Author: chswebsite

Philip Gorski, Yale University

At first glance, the protesters who gathered around the American Capitol on 6. January seemed to be a motley crew. One observer espied: “Preppy looking country club Republicans, well-dressed social conservatives, and white Evangelicals in Jesus caps…standing shoulder to shoulder with QAnon cultists, Second Amendment cosplay commandos, and doughy, hardcore white nationalists.” The symbolism on display also seemed like apples and oranges. One group erected a giant cross, another a wooden gallows. Someone in the crowd waved a “Jesus Saves” banner, while another sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie.

On closer inspection though, the picture gets murkier, the lines harder to draw. Christians waved Trump flags. The neo-Fascist militia group known as the “Proud Boys” kneeled and prayed before plunging into the breach. Nor were such mixtures of Christian, nationalist and white supremacist symbols unusual. One man, decked out as a cosplay crusader, clutched a large leather Bible to his chest with skeleton gloves. What looked like apples and oranges turned out to be a fruit cocktail: White Christian Nationalism (WCN).

What is WCN?

WCN is, first of all, a story about America. In this story, America was “founded as a Christian nation.” It was founded by and for (white) Christians; and its laws and institutions are based on “Biblical” (i.e., Protestant) Christianity; or perhaps even breathed into the Founders’ ears by God, Himself. This much is certain though: America is divinely favored. Whence its enormous wealth and power. Divine blessings lead to national obligations. America has been entrusted with a sacred mission: to spread religion, freedom and civilization – by force, if necessary. Today, that mission is endangered by the growing influence and even the mere presence of non-Christians (also: non-whites) in America. White Christians must therefore “take back the culture” and also “the country.” Which are, after all, their rightful possessions. What White Christian Nationalists hear when Trump promises to “Make America Great Again”: “Make America Christian Again.” And, sotto voce, make it “White Again”, too.

WCN is not just a story. It is also a political vision, manifested in a set of “policy preferences.” Violence and retribution are central to that vision. As survey researchers such as Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead have shown, White Christian Nationalists tend to favor a strong military and capital punishment; they also strongly oppose gun control. Racial purity is also central to the vision. As Perry and Whitehead also show, WCN is strongly correlated with opposition to interracial marriage, non-white immigration and affirmative action. It’s not hard to see what’s white and nationalist about this vision. It’s more difficult to understand its roots in Christianity. Isn’t Christianity a religion of universal peaceand brotherhood?

To understand how American Christianity became entangled with racism and violence, we first have to trace it back to its Scriptural roots. Those roots are threefold. WCN is not just one story, but a combination of three. The first is a Promised Land story based on the Old Testament. The New England Puritans saw themselves as the heirs of the Biblical Israelites.They imagined themselves as a “chosen people, and they came to see the “new world” as their “Promised Land.” For a while, they thought the native peoples might be one of the “lost tribes” of Israel. But as their relationship with the natives shifted from curiosity to hostility, the Puritan settlers recast the Indians as “Canaanites” or “Amalekites”, who were occupying “their” Promised Land.

The second story is an End Times story based on the Book of Revelation. For much of Western history, most Christian theologians read that book in allegorical terms. The violent struggles it depicted between the forces of good and evil, they reasoned, actually represented the moral struggles that took place within the believer’s heart. But there were always some Christians who interpreted the text more literally, as a description of future events. Many Puritan radicals embraced such readings, and took them along to New England.

The two stories gradually fused together during the Puritans’ wars with the natives during the late 17th century. Puritan theologians such as Cotton Mather came to believe that the New World might be the central battlefield in the final struggle between good and evil foretold in Revelation. Needless to say, Mather placed himself and his Puritan brethren on the side of the good, and the Catholic French and their native allies on the side of evil. He and other Puritans likened the Indians to demons and depicted the Indian wars as blood sacrifices to an angry God. It was war — the violent struggle between the English and the French and the Indians that some historians now refer to as the “Second Hundred Years War” – that welded Protestantism and Englishness together in the New World.

But how did Protestantism and Englishness get entangled with whiteness? To answer that question, we need to shift our focus to the south, to that other seedbed of American culture: The Colony of Virginia. There, and elsewhere, the most common justification for the enslavement of kidnapped Indians and Africans was that they were “heathens.” But this argument broke down in the late 17th century as some enslaved persons converted to Christianity and some white Christians sought to evangelize them. The problem was initially resolved by shifting the legal basis of slavery from religion to color: “Blacks” could be slaves; “whites” could not. It was then more fully resolved by creating a new theological bases for slavery. Perhaps the most influential was the “Curse of Ham.” Blacks were the descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, the argument went, and their color and enslavement were a result of the curse that Noah had called down on head. This is the third story: The Racial Curse Story.

It would be another century before WCN became American. Until the American Revolution, most colonists still considered themselves British. It was only after the Revolution, that they began to think of themselves as “American.” Until that time, the term “Americans” was more often used to refer to the native peoples. So, one way that (white) Americans set themselves apart from their British “cousins” was by claiming to resemble (native) Americans. The American (man) was a little more savage, a little more violent, than his British forebears. He was, in a sense, the true heir of the Indian who was (supposedly) disappearing, and the true inhabitant of the “frontier.” The white American had a trace of the red American in him.

WCN is what linguist George Lakoff calls a “frame.” A frame is sort of like a bare-bones movie script. It “has roles (like a cast of characters), relations between the roles, and scenarios carried out by those playing the roles.” Like a movie, it can be made and remade, with new actors and modified scenarios. The “frontiersman” becomes an “Indian fighter” and then a “cowboy.” The scene shifts from Appalachia to Kentucky to Wyoming.

Or to Texas and California. There, new actors entered the scene. Some did so involuntarily. Former citizens of Mexico did not choose to become Americans. Others came freely. Though immigrants from China and Japan did not find the freedom they were promised. Instead, they were cast into roles they did not audition for: “savages” and “heathens” unfit for “freedom” or even “civilization.” As the scene of the action followed the “frontier” to the South and the West, the actors changed but the roles remained the same.

It was not until the “closing of the frontier” and the beginnings of empire, that the script fundamentally changed: White Protestant Nationalism was reborn as WASP imperialism. The revisions were as follows. First, as Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe and Ireland were begrudgingly admitted into the charmed circle of whiteness, various shades of whiteness were distinguished: the whitest of the white were “Anglo-Saxons” (or, alternatively, “Nordics” or “Aryans.”) Second, the Promised Land became the Whole World. The motive was no longer conquest; it was “spreading freedom”, “civilization” and, of course, Christianity. All this as an act of benevolent “self-sacrifice.” Third, the End Times were indefinitely postponed. The Kingdom of God on earth would be achieved through the spread of Christian civilization – whether by peaceful or violent means.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked the beginning of WCN qua WASP Imperialism. By the end of the Cold War in 1989, WCN mutated yet again to become (White) Judaeo-Christian Imperialism. The parentheses around “white”reference the shift from the explicit white supremacism of the Jim Crow era to the “colorblind” racism of the post-Civil Rights Era. “Judaeo-Christian” gestures towards the “trifaith” vision of American pluralism that took root during World War II. “Imperialism” points towards the fundamental continuity that runs through 20th century American geopolitics: an empire of soldiers, missionaries and businessmen, but an empire all the same.

What really changed during the second half of the century was not so much the script as the scriptwriters. Since the Colonial Era, the dusty old script of WCN had been passed down from one generation of liberal Protestants to another: Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Episcopalians and even Unitarians. By the 1970s, though, they had abandoned WCN – and religion, too, in many cases. Liberal Protestants were becoming secular progressives. A rising phalanx of white evangelicals eagerly seized the torch. They began fiddling with the script. They brought back the original version of the End Times Story with its battles between good and evil and natural and supernatural forces. With the WASPs out of the way, they went back to good old plain white – which, they insisted, was no color at all. And while they remained firmly committed to American Empire qua military power, they expressed reservations about international institutions that might limit US “sovereignty.”

They had a good run but a short run. By the early aughts, they were losing control of the narrative”, as we now say. The problem was simple: the number of white Protestants was dwindling. They were no longer able to dominate the scene. Immigration and secularization were the cause. The presence of a Black family in the White House added insult to injury. The Financial Crisis of 2008 poured salt in the wound. The howls of pain from conservative white men in the American“heartland” were the loudest.

Enter Donald Trump, Golden Escalator, stage right. At first glance, he seemed an unlikely champion of WCN. But “Christian” had often been outvoted by “White” and “Nationalist” in the past, and the selection of Mike Pence made it unanimous. Trump’s Schmittian friend/enemy politics lined up easily enough with WCN’s good/evil frame. His sociopathic bloodlust and gladiatorial performativity stirred dormant phantasies of white male violence. And then there was his unapologetic and barely concealed racism. “The Blacks”, “The Mexicans”, “The Muslims” – Trump’s vision was the opposite of colorblind. And much as Trump loved “winning”, he was no fan of empire. That was for “losers and suckers.” In short, Trump preached an old-time religion of White Christian Nationalism.

There was just one problem: White Christian Nationalists could no longer muster a majority of the popular vote. They were saved by the Electoral College in 2016 – literally “saved”, they thought. But not in 2020. And surely not fairly? The lies of their “anointed” leader aside, how could they be losing control of “their” country? Trained to see hidden forces behind political events in “End Times 101”, they were quick to see them behind Trump’s loss, too. And if a “sacred election” were stolen from you, wouldn’t you try to “stop the steal”? So they tried. Unsuccessfully.

Where does this leave us?

I am told that the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” The danger is obvious: the Republican Party has become an anti- democratic party prepared to use all available means to retake power. If they succeed, the experiment of American democracy, however imperfect, is over. The opportunity, too: to undertake a Second Reconstruction that will – finally – realize Martin Luther King’s vision of a “nation of nations, a people of peoples” or, more plainly, a multiracial democracy. It will require, not just a rewrite of the WCN script, but it’s consignment to the dustbin of history.

The essay is published at TRAJECTORIES (Spring 2021 – Special Issue)

Richard Lachmann, State University of New York

There are two main explanations for Trump’s 2016 victory and for his voters’ enduring loyalty. One sees his support as largely racist, a reaction by white voters against having been governed by a Black man for eight years and what many of them regard as repeated insults from privileged elites. The other focuses on Obama’s neoliberal policies, which led to atepid recovery from the 2008 financial collapse and the spectacle of massive bailouts for banks but not for mortgage holders or the unemployed combined with total impunity for the rich crooks who caused the crisis. Of course, in a nation with a huge electorate, both those motives along with others animated millions of voters. And we need to recognize that voter suppression, ubiquitous rightwing media outlets, and the bias of the Electoral College have been essential to give any Republican in this century a realistic chance of being elected president. (Gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in compact urban districts benefit Republicans in races for Congress and state legislatures.)

In 2020 Trump received eleven million more votes than he had in 2016, while Biden exceeded Hillary Clinton’s total by fifteen million. The depressing interpretation is that millions of new voters flocked to Trump despite his catastrophic failure to address the health or economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, his inability to ever reach 50% approval, and his ostentatious dishonesty, corruption, crudeness and debauchery. The glass half full view is that Biden’s 51.3% was the highest percentage a challenger to an incumbent president has received since FDR in 1932. And Trump was the first incumbent since Herbert Hoover to lose the presidency and both houses of Congress for his party in a single term.

Both perspectives get at essential realities of US politics today. It is incredibly hard to dethrone a president, so Biden’s victory reflects the electorate’s acknowledgement of Trump’s gross record of failure. Trump was the first president, again since Hoover, to end his term with a net loss of jobs. The GDP growth rate during Trump’s term was the lowest since Hoover’s. He failed to deliver on his 2016 promises of a vast infrastructure plan or to restore industrial jobs. His only significant legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut bill, received negative approval ratings in every poll, a clear difference from the public reception of the Bush and Reagan tax cuts, and perhaps a sign of public recognition that Trump’s tax cuts, even more than Reagan’s and Bush’s, go almost entirely to the very rich and to corporations.

And yet…we need to remember that Trump’s economic failures, general ineptitude, and knack for hiring cranks and fools were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it is almost certain that without the deus ex machina of a pandemic the economy would have been good enough, and Trump’s incompetence and callousness not blatant enough, to allow him to win an Electoral College victory even as he would have joined Bush in 2000 and himself in 2016 in winning the presidency while losing the popular vote. After all, if Trump had gotten 80,000 more votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, he would have tied Biden with 269 electoral votes for each, throwing the outcome to the House where Republicans hold a majority of states, and which would have given Trump the presidency. So the real question then becomes, how can we explain so many Americans’ modest expectations of their presidents?

Trump’s initial election and his enduring support from more than 40% of the electorate are grounded in a decades-long failure of presidents, and American government more broadly, to deliver benefits for ordinary people. Except for Obamacare, there has not been a single significant addition to social benefits since the Johnson administration. When Bill Clinton touted the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave, as one of his major achievements we were deep in the realm of the pathetic.

As has been endlessly reported, median income has stagnated since the 1970s. Life expectancy and educational attainment have plateaued in contrast to every other rich country and many much poorer ones. The system for paying for medical care has become ever more baroque and open to grifting even with Obamacare. Student debt has risen over $1 trillion in the past twenty years. At the same time, the ability of the rich to benefit from tax cuts, bailouts, subsidies, and contracts has become ever more open.

Republicans have been masterful at undermining confidence in the idea that elections can matter for anything other than packing courts and asserting the superiority of “real” Americans against the Democrats’ multiracial cosmopolitan coalition. Using the filibuster and other parliamentary mechanisms, Republicans have prevented Democratic presidents from delivering on their promises no matter how modest. Rightwing judges have blocked administrative measures. The US state relies much more than other wealthy nations on regulation and provisions in the tax code to deliver social benefits and to protect citizens. Such measures inevitably become ever more complex and open to manipulation by lobbyists who, unlike ordinary citizens, have the time and expertise (or money to hire experts) to manipulate agencies, including the IRS, to lock in special benefits and undermine broadly worded laws that proclaim the intention of guarding citizens’ health, safety, and ability to work and consume free from theft by their employers and the corporations from which they purchase goods and services.

Democrats in recent decades have been unambitious in their reform proposals. With the great exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidentialandidates in the post-Reagan era have mimicked Republicans and devoted their efforts to explaining why they couldn’t enact benefits citizens in other rich countries take for granted. Instead, they have invited voters to participate in “conversations” about race and poverty, discussions that they admit are intended to enlighten rather than to solve problems. (Biden, in response to Sanders’ challenge and in contrast to Clinton in 2016, offered surprisingly expansive proposals even as he evoked nostalgia for the supposedly golden Obama years.)

Voters get almost no help from journalists in understanding the complexities of government decisions or in seeing the implications of legislation and budgetary and administrative measures. Americans have little idea how the government spends money. Among the most extreme and enduring errors is the belief, revealed in poll after poll, decade after decade, that foreign aid makes up at least 20% of the federal budget (the real number is under 1%). Democratic presidents do little to clarify matters. Obama, in perhaps his worst act of political malpractice, never articulated the difference between his Recovery Act of 2009 and Bush’s bank bailout in late 2008.

All this understandably led many voters to yearn for a strongman who could “drain the swamp” (in Trump’s own words) and “knock heads together” (in someone else’s words). Trump issued a continuing stream of promises and boasts in his campaigns and during his presidency. Despite legacy newspapers’ and television networks’ escalating willingness to label Trump’s claims as lies, polls and interviews suggest that the 74 million who voted for Trump in November took his violent rhetoric as evidence of his willingness and success in confronting “special interests.” That term is vague enough to encompass both the billionaires that Trump claimed he knew and had the wealth and audacity to deny as well as China, immigrants, demanding minorities, and snooty coastal elites. In the absence of real knowledge about how government works, it became easy for Trump’s supporters to mistake inhuman measures against immigrants and violent rhetoric against China for real action against those and other targets.

President Biden and Congressional Democrats are giving clear indications that they have absorbed the lessons of the Clinton and Obama years. Only massive spending and dramatic reforms can cut through the miasma of misinformation and ignorance that allows so many voters to believe that the Republicans are the party of “ordinary people” or that there are no essential differences between the two parties and therefore they might as well go with the party that indulges their hatreds and puts up candidates who at least offer a good show. Warnock and Ossoff’s success in campaigning on the promise to deliver $2000 relief checks emboldened Democrats to refuse Republican “compromises” that would have reduced that amount or otherwise significantly cut the $1.9 trillion total of the new relief bill. If that measure is followed by further achievements such as a massive infrastructure bill oriented toward green energy, a $15 minimum wage, and strong regulatory measures that offer palpable protections to workers and consumers, then voters will be able to see clear differences between the two parties and will have the motivation to vote for Democrats at all levels in coming elections.

Democrats can’t count on media, even that produced by sympathetic journalists, to explain how those measures will impact ordinary Americans. Politicians will need to tout those accomplishments themselves again and again. The 2020 election demonstrates that even the most egregious failures and grossest behavior will not cost Republicans enough votes to ensure their defeat. Democrats need to produce dramatic programmatic achievements and to publicize those relentlessly. Otherwise, we will see a repeat of the 2010-16 election cycles. Republicans will be able to distort Democrats’accomplishments, a task made easier if those successes are meager or hidden in convoluted legislation. Unless and until voters see improvements in their lives, they will continue to blame an array of enemies that Republicans will vilify in colorful and violent language.

The dilemma Democrats face today is not unique to the US or to this moment. Left parties win support when they institute policies that deliver results that make real and legible differences in peoples’ lives. The more complex the programs, especially when they are not universal and have elaborate procedures for deciding who qualifies, the harder it is for voters to see those results and the easier it is to believe that someone else is benefitting at their expense. The target of resentment differs from country to country. In the US that someone else most often is seen as Black. Thus, the lack, or progressive weakening, of universal social benefits provides fuel to sustain old and animate new prejudices.

As unions weaken in most rich countries and media become ever more concentrated and open to rightwing manipulation, voters lose access to institutions that can explain the implications of electoral and legislative choices. Biden and the current Democratic Congressional majority, like their counterparts in other countries, can overcome those limitations only with clear and ambitious programs that deliver benefits that are impossible for the broad public to ignore and therefore difficult for Republicans to distort.

For comparative historical sociologists, the post-Trump era provides an interesting case to test our theories on how policy is made and how voters understand their choices. For those of us who live in first world democracies (however limited) and who would like the next generation to have that same option, the decisions elected officials and ordinary citizens make hold much more than academic interest.

The essay is published at TRAJECTORIES (Spring 2021 – Special Issue)

Stephanie L. Mudge, UC Davis

If we are willing to set aside the truly horrifying circumstances surrounding the 2020 election from beginning to end—a big ask—and focus on certain selected facts, one could dare to argue that U.S. democracy is alive and kicking. After decades of alienation and demobilization up until 2008, voter turnout as a percentage of the voting-eligible population in 2020 exceeded 66%—a rate unseen since the turn of the 20th Century. Voter turnout increased in every state in the country, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. Early voting among younger-generation Latinx voters increased by more than 300% relative to 2016. Numbers aren’t in on Black voter turnout, but all signs point to unusually high figures on that front, too. Big tech firms began to show some glimmers, long overdue, of a sense of democratic and civic responsibility—even if it meant taking measures that work against their bottom line. The 117th Congress, record-breaking in many respects, features an all-time high of 141 women members (26.4%) and more racial/ethnic diversity than any Congress in history. And despite an unprecedented assault on the integrity of democratic institutions led by the President himself, those institutions by and large withstood the test—for now.

Yes, I know. What about the horrors of January 6th? What about the fact that 46.8% of votes— more than 74 million—were cast for a President that trafficked in racism, anti-science, xenophobia and corruption, and who may well run again in 2024? And then there are the 33 states that have, since the 2020 election, introduced a whopping 165 bills aimed at restricting the vote, not to mention the heart- sinking tidbits that appear on our social media feeds like regressive and anti-democratic homeschooling and images of a militarized Capitol on-guard against deepening far-right and white supremacist threats.

Often times the term “polarization” refers to partisan rancor and the increasingly vast divide between red and blue. But I would argue that we should think about polarization in a much broader way—what we might term a polarization of possible futures. Depending on where we look, how we think and where we get our news, the political present may look like a regressive hellscape of racist autocratic backsliding or the emerging terrain of a new era of democratic forward progress—one in which younger generations and historically marginalized groups lead the way.

Indeed, for each of the horrors outlined above, there are important counterpoints (with the exception of January 6 , which has no silver lining). Biden is neither populist, nor charismatic, nor especially progressive, and yet he won against a populist rival with a deeply loyal base by a margin that, for some, qualifies as a “landslide victory”—one that featured impressive historical achievements, including the flipping of Georgia to the Democratic column for the first time since 1992. For every bill out there aimed at restricting voting access (across 33 states), there are at least three other bills aimed at expanding access (across 37 states). For every image of homeschooling as a hotbed of anti-democratic, anti-feminist conservatism there is counter-imagery of a generation of homeschooled graduates who actively uphold democratic and civic virtues. Meanwhile, as committed fiscal conservatives are increasingly marginalized in a Trumpifying Republican Party and (some) Democrats seem ready, finally, to return to an embrace of proactive spending initiatives, the age of austerity—and the obscenely winner-take-all economy that was its complement—is losing its grip. The notion that caring for a family isn’t real work worthy of pay seems to be on its way out. Some corporations and foundations that have never been especially well-known for their progressive radicalism are changing their tune on the urgency of climate change and are funding academics—even sociologists!—to counter and reverse neoliberal logic.

If we take all that in, it starts to seem that the most striking thing about the 2020 election, the lead-up to it, and experience since is not that they decisively showed where we’re headed, but rather that they unveiled a range of future pathways that is more wide-open now than during any time in living memory. Historical sociologists might even conclude that we’relooking at a turning point the likes of which hasn’t been seen in generations, comparable more to the 1930s than the 1960s.

How do we know which of our polarized futures is most likely? That’s not a question I think we can answer right now. But I do think that if we take in the whole political landscape, rather than viewing it from within our political and media bubbles, the picture is not as grim as some would have it. Much depends on dynamics within the parties: how far the Trumpification of the Republican Party progresses, what that does to Republican electoral prospects in the longer term, and whether Trumpification finally drives Republicanism into the anti-democratic cul-de- sac that now seems to be its logical end-point; on the Democratic side, the question of whether the fragile truce between its youth-dominated“progressive” wings and the party’s more senior ranks of moderates and Clinton-era holdovers can hold is crucial, as is the question of whether Democrats’ slight—probably temporary— Congressional advantage will translate into meaningful institutional shifts toward securing voting access, reversing racial injustice, bolstering organized labor and improving the economic situations and prospects of the long- suffering U.S. working and middle classes.

On these last questions, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about how the ostensible late-twentieth-century victory of democratic capitalism became, in practice, a victory of capitalism over democracy—in social democratic and center-left hands, no less—I wouldn’t say recent history gives us a lot of reasons to be optimistic. The argument that I settled on, in a nutshell, was that politicians, like the rest of us, act on the world on the basis of how they understand it, and by the later twentieth century dominant factions among “progressives” and “social democrats” understood the world in terms of what markets’ interests would allow, which helps to explain why the once-optimistic era of the “third way” now looks like the widespread self-sabotage of center-left parties. In the U.S. case, did this have to do with the increasingly detached, elite- dominated, money-driven world of electoral politics? Yes, surely—but the U.S. political class has always been elite-dominated, and yet there was a time when many of its members thought in very different terms. Were market- centered worldviews mere recognition of financializing economic realities? Sure, to some extent—but let’s remember that political elites of many partisan stripes helped to usher that reality in; they were not merely bystanders. In other words, we could make the argument that the beliefs came first and the reality followed.

If this analysis is right, the question is how dominant figures inside Democratic networks ‘see’—and especially how they understand the horizons of the economically possible in the COVID context and (hopefully) post-COVID future. And here I am very cautiously optimistic—not because I have much faith in Democratic Party elites, but because the avenues into those networks seem to have opened up and multiplied in recent years. To the extent this continues to push out the boundaries of the possible in new progressive directions, the better our possible futures look in otherwise dark times.

This essay is published at TRAJECTORIES (Spring 2021 – Special Issue)