CHRISTIAN NATION: THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL THAT CAME TRUE

I apologize in advance for the length of this post.  Various people have asked me to share the text of a talk I delivered last night at the Harvard Divinity School.   Here it is.

CHRISTIAN NATION: THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL THAT CAME TRUE

A public talk by Frederic C. Rich

Harvard Divinity School, November 4, 2025

I want to thank Professor Johnson for the invitation and say how delighted I am to be here at Harvard Divinity School.   I understand that the Master of Divinity degree is designed to prepare its graduates for a career centered around ethical leadership, and as you’ll hear, I think ethical leadership is exactly what is required in the current moment.

My novel Christian Nation was published in 2013.   It takes the form of a fictional memoir, written by a dissident in an America that has become a totalitarian state.   It’s called Christian Nation because at the time I saw Christian Nationalism as the primary force driving us in the direction of intolerance and authoritarianism.   At the time I made clear that the book was intended as a warning, not a prediction.  Here we are 12 years later, the warning was ignored, and it is well on its way to coming true.   

What I am going to do tonight is in four parts, reflecting what I am most often asked, both by those you have read and not read the book: 

·      First, how did I see it coming so early and why did I give the warning in the form of a novel? 

·      Second, what were the main lessons that I hoped the reader would take away from reading the book, lessons that would motivate them to work to prevent the coming  authoritarian wave. Professor Johnson asked that I illustrate these by reading a few passages from the book. 

·      Third, how did what has actually happened differ from what I foresaw, and does it matter for the ultimate outcome? 

·      And finally, the most difficult question – what do we do now?

Let’s dive into the first question – how did I see it coming and why do it as a novel?

It all started August 29, 2008, the day Senator McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate.  Very few people outside of Alaska knew who she was, and even fewer knew anything about her.  I happened to know quite a lot about her, from having worked on a project in Alaska.   When the announcement came across my screen, I was shocked.  Quite simply because she was well known within Alaska for being unable to perform the most basic tasks required as Mayor of Wasila or Governor of Alaksa, spectacularly ignorant about history and almost everything else, and completely provincial.  Her world view was rooted in one of the strangest religious enthusiasms in a country where there were plenty.   I felt like I had stepped into an episode of the twilight zone, completely mystified as to how this could have happened.   It seemed to me that if one of the two major parties was proposing to put such a person within a heartbeat of the presidency, then something fundamental had shifted in both American culture and American politics. 

I set out to discover what it was, and my research took me deep into the hidden world of Christian nationalism, with its twin doctrines of dominionism and reconstructionism, each of which requires that democratic constitutionalism and rule of law must be demolished if they stand in its way.    And they do. 

Let me read you an excerpt where the memoirist describes first learning about the pre-millenarian doctrines of dominionism and reconstructionism:   

It was 2009, I think, after President McCain’s sudden death, that my best friend Sanjay first explained to me that behind the public face of the Christian right was a strange mix of fundamentalist theologies, all different and often at odds with one another, but aligned in supporting the election of politicians who believe they speak to and for God, aligned in seeking to have their religiously based morals adopted into law, and aligned in rejecting the traditional notion of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Of these fundamentalist theologies, the most extreme, and in many ways most influential, were dominionism and reconstructionism.

“Dominionism,” Sanjay explained, “holds that Christians need to establish a Christian reign on earth before Jesus returns for the second coming. Dominionists also believe that Christians in general have a God-given right to rule, but more particularly, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, that Christians have the responsibility to take over every aspect of political and civil society. And dominionism is often associated with a fringe theology called ‘reconstructionism,’ which emphasizes that this reconstructed Christian - lead society should be governed strictly according to Biblical law.”

How bored we were at first with Sanjay’s preoccupation with this dark strain of

American belief. I didn’t know, and Sanjay only later discovered, that this

“dominionist” outlook had influenced not only The Wasilla Assembly of God, the

Pentecostal church attended by Sarah Palin in Alaska, but many thousands of others around the country. What had once been a fringe of exotic beliefs and schismatic sects had entered the religious mainstream in America.

Before the start of the Holy War, I delivered dozens of speeches warning of the political ambitions of the fundamentalists. Most of the time, I illustrated the meaning of dominionism with a single quote from a prominent evangelical “educator” from Tennessee, George Grant. I still remember it:

Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to

reclaim the land for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and Godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. . . . Thus, Christian

politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land – of men, families,

institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.

At the time I was writing Christian Nation, we generally referred to the great divide  in America as the “culture war” – but I noticed that very few on the liberal side of that split took seriously the possibility that the other side might win.  After Sarah Palin, I became fixated on the possibility that the other side might actually win, and obsessed by the question of what that might look like.  

And this led to the novel.  Why a novel?  I wanted to make it personal.   The narrator in this fictional memoir recounts how it happened and the effect it had on his own life.   This was in deliberate contrast to the approach taken by others writing dystopian fiction, such as Margaret Atwood.  Think about Handmaid’s Tale, where the story starts in the strange dystopian future with no indication of how you got there.    Since my ambition was to make the reader believe that the dystopian future was a real possibility  –  the fictional memoir form takes you there step by step  – with the result that at each step the reader thinks, yes, I agree that could happen.   In a sense I was reverse engineering the work of Hannah Arendt.  When looking back at the rise of fascism in the 1930’s she asked three questions:  What happened?  Why did it happen?  How could it have happened?   These are the questions my fictional memoirist asks from the dystopian future, now to a significant extent our present, where we find ourselves asking the same questions.

My choice of a novel was also influenced by a belief in the power of art, music, and literature to change hearts and minds in a way that journalism and scholarship cannot.   I was thrilled when one of the early reviewers of the book said that reading Christian Nation was like getting punched repeatedly in the stomach.  This was exactly the effect I was going for.  

While on the subject of the potential power of fiction, I’ll can’t resist mentioning here that I have just finished another novel, the doppelganger to Christian Nation, the utopia to its dystopia - about the next Buddha called Maitreya, and what a Buddhist Dharma refreshed for the 21st century might mean to the world.  

Let’s move on to the second part – what truths I hoped my readers would take away from the book, the things that I hoped would arm them against what I feared was to follow. 

First, I needed to educate the reader about how much of the Christian nationalist revolution had already happened.   

Let me read another excerpt:

After the 2004 election, not only were the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, numerous cabinet members and other senior federal officials born-again Christians, but 42 out of 100 U.S. Senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100% from the Christian Coalition. The Federal Government was channeling billions in taxpayer funds to “faith based” organizations – nearly all evangelical.  Much later, when working for the Governor, I read a lot about revolutions. Revolutions are rarely if ever majoritarian, but instead are usually propelled by a small group that is disciplined and fanatical, to which a passive majority then acquiesces. Incredibly, by 2005 the first phase of the Christian revolution was already over, yet few people other than its proponents understood at the time that this had happened. The small band of fanatics, headed by men like James Dobson, Tony Perkins and Doug Coe, inspired by

Rushdoony, funded by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., had succeed in bringing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity from the fringes of American life to the very heart of political power. A theology that had been intolerable to mainstream Christianity before, had achieved legitimacy. In 1981 Gary North had written that “to smooth the transition to Christian political leadership . . . Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

This was, they were clear, to be a revolution from within. 25 years later, evangelicals, through carefully incremental political work at the precinct, county and state level, had seized control of the Republican Party. It was a movement that was at once cultural and political, and it was the largest such movement in the country by far. All that by 2005. Very few people at the time noticed what had happened.

My second intention was to give the reader an even a deeper historical perspective, in which we see that religious intolerance is actually the norm in human history.  It’s ironic – and useful – that we’re having this conversation here in the heart of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded by the persecuted Pilgrims seeking religious freedom and tolerance.  Consider what happened next.  Having secured religious freedom for themselves, they proceeded to create a theocratic polity dedicated to total intolerance of the slightest deviation from the state religion.   When the far-right claims that America’s roots are as an authoritarian Christian theocracy and that liberal democracy is a deviation from our founding values, this is in part what they are thinking of. 

But at the time I wrote the book, the idea that prevailed in places like Harvard, and among my friends and acquittances, was that liberal values would inevitably triumph – how often we all quoted Dr. King about how the arc of the moral universes bends toward justice.   That may be – but to think we were living at a time well along that arc was and is a misreading of history.   

Let me read you another excerpt:

By 2005, Christian fundamentalism, self-identified by various types of congregations

referring to themselves as “Bible-believing churches,” had migrated from the deep south to northern suburbia, where loss of community and empty consumerism left a void that the evangelicals were all too ready to fill. They filled the void not with a traditional Protestantism, but with a dumbed-down Christianity where “faith” was not a private embrace of the mysteries inherent in the human condition, but a requirement for complete dogmatic credulity; where the ultimate measure of devotion and religiosity was the willingness to dismiss empirical reality and profess absolute belief in bold and improbable lies (such as the coexistence of man and dinosaurs); and where the primary values were not the dignity and integrity of the individual and realization by that individual of the whole and spiritual self, but total submission by the individual to Biblical law and Godly authority. And perhaps most tragically, what had migrated north was a redefined Christianity in which the singular voice of Christ called the faithful not to modesty, charity, meekness, love and social justice, but to a theological imperative for the accumulation of wealth and political power in order to establish Christian dominion over the country.

The evangelical Christianity that spread from the south to the rest of the country was, in effect, an ideological system demanding complete obedience to the word of God as revealed by the Bible. The Bible was no longer a book of instructive parables, whose teachings were limited to the sacred and the moral. Instead, the Bible had become what he evangelical faithful called a “guide to everything:” facts, history, science, politics and civil life. The non-evangelical majority was bemused by the evangelical preoccupation with Biblical literalism as manifested most prominently by “creationism,” but in retrospect, these specific beliefs were trivial distractions; what so few people saw at the time was that this mind-set of credulity was a form of brain-washing that completely undermined role of rational argument that lies at the heart of democracy. This, more than anything else, laid the groundwork for the totalitarianism that would follow.

Now of course these beliefs weren’t then and aren’t now held by  a majority of Americans, but they were and are embraced by somewhere between 32% and 34% of the American population.     Year after year, that same percentage responds to polls saying that they believe, among many other things, in the literal truth of every word in the bible, and that  hell is an actual place where every person not born again in Christ spends eternity in conscious torment.   

Back in 2013 these numbers terrified me – because time and again history has shown that a passionate minority in low 30% range can be expected break out from the fringes and take power.  How?  Because passion trumps popularity.  The voting turnout rate among these committed evangelicals is around 85%.  The voting rate among the population as a whole?  Usually somewhere in the mid 50s.  And the percent of the German population voting for the Nazis in the Reichstag election that brought Hitler to power?  32%.

There was another lesson – highly relevant today – that I hoped readers would take from Christian Nation.  Human brains are wired for mass delusion, which in America has found repeated expression in religious revivalism and populism.   This is a through line in human history.   And already, when I wrote the book, it was obvious that this innate tendency was being exacerbated by trends in modern media. Even before the rise of Fox and social media, the Christian Broadcasting Network grew explosively, was highjacked by the Christian nationalists, and became a powerful tool in promoting the flight from main stream protestant churches to the suburban mega church.    And then came the internet and social media where, in a flash, the like-minded found each other, and the relentless algorithms imprisoned them in an information bubble where they were fed nothing other than that which they already believed or which reinforced their views.  

Two final things that you would have learned had you read Christian Nation in 2013.

This first was that Christian nationalism was already deploying the powerful canard of victimhood.  Let me read another excerpt:

In a strategy common to fundamentalists the

world over, evangelical preachers successfully tapped into the meme of the “persecuted church.” The growth of a modern, secular and tolerant society, they argued, really is about the tyrannical suppression of Christianity, because the idea of a secular and tolerant society is inconsistent with Christian claims to dominion over civil society. In the ultimate Orwellian perversion, the core “secular” value of religious tolerance becomes intolerant and tyrannical. Extension of basic civil liberties to those who engage in a sexual practice that is taboo to fundamentalists becomes an attack on the Christian church in which Christians, and not the historically persecuted homosexuals, are the true victims.  Permitting gays to marry becomes an attack on marriage, in which married people are somehow victimized, threatened and undermined. Abortion is seen as an attack on life itself. Even ordinary non-evangelical Christians started to look at modern secular

society differently. Perhaps the big city atheist intellectuals really do not mean “live and let live.” Perhaps, they began thinking, the patina of tolerance really is part of a program to abolish my religion and prevent me from believing and worshiping as I see fit. Fear is contagious, and when accompanied by economic distress and social alienation, turns easily into the comforting cloak of victimhood, providing absolution to the wearer for his misfortune, solidarity with his fellow victims and an enemy on whom to project his anger and resentment.

I found in Adam’s file a clipping on Pat Robertson, the strange Christian media mogul with reconstructionist tendencies who ran for President of the United States in 1988. It was Robertson who first introduced the idea of Christian fundamentalists as a persecuted minority. In a 1993 interview he said, "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different . . . More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." Reading that now, I can’t help wondering what the journalists first hearing these words thought. . . .  Because such an assertion was manifestly untrue as an empirical matter, did they not see that it must have been uttered for a purpose? . . .

After all, what do such victims do? What are they entitled to do? What would we expect them to do? There is no moral or legal code under which a minority so terribly victimized would not be entitled to rise up and vanquish their persecutors, and claim the mantle of history – and the mantle of righteousness – in doing so. But neither Sanjay nor I saw it at the time, or could even have imagined how quickly the self-described victims would become the victors.

My final intended takeaway from Christian Nation was perhaps the most important:  Proto- fascists and authoritarians of every ideology almost always signal in advance what they will do if they obtain power, but no one believes them.   So many of the secular-minded don’t really understand belief – they cannot bring themselves to accept that those in grip of religious enthusiasm actually believe what they say.   Let me read you the end of the first chapter:

This was not the first time that the world didn’t listen.  In college, I read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.    14 years before the first shot was fired, he announced his plan to destroy the Parliamentary system in Germany, to attack France and Eastern Europe, and to eliminate the Jews.  Why, I asked the professor, did neither ordinary Germans voting in the Reichstag elections in July 1932, nor foreign leaders reacting to the rise of Nazism, believe him?   Why was anyone surprised when he simply did what he said he would do?  She had no answer. 

The fall of my senior year at Princeton, 20 perfectly sane, well educated, middle class and deeply religious young men flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.   During the decade before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden had shouted out his warnings of mass murder using all the means of modern communication.   And still, we were surprised when he did what he said he would. 

So I suppose what happened here is that they said what they would do, and we did not listen.  Then they did what they said they would do.   

So if you want to know what comes next, just listen.  Don’t dismiss Project 2025 or the absurdities that emerge from the mouths of MAGA and its leaders – because they will do – or at least try to do – exactly what they say.

Let’s move on to the question of how what has actually transpired differs from what I foresaw.    In Christian Nation, a demagogic populist defeats Hillary Clinton in 2016, so I had that part spot on.   The main differences in what happened next result from the fact that the demagogue turned out to be Donald Trump.   A man motivated by neither religion nor ideology, but simply by one of the most epic cases of megalomania in human history.  For those of you who don’t know, what the Greeks called megalomania, modern psychiatry now rather more dryly refers to as “narcissistic personality disorder” – a pathological condition characterized by obsessive pursuit of power, delusions of grandeur and omnipotence, an obsessive desire for control or dominance, and hostility to any truth that stands in the way.      

To truly understand what we face now we must focus on the distinction between root and proximate causes.  The proximate cause of what is happening today is mostly Trump – his narcissistic and vindictive impulses are translated into action by the Federal government without the screening of staff that occurred in the first term or oversight or restraint from Congress.   The institutional norms so greatly damaged in Trump’s first term are now a smoldering ruin.  They’re gone.  So this is the proximate causes of what’s happening now  – and this I did not foresee.

But the root causes remain.  We have a deeply degraded popular and political culture.  But without Christian nationalism, Trump would still be perched in his golden penthouse on Fifth Avenue.   Without the support of the evangelical vote, Trump could not have been elected and the GOP could not maintain control of Congress.   As a result, Christian nationalists have complete leverage over Trump and the Republican Party.   The Christian right has the power to dictate compliance with their agenda – and also to stop Trumps’ worse abuses if they choose to.   And yet the same folks who view the Bible as the definitive guide to everything, have instead chosen to empower a man who glorifies wealth and vilifies the poor, who says you must hate your enemies, not love them, who reviles humility, who would never turn the other cheek, who completely lacks empathy or compassion. 

And how is this possible?  Because Christian morality has been turned upside down, now embracing the view that the ends do justify the means, thus overturning the foundation for any moral system, Christian or other.    Lie, cheat and steal?  Hate your enemy?  Don’t forgive but seek revenge?   Jail and murder the innocent?   Starve the poor?  Turn away the persecuted?  All good with us, as long as we get abortion outlawed, gays put back in the closet, and realize our Christian nationalist dream of complete dominion.   The ends justify the means.  This is why Trump had to correct Charlie Kirk’s widow at the memorial service – a sincere Christian, she said the example of Christ required her to forgive her husband’s killer – she was immediately corrected by Trump, who lectured his Christian supporters that they must instead hate those who oppose him. 

Never confuse the tool with the agenda.  Trump is the tool that I did not foresee, but the Christian nationalist agenda remains the same, and now a whole panoply of ugly far right causes has come along for the ride.  They are so close to winning the culture war they can taste it.  They will let nothing  stand in their way, not the 2026 elections, not the law, not the constitution.   

Last year I went on a pilgrimage to Dachau.  Hitler opened Dachau only months after his 1933 ascension to the chancellorship and filled it not with Jews, but with those political opponents who had opposed his rise to power.  And now Trump stands on stage and simply orders – publicly orders - those sworn to uphold the constitution to instead prosecute those who opposed him, or – the ultimate sin, those who betrayed what he regards as an absolute duty of personal loyalty.

Let me remind you of one other lesson of history.  Human beings are adaptable, always wishing for the best, and much prone to willful blindness.  The previously unimaginable happens, and after an initial shock, psychology takes over and, both individually and collectively, we convince ourselves that actually it’s not really so bad and somehow everything will be alright.  

Here is what Greg, the memoirist says in the book, especially relevant, I think, to those of you closer to the beginning of your lives than the end:

Of all the things I held certain at the beginning of my adult life, which was most mistaken?   . . . At the start of my career, I knew that the exact path of my career would not be clear or certain.  But I did think that the ground over which that path would lead would be more or less stable.  I believed that the stage on which my life would play out  -- this country and its institutions – would be essentially static and unchanging.  I see now that this was a spectacular failure of perspective.  I should have known from history that the ground on which we take the walk of our lives is shifting and unstable, and that change is unpredictable and spasmodic.    Nothing seems to us – in human time – to be more solid than the ground.  And yet in reality the earth’s crust jerks across the globe in devastating spasms.  Centuries or millennia of rock solid calm, punctuated by a few minutes of heaving and rolling readjustment.  This is the perspective of geological time.

But after the cataclysms of the twentieth century, it seemed to me in 2005 that the ground was stable.  Indeed, the framework within which I thought my life and career would unfold seemed so settled as to be invisible.   I never thought of a stable Federal union, open society, democracy, personal freedom or indeed basic civil order as characteristics of the present time.  The status quo was so expected, so much a given, that not once did even a flicker of appreciation for these things cross my consciousness.  What I gave no thought to then, has for the last fifteen years never been far from the center of my mind. 

Finally, in closing, I will try to address the question I am most frequently asked:  What can we do now?  

First, history teaches that the greatest ally of authoritarian projects is complacency.   So the first and perhaps most important lesson is to reject any impulse you have that tends toward complacency.

I often think of one of the epigrams that begins a chapter in my book.  It’s a quote from one of your own – Dr. James Luther Adams, a friend and counselor to dissidents in Germany in the mid 1930s and later a professor here at Harvard Divinity School who retired in 1968 and lived a few blocks from here until he died in 1994.  Looking back, Professor Adams said “If only 1,000 of us in the late ‘twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.”

I have always found this thought chilling, no more so than in the present moment.  One thousand people with foresight and courage could have prevented the death of 12 million jews and non-jews in the holocaust, and the deaths of 20-25 million soldiers, not to mention the enormous suffering in Germany and around the globe.  One thousand.   I wonder what that number is today?  

Historians have observed that successful resistance requires two things:  a physical locus – that is, an area in which resistance sentiment represents an overwhelming majority of the population and which has the wealth and power to provide a secure base for the resistance movement.  In my book that place was Manhattan, where democracy makes its last stand against the theocrats in a civil war.   The second requirement is a leader or leaders.  At the moment we are missing both.  

I have travelled extensively during the past year in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.  Everywhere people are terrified – they all seem to understand the implications of what is happening better than we do here at home.  It seems to them that the good America that they know and love is asleep or in some kind of trance.  What are you doing about it, they ask me again and again. 

The first step in organizing an effective resistance is to come to grips with what we have already lost; the list is long: an independent Department of Justice, a non-partisan career civil service, ethical standards that are enforced against those holding public office, a nonpartisan supreme court, a non-politicized military, a widely accepted law and norm prohibiting domestic use of the military, a widely shared intolerance for outright deceit by our political leaders, Congress functioning as a check on the executive, indeed a Congress that can be said to be reasonably representative of the American people – all already lost.   All of these can potentially be recovered – some following a single Congressional election, but others will take decades to restore.   For people in their 20s, this is a hard truth to swallow. 

The world has not written off America.  They cannot.  They know what totalitarian kleptocracy brought to the people of Russia, they see what Erdogan has wrought in Turkey, Modi in India, Milei in Argentina.  They know what the stakes are.  Even with all its flaws and imperfections, all its broken promises and irrational spasms, America has served as a beacon giving the world confidence that pluralistic democracy is possible.  America is the dream that has made billions of desperate and persecuted lives around the world endurable.   We need to save it for them as well as for ourselves.  

In this as in all things, the young must lead.  My generation – coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, ending the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights and the liberation of women – we thought we had succeeded in slaying the ancient monsters and changing the world.  We were wrong.  The monsters lurked in the shadows and they have re-emerged to fight again.   This battle is not simply a political one – it is a moral one.  Indeed, I believe it is primarily a moral one.  So as scholars, students, and practitioners of divinity, you have a critical role to play.  The question is not whether you can succeed, the question is whether you must try.  And under any moral or ethical framework of which I’m aware the answer is unequivocal – you must.      

Thank you.

Gangster, Showman, Conman

The Gangster

                  Gangsters are professional bullies who, among other things, run protection rackets.  Give me money or I feed you to the wolves.  Trump was happy to run his protection racket against Ukraine in front of the world on live TV.  He thinks it makes him look tough.

                  For gangsters, everything is personal.   All relations are about dominance and submission.  For Trump, if you are a sycophantic flatterer, you are “nice.”   If you are not, you are “nasty.”  If you actively seek to constrain his impulses (or actively refuse to submit to his dominance) you are an enemy.   All “diplomacy” among the capos is mano a mano, and we saw on Friday what that looks like. 

                  Gangsters live and die by two principles.  The first is absolute personal loyalty to the capo (Trump) and family (MAGA).  Second is that the only unforgivable crime is betrayal, and when it occurs it must be publicly punished.  Trump is methodically punishing all who he believes have betrayed him.  Firing is for minor offenses.  He has condemned Mike Pompeo to death by removing his security detail while under a fatwa from Iran. 

                  Gangsters are obsessed with hierarchy.   Trump is obsessed with Putin and Kim Jong Un because they possess powers that he does not:  the ability to determine the outcome of “elections” and exercise power for life unfettered by the rule of law or political checks and balances.   And gangster hierarchy is also defined by the size of your “turf.”   Trump needs to show the other capos that he controls his neighborhood, thus the public bullying of Canada and Mexico.  And adding Greenland makes perfect sense, a large addition to his turf which can be taken without too much trouble from a weakling. 

The Showman

                  For a showman, all publicity is good.  When the showman has an epic case of narcissistic personality disorder, public attention becomes an all-consuming addiction.  Trump is living his dream, where he is the lead in every news story everywhere in the world every day.   

                  Shows are about spectacle, not substance.  Everything you need to know about what is happening you could learn by studying Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (formerly WWF).  From 2016 on Trump has followed the show’s recipe of extreme vulgarity, spectacle, nicknames, insults, fake feuds, and conspiratorial fantasy.  Characters compete to be the most crass, obnoxious, vulgar, and crude.  And new outrages – the more preposterous the better - are required in every episode in order to hold the attention of the audience.   Trump instructed his staff to treat each day of his presidency like the episode of a reality show “in which he vanquishes rivals.”

                  The showman’s approach to entertainment, politics, and now governance is devoid of substance or content.  Trump doesn’t hide this.  He bragged following the vile spectacle in the oval office on Friday that “this is going to be great television.”     

The Conman

                  The conman revels in the stupidity of his “marks” and brags about the magnitude of his cons.  Trump takes great pride in the billions he extracts from cons such as the Trump meme coin sale.  Stealing from the marks is a form of dominance.

                  The conman starts out as a grifter dealing in small deceits: sins of omission, misleading twists of the truth, and petty lies.  He graduates to the big lie.  The preposterousness of the big lie is the ultimate measure of status.  It is safe to say no one in public life has lied bigger and bolder than Trump.  It is the source of enormous pride.

                  Trump’s con game has flourished in a culture that no longer has faith that the market economy rewards innovation, hard work, efficiency, or the creation of value.  Instead, ordinary people struggling to get by are told dozens of times a day that the rich made it through “hacks” and “tricks.”  Hacks and tricks are exactly what the conman sells.   When Trump came along, a third of the country was ready to buy.

_________

It is astonishing that the commentariat continue to cover the unfolding train wreck through the same lens they have used for decades.  They assume that actions by a president reflect the exercise of goal-oriented reason and thus can be explained in terms of ideology, policy, and/or political calculation.  In Trump’s case, they cannot.  Everything happening that originates from the White House is simply an expression of who Trump is.   He is a gangster, showman, and conman.  Look at it that way and you will easily understand what is happening and why.

History Rhymes

Reading during my current trip has included scholarly accounts of two major political leaders active in the 20th and 21st centuries.  As I read, I jotted down revealing details about each one.  Can you guess who they are from the excerpts below?

Leader #1

·      His highest words of praise about someone were that they had “said some very nice things” about me.

·      He was ignorant and uniformed but constantly promoted himself as a “genius.”  He had total faith in his views and ideas on all subjects and ignored experts.

·      Foreign heads of state meeting him observed “his self-assurance and self-praise are absolutely monumental.”  They found him “bizarre.”

·      In his rallies, his speeches were rambling “monologues,” but people had to cheer and applaud, lest they attract threats of violence from others in the audience.  The rallies were not customary political events but “tribal rituals.”

·      He chafed under any limitation on his power, expressing open hostility to checks and balances, rule of law, the judiciary, and the electoral process.

·      He portrayed himself as the champion of national exceptionalism.

·      His governance was highly personalized, with his family holding key positions of power in the party and the government.

·      He eventually came to surround himself only with loyalists and sycophants.

·      His decision-making style was impulsive, ego-driven, and often based on personal instincts rather than the opinions of experts or careful deliberation.

·      His ascension to power was “history repeating itself as farce.” 

Leader #2

·      He was a highly charismatic leader who inspired unprecedented and unshakable loyalty from his followers.

·      His rallies were showcases for the fervency of his popular support and featured long rambling bragging rants. 

·      He promised to restore national “greatness” and said that only he could do it, casting himself as the savior of the country.

·      He targeted immigrants and minority groups as scapegoats for the nation’s problems and campaigned based on xenophobia and racism.

·      He promised if elected to suppress opposition, control the media, and otherwise undermine democratic institutions.

·      He took the political use of outright lies and disinformation to a new level.

·      News outlets that criticized him or reported the truth about his activities were automatically accused of falsehood and illegitimacy.  He could not tolerate an independent or objective press.

·      He exploited divisions within society, pitting groups against each other, calling opponents the “enemy” and solidifying his base by preaching relentlessly of a war between “us” and “them.” 

I know.  It’s impossible in each case not to think immediately of Trump. 

But neither one is Trump.  The first is Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania between 1965 and 1989.  The second is Adolph Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. (In case you are not aware, under Ceausescu’s 24-year dictatorship, thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, and killed, all freedoms were eliminated (including bans on contraception and abortion), living standards plummeted and inflation soared.  Thirty-five years later, the country has yet to recover.)

Across time and cultures authors and playwrights – Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Ibsen, Schiller, Camus, and countless others – have taught us that character is destiny.  Flawed leaders inevitably result in chaos and national disaster.  When a leader lacks integrity, wisdom, or any moral compass, when they are unhinged by unbridled ego, greed and selfishness, when they inhabit the fantasy of their own greatness and lose the correcting anchor of objective truth, the result is ruinous.  Always. 

It does not matter whether the authoritarian is on the right or the left.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s Chavez or Franco, Mao or Mussolini, Stalin or Pol Pot.  It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1st century or the 20th century, or Europe, Asia, or the Americas.   The result is the same:  destruction of democratic institutions and norms, purges, deportations, camps and mass detentions, famines, forced ideological conformity, war, genocide, economic collapse, cultural collapse, ethnic persecution.    

As Mark Twain said, history may not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Dachau

Last week I visited Dachau. 

In the Reichstag elections of November 1932 the Nazi party, promising to restrict immigration and expel non-Germans, received only 33.1% of the popular vote.  Although a majority of the German people voted for other parties, Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933.  Democracy ended two months later, in March. 

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign, Hitler’s greater obsession turned out to be retribution against his enemies.  One his first acts was to order the establishment of detention camps, the first of which, Dachau, opened on March 22, 1933, as a detention center for political opponents of the Nazi regime, primarily Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi program (the establishment of concentration camps for Jewish citizens came later).  

92 years later, in the country that scarified nearly 500,000 of its citizens to defeat Hitler, a man idolized by almost exactly the same minority percentage of the voting population has also vowed to use the power of the presidency to seek revenge, retaliation, and retribution against those he considers his political enemies.    At the same time, he told Time magazine and has repeatedly promised that immediately following his inauguration he will open detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

Millions have visited Dachau since it opened as a memorial in 1965, determined that it must not be allowed to happen again.

But it is happening again.  Historians analyzing the greatest global catastrophe of the 20th century observe that the Nazis could have been stopped in 1932 had major establishment figures not miscalculated that Hitler could be controlled, and had center-right and center politicians thrown their support behind a single opposition.   Should Trump not be stopped, history will reserve its harshest judgment for non-MAGA Republican leaders who, through public endorsements of Harris, could have made it safe for conservatives of all stripes to cast the only moral, patriotic, and intelligent vote, but instead took the expedient, selfish, and cowardly route and stayed silent.

A Not-so-Distant Mirror

I have been reading the superb British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his 1930s walk from London to Istanbul.  In 1933, about nine months after Hitler came to power, he passed on foot through countless German towns and villages, meeting and observing local people in pubs, inns, and chance encounters on the road.  It was early enough that most spoke freely about what was happening in German politics.

Fermor reported that Nazi party activities seemed to be “swallowing up” the whole lives of its followers.  He reports an all-consuming religious-type fervor, directed at a single man, which seemed to allow no time or energy for the rest of life.   I read this on the same day that I saw the heart-breaking testimony of a January 6 insurrectionist, relating how he had been consumed by cultish devotion to Trump and his life had shrunk to near-constant immersion in the on-line hell of the far right.  

Fermor also observed, “It was a time when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany.”  All I could think of were all the many sad reports from friends about family members lost to Q-Anon and other conspiracies, which left them unable to tolerate the lack of belief by their loved ones and former friends. 

Even the nature of the fervor seems similar.  Over and over, in his meetings with self-proclaimed followers of Hitler, Fermor found that they had little understanding of Hitler’s actual policies or ideology.   Instead, their enthusiasm was grounded in the deeply human longing for a savior, vulnerability to the false promises of the demagogue, and a sense of belonging with a group of co-enthusiasts.  It seemed to Fermor like some sort of emotional contagion, which once caught was impossible to dislodge.   Remember that the Republican Party redefined itself as a cult on August 23, 2020, when the GOP national convention resolved that the party’s agenda is whatever Donald Trump says it is from time to time. 

And finally, Fermor was astonished by the number of Nazi supporters who told him they came to the Nazi movement from other parts of the political spectrum, not from prior affiliations with the right.  He gives a detailed account of a young Nazi who stated that he had been a committed Marxist and was unable to see any conflict between his current and previous positions.   It is hard not to think of the millions of voters here who switched to MAGA from a lifetime of voting D.  

Of course, there are vital differences between now and 1933.  The erosion of America’s hegemony from its peak immediately following the end of the Cold War cannot be compared to the humiliations suffered by Germany following the end of World War I.   The economic pain of the American middle-class pales beside the damage caused to Germans by the hyperinflation and economic collapse of Weimar Germany.   And MAGA’s appeal to white male supremacy cannot compare to the deeply rooted and pervasive antisemitism already present in Germany when Hitler came on to the scene.    

By the time of the 1934 mid-term elections in America, a surging fascist movement, enamored (like their contemporary brethren) with Hitler, Mussolini and other foreign strongmen, energized the GOP campaign to re-take control of Congress. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins is reported to have said the following:  “They deserved to lose the election even more than we deserved to win it.” 

I commend this thought to your attention if you are doubtful or unenthusiastic about Democrat candidates up or down the ballot.   Let’s say you’ve even concluded that they don’t deserve to win.  It doesn’t matter. Secretary Perkins’s point is the key one and the great lesson of the 20th century – the other side deserves to lose even more.   

The First Fifteen Months

You only need to answer to a single question in order to cast your vote in November:  What would happen to America if Trump were re-elected?    You might think the answer requires speculation.  It does not.  It can be answered by simple observation.  There is another country whose previous leader was reelected in 2022 thanks to a fanatical adoring base consisting of about 25% of the electorate, a wave of anti-democratic nationalist populism, and a political deal giving ultimate power to religious fundamentalists.  I refer to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel.

David Shulman, a professor emeritus at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and 2016 winner of the Israel Prize (the country’s highest cultural honor), in a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, gave the following account of what followed Natanyahu’s reelection in 2022:

For the last fifteen months, since this government was sworn in, we have watched the accelerating disintegration of the state and its institutions.  No one, not even the most optimistic of our [Israel’s] enemies, could have predicted this swift decline.  We have a prime minister whose main talent is to contrive ever more unscrupulous schemes for his own political survival . . .  a society hovering on the brink of civil war; a sick economy impoverished by unimaginably vast transfers of citizens’ tax money to the ultrareligious factions and their yeshivas; a civil service that has been gutted by the appointment of political hacks and sycophants in place of professionals; a legal system, once more or less functional, in danger of being destroyed . . . once-banned violent . . . extremists, relegitimized by Netanyahu, in the Knesset and high-ranking positions in the government . . . [It is as if the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had been appointed head of the FBI.] This is the short list.  I won’t ruin your day with the long one.

He did ruin my day.  I hope I have ruined yours.

Talking Points

Political discourse in this country often seems to have been reduced to the repetition of the day’s talking points promulgated on social media by each side.   So taking a break from long-form analysis, here are my talking points for today:

1.     With Trump’s absorption of the Republic National Committee into the Trump organization/family, we no longer have a two-party system.  We have a demagogue and an opposition.   The Republican party had a good 170-year run, but it lies in ruins and cannot be resurrected.  Before Trump puts Putin-like barriers in their way, the center right in America had better start organizing a successor.

2.      It is no longer responsible to tolerate or amplify (as even the most responsible media sources routinely do) the now-almost-daily assurances from Trump apologists that it’s all rhetoric (“Trump being Trump”) and that he won’t actually do any of the “crazy shit” he says.   Don’t believe them.  He means what he says.

3.     Nor should we take any comfort from the same apologists’ messaging that, even if Trump tries to do the “crazy shit,” there are impediments that will stop him, so it’s OK.  Really?  The “establishment” figures who surrounded him before are gone.  The non-MAGA Republicans who had retained some influence within the party have lost it or exited the field.  The Supreme Court is disinclined to stand in his way. 

4.     Unless you stop ignoring Trump’s pathological narcissism, you will never understand him or what we face.  No issue is interesting to Trump unless it involves him personally (and most issues are re-framed so they are about him).   The world is divided into friends and enemies.  Friends are those who flatter him and appear for the moment to buy into his narcissistic narrative of greatness; enemies are everyone else.  Information is credible if it supports his narcissistic narrative or advances his goals.  Information is dismissed as “fake” or a “hoax” if it does not.  Understanding Trump really is that simple. 

5.     The damage he has already done to America’s standing in the world is devastating.  This week’s statement green-lighting Putin to attack NATO members was the most damaging yet.  The late Senator John McCain nailed it in 2018 following Trump’s first meeting with Putin: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. . . . Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency.”   This week was worse.

Talking points are for talking.  Please.

MAGA Troops in the 'Hood

Dear Millenials and Gen Z:    Bored with politics?  Grumpy about the Democrats running an old man?  Thinking maybe you’ll just check out and not vote?   Planning to hunker down in Ft Greene and bake some sourdough? 

Consider this.  By early next year, if Trump is elected, he’s just promised you’ll be seeing red state national guard troops, federalized and answering to Trump, marching through your neighborhood rounding up folks for mass deportation.  Think you’ll be able to ignore that? 

You didn’t think this was all real?  Tonight blue state governors all over the country are scrambling to analyze whether they can keep control of their own state’s national guard troops, and legally use them to confront the red state troops rounding up people in the streets of blue state cities. 

[Hint to blue state governors:  read Christian Nation, Chapter 13:

“Can they really take over the New York Guard?” the Governor asked.  I answered.

“Yes.  Since 2007, a Governor’s consent is not required for the President to assume command of the Guard in a state.  What we need to do is ensure that all the senior officers are loyal to you, sir.  If they are not, we must replace them while we can. . .”]

So maybe it’s time to reconsider sitting this one out.

When I wrote my dystopian novel, Christian Nation, it was not difficult to predict what Christian nationalists and their puppets would do upon obtaining control of the Federal government.  In part, because they’ve told us what they will do (as Trump continues to do), and in part because a quick legal analysis reveals the steps that would be required to implement their agenda over the vigorous objection of the majority of the population and all of the blue states.   I’m sorry to say it, but every scenario ends in violence:

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the Feds advanced up through New Jersey and the formidable Joshua Brigades from Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, and Colorado took up positions up and down the west shore of the Hudson, from the George Washington Bridge in the north down to Bayonne Island.   Manhattanites lined the east bank of the Hudson staring across at the alarming sight of tanks and artillery all poised to shoot across the River at the full length of the island.  In a symbolic gesture, the Holies occupied Liberty Island from the Jersey side and draped the base of the Statue of Liberty with the “Christian flag”.   At the same time, a small unit of Marines landed at Stony Brook on the North Shore of Long Island, and proceeded south to secure McArthur Airport in Islip.  We watched nervously as huge C-17 transports streamed continuously in and out of MacArthur Airport all afternoon, discharging troops, tanks, vehicles ,and supplies.   The next morning, the City was transfixed by the strange sight of tanks and armored personnel carriers streaming west along the otherwise empty Long Island Expressway and Southern State Parkway.   The defense perimeters at the City’s eastern edge were pierced following a brief skirmish.  A brave unit of Guards briefly halted the advance around Kennedy Airport using only three old tanks brought down from Camp Smith in Peekskill, until helicopter-fired missiles destroyed each tank.   The Governor pulled all our forces back to Manhattan, and deployed them at the bridge and tunnels exits, which were relatively easy to defend, and to reinforce the troops at the most obvious spots for amphibious assault around the island’s perimeter.   By the end of the day, the same formidable line of tanks, artillery and troops lined the east bank of the East River all the way up to the South Bronx. 

It gets worse.  But it doesn’t have to happen.  All that is needed is for turnout percentages of independents and Democrats to approach those of Christian fundamentalists (typically around 85%).  The decision to disengage and stay home is a decision to welcome MAGA shock troops to the ‘hood and send 5% of the American workforce back where they came from, leaving the economy in a shambles.  It’s your choice.