Most certainly, Abraham Lincoln would be disgusted. The Republican Party -- the party that freed the slaves -- is now the Party of Donald Trump. Former Republican speechwriter Michael Gerson writes:
One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles. Thus his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6 riot felt free to carry Confederate battle flags and wear “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts without fear of reproof from their political allies. Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference.
The Party now voices one theme: white grievance:
The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks. Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting. Trumpism is defined by the belief that real Americans are beset by internal threats from migrants, Muslims, multiculturalists, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa militants and various thugs, gangbangers and whiners.
And it proudly claims to be Christian:
The largest single group within the new GOP coalition is comprised of people who claim to be evangelical Christians. And the view of human beings implied by Trumpism is a direct negation of Christian teaching (as well as many other systems of belief). Christians are informed — not by political correctness, but by Jesus — that every addict and homeless person you might encounter on a nocturnal walk in New York is the presence of Christ in disguise. And the parable He told in Matthew 25 illustrating this point is a rather stern one. Those who follow their pre-cognitive disgust and refuse to treat the hungry, the stranger, the sick and imprisoned as they would Christ are told: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
The abolitionists of Lincoln's day also called themselves Christians. But Trumpified Christians are the mirror opposites of those abolitionists. In fact, they are the mirror opposites of Lincoln's Republicans.
From Lincoln to Trump. It's been a remarkable journey.
Image: Vox.com
16 comments:
It wasn't that long ago that Russia's Orthodox church threw in its lot with Putin's regime. Christian churches are not always averse to authoritarianism and corruption when a quid pro quo is dangled before them. In the days of the Czars the Orthodox church was a branch of government, its head chosen by the Czars directly.
Andrew Bacevich has written of the Christian evangelicals coming to dominate religion in the US military. Princeton historian, Kevin Kruse, in "One Nation Under God," traces how the radical evangelical churches threw their lot in with the corporate and conservative forces in the wake of the Great Depression to become today's de facto state religion. It is what Bacevich calls the expanded "military, industrial, neoconservative, evangelical, commercial "for profit" warfighting (think Blackwater) complex."
Trump didn't create this but he's adept at finding ways to exploit corruption and he was able to bring radical rightwing extremism and their institutional bigotry into the fold. There are other fine books such as Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" and Chris Hedges "American Fascists" that look at the quiet displacement of Christianity in these pseudo-Christian churches.
My experience, Mound, has been that all organized religions have a "Do As I Say" segment of believers. Christ, as I recall, insisted that religion was a choice, not a command.
Dem. Rep. Al Green of Texas summed it up well last week when he ripped into GOP Rep. Greg Steube for saying that God opposes LGBT rights. Green said,
You used God to enslave my foreparents. You used God to segregate me in schools. You used God to put me in the back of the bus. Have you no shame? This is not about God, it's about men who choose to discriminate against other people because they have the power to do so.
The GOP's journey has taken it from the party of Abe Lincoln to the party of John Calhoun.
Cap
I agree, Cap. The story of the GOP is the story of a march backward through history.
In addition to Mound's (always well-researched) comments, Owen, I would add that these same evangelical sects have basically taken over providing "religious" leadership to nearly all the prisons in the U.S. as well.
Just think: A prisoner (unless he is Black), a convicted serial killer, can go up before the parole board and proclaim that he is a changed man because he has "taken his personal lord and savior, JC into his heart" and therefore no longer a danger to society. And all the while, one of these fervent evangelicals will be standing right beside with his right hand over his chest proclaiming all will be well if this newly reformed man is released into society.
In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lulymay, two con men visit a "camp meeting." In the midst of the proceedings, one of the two pops up, claiming that he and his friend have been inspired to "convert the pirates in the Indian Ocean." However, they need traveling expenses. They pass their hats and make a killing.
@ The Disaffected Lib 12:44 pm
It wasn't that long ago that Russia's Orthodox church threw in its lot with Putin's regime.
Well, I have no idea if Putin is even slightly religious but he offered and still offers a level of stability and security that was completely lacking in the 1990's. Foreign businessmen no longer need bodyguards in St. Petersburg and gangland shootouts in the streets of Moscow are pretty much a thing of the past.
Putin shows up at major religious festivals, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, etc. The Orthodox and the Muslims are building new churches and mosques. As far as I can see he is not encouraging the crazy fringe religious like Trump; he wants to keep the peace among the various religious groups. Memories of Chechnya and Dagestan are still fresh.
However, jrk, hee's making life for folks like Alexander Navalny very difficult.
This is what happens to ANY organization when spoiled "torch-bearers" who merely "inherit" it by virtue of being "next in line" on the hierarchy scale, alongside modern-day "Pharisees" and various favored hacks who "make it to the top" via some kind of favoritism, eventually end up taking over and becoming the gist of said organization.
The Republican Party has had more than enough time to evolve into something altogether different than its earlier incarnation of Lincoln's time.
Today's Republicans are like the folks who populate a William Faulkner novel, Tal. They hang on to a long-ago dream, as the society they inhabit rots from the inside out.
@ Owen
However, jrk, hee's making life for folks like Alexander Navalny very difficult.
Or you might say that Alexei Navalny is making life very difficult for Alexy Navalny.
When you are on probation, it probably is a good idea to check in with your probation officer. Reportedly, he had not been seeing his probation officer for most or all of 2020 before the alleged poisoning incident. After he was released from La Charité Hospital he spent a few months in Germany and Switzerland---with appropriate selfies---when he was supposed to be back in Moscow seeing his probation officer. Apparently the Russian probation people were annoyed.
I have seen some reasonable suggestions that he managed to lose some powerful political protection in Russia lately. Even being on probation and not in a correctional centre after he and his brother's conviction for embezzlement suggested some political godfather. His brother went to prison. It looks like godfather's patience has run out. It is very likely that Navalny did not, really, expect to be arrested at Sheremetyevo airport upon his arrival in Moscow.
In the West, Navalny is viewed as an important Russian opposition leader. In Russia, for those who actually know who he is, he is a minor figure on the fringes of the political scene. The Return of Alexey Navalny.
He is a sort of a Juan Guidó without the name recognition. He is an issue for Russia from an international affairs angle. Internally, he is a non-entity. As a poor comparison, he is the rather dodgy leader of an organization with a popularity rating the same a bit lower than the People's Party of Canada.
He also has a couple of outstanding charges one of which is for defaming a veteran of the Great Patriotic War (Russian part of WWII).
We're dealing with false equivalences, here, jrk. Putin is a shrewd operator. Give him that. But it's he himself that matters -- not the country.
@ Owen
But it's he himself that matters -- not the country.
Totally disagree. He is a long-time politician and an authoritarian one, to put it mildly, but he also is a patriotic citizen of the Russian Federation. He inherited a basket-case of a country in 2000, not exactly John McCain's "gas station masquerading as a country but close, and today it is a quite prosperous and apparently stable country. Life expectancy which nosedived in the 1990's after the collapse of the USSR has greatly improved.
It appears that the overall standard of living has improved immensely though not to a Canadian or Western European standard. Health care seems to have been improving before pre-Covid but is still very dicey in a lot of more rural areas.
Heck, before Covid-19 struck, I was hearing Russian spoken by what looked like obvious tourists here in town. This suggests a fair bit of disposable income. It made an interesting change from the standard Chinese, German and Japanese.
Compare Putin to something like Trump or that idiot Boris in the UK and he comes out looking pretty good. I am sure, if I enumerated them, there are lots of his policies I would disagree with. The Russian economy has been much more stagnant than it should have been in the last decade but overall the lot of the average Russian has improved measurably in material terms since 2000.
Look at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, he has carried out purges, persecuted journalists, seems to have set off the most recent Kurdish insurrection and has engaged in some reckless interventions in Syria, Iraq, Libya and the recent Armenia--Azerbaijan conflict. Turkey's economy is not quite in tatters but it is fairly rocky. And all for what? His personal aggrandizement or some romantic idea of reviving a Turkish Caliphate. Oh, he also built himself a new presidential palace for an estimated low price of 1 billion +.
We, in the Anglo-sphere tend to get a somewhat slanted view of Putin and Russia in general. I have not been able to find a complete-text copy of the New York Times' advertisement for a for a new Russia correspondent but here is an excerpt taken from an article by Paul Robinson
It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.
If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent. … We are looking for someone who will embrace the prospect of traversing 11 time zones to track a populace that is growing increasingly frustrated with an economy dragged down by corruption, cronyism and excessive reliance on natural resources.
New York Times.
Nothing like hinting at how you want the stories to read.
And Mussolini made the trains run on time, jrk. The basic question remains: At what cost?
@ Owen 11:35
And Mussolini made the trains run on time
Actually I do not believe he did. Like any good fascist, he lied.
At what cost?
Unknown. So far, given Russian history it does not look all that bad. So far, Putin is a vast improvement over a corrupt, drunken, fool like Yeltsin. The real crunch is who replaces Putin and how. If even the USA with a couple of hundred years of democratic transfers of power can suffer what looks like an inept coup d'état attempt Russia with no such traditions looks worrying.
I have no idea what will happen in Russia, jrk. For that matter, I have no idea what will happen in the United States.
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