#43 INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

The profoundly dispiriting spectacle of the Biden-Trump debate, featuring a dottering old man who struggled to finish his sentences or stay on topic vs. a highly energized old man who lied relentlessly to the point of psychosis and often couldn’t be bothered with any topic except immigration, had to be a low point in my now many decades of following American politics.  It was so awful, the subsequent commentaries that I heard didn’t even bring up their absurd argument about who was the better golfer.

What the fuck?  Out of 350 million people, these are the best two we could come up with?

That was five long days ago, but it might as well be fifty years now that we have the Supreme Court’s decision essentially aimed at giving Trump immunity from prosecution and giving the American president a monarch’s impunity.  That’s suddenly the law of the United States.

None of this came out of nowhere, as jolting as it all seems.  We’ve finally reached the rightwing tipping point, the moment they’ve dreamed of and schemed for so very long.

I don’t know how far you care to go back.  I’d start with Europe dumping its religious fanatics in the New World.  You can’t get around the Civil War, which left its mark on the American psyche that’s still festering there nearly 160 years later.  How about the American sympathizers with the fascists in the 30s and 40s?

That does bring me to a book I read some years ago now, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges (2006).  Looking it over this evening, I realize just how precisely he presages our current dilemma, though I don’t think he anticipated Trump.  Trump’s how we reached this crisis point, but it’s what came before that prepared the ground that’s the true issue.

Hedges has an idiosyncratic but pertinent background for writing this book, as he came out of a Christian seminary, but had a long career as a journalist who witnessed the rise of autocracies in Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and elsewhere.  He recognizes the same kind of patterns in what we nowadays call “Christian Nationalism,” though they have often referred to themselves as “Christian dominionists.” Dominion strikes me as the operative jargon.  It’s extremist Christians who want dominion over America, and they’ve long plotted to get it.  They dominate the Republican party, and they’re perfectly willing to throw democracy, the American constitution, the Bill of Rights, and whatever else becomes an impediment to their ambitions—like the truth itself—into the toilet, while talking up their patriotism, religiosity, and their many other hypocritical facades.

I would like to know what’s so “conservative” about that?  What exactly are they “conserving”?

Well, I think they’re conserving the world that never-was, a fervent fantasy of an all-Christian America where a literalist interpretation of the Bible rules and gay people or anyone one else who looks funny has no place.  Hedges:

“There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity, disorder and chaos.  Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check.  It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female.  These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare.  Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence.”

That’s the rescue this kind of Christianity aims to effect.  For Americans stranded in towns left dying when industry vacated them (I visit them when I go to prisons in eastern Colorado), who are left with the hollow promises of a materialism they can’t really pursue, and feel in many ways that the pride has left America and being American, Christian dominionism comes in with an energized, orderly world promising that they can join the elite as upraised believers when Christianity finally rules America and Jesus returns to punish the sinners.

Hedges observes how insular these kind of communities had become by the time he’d published his book—shopping only in Christian malls, confined to spending time with your church’s members, and consuming a diet of nothing but Christian news and media.  He makes no mention of Fox News, but you can see where the Christian evangelicals merge with the Republicans.  I wonder if the producers at Fox didn’t study evangelical media patterns.  Both aim for a completely insular audience who’s never truly exposed to counter-viewpoints or legitimate concerns that fall outside of diligently repeated dogmas and talking points.  Doesn’t the following paragraph more or less apply to the MAGA crowd?  Hedges:

“Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless.  We cannot reach this movement.  It does not want dialogue.  It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion.  It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school.  Naïve attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christians or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction…..These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives.  They have one goal—its destruction.”

Of course, demonizing liberals, Democrats, non-Christians, or non-evangelical Christians as of Satan, a curse on this very Earth, does not differ so much between the pulpit and Fox News talking heads. (All attempts to convince them that we, too, are human, are doomed.) How many times did Trump pivot in that debate to the unwashed, foreign hordes coming over the border to maim, kill, rape us, and take our beloved plantation and custodial employments?  And when that happens, that’s the Democrats fault.  Or maybe it’s trans people.

Anyway, whoever the fuck it is, your problems all come from liberals and non-white people.  Never mind that the Republicans signed off just as much as the Democrats did on allowing industry to leave the heartland.  Never mind that they’ll always protect the bottom line of any corporation or any rich guy, and they’ll happily strip away the social services that their Republican base depends on.

To see this conspiracy in full form, look no further than the Supreme Court, who has now come out of its own closet.  They salivated to finally overturn Roe vs. Wade, and they were put into the job to do just that.  Forget fifty years of its precedent as a human right.  In the past week, they held up a law making it illegal to be homeless and sleep outside; they stripped regulation-making capacity from government agencies, thus realizing another cherished conservative dream of destroying governmental power over business and the environment; and Monday they set it up so the president could act with immunity in the capacity of president, opening the door to unimaginable potential for autocracy and corruption.

How did they get there?  Through a long, well-funded evangelical effort to stack the courts with Christian extremist judges.  The Supreme Court, apparently the ultimate in untouchable elitism, can’t be bothered anymore even with feints at following legal precedents or clearly established law.  Did they not learn in school that the United States established itself through the rejection of monarchy?

Of course they did.  They just don’t care.  Why don’t they care?  They’re part of the divine plan to establish an all Christian nation.  They, like red state legislatures busy stripping away individual rights, regard themselves as the only legitimate governance.  If there are checks on the presidency (for when Trump gets there) or on the Supreme Court, that’s a mere inconvenience.  As long as you’re fulfilling God’s Plan and you’re not a Democrat, you are exempt from normal concerns, like, say corruption via billionaires.

Clarence, they’re not giving you all that money because they like you.

What’s extraordinary, then, beyond the prolonged, slow-moving coup that’s on the verge of enactment, has to be that it’s the face of Donald Trump that brands the enterprise.  None of this quite works without his special ingredient.  That he may be the least religious man to ever hold down the job of American president doesn’t seem to bother the evangelicals (“I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”).  That he’s mean, hateful, bullying, utterly corrupt and corrupting, and prevaricates with every word out his mouth doesn’t upset them. They rationalize this as he’s the guy who will bring God’s Plan to fruition, but “he knows not whom he serves.”

He serves himself, fools.  Nothing could be more screamingly obvious.  But since evangelicals are apparently unfamiliar with the Devil’s Bargain, allow me to explain it: it seems like you’re getting everything you want on the front end, but oh are you sorry when the bill comes due.

In a way, it’s the bill coming due for America and its many sins.  An utterly fraudulent, maniacal egotist edges ever closer to taking over the most powerful role in the world so that he can replace governmental experts with sycophants, use the justice system to attack his enemies, and set himself up as an autocrat with total power, enabled by the spineless, greedy Republicans in Congress, the rightwing media, and the smug pricks on the Supreme Court.  If Trump wins the election, Christian evangelicals will finally get their stifling utopia, seal their deal with the Devil, and the rest of America—and the world with it—is good and fucked.

That’s where we stand shortly before Independence Day 2024.  I wish I could declare independence from all this atavistic horror.  I believe that was the original idea invigorating the American adventure—you could leave behind the hidebound tyrannies of Europe and live your own vision.  If you separated church and state, for instance, you could observe your religion as you pleased.  Yet, that doesn’t seem good enough.  You have to observe my religion as I please.

All of this comes at a moment in history where the overwhelming truth has to be how bound together we are as a species on this planet.  If there’s a war on the other side of the world, we never would have heard about that, even a couple hundred years ago, but now it’s on our screens.  The toxic waste dumped in one ocean floats to another.  The collective carbon emissions on the planet have started to convulse it.  Our borders cannot be remote or impassable any longer.  People from one part of the world leave in desperation for another.  We’ve been building to this moment of recognition since we’ve had any notions of history, and I suppose what must come with it is all the undertow of clinging to a fervent projection of how it used to be, how we must go back to an isolation we never truly had from one another.  Sooner or later, our paths cross with people who are not us.  Are they really so different than us?  At what point will we wake up, start a revolution, and proclaim our interdependence?