The GOP Crosses a Line

In 2020 the Republican Party declined to articulate a platform, telling voters that the party stood for whatever Trump says.   So when Trump insisted he won the 2020 election, it should have been little surprise that the party embraced the “big lie.”   As of yesterday, the purge of politicians unwilling to support the party line is complete.   Accordingly, the time has come to recognize that the GOP has crossed a line.  It’s core animating principle is now seditious conspiracy, which should disqualify it from further participation in American politics, forcing a new party to organize and represent the views of the law-abiding American right.

The U.S. Code defines seditious conspiracy (among other things) as “two or more persons . . . conspir[ing] . . . to oppose by force the authority [of the Government], or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States . . .”   Congress gathered on January 6 to execute the most fundamental of our laws, those providing for the peaceful transfer of federal power.   Trump and those around him organized an armed mob to come to Washington to oppose and delay the execution of those laws, which mob then set off for the Capitol at the personal and public behest of the leader of the GOP.  This was only the most visible part of a broad conspiracy to fraudulently overturn the lawful results of the election.

The GOP could have preserved its place as a legitimate party (although engaged in the most aggressive and least principled sort of politics) simply by distancing itself from this seditious conspiracy.  A few individual Republican politicians did.  But the party has now fallen completely under the control of those who did not.   The single litmus test for GOP candidates is now, in Trump’s words, assertion that the lawmakers gathered on January 6 were trying “illegally to take over the country,” illegal because Trump “won in a landslide.”

Thanks to the consistent advocacy of the ACLU and other liberal (in the traditional sense) groups, the reach of the First Amendment is broad.   Indeed, the fringe (neo-Nazi, white supremacist) right survived and eventually grew into a vigorous political force under the umbrella of First Amendment protection.    But that protection has limits.  Speech is protected until that speech becomes likely to incite imminent lawless action (as the Supreme Court put it, “advocacy [that] is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”). 

The national GOP (now the puppet of the same network of shadowy zealots who worked to install “fake electors”) is systematically engaged in advocating and executing plans under which state election officials will violate their oaths and the law to ensure Trump’s victory, and state legislatures will, if necessary, ignore the popular vote and designate electors loyal to Trump.  The seditious conspiracy did not end on January 6, it has continued with increased vigor every day since.

I hope that Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and scores of other courageous and principled conservative politicians will now finally quit the GOP, organize a successor party, and vigorously contest the 2024 Presidential election.   A third party home for the nation’s many conservatives would, as a practical matter, also make it much easier to proceed with prosecution of the Trump party for seditious conspiracy and other offenses. The national GOP should be disqualified from participation in national politics until and unless it affirms its support for the constitution and the rule of law, and promises to abide by the results of the legal process by which contested elections are resolved[1].

A reminder from history:  Authoritarian forces almost always gain power through elections. After that, there is no going back, since job one for such newly elected authoritarians is to compromise the democratic institutions through which they could thereafter be opposed.   Trump tried this and failed in 2020.  The Trumpists, now free of responsible mainstream Republicans who reigned in such instincts between 2016 and 2019, won’t make the same mistakes again.  Moreover, the bright line between conventional means and political violence has been crossed, and TrumpWorld is now armed to the teeth. 

Ms. Cheney, now is the time.   After 2024, it will be too late.    

[1] Trump himself should have been replaced as the party’s nominee in 2016 when he refused to promise to abide by the results of the election unless he won.

A Light in the Darkness

I’ve never before shared or recommended a YouTube video.  But now I recommend that you watch this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPJL488cfRw  . 

I read the newspapers this morning and was left, as usual, with a leaden feeling of despair at a culture and civic sphere now dominated by superficiality, ignorance, mendacity, arrogance, coarseness and incivility.   The price of engaging with the public sphere, has been ­– at least in my case – an increasingly dark view of humanity and its prospects.

Returning to my desk, I found a page I had torn from a recent Economist describing a performance by 18-year-old South Korean pianist Lim Yun-chan of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at the Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas.   The video now has nearly 6 million views.   I just watched it.  The performance left in me tears (as it did the conductor).

Some of those tears sprang from the sheer beauty of the sound.   But there was something else – a message that the music didn’t need words to convey.  It reminded me of the infinite potential of humanity.   Of our potential to push the boundaries of achievement further and further.  Of our potential for nobility, subtleness, generosity, and imagination.   And of all that can be accomplished when we tear down the walls of tribalism, in this case to have a young pianist from South Korea play music written by a dead Russian, conducted by a woman born in New York, before a wildly enthusiastic Texas audience.   

I hope this brightens your day, as it did mine. 

What's Not Being Said

It has been frustrating to follow the media coverage of Dobbs, most of which fails to put the overturning of Roe in the context of the broader five-decade project of politically active Christianity. I challenged myself to summarize briefly the handful of most important things that are missing from our national post-Dobbs dialogue:

1. We continue to treat abortion arguments as if they are policy, ideological, or political disputes. If they were, we’d be where we were under Roe, talking about how to balance the interests of the mother and unborn child. But the minute the Christian right had the power, look how quickly the widely supported common sense exceptions (rape, etc.) fell away. All around the country we are seeing laws reflecting a Taliban-like religious fundamentalism under which a 12-year old pregnant by an incestuous rape, likely not to survive her pregnancy, still would be required by the state to carry her baby to term. Only the perversions of absolutist religion can lead to this kind of result. This is all about fundamentalist religion and the extent to which we allow it, and not prevailing morality reflected in sound public policy, to govern. Dobbs should have prompted a wide-ranging discussion of the role of religion in public life. As long as we are not having that conversation, we will be blind to what really is happening..

2. Like Trump’s “big lie” almost everything you hear from the right about the culture war is a direct inversion. The fight for “freedom of religion” is actually a fight to end freedom of religion. The argument to “let the states decide” is intended to disguise the actual goal of doing whatever it takes to implement the entire culture war agenda everywhere in the country. They harvest supporters by railing against “big government” but their agenda requires the intrusion of government into the most intimate corners of our lives.

3. The goal of the culture war is to require compliance by non-believers with the religious beliefs and taboos embraced by a minority of Americans. Why are they not content with the freedom to follow their own beliefs? Why do they feel compelled to impose them on others? Because the core group that is the driving force behind the Christian nationalist movement believes that an American nation compliant with the will of God (as conceived by them) is necessary to achieve the most important thing that will ever occur, the second coming of Christ.

4. The religious right now recognizes that authoritarian government is necessary to achieve their goals. With only 32-34% of the population in their camp, the Christian right understands they are likely to remain a minority and thus that their vision cannot be implemented or sustained over the long term if we remain a pluralistic democracy. The undermining of democracy became a particular priority as they understood the speed at which demographics were moving against them.

5. No one should think for a moment that the overturning of Roe was or is an end in itself. In regard to abortion, they will not stop until the ultimate goal is achieved: to stop the “killing of babies.” Anything else (e.g., leave it to the states) is a smokescreen. To achieve that goal, they will go as far as necessary, including criminalization of anything done by anyone anywhere in the US to facilitate the “killing of a baby” after conception. All that Dobbs does is to remove the federal constraint on whatever legislative craziness the red states wish to pursue. But if the right controls the instruments of federal legislative authority, then nation-wide criminalization will follow and, with the right of privacy/substantive due process gone, the Supreme Court will allow that legislation to stand.

6. The right has said out loud, to anyone who will listen, that banning abortion is only a first step (which no one can doubt following the high-profile admission in Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion). The Christian nationalist movement (now synonymous with the GOP) will use every tool at their disposal to achieve the balance of their self-declared agenda, which includes banning contraception, eliminating same sex marriage, recriminalizing sodomy, restoring anti-blasphemy laws, eliminating the concept of a “hate crime,” pulling out of the UN (and all other multilateral institutions), reinstituting Christian prayer in the schools, eliminating all federal education standards and requiring “equal time” for faith based curriculum (including creationism), and much else. If you want to see a concise compilation of the complete agenda, have a look at the text of “The Blessing” that appears in Chapter 12 of my dystopian novel, Christian Nation.

Looking back from the theocratic future, the narrator of Christian Nation writes, “[T]hey said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.” Now is the time to listen. Attorneys-General now speak openly of taking legal action based on “God’s intention.” GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert didn’t mince words: “The church is supposed to direct the government.” When I wrote Christian Nation those holding these views lurked at the fringes of our national political life. Now they stand at its apex, in a plural marriage of convenience with Trumpist populism and traditional Republicans willing to make a Faustian bargain in pursuit of power. They control the Supreme Court. In 16 weeks they will probably control both houses of Congress.

What are you going to do about it?

Ends and Means

There is only one thing you really need to know about the current state of politics in the United States:  those in control of one side believe that the ends justify the means; those in control of the other do not.

Although both sides are passionately attached to their agendas, only one side has decided that it will do and say anything to achieve it.    The new GOP is a party which no longer recognizes or respects any constraint:  neither the dictates of morality (which prescribe those means that are off limits, no matter how desirable the ends), nor the law, nor the political traditions that have enabled two centuries of democratic governance. 

How did this happen?    First, the GOP became infused with the righteousness and certitude of the religious right.   When your agenda is dictated by God, is it hardly surprising that you will go to any length to achieve it.  Second, the previous cultural and ethical constraints on political ambition were demolished by the Trump presidency.  For Trump personally, the need to feed his insatiable narcissism justifies anything, no matter how morally repugnant or harmful to others.  These twin pathologies infected the GOP, which, zombie like, was transformed into a single-minded monster whose raison d'être is the pursuit of power.  When that pursuit comes at the expense of truth, constitutional democracy, rule of law, our national security and standing in the world, or even simple decency – all these can be dismissed as justifiable collateral damage.  After all, the ends justify the means.

Almost all criticism of the new Trumpian GOP is met with “but what about . . .”  And yes, the other side is hardly saintly.    And yes, they have an extreme wing that sometimes pushes whacky and even dangerous ideas.    But this obscures the one thing you need to understand to navigate the new political landscape:  one side believes that the ends justify the means and the other does not.    

There are thus only two possible outcomes.  In the first, through overwhelming electoral defeat, the right is forced to return to contesting for its agenda within the previous constraints (some minimum level of respect for veracity, abjuring violence, and accepting the rules of constitutional democracy).  In the second, the GOP succeeds in obtaining permanent power, which leads to the end of the American experiment.  

235 years ago Ben Franklin famously announced the outcome of the Constitutional Convention to a Philadelphia matron:  “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”  The you is now us.

Willful Blindness

Why is it that the commentariat seems incapable of looking even one step ahead, when the battle plan for the right’s culture war is there for everyone to see?    For example, journalists are reporting on what the post-Roe world would look like for women in red states, painting a picture of the costs, inequities and inconveniences of women having to travel out of state for an abortion.

But that picture is woefully incomplete.  Do they really think the anti-abortion movement will stop with bringing down Roe, and sit on its hands as red state women travel across state lines to get the abortions that have been prohibited at home?   The point is to save fetuses, not simply rid their states of abortion clinics.  So after Roe is gone, red state legislatures will attempt to criminalize all conduct which assists a woman to cross state lines to obtain an abortion elsewhere. 

This move was foreshadowed in the recent Texas abortion law, which permits civil actions against people who “abet” abortion, such as insurers that approve a claim; ride-share drivers who drive a patient to a clinic; anyone who shares information about abortion options; family members, clergy, rape crisis counselors or others who help someone obtain a prohibited abortion (or, under the Texas law, merely “intend” to provide such help).   After Roe is gone, this law, and similar laws in other states, will most likely change this liability from civil to criminal.   And the minute the GOP controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency (or a veto proof majority in Congress), federal legislation (most likely similar to the Mann Act, which makes it a federal crime to transport a woman across state lines for purposes of prostitution) will most likely prohibit any act in “interstate commerce” for purposes of facilitating access to abortions in other states. 

They will not stop even there.  “State’s rights” is a cause embraced by the GOP only when the left is in control of the Federal government.   The principle always has been abandoned the instant that federal action in furtherance of their agenda is possible.  It’s not enough for the red states to be unfettered from constitutional limits, because the Christian nationalist objective (realization of America’s destiny as the Godly kingdom) requires the taboos, specific moral dictates and even eschatological narratives of the evangelical movement to be controlling nationwide. The right will not stop until abortion is banned by federal law as well, at which point (in the absence of Roe) the blue states will no longer have the right to permit the procedure.

Abortion is the canary in the mine.  With the Federal judiciary lost, should the right take control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, there will remain no barrier to full implementation of the Christian nationalist agenda.  The former  establishment Republicans will step aside in return for tax breaks and deregulation.   As the protagonist of my book Christian Nation writes in his fictional memoir from the dystopian future, “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.” 

To switch metaphors from the avian to the amphibian, we are frogs headed slowly to our deaths as the water in the pot boils.  But worse than that, we are frogs who are willfully blind to the clear intention of those controlling the stove.   If we would only open our eyes, we would see exactly what is coming.

This Type of Religion Kills

When I wrote my 2013 novel about the threat posed by the far right and its theocratic objectives, one of the heroic characters campaigning for separation of church and state says he would defend with his life the freedom of conscience and religion of all Americans, including his opponents. 

This used to be my view, until “religion” came to mean something very different.   Take Greg Locke, the pastor at the Global Vision Bible Church near Nashville, who, as reported by the Washington Post, has stated the following during his “sermons”: the pandemic is “fake,” the death count is “manipulated,” and the vaccine is a “dangerous scam” made of “aborted fetal tissue.”   This week, he went a step further: “Don’t believe this delta variant nonsense.” If “you start showing up [with] all these masks and all this nonsense, I will ask you to leave.”   Lest you think his views on COVID and vaccination are not political, he has clarified his position, preaching to his congregation that  President Biden is “a sex trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.” 

This man and his views are not simply tolerated, they are subsidized by the tax deductibility of contributions to his “church” that permit his hate-filled bilge to be amplified and spread.  And because he speaks under the cloak of “religion” his speech and actions are increasingly exempted from laws that would otherwise render them illegal.

Under both global norms and traditional Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, freedom of expression has been limited in situations where necessary to prevent harm to others.   Examples include libel and slander, obscenity, sedition, incitement to unlawful behavior, disclosure of classified information or trade secrets, copyright violation, the right to privacy, public security, perjury, practicing medicine without a license, etc.   And we all remember learning that falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is not tolerated, because the resulting injuries and deaths are foreseeable.   But yell “God told me there’s a fire,” and it’s OK?

If we had access to the relevant statistics we could calculate the probable number of people who will die because “Pastor” Locke convinced his flock that the pandemic is a “fake” and that God requires them to remain unvaccinated.    But now consider that roughly a third of Americans attend similar services, and the number of resulting deaths is in the hundreds of thousands.   This type of religion kills.  And to permit, privilege and subsidize it – when the nation’s number one public health and economic priority is to achieve high rates of vaccination – is insane.  

We’ve seen this all before.  Frederick Douglass, in his magnificent July 4 (actually July 5) address in 1852 called out the American church’s perversion of Christianity in support of slavery: “These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form.”

The Nightmare Is Not Over

I, like a solid majority of my countrymen, will celebrate the end of the national train wreck that was the Trump presidency.  But that celebration must be tempered by a sober understanding that the nightmare will not end until the competitiveness of the GOP no longer depends on the lunatic fringe.

NBC News reported yesterday that the vast galaxy of the far right is splintered into two principal groups.  One is largely motivated by QAnon adherents who believe that Inauguration Day will be the climactic realization of their prophecy, when Trump will force a 10-day countrywide blackout that ends in military tribunals, the mass execution of his political enemies, and a second Trump term.  You read that right, mass execution.  On the other hand, the cluster of various anti-government hard-core Trumpists call this magical thinking, and insist on more practical and proactive steps to bring about the required violent insurrection and a second term for Trump. 

Sure, kooks and zealots have been around for a long time.  Before, they were few in number and isolated.  Now, they are united by the internet and number in the tens of millions.   Before, their vile nonsense could be spoken only in furtive meetings of militias and hate groups, now the President of the United States has given them permission to speak it out loud.   Before, they were despised and ridiculed by both major political parties, now, they are indispensable to the political fortunes of one of those parties, whose leader calls them “good people” who (even as they attempted to reverse the election through violence) he “loves.”  

The result? As of three days ago, polls showed 30% of the GOP had a favorable view of QAnon, and a few days before that (but in both cases after the attempted insurrection), 49% of Republicans opposed proceeding with the inauguration of the new president.   When 30-40 million Americans lose faith in democracy, anchor their politics in preposterous delusions, support an authoritarian demagogue, and remain essential to the fortunes of one of our two established political parties, our constitutional democracy remains in peril, despite the coming transfer of power.

It is tempting to take some comfort in the good sense and relative grounding of the slim majority of GOP voters who are embarrassed by QAnon and reject the stolen election delusion, but it would be a mistake to expect that embarrassment to translate into abandonment of the GOP on future election days.  Even after the shambolic catastrophe of the past four years, more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.   Why?  This is the era of identity politics, and when shifting your partisan allegiance requires you to swap out your essential sense-of-self for a different one, it becomes very hard to do.  As a result, solving this problem in the long term cannot depend on the Democrats reliably and consistently defeating the GOP in elections, instead it requires that the GOP/conservative movement reform and transform itself from within. 

The question for the country is whether the Republican leadership is likely to ostracize the kooks, repudiate Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and wean its members away from the dangerous hallucinogen that was Trumpism and its supporting pathologies.

Of course, from a moral and patriotic standpoint, we have every right to require that the GOP do this as a condition to retaining its standing as a legitimate political party, i.e., one sworn to work within the constitutional system.   But that’s not the question.   The question in front of us is will existing or emerging leaders on the right actually do it. 

The matter will be decided by political calculation, not moral suasion.  Will Trump become toxic?  Not likely – more likely a martyr to the cause.  Does the path to power within the party come from gaining the mantle of Trump, which in turn will mean deifying him in the manner of Chavez and Castro?  That was the orthodox expectation that caused 147 Republican Congressmen to throw democracy under the bus in pursuit of personal power.   But perhaps after January 6 that expectation is changing?   But even if the Trumpian cult has been weakened by January 6, will support of the Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and other extremists continue to be only path to victory in a GOP primary, as it has been from a time long before Trump?  Probably, unless . . .

Two recent incidents remind us of the role of money in politics.  One is how quickly the media suspended promoting conspiracies regarding Dominion voting machines when the company sued them for the billions in damages caused by these fantasies.  The other is how many companies have made their own economic calculation regarding the unacceptable cost to their businesses of supporting the GOP sedition caucus, advertising on Fox hosts promoting the stolen election falsehood, and doing business with the Trump Organization.   Money may be the sole lever than can persuade the GOP to escape its domination by kooks and extremists, and take the difficult step of rebuilding a coalition that can win without them.   Money also can help break the grip of Fox, which controls the information flow to the conservative half of the country.  Ironically, Fox started as the house organ for the conservative movement, but during the Trump administration turned the tables and instead ended up dictating policy and messaging to a media-obsessed President with few ideas of his own.   Withdrawn advertising and boycotts can incentivize Fox to reinvent itself as once again doing actual journalism, perhaps still with a right-leaning bent, but recognizing the diversity of views on the right and never again acting as the author and enforcer of a prevailing orthodoxy.  

The other lever that could influence the political calculation of the GOP is legal peril.   The Biden administration, while respecting the First Amendment, must diligently prosecute the myriad criminal infractions by armed militias, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, promoters of conspiracies, and far-right extremists of all sorts, and amplify the risk of legal jeopardy for all who support them.   When the Trump administration’s own national security apparatus calls them the leading national security threat to the United States, the Biden Justice Department has an opening to act as aggressively as they would in the case of foreign terrorism. 

While these levers can provide incentives, breaking the grip the far right has on the GOP requires envisioning and then building a GOP coalition that can win without the far right.  This is a huge opportunity for ambitious young conservatives.  Ironically, Trump’s 2016 coalition showed the way by appealing to middle class voters excluded from the economic booms of the past decades.   

Ironically, to save America, Democrats and independents must work to make it possible for the GOP to reinvent itself in a way that provides conservative Americans with an alternative to fascist authoritarianism.  This will be hard for progressives to accept.  But if the GOP remains in the grip of Trump, or a post-Trump GOP remains in the grip of the lunatic right, then, as David Axelrod put it, the events of January 6 will prove to be a “dismal landmark on the way to ruin.”

The Other Pandemic

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) provides that a diagnosis of delusional disorder is made if a person has “non-bizarre” delusions (meaning things that could happen in real life, such as being stalked by someone, as opposed to, say, seeing flying elephants) for at least one month and does not have the characteristic symptoms of other psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. 

Recent polls showed that 52% of Republicans believe that Trump won the election and 56% of Republicans believe that the QAnon conspiracy theory is “mostly or partly true” (33% believe it is “mostly true”).     As a reminder, Forbes magazine described the QAnon thesis as follows:   “President Trump is defending the planet from a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles (consisting mostly of Hollywood celebrities, liberal politicians and "deep-state" government officials) who are running a secret child sex-trafficking ring”  (the ever-sober Forbes omitted the more sensational non-core elements of QAnon belief, such as these same folks harvesting children’s blood).  

Both these delusions are not only unsupported by any evidence, but are easily disproven (and have been).   On their face, in the usually more restrained words of Forbes, they are “preposterous” and “outlandish.”   They are not opinions or beliefs, they are delusions.

With at least 245 million voting age Americans, 30% of whom most recently identified themselves as Republican, that means that about 38 million of our fellow citizens suffer from the delusion that Trump won and 24 million believe the QAnon conspiracy to be “mostly true.”

So as we enter 2021 America finds itself in the grip of two pandemics.  COVID has infected over 14 million Americans.   The 24-38 million delusional Republicans, most presumably being non-schizophrenic, and having persisted in these delusions for over a month, comprise a pandemic far more severe and perhaps more consequential than COVID: a pandemic of delusional disorder.  

While this disorder, unlike COVID, does not generally threaten the lives of the afflicted, it does make them vulnerable to mendacious politicians, con men, and hucksters of all kinds (the current President leading the way by conning mostly small donors, following the election, out of $200 million).   Most importantly, though, this second pandemic does threaten the life of the country.   Democratic government cannot be sustained with over half of one of our two political parties afflicted by a disabling delusion.   I say “disabling,” because you cannot freely exercise your rights as a voter when your judgment and discretion have been warped or coopted by a delusional conviction.    And the democratic system collapses when a critical mass of citizens no longer accepts elections as free and fair.

This second pandemic should be receiving equal time on the news feeds, nightly news, and front pages.   Psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists should help us understand the causes of this outbreak of mass hysterical delusion.  David Brooks argued that conspiracy theories take hold among “low status” groups that feel powerless; but within weeks acknowledged that this didn’t explain why “the neurosurgeon down the street” (neither low status nor powerless) believed that the election was fraudulent.  We have a strong grip on the causes and proper treatment of COVID-19.  But we don’t yet understand the delusional disorder pandemic, and until we understand it, we won’t know how to treat it.

Ultimately, this pandemic of delusion ­­– and not COVID ­– will present the knottiest challenge to the new Biden administration.  Left undiagnosed and untreated, it will power and sustain hyper-partisanship, political dysfunction, and the fracturing of the nation into irreconcilable camps through the Biden administration and beyond.