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Thanks again for your questions, readers. Have a question for next Thursday’s mailbag? Leave it in the comments below.
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<PowerOfOne>: Brian, in your response to Nancy you said:
"In the inner-most ring are the true diehards. Maybe 20-30 percent of the population. Basically the fascist rump of the country."
and you said
"Perhaps a quarter of the country will never leave him—they’d rather rule an impoverished, fascist America than participate in a prosperous American democracy."
One thought that seems to be a third rail in the analysis of Trump's success is the impact of Christian nationalism. Personally, I think a huge portion of the one quarter you mention are Christian Nationalists. In fact, that second quote comes close to the essence of CN thinking. I'd be curious as to your thoughts on that and what Dems (and all of us) must do to address it?
When I look around the world, and through our history, for insight into this moment—to what extent is it novel, to what extent is it distinctly American, to what extent does it resemble episodes in international history?—I find myself drawn to three comparators: the Jim Crow south; the early 20th century (the red scare, the Palmer raids, J. Edgar Hoover); and the Franco regime after the Spanish civil war. (I’m no historian, there are surely other analogs.)
So we have a lot of experience with authoritarian movements and regimes that drape themselves in the mantle of Christ. The question is whether that means we ought to oppose them in distinct ways, or whether we should rely on the same techniques that have defeated godless fascism or other non-religious despotisms. I suspect the answer is the latter.
If you look around the democratic world today, you’ll find that (speaking very loosely) a fifth to a third of all societies are pretty fascistic. It’s just that fascist blocs in Europe aren’t necessarily controlled by religious extremists, and in most cases they aren’t able to take over their governments.
How that happened here is…almost too complicated to fathom. Factors include a poisoned information environment, a long-run culture of militance on the American right, corruption, Lost Cause-ism, Trump’s unique and shameless celebrity, historical contingencies (his minoritarian victory in 2016, COVID, Joe Biden), and aspects of the constitutional design.
But neither his movement, nor its desire to dominate, are terribly unique. There’s nothing uniquely Christian or religious about the dictatorial temptation to rule over rubble when the alternative is treating strangers as equals. Long before Fox News and James Comey and the Biden administration, we had an old adage of unknown provenance: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” We knew!
Given broader similarities, I suspect the character of optimal resistance doesn’t turn much on the fact that American fascism contains a large element of religious extremism. In either case you want people in the streets, protesting peacefully, drawing buy-in from civil society and other powerful institutions, sowing division within the ranks of ruling functionaries.
To look ahead a bit, if we wanted to insure against a fascist revival, where Christian nationalists make further inroads into mainline Christianity, and then come back bigger and harder to defeat, it might behoove the next Democratic presidential nominee to use the godlessness of the actual fascist regime as a wedge to pull mainline Christians and liberal Christians firmly on to the pro-democracy side.
Some of this might happen on its own—see Trump fantasizing about becoming pope, and drawing bitter backlash from New York’s Catholic bishops.
But all recent Democratic presidents have been practicing Christians who deployed their faiths in various ways.
In his breakout 2004 Democratic convention speech, Barack Obama tried to seize the center with this memorable line: “We worship an awesome god in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”
Joe Biden let his devout Catholicism speak for itself in its contrast to Trump, and used it to subtle but I think mostly positive effect after Dobbs: The right is for crackdowns, the left is for everybody else, including religious people like me who have misgivings about abortion.
The next Democratic nominee could try something a little more frontal, particularly if he or she happens to be a Christian. I would love to hear prominent religious liberals co-opt religious revivalism from the far right. There’s this bloc of Americans, and a set of conservative elites providing them intellectual cover, who lament that church attendance and religious practice are in decline, but then make common political cause with the least Christ-like man in America. It would be interesting, and perhaps politically effective, for the party to say: We welcome a new dawn of spirituality in America, but it can’t and won’t be led by bad-faith actors who’d bargain with the devil for the power to control others. Only an American Christianity of loving thy neighbor has the potential to grow. An American Christianity of rendering thy neighbor to a foreign labor camp or swindling him out of his retirement savings with meme coin scams is destined to fail.
Jonathan Rabinowitz: How will we first know if the Rs can't pass a budget because they can't agree on Medicaid cuts? It seems to me that [House Speaker Mike] Johnson is very careful to avoid mentioning any progress on the budget whatsoever. What signs will there be for the astute observer that they can't get to Yes?
Good timing on this question, as Johnson may have tipped his hand that some of the most extreme and partisan Medicaid cut ideas won’t be able to pass the House. The problem is, congressional Republicans are deeply dishonest, and also, their whip methods are purely coercive at this point. So I’m not sure we can take this concession to the bank, let alone know whether it means they’re going to bail on Medicaid cuts altogether.
As Matt noted on this week’s podcast, it seems highly likely that they’ll be able to add a work requirement to Medicaid, even though the cost-savings of a work-requirement are minimal.
