person isn’t equally horrified by Y.  But as he says, “it is undeniably true that how somebody feels or posts online is not going to do anything to help any of these people, and even truer that scolding someone about his selective outrage will not.”

The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how.

These observations are certainly fair. Every time we point to “outrage A” is not evidence that we don’t give a fig about outrage B. That said, however, the essay ignores a widely-employed form of whataboutism that does deserve condemnation–the use of “what about X”  to distract from the behavior being discussed, and–not so incidentally–to draw unfair moral equivalencies.

Are Republicans assaulting and undermining democracy? Well, some Democrats are corrupt!

Trump defenders who respond to his theft of highly classified materials with “well, what about her emails” are an example of that not-so-innocent form of whataboutism. Not unlike those long-ago arguments between small children, they want to point fingers somewhere else, and they want to suggest that “everybody–especially members of the other party–does these things and that they are all equivalent, so it’s unfair to pick on our guy.'”

A recent essay in The Conversation addressed this less-innocent form of the tactic.

Formally speaking, whataboutism is a fallacy most closely related to the ad hominem fallacy, wherein a person responds to an accusation by attacking the person making it.

Even if the counter-accusation is true, it doesn’t justify whoever is being accused in the first place. “At best, it shows that both parties behaved shamefully. And, of course, two wrongs do not make a right.”

In philosophy, an argument is a reasoned debate aimed at truth. But in many other contexts, people often do not view arguments in this way. They view them, rather, as battles to be won. Their goal is to get their opponent to concede as much as possible without their conceding anything themselves.

Viewed in this way, whataboutism is an effective strategy. It works on the principle that offence is the best form of defence. By launching a counter-attack, you place your opponent on the back foot.

The problem is, when everyone is arguing about which behavior is worse, problems don’t get solved.

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Michael Gerson’s Jeremiad

Students of early American history will recognize the term jeremiad, a favored form of sermon delivered by Puritan pastors of the time. Wikipedia tells us that a jeremiad is “a long literary work lamenting the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective.” The term comes from the prophet Jeremiah, who catalogued Israel’s fall from fidelity and warned of the horrible judgments to come.

I wouldn’t apply the term “invective” to the recent, lengthy essay in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson, but I would definitely  call it a jeremiad.

Gerson is best known as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and as a devout Evangelical Christian. Along with other intellectually-honest Republicans, he has been appalled by Donald Trump, and like other genuine Christians, disheartened by the embrace of Trump by those who claim the Evangelical label. He is especially distressed by the fact that “much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism.”

Gerson’s essay is long, and it is definitely worth reading in its entirety. This post cannot do it justice. He begins by recognizing that many conservative religious people feel disrespected and defensive, and believe that their values are under assault by government, big business, media and academia.

Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions…

The political alignment with MAGA activists has given exposure and greater legitimacy to once-fringe ideas, including Confederate nostalgia, white nationalism, antisemitism, replacement theory and QAnon accusations of satanic child sacrifice by liberal politicians.

Gerson acknowledges the influence of population density and the rural/urban divide on patterns of belief– and the political reality that America’s electoral mechanisms skew in favor of geography over population. But his essay is mostly concerned with the damage MAGA Republicanism is doing to Christianity.

Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry…

Conservative Christians’ beliefs on the nature of politics, and the content of their cultural nightmares, are directly relevant to the future of our whole society, for a simple reason: The destinies of rural and urban America are inextricably connected. It matters greatly if evangelicals in the wide, scarlet spaces are desensitized to extremism, diminished in decency and badly distorting the meaning of Christianity itself — as I believe many are.

To grasp how, and why, it’s important to begin at the beginning.

Gerson follows that sentence with a lengthy history of Jesus’ background and teachings- his preaching against religious hypocrisy, his welcoming of “social outcasts,” and a “future age in which God’s sovereignty would be directly exercised on Earth.”

What brought me to consider these historical matters is a disturbing realization: In both public perception and evident reality, many White, conservative Christians find themselves on the wrong side of the most cutting indictments delivered by Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ’s revolt against the elites could hardly be more different from the one we see today. Conservative evangelicalism has, in many ways, become the kind of religious tradition against which followers of Jesus were initially called to rebel. And because of the pivotal role of conservative Christians in our politics, this irony is a matter of urgency.

He follows those paragraphs with an indictment of Christian Nationalism, concluding that

Evangelicals broadly confuse the Kingdom of God with a Christian America, preserved by thuggish politicians who promise to prefer their version of Christian rights and enforce Christian values. The political calculation of conservative Christians is simple, and simply wrong.

Gerson goes on to list numerous ways in which that calculation is wrong–and dangerous to democracy.

As I said at the outset of this post, this is a lengthy essay. It is also and obviously a product of considerable distress over the political grievances that have distorted and displaced authentic faith. As he concludes, “It is difficult for me to understand why so many believers have turned down a wedding feast to graze in political dumpsters.”

Gerson’s jeremiad puts him firmly within the camp of those of us who have been warning Americans about the dangers of Christian Nationalism–and reminding them that Christian Nationalism is very different from actual Christianity.

I admire Gerson’s attempt, but somehow I doubt the Christian Nationalists will listen.

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