Tag Archives: Trump

Good Religion, Bad Religion

There’s a yiddish word that describes today’s post: chutzpah. 

Chutzpah is gall of the “how dare she” variety. It’s sometimes illustrated by an anecdote about a person who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

Today’s post is about Christianity, and the reason I acknowledge my own chutzpah is because I am neither a Christian nor a believer. I come from a tradition that emphasizes behavior over belief–works over piety–and has co-existed pretty comfortably with science and secularism. (Minorities tend to flourish in more open, secular societies.)

What prompted this post was an article I came across in–of all places–Marketwatch, asking  why approximately half of Catholics and a majority of Evangelicals continue to support Donald Trump. The basic answer to that question, according to the article, is continued resentment of the First Amendment’s separation of Church and State.

To this day, there are many people who would like to put religion back into the center of public and political life. This is presumably what U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a deeply conservative Catholic, meant when he denounced “secularists” for launching an “assault on religion and traditional values.”

Of course, a preference for putting “religion” back in the public sphere raises a question that becomes more and more relevant as the country diversifies: whose religion? 

The article also referenced the relationship between a certain kind of Christianity and racism. It noted that Protestants had been supportive of Separation of Church and State so long as they remained culturally and racially dominant.

This changed after the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s, which alarmed many white Christians, especially in the southern states. Today, evangelicals, like Catholic conservatives, are among President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. They, too, believe that family and faith are under siege from liberals and secularists…

The attempt by contemporary Catholic conservatives and Protestant evangelicals to infuse politics with their religious beliefs obviously runs counter to the ideas of the French Revolution, which sought to uphold freedom from religion, but also of the American Revolution, which instituted freedom of religion. Both groups are targeting the carefully erected barriers between church and state.

This is dangerous, not only because it fosters intolerance, but also because it challenges, in the spirit of de Maistre, the idea that political argument should be based on human reason.

Once political conflicts become clashes of faith, compromise becomes impossible. A believer cannot bargain over a sacred principle.

You can’t argue with God. (Or your version of God.)

The article reminded me of Robert Jones book The End of White Christian America, which probed the anxieties–and rage– of white Christian men, as the racial, religious, and cultural landscape continues to change in ways that erode their previously privileged position.

When I was researching my 2007 book God and Country, I came across the very useful categorization of the nation’s founders into “Planting Fathers” and “Founding Fathers.” The Puritans were Planters. They came to the New World for “religious liberty,” which they defined as freedom to worship the right God in the right church and establish a government that would require their neighbors to do likewise. One hundred and fifty years later, the Founders who drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights defined liberty very differently–as the right to follow one’s own beliefs, free of government interference.

What had intervened was the Enlightenment.

Our legal framework may be based on Enlightenment understandings of liberty and the role of government,  but America is still home to lots of Puritans who reject that understanding– along with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science, evidence and empiricism.

The continuing culture war between our contemporary Puritans, secularists, and adherents of  non-fundamentalist religions raises some important–and too often neglected–questions: what good is religion? do modern societies still need it? what separates “good” religions from harmful ones? what’s the difference between a religion and a cult?

My youngest son has suggested a useful distinction between good and bad theologies: If a religion makes you struggle with the hard questions–what does it mean to be honorable, to act humanely, to treat others as we would want to be treated, etc.–it’s probably good.

If, instead of helping you confront the questions, it provides you with the answers, it’s bad.

To which I will add: if your religion leads you to support a leader whose behavior is contrary to everything you profess to believe because he promises to erase the line between Church and State and restore White Christian male privilege, you are a flawed person embracing a deeply flawed theology.

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Americans Can Hear Trump’s “Dog Whistles”

It occurs to me that calling the Trump campaign’s racist messaging “dog whistles” is increasingly inaccurate.

An actual dog whistle– a high-pitched whistle used to train dogs– typically has a sound inaudible to humans. Politically, the term has been used to describe messages aimed at particular constituencies that can hear them, but using language or imagery that the broader public will not “hear” or understand.

Trump’s messaging, on the other hand, has gotten less and less subtle. We’ve gone well beyond the “very fine people on both sides” response to the Neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. These days, messages aimed at his most reliable supporters–racists–are heard and understood by growing numbers of the general, non-racist public.

Just this year, we’ve had several examples. There was the rally scheduled for Tulsa on June 19th. In 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the most horrific racial pogroms in American history, and June 19 is Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the day slaves in Texas learned they were free. Until recently, most white Americans were unaware of both, but that has been changing as history texts have begun including the less savory parts of the country’s past. (Ironically, given the blowback to Trump’s announcement, many Americans who were unaware of that history now know about both.)

Then there was the announcement that Trump’s acceptance speech would take place in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27. Black people in Jacksonville know August 27th as “Ax Handle Saturday”–a day when  people participating in a 1960 NAACP demonstration were chased through downtown Jacksonville streets and beaten. Another “coincidence.”

More recently, Trump retweeted a supporter shouting “White Power.”

And of course, there was the truly horrifying campaign message conveyed along with Trump’s current fixation on the ANTIFA of his imagination. A campaign attack on ANTIFA was illustrated with the same upside-down red triangle the Nazis had used in concentration camps to designate political prisoners.

Fewer Americans are familiar with the history of the red triangle, so its use by the campaign probably fits the dictionary definition of a “dog whistle.” The symbol was used in Facebook ads and on the “Team Trump” page, alongside warnings of “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups” and requests that supporters sign a petition about ANTIFA.

And as if the triangle wasn’t explicit enough, the campaign placed exactly 88 ads using the symbol–88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.”

Nixon had his “Southern Strategy.” Reagan was regularly accused of dog whistles to bigots. The GOP has long been accused of covert messaging to America’s distressingly large number of voters who exhibit “racial grievance”–or are outright white supremacists. Even at the GOP’s worst, however, most campaigns have tried to have it both ways–appealing to the racists while not being blatant enough to alert the people in their own party who would be repelled by such messages.

Not Trump. For one thing, he can’t spell subtle. For another, his personal history suggests that he is entirely sympathetic to the “cause” of white supremacy. The evidence stretches from his early refusal to rent apartments to African-Americans, to his truly reprehensible vendetta against the young boys wrongly accused of a Central Park rape, to his ridiculous, disgusting “birther” campaign and his obvious, obsessive effort to destroy anything and everything done by Barack Obama.

Let’s not dignify the Trump campaign by suggesting that it uses “dog whistles.” Let’s call it what it is: a campaign by a white supremacist, for white supremacists.

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It Can’t Just Be The “PeePee” Tape…

The evidence just keeps coming: Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

Time Magazine is one of the many media outlets reporting what can only be labeled a bombshell: that Trump’s buddy Vladimir Putin had put bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan–paying Taliban fighters for each American killed– and that the U.S. has taken no action in response.

In his first comment on the matter, President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that “nobody briefed or told me” about the “so-called attacks,” a comment that his former national security adviser termed “remarkable.”

The New York Times reported Friday on the alleged actions by Russian military intelligence — paying Taliban-linked militias to kill American and British troops — and that Trump and other top White House officials had been briefed on the matter months ago. Major elements were also reported by the Washington Post.

The New York Times reported that the bounties likely resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members. The Times also reported that the President had been briefed about the intelligence in late March, and had chosen to do nothing. (The Times may have been the first to report on the alleged Russian operation–they got the “scoop”– but the story has since been confirmed by several other media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News.) 

VoteVets clearly believes the reports; the veteran’s organization has issued a scathing video in response.

Trump’s continued insistence that neither he nor Pence had been briefed on the matter is simply not credible, according to former Intelligence officials–and if it did prove to be true, it would expose huge failings in the Trump administration.

David Priess was a CIA agent during Bill Clinton and George W Bush’s presidencies; he took to Twitter to explore the various possibilities.  He found it significant that the White House was not disputing the truth of the intelligence, and concluded that if the president really wasn’t told, the failure to brief him would constitute a massive failing by the national intelligence community.

Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, also has been quoted as saying that if the denial were true, and the intelligence never made its way to the president, it would signal dangerous incompetence by the Trump administration.

“I don’t believe this for a minute, but if it were true, it means that Trump is not even pretending to serve as commander in chief. And no one around him has the guts to ask him to. More evidence of their deadly incompetence,” she wrote, following the White House denial. 

Her deputy at the time, Ben Rhodes, wrote: “In addition to being almost certainly a lie, the idea that Trump wouldn’t be briefed on Russia putting a bounty on US troops is even crazier than him being briefed and doing nothing.”

This is an evolving crisis: A report late yesterday from the New York Times quotes two officials insisting that the President had been briefed on the matter on February 27th. An even later report, from the AP,  asserted that top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than previously reported.
 
 So–as most commentators assumed–Trump is  lying.  The obvious question is: why did he fail to take any action? (Or as several people in my FaceBook feed put it, what does Putin have on him?)

Just last month, Trump was calling for Russia to be reinstated into the G7. 

As the blowback has grown, and as both Democrats and Republicans have demanded answers, Trump’s protestations have morphed somewhat. According to Huffpost, Trump now claims that the Intelligence officials had determined that the story was “not credible.”

What is “not credible” is this massively incompetent, thoroughly corrupt and probably traitorous administration.

Twenty-four Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan between early 2019 and early 2020. A competent administration would want to know what part, if any, the Russian bounty operation played in those deaths. A President not beholden to Russia and Vladimir Putin would act–if not in late February or early March, when the President rather obviously knew about this– at least now, when the whole world knows.

November can’t come soon enough.

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Psychology and Autocracy

A recent op-ed in the New York Times warned that would-be autocrats–yes, Donald, we’re looking at you–get very dangerous when cornered. As Trump finds it more and more difficult to live in the fantasy-land he has constructed, there’s no telling what he might do.

This caution is similar to worries I’ve heard expressed about the time period between the election and January 21st, when (hopefully!) a new President assumes office. Both concerns are valid–and we all need to recognize that the feckless Republicans in Congress are responsible for whatever happens.

A reference in that same op-ed made me think about the blind obedience of those Republican elected officials.

After noting the departure of ethical Executive Branch officials and their replacement with “an army of pliant flunkies and toadies at the agencies, combined with the always-enabling Mitch McConnell and an increasingly emboldened attorney general, William Barr,”  the author wrote

Three years ago, a friend of mine shrewdly pointed out that Trump’s election would be like one long national Milgram experiment, the famous psychological study from the 1960s that revealed just how susceptible people are to authority, how depressingly willing they are to obey even the most horrifying commands.

Readers of this blog undoubtedly remember learning about the Milgram experiment, (initially undertaken to investigate why so many Germans had insisted that they had participated in genocide because they were “just following orders.”)

Volunteers were told that they were participating in an experiment in which they would be “teachers” administering electric shocks when “learners” gave incorrect answers. In reality, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram was studying the willingness of people from a variety of backgrounds and a diverse set of occupations to obey an authority figure who ordered them to perform acts that were in conflict with their personal morality.

The fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. The experiment demonstrated that despite the discomfort and reluctance of most volunteers (and despite hearing the “learners” screaming in pain), a very high proportion of the volunteers continued to obey the authority figure’s instructions and administer the shocks..

Milgram himself summarized the experiment in 1974, in an article titled, “The Perils of Obedience”:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

I’m still mulling over the applicability of the Milgram experiment to those we might consider Trump’s Republican “troops”–and what the results of the experiment might mean for America over the next few months.

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Fending Off The Elephant

Sometimes, if a threat doesn’t exist, you just have to invent it. Case in point: antifa, which stands for “anti-fascist.”

According to reputable sources, antifa refers to a point of view, not a formal group of any kind–there doesn’t appear to be an anti-fascist counterpart to Boogaloo Bois, or other far-right organizations, and no one identified as antifa has been arrested during the protests. (One Twitter account claiming to be antifa turned out to be run by white supremacists, and a report from rightwing extremist Cassandra Fairbanks alleging an assault by antifa also turned out to be bogus.)

But reality hasn’t kept race-baiting extremists from trying to manipulate public fears.  The inconvenient fact that there is no “there” there hasn’t stopped Trump and his merry band of propagandists from warning about the dire threat antifa poses to the American Way of Life. 

Nicholas Kristof recently reported on credulous responses to that “threat” in small towns around America, including Coquille, Oregon.

Coquille is a sleepy logging community of 3,800 people, almost all of them white. It is miles and miles from nowhere. Portland is 250 miles to the north. San Francisco is 500 miles to the south.

But Fox News is in a frenzy about rioters and looters, and President Trump warns about the anti-fascist movement known as antifa. So early this month as a small group of local residents planned a peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protest in Coquille, word raced around that three busloads of antifa activists were headed to Coquille to bust up the town.

The sheriff and his deputies donned bulletproof vests, prepared their MRAP armored vehicle and took up positions to fight off the invasion. Almost 200 local people, some shouldering rifles and others holding flags, gathered to protect their town (overshadowing the handful of people who had come to wave Black Lives Matter signs).

As Kristof goes on to report, Coquille was one of a number of small towns where deluded “patriots” armed themselves and prepared to fight the invaders. When the hordes of antifa toughs failed to materialize, the armed “patriot defenders” mostly refused to believe they’d been duped; several took to Facebook to boast that antifa had been repelled by their show of force.

The delusional response reminds me of that old joke about the guy who was constantly doing something weird (I’ve forgotten what), and was asked why he kept doing it. He replied that he was keeping the elephants away. When the questioner expressed skepticism, he pointed out that there weren’t any elephants in the room, so clearly whatever it was that he was doing, worked. (I’m not a good joke-teller in person, either.)

The antifa threat may be fanciful, but the Neo-Nazis and “race warriors” are all too real–and Trump’s “dog whistles” have become far louder and so thinly veiled that even notoriously cowardly FaceBook removed the most recent example.

In its online salvo against antifa and “far-left mobs,” President Trump’s reelection campaign displayed a marking the Nazis once used to designate political prisoners in concentration camps….

In response to queries from The Washington Post, Facebook on Thursday afternoon deactivated the ads that included the inverted red triangle.

The red symbol appeared in Facebook ads run by Trump and Vice President Pence, as well as the “Team Trump” page. It was featured alongside text warning of “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups” and asking users to sign a petition about antifa, a loose collection of anti-fascist activists whom the Trump administration has sought to link to recent violence, despite arrest records that show their involvement is trivial.

When the triangle first appeared on the official Trump site, my son sent me a screen-shot, together with a photograph he’d taken last year when he took his children to Dachau. The photo was of a placard showing the different colored triangles the Nazis had used to identify different types of prisoners: Jews, gays, etc.

As if the triangle wasn’t explicit enough, the campaign placed exactly 88 ads using the symbol–88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” 

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a leading American scholar of the Holocaust, compared inclusion of the symbol to the campaign’s initial decision to hold a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. (Trump delayed the rally by a day following an outcry, but the message had already reached its intended audience– as had the triangle.)

Antifa may not be a genuine threat to public peace, or even a real organization. But as America prepares for a general election,  the Trumpers are proving to be right about one thing: anyone opposed to them is antifa.

The elephant in the room is the elephant.

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