I’ll post just the three or four items that struck me the most today, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol of the United States.
Time Magazine, via Yahoo! News, 4 Jan 2022: January 6th May Have Been Only the First Wave of Christian Nationalist Violence
Largely forgotten—unless we look back at countless photos and footage of the violence—are the Christian banners and flags, the wooden crosses, the impromptu praise and worship sessions, the “Jesus Saves” signs, the Christian t-shirts, and the infamous corporate prayer in Jesus name in the Senate Chamber. Having stormed the sanctum of American democracy, the “QAnon Shaman” thanked God for “filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ,” allowing them to send a message to their enemies “that this is our nation not theirs.”
We are forgetting that January 6th was very much a religious event—white Christian nationalism on display. We must remember that fact. Because evidence is mounting that white Christian nationalism could provide the theological cover for more events like it.
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Slate, William Saletan, 6 Jan 2022: The Real Threat to American Democracy, subtitled, “It’s not Republican politicians. It’s their conspiracy-addled voters.”
Republican politicians have spent the year since Jan. 6, 2021, working to undermine democracy and the rule of law. They’ve condoned or ignored Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, purged colleagues who spoke the truth, and tried to cripple the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. But beneath this corruption lies a deeper problem: a toxic GOP electorate. Republican politicians are entertaining the lies, ousting the truth-tellers, and sabotaging the investigation because that’s what their voters want. It’s the surest way to survive a Republican primary.
In the past two weeks, media organizations have released a slew of polls that show how far Republican voters have drifted from reality. For starters, they’ve fully latched on to the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election. More than a year after counts, recounts, and court fights resolved the outcome, 70 percent to 80 percent of Republicans still insist that President Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win. Seventy-four percent say the election was “rigged and stolen from Trump,” and 60 percent say it should be overturned.
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The Republican electorate’s pathologies don’t excuse the cowardice or opportunism of GOP officeholders. Many of these politicians stood by or collaborated as Trump spread the lies; others are too spineless to speak up now that the lies have taken hold. Instead, what the pathologies show is that the party’s leaders have become its followers. They allowed their base to become convinced that the election was stolen, and now they’re catering to this madness to keep their jobs. The only way out is to reverse the incentives so that in future campaigns for office, lying about the 2020 election and covering up Jan. 6 is more costly than defending the rule of law. It’s unlikely that we can make such corruption a liability in Republican primaries. Let’s hope we can make it fatal in the general election.
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New York Times, guest opinion essay by Katherine Stewart, 6 Jan 2022: Christian Nationalism Is One of Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons.
The most serious attempt to overthrow the American constitutional system since the Civil War would not have been feasible without the influence of America’s Christian nationalist movement. One year later, the movement seems to have learned a lesson: If it tries harder next time, it may well succeed in making the promise of American democracy a relic of the past.
Christian nationalist symbolism was all over the events of Jan. 6, as observers have pointed out. But the movement’s contribution to the effort to overturn the 2020 election and install an unelected president goes much deeper than the activities of a few of its representatives on the day that marks the unsuccessful end (or at least a temporary setback) of an attempted coup.
With reactions to Jan. 6, 2021, from Michele Bachmann, Lance Wallnau, Charlie Kirk, Michael Farris, Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Dinesh D’Souza, Ralph Reed, and others (and a mention of David Barton, “a key figure in the fabrication of Christian nationalist myths about history”). The usual suspects.
With references to the “Seven Mountains” ideology, which I had not heard about. Several Google matches, but nothing on Wikipedia. It’s about Christians who want to control the world.
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Slate, Nicole Lewis, 6 Jan 2022: What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists, subtitled, “A year later, we are still trying to understand what drove the individuals to the Capitol, and still ignoring what we already know about how they got there.”
It has been one year since thousands of people gathered on the steps of the Capitol building with the shared mission of interrupting the peaceful transfer of power. The anniversary of Jan. 6 has brought with it a flood of stories exploring what could have possibly driven so many people to turn against the very democracy they swear they were trying to protect.
“The rioters’ stories are framed as a portrait of loss,” says Kerry Howley; we learn about Gina Bisignano, Guy Reffitt, and Rosanne Boyland. At the end she raises the question,
What do we do about these insurrectionists’ naïveté and inability to parse fact from fiction?
Lewis’ point:
Her telling of Bisignano’s, Reffitt’s, and Boyland’s stories offers an unvarnished look at the absolute banality of evil.
Which is to say, they were just ordinary, unthinking people. But:
Howley’s protagonists reflect a political sensibility that has swept through the nation. Whether we call it populism or nationalism or nativism doesn’t really matter. A subset of Americans, mostly white, vehemently believes the country is being stolen from them by liberal elites and people of color.
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It is their whiteness, not their ordinariness and naïveté, that’s most predictive of their eventual assault on the Capitol.
Much more here, but this dovetails with the many other observations that the rioters were white and Christian, people who felt their country was being taken away from them (and that such a despicable person as Donald T, despite all his supporters’ claim to Christian morality, was the only way they could get it back).
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Passing thought: if the Republicans and Trump supporters are so sure that “antifa” and BLM were behind the Jan. 6 2021 event, why wouldn’t they *welcome* investigations into that event? Instead, they try to block every investigation they can. To anyone who is not addled by ideological cultism, this is as telling as anything.
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There’s a broad general theme at work — one of my provisional conclusions — that humankind cannot bear much reality (T.S. Eliot). That most people live in subjective worlds among one another, with no appreciation or understanding of the real, objective world.
But some people are better at dealing with reality than others; more open to new circumstances in a changing world, instead of reacting against those changes.
And again in the broadest possible terms, as the world becomes more and more interconnected, with all of us in easy touch with the experiences and beliefs of others unlike ourselves, the people most alarmed by perceived threats to their identities and ways of life, resort to whatever it takes to defend themselves against change.
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One more: John Scalzi.
