A view of our world from a responsible US Senator

This is so good, I must pass it on. By way of The Status Kuo. Concurrently, Mr. Capeheart, a long time fixture at the Washington Post is moving on. He won't gloss over "threats to democracy" from the Trump regime and the MAGA Republicans.

Questions for us all

Why do I read Matt Yglesias? He's routinely something of a know-it-all twit. But skimming through his broad range of topics does broaden my own thinking -- so yes, I do read him.

Today he answered an interesting reader question:

Vasav Swaminathan: In honor of the fourth of July, what was America's greatest moment? Of all time? Of your lifetime? Of the last decade?

Of all time, I would say World War II and the Marshall Plan. Of my lifetime, probably PEPFAR. And of the last decade, either the rapid development of Covid vaccines or the rapid deployment of emergency military aid to Ukraine. 

I can take a swing at that question. It's interesting.

Click to enlarge.

America's greatest moment of all time? Unequivocally, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. By the middle of the 1860s, the Union army had obliterated the Confederate rebellion in a bloody war which ended slavery. At the conclusion of that war, the President -- Abraham Lincoln -- who had cautiously and bravely led the North through that terrible trial of the nation's values, was assassinated by a sympathizer of the losing South. His Vice-President, the south-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, was quite prepared make peace with the defeated states on terms that allowed continuation of white oligarchic rule over the freed slaves. 

Republican majorities in Congress (the GOP was a different animal then!) stumbled their way through complicated legislative maneuvers, including a failed impeachment of Johnson, to enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution which were meant to ensure we'd be a democratically organized country observing citizens' rights. No more chattel slavery, the rule of law must be recognized by the various states, and no denial of the right to vote on the basis of race -- roughly speaking. 

Yes -- the current Supreme Court is trying to gut these accomplishments. But those 19th century Americans were right to enact their "rebirth of freedom" then and we are right now, to hell with John Roberts and his posse of black-robed crooks.

Of my lifetime? That's easy. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s which forced the reaffirmation and re-invigoration of Reconstruction amendment principles, including forcing one-person, one-vote districts, integration of public schools and public facilities, and, by extension, full citizenship for women and LGBT people.

The current MAGA party doesn't recognize any of that either. We're being subjected to the ascendancy of aggrieved ignorant white men. I guess we have to rise up against cruelty and bigotry again ...

Of the last decade?  On this I find myself agreeing with Yglesias: the development and deployment of the COVID vaccine pointed the way to species-survival in the world humans have made. We can make a livable world if we can overcome the fraction of us who are too dumb or too self-centered to understand the project.

Thanks Matt! How would you answer those questions?

No Kings in San Francisco

Part One: the people assemble in Dolores Park. 

I'm told that by the time the march got underway it took two hours to get everyone into the street and off to Civic Center. From the viewpoint of the not-terribly-mobile photographer, it's easier to interact with folks on the grass perimeter. The San Francisco Chronicle says "tens of thousands" of marchers, whatever that means.

 

Hope in a "moral moment."

These women have something to say.

Here's a gent with some admonitions.

Waiting to get into the scrum.

Sometimes the strongest response to our rulers is mockery. "Oh really?"

And sometimes it is poetry recalled ...

 

Old friends keep on keeping on.

New friends make art.

 

American has a solid political core that loves democracy and has no intention of letting go of it.  

Former United States Attorney Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse

A whiff of optimism

It's hard to be optimistic this week, with the Trump regime working to dump unlucky migrants in South Sudan and the Supremes trashing the organs of the administrative state such as the NLRB -- but I'm open to the thought that there's lots I don't yet know about the resilience of this formerly "free" country. 

David R. Lurie is a New York corporate and securities lawyer who thinks there's more hope for the country than we might think at present. That's what he takes from observing Trumps "cabinet of dunces."

In his second term in office, Trump is, truly, being Trump. He’s rigorously demanding that the government be “operated” the way he conducted business for decades — that is, solely and exclusively for short-term gain and self-aggrandizement. The result, it is becoming clear, is a regime that leaves chaos in its wake instead of creating anything approaching the foundation for a legacy.

Thus, far from setting out to institutionalize a sustainable right-wing revolution — like Ronald Reagan did, with some pernicious success — Trumpers are engaged in a project directed at sabotaging as much of the nation’s government, and destroying as much of its economic and political power, as possible.

While the consequences of this nihilistic assault are likely to be catastrophic, the hopeful possibility is they could also be remarkably short-lived.

The incompetence is the point.

Even those cabinet members who once gave some evidence of brains and sense have to prove their stupidity.

... In an administration in which the sole consistent goals are valorizing Trump and making him as rich as possible, any official who demonstrates an ability to effectively administer and carry out the business of the US government is viewed with profound suspicion. On the other hand, those who are willing to learn incompetence and moral obtuseness are promoted.

[An example.] Trump is now, absurdly, speaking of Rubio as his potential successor to the presidency. This comes after the longtime Russia hawk and promoter of American international leadership has become the willing instrument of Trump’s campaign to undermine it and turn our nation’s longstanding allies into enemies, aligning the United States with pariah nations like Russia and undemocratic ones like El Salvador. Rubio is also serving as the figurehead of Trump’s shambolic gutting of American soft power infrastructure that has left vast numbers of children around the world at risk of starving as food rots in warehouses, and HIV sufferers to die in desperation for lack of lifesaving medication.

... Most of the cronies Trump has placed “in charge” of other critical agencies of the US government did not have to learn to be stupid like Rubio and Bessent. Instead, they were chosen precisely because had established track records of being lazy, ignorant, incurious, and morally obtuse, thus giving Trump confidence they would not bat an eye as the institutions they are charged with administering are destroyed. The examples are becoming chillingly familiar.

Instead of causing despair, Trump's enthusiasm for performative idiocy gives Lurie hope.

... The Trump administration’s illegal sabotage of the nation’s government, while hugely destructive, could also prove largely transitory.

When Trump exits the White House (or is forced to exit) office in a few years, he and his cronies will leave a huge swath of damage in their wake, likely including a record of avoidable epidemics, natural disasters followed by recovery debacles, and a US economy that is facing unprecedented challenges to its international preeminence. Furthermore, entire government departments will have been rendered empty shells, with many still reeling from damage inflicted upon them by Trump and his cronies.

But unlike either FDR or Reagan, Trump the governmental arsonist is highly unlikely to leave behind any substantial institutional or ideological legacy that his successor will have to grapple with. Rather, the next president will be tasked with a massive rebuilding project, much as nations — including this one — have had to reconstruct themselves, sometimes for the better, in the wake of major wars.

The possibility that Trump’s assault will be so cataclysmic as to leave the United States without the democratic institutions required to move beyond the disaster that comprises his regime can not be discounted. But if we succeed in keeping our nation from imploding between now and 2029, putting Trumpism behind us may prove easier than some imagine.

I think there may be something to this: a regime run by a chaos agent who is incapable of envisioning anything more durable than a small time personal con may fail to implant itself when resolutely opposed by a genuinely free-minded people. That's up to us.

• • •

A couple more thoughts:

Yair Rosenberg: Voters sometimes fall for myths, but eventually, like children, they outgrow them." [That one is about Bibi Netanyahu, but seems applicable to our situation as much as that of Israelis.]

Jocelyn Sze: "I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists. ... As our founding documents remind us: 'A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.' ...  keep faith in the long game. While narcissistic dynamics rely on urgency and alarm, deep change comes from staying calm, clear and connected. In defending against narcissistic control, the answer is never to mimic harmful tactics — it is to recognize them, grieve their damage, stop enabling them and break out of reactivity. Boundaries, civic mobilization and long-haul strategy are how we begin to heal the democratic spirit. In both therapy and democracy, healing begins the moment we stop reacting and start remembering who we are."

Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?

Reporting in the U.S. on the Afrikaner "refugees" -- some nearly 60 white people -- that Donald Trump has imported to this country is driving me nuts. Even media nearly as unsympathetic to this human migration stunt as I am seem to me to fail to convey the many complexities of South Africa. I'm not claiming to know all the ins and outs of South Africa as it exists today, but I did live there briefly in 1990 working on an independent anti-apartheid newspaper and came away with some basics that are missing from many accounts.

Some of my observations:

• The local Black-led independence party that led the struggle against white rule, the African National Congress (ANC), has won majorities ever since the first free election in 1994. But it's majorities have declined over time and today it governs in coalition with the Democracy Alliance which has a history as white-oriented party.

• Despite its many faults, including corruption, the ANC has continued to stand proudly for the self-expression of peoples enduring European rule, including the people of Palestine/Israel. We can suspect that the racial views of Afrikaners are akin to white Mississippi in 1963. Most Black South Africans, knowing racism, assume Palestinians have lived under something like the apartheid regime. When the issue is the oppression and genocide of a people, nuance gets lost. (Properly on this in my view, but that's another topic.)

• Rather importantly, given where Donald Trump probably gets his "information," Elon Musk is NOT an Afrikaner. He's from the wealthy English-speaking former ruling imperial class of the country, a man unreformed after the fall of white rule apparently. 

The BBC has published a very helpful explainer that rings true: 

South African History Online sums up Afrikaner identity by pointing out that "the modern Afrikaner is descended mainly from Western Europeans who settled on the southern tip of Africa during the middle of the 17th Century".

A mixture of Dutch (34.8%), German (33.7%) and French (13.2%) settlers, they formed a "unique cultural group" which identified itself "completely with African soil", South African History Online noted.

Their language, Afrikaans, is quite similar to Dutch.

But as they planted their roots in Africa, Afrikaners, as well as other white communities, forced black people to leave their land.

As was true in the United States, this small colonizing minority population could only rule by repressing the vast majority population, indigenous Black and later "coloured" people of Asian and mixed race backgrounds. Unlike in the U.S., neither Afrikaners nor later British imperialists succeeded in killing off the "others," remaining a well-off, empowered minority. They therefore put the others to work on farms and in mines.

In 1948, South Africa's Afrikaner-led government introduced apartheid, or apartness, taking racial segregation to a more extreme level.

This included laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.

They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that "blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water".

Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power.

Afrikaners currently number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million ...

... South Africa's most recent census, done in 2022, shows that Coloureds, (an officially used term meaning people of mixed racial origin) are the largest minority, making up 8% of the population. They are followed by white people, including Afrikaners, at 7%, and Asians at 3%.

The ANC has stood for what South Africans call "non-racial" government. There's plenty of grievance and prejudice, but by and large Afrikaners can have a chance in the country, certainly better chances than the Black African majority.

Even though white-minority rule ended in 1994, its effects are still being felt.

Average living standards are far higher for the white community than black people.

White people occupy 62.1% of top management posts, despite only accounting for 7.7% of the country's economically active population, according to a recent report by South Africa's Commission for Employment Equity.

The government has enacted a number of laws to try and redressing the balance, such as the Broad-Based Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity Acts. An amended version of the second act imposes strict hiring targets for non-white employees.

As in the U.S., this official affirmative action policy is not popular with white people who previously didn't have to compete so hard. The ANC's coalition partner, the Democracy Alliance, is challenging the acts in court.

Elon is telling Trump lies about his interactions with South Africa, according to its government:

... Trump's close adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has referred to the country's "racist ownership laws", alleging that his satellite internet service provider Starlink was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".

To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

This mainly refers to South Africa's majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) - a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors - told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence....

Only a small minority of Afrikaners are thrilled with Trump's offer of refugee status: 

After Trump's offer, Afrikaner lobby group Solidarity posted an article on its website headlined: "Ten historical reasons to stay in South Africa".

In parliament last week, the leader of the right-wing Freedom Front Plus party said they were committed to South Africa.

"We are bound to Africa and will build a future for ourselves and our children here," Corné Mulder said.

Let's give the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the last word here:

[He] has said it was "completely false" to claim that "people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution".

Referring to the first group who have moved to the U.S., he said: "They are leaving because they don't want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country and our constitution."

South Africa is one of the most violent and complicated places I have ever spent time. As is usual with Trump and MAGA, they are not doing justice to the intricacy of the nation. Complexity is hard.

We need boundaries and a new aspirational consensus

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to assume that most Americans had, if not a considerd opinion, still an instinctive revulsion against Nazis. Those were the bad guys ...

No more. Elon, his incel acolytes, and his fanbase get their jollies from playing at fascism. One has to assume that many of these guys (yes, they are mostly guys) know little of what they are aping, because there's no evidence they know much about anything. Elon may be a deeper case; the South African class and milieu from which he emerged was often authentically fascist as they struggled to hang on to their white European privileges over the nation's Black majority.

Thomas Zimmer is a German, a professor of contemporary history at Georgetown University. He knows a thing or two about fascism. He reports that many in German society are trying to hold the line against resurgent neo-Nazis:

News broke Friday morning that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now officially classifying the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group. The decision came after three years of investigating the party and was presented in a 1,100-page report. ...

Zimmer explains carefully that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) can be accurately called "neo-Nazi" by US readers. All the other German political parties, much as they oppose each other, agree not to work with the neo-Nazis which made electing a coalition Chancellor, the Conservative Friedrich Merz, a messy process. But German civil society got it done; for the time being, their neo-Nazis are excluded from power despite winning 20 percent of the vote in the last election.

No surprise -- JD Vance and the MAGAts love them some AfD and disdain Merz.

Zimmer then looks at what the rise of German neo-Nazis might imply about parallel developments in US politics: 

This is a remarkable moment in U.S. history. The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus. 

The term is imperfect and perhaps even problematic. There was certainly never a universally shared consensus in America that the key elements of Nazi politics and ideology were bad. But there was nevertheless some agreement across the mainstream political spectrum that America had fought a righteous and noble war against Hitler. American society celebrated and revered its “Greatest Generation” and the soldiers who defeated the Nazis; American popular culture used the Nazis as a representation of ultimate evil. Anyone openly siding against this agreement would have had to expect to pay a price – politically, socially, and culturally. 

In post-1945 America, this was obviously never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics and “respectable” society.

That is evidently no longer the case. MAGA is now in power. This breakdown of boundaries did not happen overnight. It took decades for the most extreme factions to pull the entire “conservative” coalition further and further to the Right – and for the more moderate people, all those who might have objected to the idea of supporting German Neo-Nazis, to be ostracized. 

It will likely take decades to get the country out of this mess, which requires not just political change, but a fundamental reform of political and social culture. If a stable democracy that deserves the name is ever to emerge from this, America will have to restore some boundaries. We need to reimagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward. 

You are siding with the German Neo-Nazis? That makes you the bad guys. In a society that cannot hold even that basic line, democracy stands little chance.

I'm up for giving democracy a chance. No more MAGAts and Nazis!

When some evangelizing seems a right move

Fred Clark writes The Slackivist where he urges seekers and other ex-evangelicals to  "Test everything; hold fast to what is good." He is as horrified as so many of us are by the dragnet Donald Trump and this ghoulish assistant Stephen Miller are letting loose against migrants.

He recounts the story of the Oklahoma woman and her kids put out half naked in the rain while unidentified agents who trashed their house and stole their money -- all only to realize that the person the agents sought had moved on. (Homeland Security is now claiming lamely there had been human traffickers at the address previously.)

Clark has a suggestion, only a little tongue in cheek, for resistance to this kind of thing:

Doxxing the Secret Police to call them to repentance

The secret police of ICE know they’re the Bad Guys. That’s why they wear masks and don’t carry badges and refuse to give their names.

And so ... it is necessary for us — and for them — to unmask them, to use their names, and to identify them publicly. To make them famous. This is needed to save our freedom and to save their souls.

Refusal by such "agents of the law" to say who they are and who they work for seems to indicate fearfulness ...

... But what are the secret police afraid of? Who are they afraid of? Why are they hiding their faces and their names?

They are afraid of us — of the majority of normal, decent people. And they are hiding their faces and their names because they know that what they are doing is wrong and shameful and bad. They know that they are the Bad Guys in this story. That is as obvious to them as it is to you and so they cannot face you. They cannot do what they are doing and save face, so to do what they are doing they must hide their faces.

So let’s see their faces. And their names.

In asking to see those faces and names, some fear I’m also asking thereby to learn their addresses, which seems to imply a hint of violence or, at least, the threat of such. (“We know where you live” almost always seems to be an implicit threat of violence.) But violence is not at all what I’m suggesting and not at all what I have in mind

Clark has experience meeting people who didn't expect visitors at their houses ...

What I have in mind, rather, is Evangelism Explosion. What I have in mind is what I learned and practiced in youth group at my white fundamentalist Christian church growing up — the spiritual practice my white evangelical tradition shares with the Latter Day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m talking about door-to-door evangelism.

Most of you reading this have only experienced this from the other side of the door — as the knock-ee rather than as the knock-er. I’ve been on both sides. Neither one is pleasant.

The one positive thing from my experience conducting door-to-door “evangelism” was probably that it made door-to-door political canvassing so much easier for me. Sure, an undecided voter might not welcome a random knock at the door, and, yeah, they might not favor the candidate I’m campaigning for, but even the worst case scenario here isn’t as bad as the essential premise of the conversation you’re trying to have when doing door-to-door evangelism. 

That involves standing on the front porch of a stranger and saying, “Hi. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I know you’re a sinner who deserves to suffer for eternity in Hell.”

... you can kick the boy out of evangelicalism but you cannot completely kick the evangelicalism out of the boy. And so when I think about these secret police masking themselves in their shame — when I think about a group that already understands that they are sinners in desperate need of repentance and salvation — I can’t help but think it’s worth giving this a try.

...  the names and addresses of our secret police should also be treated just as all those Evangelism Explosion training sessions taught us to treat the names and addresses of our “unchurched” neighbors.

We should be knocking on their doors.

We should smile and tell them we’re there with the good news of salvation, because even though they are damnable sinners, repentance and redemption are still available. The repentance and redemption they need are still possible. The salvation they already know they need can still be theirs.

After all, they are already admitting to guilty consciences with the masks and gear ...

... The Bad Guys may choose to continue being the Bad Guys, but we cannot allow them to deceive themselves about the fact that that is what they are choosing.

Our “Evangelism Explosion” training taught us more tactful ways of saying that. But still, that’s what we were saying.

Caveat: The political canvassing training I've had nowadays is, perhaps, a little more sophisticated and a little less ham-handed. The model promoted by the union UniteHERE calls on canvassers at the doors to share, empathetically, what motivates them to do anything so odd as knock at the house of a stranger. "I'm here because I'm afraid a Trump administration might screw up my Social Security ..." for example.

But Fred is onto something. Reaching out directly, non-violently, to the consciences of the agents of a rogue state seems a right idea. Probably not simple or easy, but one right approach among many. Takes some courage, but so does everything these days.

May Day in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

The crowd at Five Corners had a lot of issues with the present regime. Trump 2.0 offers a wide spectrum of harms to be called out.

This family came out to express historic May Day issues. May Day in the United States is descended from Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Market demonstration where cops violently broke up a protesting crowd and the emerging socialist/labor movement called for a general strike. Contemporary oligarchs may drive us there one day.

 

Generalized protest of the Trump regime's crimes was common.

What could be more straight forward?

So was the shout out to horrors past.

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Kamala Harris, once again finding her voice:

She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”

Vineyard folks have not forgotten.

Happy May Day!

Let's keep up the good work. Quite a slide there.

Via The Guardian: They’re the sort of damning reviews that would give any normal person pause for thought. But Trump is not a normal person and is not known for self-reflection. Instead, he ignored the scathing verdicts and immersed himself in the rightwing mirror world, spending most of Tuesday retweeting increasingly hyperbolic praise from Republicans.

“The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

See you at a May Day demonstration. We'll be at one near us. Will you?

We're an unruly and unruled people

After reading at least twenty 100 Days of Trump appraisals of the regime, I think I give my prize for doing the distasteful subject the most justice to historian and opinon writer Jamelle Bouie (gift article).

Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. 

You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.

If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure....  Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings. ..

... MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness. 

Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.

Bouie warns that Trumps' relative failures in his first 100 days are no reason for incautious confidence that we can hold off his attempt, abetted by tech bros, to end our democratic experiment.

Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.

But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.

About ten days ago, I began to sense that people and institutions were pulling themselves together to fight the MAGA authoritarian onslaught. Folks are taking on Tesla, immigration prisons, even the defense of ultra-rich Harvard. We going to be badly damaged in this fight; some people -- as usual those who were always in the most need of support from society -- will not make it to another side. But there is no reason to give up the fight now.

Doing democracy

I've never been very good at the necessary task of agitating my own Congresscritter for more action for better policies. I think I've been on two visits to Congressional offices in the last 35 years  -- of course for me the target has been Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi which gives me a sort of an excuse: for most that period her real constituents were not her local voters but more the recalcitrant members of her fractious Democratic caucus. As constituents, we felt a little beside the point and we were.

But I love reading accounts from people newly inspired to do this work of direct democracy. In the present moment, agitating slow poke Democrats and useless Republicans is part of the necessary struggle.

At my core I’m a storyteller. I love probing the past and the present to learn the “story of us” and how these true-to-life tales might inspire us to become better humans.

Dr. Jemar Tisby is an historian of religious faith focused on racial justice and a prolific writer and preacher. But he'd never done a Congressional visit before this past month: 

People Power

I'll be marinating on my time visiting offices of representatives and senators for a long time.

This was precisely what our government was set up to do--provide an avenue where constituents can let the elected officials who represent them know their concerns and have a reasonable expectation of being heard.

In its most basic sense, democracy means "people power."

That day I felt like a person who at least had the power to express my views to the people empowered to make policies.

The experience made the work of the federal government less opaque and intimidating.

At the end of the day, all the bills, all the laws, all the deliberations are done by people.

Regular human beings.

They are imperfect, they have fears, hopes, and worries.

They can also be influenced.

The most frequent refrain I heard throughout my day on Capitol Hill was, "Your voice matters." ...

... when we speak, we disrupt complacency. We remind officials and politicians that the people still have power.

As I looked back at the marble of the Capitol, I felt it again: this is our building, our Congress, our country. Our democracy. And we must never let them forget it.

If we can possibly stand it, more of us need to do it! Or at least call these reps up, frequently.

• • •

Tisby is author of several books. I've just finished reading one as an audio book and looking over the young adult version of the same material snagged from the wonderful Cape Cod library system.

Both tell stories of individuals central to the US Black experience -- central to "doing democracy" in the context of the long freedom struggle -- that may be unfamiliar to most white readers. Tisby is particularly attentive to the roles and accomplishments of women. Highly recommended.

Trump is flailing

Today's polling tells a story of the Trump regime's growing vulnerability and instability. Some morsels via Newsweek:

In a Pew Research Center poll,  

Trump has an overall approval rating of 40 percent compared to a disapproval rating of 59 percent. The survey shows that 44 percent of men approve of the job the president is doing compared to 55 percent who disapprove.

Trump fares worse with women, as 37 percent approve of the job he's doing compared to 62 percent who disapprove.

The president's approval rating is underwater with white, Hispanic and Asian Americans but none more glaring than his approval rating with Black U.S. adults. The survey shows that only 14 percent of Black Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as commander in chief, versus 82 percent who disapprove.

The survey was taken from April 7 through April 13 among 3,589 respondents. The poll has a margin of error of 1.8 percent.

The poll also details Trump's approval rating among age groups. Again, Trump is in the negatives with every group. Among those ages 18 to 29, 36 percent approve of the job Trump is doing compared to 63 percent who disapprove.

That's brutal for the mad king. And it serves all of us well to never let him forget it. 

• • •

Henry Farrell teaches international politics at Johns Hopkins University, so presumably he's at least adjacent to the experience of the Trumpian threat in research institutions. He has some useful thoughts on strategy for the growing resistance.

The Trump regime does not impress him as being especially competent at the domination game. 

... authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.

... The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make their success seem like a fait accompli. [Farrell uses a female generic pronoun in this piece; I find it more annoying than enlightening in this context, but here goes.] She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.

... That process of persuasion becomes more difficult, the more unbounded the ambitions of the wannabe authoritarian are .... The more powerful and unruly the authoritarian becomes, the more readily they can make promises or threats. Equally, the less credible those promises or threats become, both to allies and to enemies. Absolute power implies absolute impunity: if I enjoy such power, I have no incentive to behave trustworthily to anyone.

For just the same reason, no-one has any incentive to trust me. You will not believe my promises, and you may fear that if you give in to my threats, you will only open yourself to further abuse. Thus - as I, as an aspiring authoritarian move closer to unbounded control, I need to artfully balance the benefits that my power can bring to my allies with the fear those allies may reasonably have over what happens should that power be turned against them.

... Trump’s strategy has been much less effective than it might have been. Trump has shown he is unwilling to stick by deals. ...The good news is that the Trump administration is playing its hand very badly. If Trump had been more willing to accept defectors into his camp, by sticking to deals that gave them something worth having, he would be in a much stronger situation than he is at the moment. Furthermore, and somewhat less obviously, this may also disrupt his own existing coalition. Wall Street, for example, may worry that it is next for the chopping block. Silicon Valley the same.

That is, nothing about Trump's behavior in asserting his (illegitimate) power should impress his targets as proving he is offering a viable side to play on. He's not. Institutions tempted to try to cooperate with him realize quickly that there is no reliable there there.

But Farrell points out that people building opposition also face challenges. The good news is we're all over the map; the less good news is that we don't necessarily know each other (yet) and that we don't (yet) act in concert.

The bad news is that the opposition is much more disorganized than it ought to be. Coordination is bolstered by shared knowledge that others will coordinate too. We don’t have that, in part because of lack of leadership, in part because of a media landscape that makes it difficult to generate such shared knowledge... 

Our presumptions about what other people think can play an extraordinarily powerful role in shaping how we ourselves think, and what we are prepared to do. And in a country where such presumptions can be grossly skewed, it can be very hard to generate coordinated action. Finally, exactly because the opposition is disorganized, and because humans are human, it faces its own collective version of Trump’s temptation to humiliate and subjugate defectors from the other side, rather than welcoming them in.

Farrell has suggestions that he considers obvious:

•  ... Figure out how to generate common knowledge that will enable coordination. Protests - especially if they are widespread, and especially if they happen in unusual places, or involve surprising coalitions can help generate information cascades. But getting media coverage and broader conversation is important.

• ... Welcome in the strayed sheep, and work on widening the cracks in the other coalition. Leopard-face-eating memes may feel personally satisfying, but they usually do not ease the process of converting disillusioned opponents into active allies.

• ... Help build your coalition as far as it can go. Do everything you can to minimize defections from it, and to maximize defections from the other side. Take advantage of the opposition’s vulnerabilities and mistakes - especially the trust problems that are likely to flourish in a coalition around an actor who aspires to untrammeled power and is deeply untrustworthy 

•... And do what you can now; things are likely to get much harder, very quickly, if the opposition’s victory becomes a self-confirming expectation.

Good stuff this. Thoughts: 

• we're all going to have to generate common knowledge under the mainstream radar until the usual suspects realize we're a force and good for business. Think what Brad Newsham has managed with his beach protests!

 • we haven't got time or space for excluding past irritants and even enemies in the big tent we need. Yes, that means I sometimes have to read David Brooks (barf!).

•  Let's keep working!

Lines must be drawn

Crosspurposes: Christianity's broken bargain with democracy by Jonathan Rauch

This is a strange book. Someone -- don't remember who -- must have recommended it. I needed distraction while Democrats were failing us in DC yesterday, so I rushed through it.

Mr. Rauch is at pains, repeatedly, to express his diffidence about commenting on American Christianity -- after all, he's gay, Jewish, and a non-believer in all things religious. And he should be diffident. This book, purportedly about American Christianity, contains nothing about Catholics, nothing about the Black church, nothing about Latino religiosity, and darned little to suggest there are any women in the mix. He gives mainline Protestantism a once-over-lightly, rushing on to center white evangelical Protestantism. (Actually membership in the mostly white mainline denominations is about the same percentage of white Christians as the percentage of white evangelicals; he falls into the common journalistic fallacy of substituting the latter for the whole.)

His impetus for the book seems to be that Rauch has concluded that secular liberalism and some sort of Christianity need each other within American democracy -- and that white evangelical Protestantism has gone off the rails, transforming itself into a regressive political force. Well, duh!

He calls this situation a "cultural trade deficit."

Sometimes Christian America [he means white evangelical Protestantism] and secular America can rub along merely leaving each other alone. But sometimes they come into conflict; and when they do, they have positive obligations to make room for each other. ... Their bargain requires that the Constitution be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism. The bargain is implicit, but America depends upon it nonetheless.

... America's demonstration that a country can be both devout and diverse, secular and spiritual, has been a historic achievement and a gift to the world. ... But the religious side has been less and less able to uphold its end of the bargain. ... A result is what I think of as a cultural trade deficit.  

... Look at it this way. Secular liberalism certainly promotes important values: tolerance, lawfulness, civic responsibility, equality, and so forth. But they are primarily procedural values, which orient us to follow certain rules. The legitimacy of those rules must come largely from outside of secular liberalism itself ... in practice, that has meant relying on Christianity to support the civic virtues. So we atheists rely on Christianity to maintain a positive balance of trade: we need it to export more moral values and spiritual authority to the surrounding culture than it imports. If, instead the church is in cultural deficit -- if it becomes a net importer of values from the secular world -- then it becomes morally derivative rather than morally formative. Rather than shaping secular values, it merely reflects them and thus melts into the society around it. ...

Yes -- one subset of Christians has replaced the way of the uppity itinerant peasant murdered by a vicious empire (that's Jesus) with the worship of Emperor Donnie. Many others, Christian and not-Christian, merely try to keep their heads down and wonder what became of values like decency, generosity, honesty and kindness.

Rauch gives an affirmative nod to the bargain Mormon officialdom has made with the existence of LBGT+ people in Utah. It's certainly interesting and better than what passes for a moral order in Texas -- or in the White House. I wish he had talked with someone other than the higher-ups of the Mormon church; at least in days past, LGBT people and anyone who was not a Mormon have often felt repressed where the Church of the Latter Day Saints sets the rules. Yet movement in the direction of pluralism must be good.

A strange book. I find it too confused to recommend -- and I feel confident that the confusion is not mine but Rauch's.

We live in a time when lines are being drawn. Confusion is a luxury. Evil is afoot. On the one side, the billionaires. On the other, everyone else and democracy and equality.  Once upon a time in this country, the moral evil which had to be repudiated was slavery. Today the lie which must be repudiated is that acquiring billions of dollars should give license to a few to rule the many.

That goes for Christians in all our diversity, for believers in other traditions, and for those who find their values through other sources. 

The Dishonor roll

Ten Senate Democrats threw away their only chance for relevance against Trump/Musk's fascist takeover the United States government by voting to advance a budget resolution which codifies the coup. Here's the list (reporting didn't make this easy to find.)

The Congressional procedure is complicated -- but "Chuck Shumer's cave" is on these 10 people.

Shaheen and Peters are retiring. The rest of them think they can put this betrayal of their voters behind them. Maybe they can. 

But what's the point of having them if they can't get off their knees? 

My ancestors risked life to end the reign of a king -- and they thought a bath of tar and feathers was the just deserts of traitors. We don't go in for such things these days -- but the traitors should have a very hard time if they think they can walk among their voters without being shouted down and shamed.

Foul betrayals

A thoughtful description of Donald Trump's sell out of Ukraine to Putin comes from Kviv via David Rieff in The New Republic:

The Trump Presidency Is an Unmitigated Catastrophe for Ukraine 

Ukrainians aren’t shocked—they have a lot of experience in the betrayal business. ...

... the mood here in the days running up to the third anniversary of the start of the war has oscillated between despair and grim fortitude. It could hardly be otherwise, and for the obvious reason: With the rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, as exemplified by the U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia that excluded Ukraine, the presidency of Donald Trump has already been proven to be an unmitigated catastrophe for Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy apparently will be putting in an appearance in Washington this week to receive our Orange Toddler's ultimatum. There's plenty of speculation about how that will play out, but whatever results almost certainly will be horrible for Ukrainians -- and all of Europe now under the Russian imperial gun.

It's worth remembering the sort of figure Zelenskiy has been over the last three years.

Zelenskiy’s sang froid during his press conference, at what amounts to nothing less than the Trump administration’s betrayal of every promise and commitment the United States has made to Ukraine, both unilaterally and through NATO in concert with Washington’s European allies, was remarkable. It served as a gripping reminder of how important, for all his faults and both the military failures and failures of governance in Ukraine that have occurred during his watch, Zelenskiy’s leadership has been since, in the first hours of the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, he declined the Biden administration’s offer to evacuate him with his family to Poland, defiantly saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Even the many Ukrainians who are disenchanted with him in general terms accept that the country could not hope for a better war leader. In this, the oft-made comparison between Zelenskiy and Winston Churchill is anything but hyperbolic. Like Zelenskiy, Churchill before the war was considered something of a buffoon, a political dilettante who had changed parties several times and who had done everything but distinguish himself during various periods as a government minister. And then, of course, immediately after the war, in the so-called “khaki election,” in which the votes of the war veterans proved dispositive, the British public voted Churchill out of office. 

But although many Ukrainians are predicting the same fate for Zelenskiy in a postwar Ukraine, as long as the war goes on, like Churchill between 1939 and 1945, Zelenskiy has proven himself the invaluable man. ...

Donald Trump is going to get away with his crime against brave Ukrainians -- just as he has skated on his crimes from his last tenure and most likely will continue to escape justice for his current even more corrupt and vicious assault on us here at home. This Friday's meeting may -- or may not yet -- resolve the shape of the Ukrainian betrayal.

A vigil in Chicago this week. Ukrainians are not without friends in the States.

Rieff goes on:

... European political elites misunderstood and misunderstand the U.S. in a way their Ukrainian opposite numbers never did. Betrayal is a good teacher in that regard. And throughout its history, from the days of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth to the subjugation of Ukraine by the Russian Empire to the murderous days of Red Power and the Moscow-made famine of 1932–1933, the Holodomor, to the contemporary era in which Ukraine was constrained to give up its nuclear weapons in return for independence and security from Russian revanchism, through to the Biden administration’s consistently insufficient grants of aid, to Donald Trump’s monstrous U-turn, Ukrainians have the misfortune to be connoisseurs of betrayal.

... Then there’s the victory of the Christian Democrats in Germany, and, more importantly, the statements by the soon-to-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz ... Donald Trump, Merz went on, had made it clear that his administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” The message was clear: As far as Merz was concerned, the fate of Europe was inseparable from that of Ukraine. ...

... if Ukrainians continue to hope, what other choice—besides flight—do they have? Which is why this bitter defiant twist on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous theory of the five stages of grief—defiance, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—is now making the rounds in Kyiv. In the Ukrainian telling, the first four stages are the same. But instead of acceptance, the fifth stage is the polar opposite: It’s “Fuck you.” There are worse ways to prepare oneself for the ordeals that lie in store.

It didn't have to be this way. Biden got off to a good start against Russia's attack on Ukraine, but muffed the follow through. American elites of both parties never really warmed to defending Ukraine; perhaps they were always shamed by encountering a people that was so clear-eyed when it faced utter evil. This country -- so rich, so complacent -- basks in more muted colors.

For me, the historical analogy which the Ukraine war has always brought to the fore is of the European democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. Oh sure, Britain and France were (mostly) glad to see the Spanish monarchy give way to a multi-party Spanish democracy. But that democracy was messy and contained leftist, pro-Soviet elements. Better to allow a Spanish Christian Fascist with German Nazi support go on to murder, pillage, and eradicate this unsavory, short-lived Republic.

In the '30s, abstaining from supporting Spanish democracy only meant Britain, France, and eventually the United States had to fight the Nazis a few years later. This time around, Donald Trump is bringing us in on the side of the Nazis. We, the citizens of these United States, also have been betrayed this week.

Against the Trump/Musk coup: who's on the job

The institutions of US civil society seem to be getting themselves together to oppose the Trump/Musk coup. We'll find out whether they can be effectual as time goes on. I'm going to list a few of them here:

The new Department of People who Work for a Living:

 

Follow this link to get connected.

• • •

The non-governmental sector is also getting organized. The Movement Voter Project, an intermediary outfit that brings together non-profit groups working for progressive change, is on the case. 

• • •

So are the advocacy and pressure groups that operate around the edges of the political parties such as Indivisible and Move-On. Their job is to goose Democrats into resistance action while afflicting Republican officeholders who are being traitors to the Constitution.  It's hard work.

• • •

In some places, offshoots of the Democratic Party can lead resistance. Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles channeled progressive electoral energy vibrantly during the past campaign and has not given up the fight for a vision of America rooted in Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and the New Deal.

• • •

And, of course, we must care for the victims of MAGA's cruelty among ourselves in our neighborhoods and homes.

• • •

We can slink away in horror at Trump/Musk's betrayal of our hobbled democracy -- or we can say with one of the heroes of the American struggle to come into existance: 

"I have not yet begun to fight."

As in John Paul Jones' day, shrinking from the fight will not protect us.

Bye-bye Joe

Every pundit around is summing up Joe Biden's accomplishments and failures. I want to play too. In a few days MAGA's merry band of saboteurs are going to preoccupy our attention. If I'm ever to unload these thoughts, today is the day.

I learned things I had not known from watching him stagger to failure.

There were times in the last few years when I considered Joe Biden the most successful occupant of the presidency for the majority of us that I'd seen since LBJ. New York Times business columnist Peter Coy (gift) summarized some of what Biden accomplished:

... he rose to the occasion of fighting the Covid pandemic and its economic effects. Although the recession was over by the time he was sworn in, the unemployment rate was still elevated at 6.4 percent. He had served as vice president during the feeble, “jobless” recovery from the recession of 2007-9, and he was determined to prevent a repeat of that slump.

Less than two months after taking office, Biden got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included stimulus checks of $1,400 per person, extended unemployment insurance and a beefed-up child tax credit. That November, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized $1.2 trillion of transportation and infrastructure spending.

Those bills did what they were intended to do. They speeded the economic recovery and brought down unemployment, helping the poor and working class most of all. The expanded child tax credit alone cut child poverty nearly in half.

Heather Cox Richardson spells it out:

The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%. Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.

Observing these successes, I thought Biden's age gave him a secret sauce: his orientation to governing was formed in the years before Ronald Reagan's "revolution" dethroned the idea of an activist federal state that worked for the benefit of the people. Reagan and the GOPers sold an exhausted people on the hokum that "the best government governs least." This was always stupid and unworkable; today, the notion merely makes room for oligarchs to rob us blind. 

Biden's basic orientation was toward building a more equitable state and economy. This enabled him to ally with Elizabeth Warren's technocrats on interventions that haven't yet been fully realized. I suspect that our new MAGA overlords will bluster and howl, but they'll also take credit as much of this survives and works out for their constituents.

Biden's deep experience of American foreign policy and influence in the world helped him at times and also left him up shit creek when he couldn't adjust to contemporary realities.

Ditching our failed state-building project in Afghanistan was unequivocally the right move. Twenty years of failure needed to be shucked off. And Trump had set Biden up to get out. But the mismanagement that killed US troops and left too many Afghans in the lurch was horrible and compound the ugliness of the whole misbegotten enterprise.

The Biden administration initially responded forcefully to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then retreated to timidity when only an all-in commitment was going enable the Ukrainians to repel the invading imperialist power. The tragedy of Ukraine reminds me of the failure of the democratic states -- Britain, France, and the US -- to support the messy but legitimate government of Republican Spain in the mid-1930s against Hitler and Mussolini. We can only hope the consequence will not be similar, forcing the more law-abiding and democratic states to fight the authoritarian axis somewhere else if we're to survive. And now we've elected the modern America Firsters who always wanted capitulation to the dictators ...

And then there is Israel, the Palestinians, and the multiple oil autocracies of what Europe labels the Near East. Biden has been utterly clueless in this arena since October 7, 2023. His age and experience seems to have gifted him with completely the wrong lessons and, bluntly, the wrong racial and ethnic sympathies. His policies seem to assume that Palestinians are uppity natives to be repressed. His supine posture toward Bibi and enabling the demise of any chance for a decent order in the region has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, from day one.

All this was made more fragile and less understandable because aging Joe had lost any feel he ever had for communicating his aims to his riling constituencies. He was the president who wasn't there. And sending Kamala out to the rescue at the last minute couldn't save his legacy.

Jim Fallows is gentle about Joe. He's seen a few presidents up close.

Presidents obsess about their place in history, mainly because they can’t control it. Joe Biden must have dreamed of being seen as another FDR. His best chance now is to be seen as another Harry Truman or even Jimmy Carter—under-appreciated in his time and then gaining respect for the long-term effects of his work.

[in his final address] ... like Dwight Eisenhower before him, Biden was in fact honest. Brutally, unsparingly so. He was honest about who was causing problems: The modern versions of robber barons, and the politicians they had bought or intimidates. He was honest that citizens had to do something themselves if they didn’t like the trends, rather than waiting for someone to save them. He was presumably honest enough with himself to imagine the outrage and attacks the speech would certainly provoke. Honest enough to imply that some of the centrist reassurances of his career may have been naive.

Biden seemed a good and decent man trying to do a job he was too aged for and perhaps also a job that his experience had both suited and unfitted him for in contradictory ways. On to the next American misadventure ...

Up against a Crusader

Robert P. Jones is the founder and president at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which studies our American religious varieties. He's also a recovering white Southerner out a Baptist faith tradition which he believes has a lot to overcome in the way of sexism, racism, and unfounded smug superiority.

The Senate hearing on TV pretty boy and macho poseur Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense infuriated Jones. He concluded:

Not a single senator probed the most dangerous part of Hegseth's background: his support for white Christian nationalism.

Apparently, in addition to Hegseth's history of drinking and sleeping around fathering children, the guy is an acolyte of one of those crackpot little sects which white American Protestantism spawns, led by a patriarch with racist authoritarian politics. 

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small newly-founded church that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who embraces a theocratic vision of Christian dominance of all institutions in society. Wilson has written that slavery produced “a genuine affection between the races” and argues that homosexuality should be a crime. Wilson holds particularly rigid patriarchal views, asserting that giving women the right to vote was a mistake, that women holding political office “should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse,” and that women should not “be mustered for combat” (sound familiar?). 

As religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, who has studied this movement for years, points out, adherence to these theological tenets are not optional in CREC churches. Hegseth is a member in good standing and has called Wilson a spiritual mentor, explicitly saying that he is a disciple of Wilson’s teachings and learning from his books.

The Democratic Senators who might have questioned him about any of this (if they were informed enough) were stymied by our ingrained respect for the absolute right of people to adhere to any belief system they choose.

I get it; I believe quite a lot of scientifically unverifiable things too. But just because people adhere to seemingly oddball religious beliefs must not mean that they cannot be questioned about policy implications of what drives them. Hegseth is about to have much influence and some concrete power over the largest element of the national government. It was the right and duty of Senators to interrogate Hegseth about this.

Jones thinks the Senate is about to confirm someone who is committed to overturning the Constitutional principles that enable him to skate away from searching questions.

If it was not outright cowardice, the Democratic senators’ timidity was at best rooted in a desire to respect the Constitution’s important prohibition against instituting a religious test for office. But if this was the reason for their failures during the hearing, it reflects a serious misunderstanding of the purpose of that principle.

The Founders were primarily concerned about prohibiting the then familiar practice of reserving offices for members of religious groups favored by the state. But that Constitutional protection in no way prohibits lines of questioning related to whether a nominees’ publicly professed beliefs and worldview, whether religious or secular, are compatible with the fundamental principles of a pluralistic democracy and the oath of office they will take to defend and obey not a president but the Constitution.

The Republican Party—whose adherents are two thirds white and Christian in a nation that is only 41% white and Christian—has clearly given itself over to the white Christian nationalist vision that fuels Trump’s MAGA movement. If, over the next four years, if the Democratic Party continues to ignore the clear and present danger white Christian nationalism represents, history will judge them harshly for their naiveté and their abdication of duty to our nation in its time of need.

In [his book] American Crusade, Hegseth wrote, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” With his nomination looking likely to succeed, that yet has arrived. And now, Trump will have his willing leader of an American crusade that will be fought—not just abroad but at home—with the most lethal forces and arsenal of weapons the world has ever seen.

I do not think Jones is being alarmist. Fortunately MAGA has internal contradictions as well as facing democratic (small "d") popular opposition that may constrain what the likes of Hegseth would like to do. Or not.

If the Dems were feeble, there were protesters in the house who Northern Californians might recognize.