Tag: politics

What Did I Get Right and Wrong About The Trump Presidency?

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 1 Comment

What did I get right and wrong about the Trump Presidency? The answer cannot be left only to the vagaries of memory, so I recently looked over some of my old blog posts and social media from 2016.

The short answer: I’m pretty sure I thought it was going to be even worse than it was. I’m convinced this was the right way to be wrong. Details below.

On March 2, 2016, while Trump was battling for the Republican nomination, I wrote this:

In my judgment, all of this more or less came to pass. I offered no hard benchmarks here but my impression is that I envisioned an even more extreme degradation of our civic fabric than the one we’ve seen. I thought there would be more violence. The day before the election, I wrote this:

I feel very comfortable standing by these words. From Charlottesville to El Paso, we saw the consequences of the hateful climate Trump stirred up. Immediately after the 2016 election, I wrote a post on “What To Expect From A Trump Presidency.” Here’s a key bit:

In contrast to every other modern American president, Trump’s basic instincts are authoritarian. He does not believe in liberal democracy. He is a demagogue willing to stoke the most dangerous fault lines in our society in order to gain power for himself. We now must hope that his foolishness creates a presidency marked more by simple bungling than by a coherent plan of oppression….

So what should we expect from a Trump presidency? Start by assuming that Trump has generally been sincere and will try to govern roughly as he campaigned. He will continue to lie with impunity, and will seek to silence and bully the press to make his lies seem normal. He will continue to create a climate of hostility against nearly everyone who isn’t Christian, White, heterosexual, and male. Muslims and immigrants are likely to be targeted with special harshness.

Expect some moments of calm. Expect the media to tell us about Trump’s surprising moderation. But four years is a long time. If Trump doesn’t launch a proactive campaign of oppression beginning January 20, it is likely to be only a matter of time. It’s not that Trump will have a coherent plan to subdue the Republic. Indeed, probably his only clear plan so far is to arrange his affairs to allow maximum corruption and profiteering. This he has already begun to do. If nothing else, he and and his children intend to become very rich. But recall, again, that Trump’s instincts are authoritarian and demagogic. There are going to be crises, both foreign and domestic, during the next four years. Trump will not respond well to any of them. Trump’s mercurial and vindictive character will come through. And the thought of men like Bannon and Sessions whispering in Trump’s ear is not comforting.

It is possible things will somehow turn out more or less alright. But the more likely scenario is that we are entering a very dangerous time….

After all we’ve seen, it now seems quaint that I was so worried about Bannon and Sessions, but I think much of this has stood the test of time. I remember sitting at the dinner table before the inauguration shaking my head and saying, “People are going to die. People are going to die.” It felt surreal to know it was coming and to have so little power to alter events. If Trump never in four years found his way to a coherent plan to end American democracy, he did in the end try to do just that.

Combining my faulty memory with facebook posts from the time and these blog entries, it seems I imagined a presidency even more disastrous than the one we got. Specifically, I thought crackdowns on Muslims, immigrants, and BLM protests would be more deadly than they turned out to be. I thought that at some point Trump would start a war abroad to boost his standing at home. I also thought there was a high possibility of economic disaster. In short, I was an alarmist.

I’m glad I was. This was a much better way to be wrong than those who were constantly caught flatfooted throughout these crazy years, surprised by the latest thing Trump had done, or naive about how racist and anti-democratic his movement truly was. I’m glad I wrote posts like this one throughout these past four years, refusing to mince words about Trump’s violence and the threat of white racism. As powerful political forces attempted to destroy our ability to imagine a common morality and a common connectedness as beloved children of God, many of us looked evil in the eye and kept our integrity. I am grateful.

To be sure, alarmism can go too far. It must remain flexible, and above all tethered to reality. We can probably all think of people whose opposition to Trump seems to have become an unwitting instrument of self-degradation.

My alarmism is why I woke the morning of January 6th wondering how many people were going to die in Washington D.C. that day. I didn’t have any special insight. I just wasn’t trying to deny what’s been right in front of us all along.

Being somewhat wrong as an alarmist is preferable to the alternative not just because it gave me a better read on events. I argue we alarmists constrained this presidency. We knew how bad it could be, so we acted to stop it. Our activism was one of the factors that prevented the worst from coming true.

From the first week of the Trump presidency we were on the streets. We showed up at airports in massive numbers to protest the Muslim ban. That set a tone. The Women’s March set a tone too. Then we were on the streets in 2017 and 2018 to defend health care for the sick and to protect immigrants at the border. We voted in huge numbers in 2018 and gained the House. In 2020 we marched for BLM and overwhelmed the racist forces with the highest voter turnout in over a century.

The Trump administration tried to create a culture of impunity. We didn’t allow it. Words and character matter. The Constitution is worth preserving. These fundamentally conservative intuitions became the stuff of liberal resistance in the Trump era.

The most important thing I got more wrong than right is captured in my 2016 preview of the Trump presidency:

We must engage Trump supporters with undiminished love and decency. Love is resistance. We must be open-hearted, lacking bitterness or animosity. We cannot rely on the usual norms of respectability that help us be kind to each other. We must love not because Trumpism is reasonable, but because the people who have put their faith in it are human beings made by God, and are infinitely valuable. And so, too, are all the people Trumpism will hurt. In the dark era we are entering, affirming the sacred worth of every person we encounter is an act of resistance.

I was right to try to live up to this code; wrong in how often I failed. All too often, I was more invested in my self-righteousness than in practical efforts to help people Trump was hurting. Christians are called to love our enemies, not obsess over them! Too often, I was obsessed over my posture toward Trump supporters rather than focusing on being in solidarity with oppressed people. I was often closed-hearted and bitter, preoccupied with being right, leaving very little room left for love or practical action.

Awareness is wasted without action. Indeed, “It is a sin when someone knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it.” Too often, as I sat in self-absorption, this biblical rebuke could be leveled right at me.

But we can also be gentle with ourselves. My fellow alarmists, don’t be sheepish. Don’t doubt what you experienced and the pain it caused you. To live through moments of crisis is to be more fully aware of the frailty of the individual in the sweep of history. So often the public action I took was the leftovers—after the papers were written, the classes taught, the dinners made, the children put to bed. The biggest challenges of the era were not, after all, public. They were inside my own head and home.

I return again to one of my favorite apocryphal anecdotes. The little boy is learning about the civil rights struggle and asks, “Grandpa, were you in the Klan or the FBI?” (The boy didn’t have a clear grasp of who the good guys were but we’ll leave that to the side).

“Son,” his grandpa drawls, “I was just in Georgia.”

There is a welcome humility in recognizing that during this era of crisis, “I was just in Georgia.” And there’s a more positive spin we might put on this anecdote. The point of liberal democracy is precisely so that more of us can be “just in Georgia,” living simple lives at peace with ourselves and our neighbors, unburdened by the fear that our actions may be of great historical consequence.

When I think back on this era I will be glad for the times I was on the street marching with others, doing what little I could to link my fate with my neighbors. I will be glad for the small practical things I tried to do here and there. I won’t miss, and I regret, the time I wasted doomscrolling on twitter.

We’ve come through a dark time, and none of us can know with certainty whether the dawn or still greater darkness lies just ahead.

Lord, have mercy, and teach us to love with action.

Settling In For A Political Crisis With No End In Sight

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 2 Comments
The good ol’ days when opponents of the American experiment announced themselves as such. Vice-President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens.

The actions of the Republican Party since Trump’s loss two months ago have clarified the present crisis more than a Trump victory could have. Not only has President Trump tried to overturn the will of American voters, growing numbers of congressional Republicans have backed his efforts.

Take it from a historian: this has never happened before. We face the real possibility of profound democratic backsliding, and there’s no end in sight.

Let’s define the parameters of this crisis in its most basic terms. Nothing is more fundamental to democracy than these two linked principles: elections are free and fair, and the losers of those elections duly concede power to the winners. President Trump and many of the leading contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination reject both principles. Republicans are turning from the American experiment, and we don’t know when or how this will end.

Today’s crisis recalls the civil war not because we’re on the verge of anything like that era’s violence, but because once again the most basic principles of democracy are in dispute. If you don’t accept the results of a free and fair election you are rejecting democracy itself. It’s pretty simple.

Secessionists could not abide the results of an election that brought an anti-slavery party to power. So they tried to leave the union. They did not pretend they won the election. If secessionists saw breaking the democratic compact as their path to power outside the union, today’s fire-eaters see hollowing out that compact as the means to power within a diminished union.

In the crisis of 1860, there was a satisfying clarity to secession. The immediate end of the union beckoned. The crisis was clear, the battle quickly joined. Today’s crisis is frustratingly diffuse. It is not announced with articles of secession or seizure of federal forts. It slowly grinds away at the very machinery of self-government and democratic procedure by which we have pledged to work out our differences.

If the Republicans succeed, we will be left with a country having the form of democracy but denying its power. (Yes, I’m going for the biblical allusions). There will still be elections but they won’t take place on a level playing field. Well-timed prosecutions of political opponents will become routine. Deployment of power across a range of institutions and life experiences will become increasingly partisan and personal rather than bureaucratic and rule-bound.

The rights and privileges of citizenship will still be enshrined in the constitution, but will become increasingly theoretical and detached from the day to day existence of ordinary citizens. Courts, media, universities, to name just a few key institutions, will lose some of their independence and become increasingly beholden to the ruling party.

These are not abstractions. We’re talking about a world where ordinary citizens have even less recourse to the law than they do now, where corruption, bribery, violence, and arbitrary power of all kinds is more routinely felt in peoples’ lives.

This is about the time in our theorizing when we stop short, confounded by the opaque nature of democratic backsliding. Are we overreacting? Is this a resistance fever dream? Or is it really plausible that the United States is in danger of joining the ranks of Hungary and Turkey, Russia and India, and so many others? For what it’s worth, the people who’ve spent their lives studying democracy tend to be concerned.

And there’s a broader historical reason to see our fate as tied with these other young democracies (or erstwhile democracies). We are a young democracy ourselves. In the robust form that we think of it, our democratic government was established when my parents were kids, as the civil rights movement transformed both the legal and cultural foundations of American democracy. In large swaths of the country some of the most basic provisions of the constitution, such as the 14th and 15th amendments, only began to be seriously enforced just two decades before I was born. And I’m still a young guy!

The United States is in danger of democratic backsliding not simply because we have a bumper crop of unprincipled Republican senators (though we do!). More basically we are a fledgling democracy trying to do something that has no real precedent: establish a truly equal liberal democracy with a diverse population made up of all the peoples of the earth. This is an exciting and inspiring project. It has real enemies.

What, then, should we do?

Are you kidding? I’m just a historian writing up a stream of consciousness rant on a Sunday evening. I want to read more from people who have really thought about and studied these issues. But I do have a couple general ideas.

–Make the abstract concrete. Look, I get warm fuzzies from talking about “the rule of law” and “democratic norms” and my stomach does little somersaults of anger when the President abuses the pardon power. But I have to face the fact that many ordinary people don’t really care. They want to know what policy and politics means for their paycheck, their family’s future, their neighborhood. We need to bring the abstractions of democracy down to the block where people live. The best defense of democracy is an invigorated democracy, where people are truly empowered not just to vote, but to shape their workplaces and communities.

–Make unlikely alliances. For instance, unless you truly in your heart of hearts hate democracy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is your friend. So is Mitt Romney. So are millions of Americans with whom you have profound political disagreements. We might not agree on how best to promote human flourishing. But we do know that a democratic future is the only one in which we will get to constructively contest our differences and build shared prosperity.

–Settle in for the long haul. This doesn’t mean being in a perpetual state of alarm. If nothing else, such a posture is unsustainable. Instead, it might mean relatively simple changes in the way you engage politics and voting in your social circles. Make “Does this candidate support democracy?” a litmus test. This crisis is so slow-moving and bizarre that lots of people don’t realize we’re in one, especially since it’s likely to last for many years. But you, dear reader, do see the crisis! So spread the sobering but hopeful news. This American experiment is really worth preserving.

The Racists Are Losing

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 2 Comments
Over 50,000 protestors fill the Ben Franklin Parkway in a march for racial justice, June 6, 2020. (Tyger Williams/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP).

This is an optimist’s case for the following proposition: one of the dumbest and deadliest inventions humans have ever devised is getting its butt kicked. Folks, the racists are losing.

We may come to remember the Trump presidency as a pathetically weak attempt to roll back the cultural, demographic, and ideological change that is rising to a nearly inexorable force. The effort to Make America Racist Again has already failed miserably. Give it another four years and it will still fail.

To drive home the point that my optimism does not rest in this year’s election results, I’m posting this before knowing whether or not Trump has been defeated. My case for optimism certainly doesn’t rest in the election of a longtime moderate Democrat with a habit of cozying up to white supremacist senators back in the day. My hope does not depend on whether this Trump interlude proves to be of the four or eight year variety. My optimism rests in a broader global-historical sweep of the twentieth century.

At the dawn of that century, Senator Ben Tillman stood on the floor of the United States Senate and said this: “We took the government away. We stuffed the ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it…The brotherhood of man exists no longer, because you shoot negroes [sic] in Illinois, when they come in competition with your labor, as we shoot them in South Carolina when they come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do.” Some might have deplored Senator Tillman’s candor but, as the kids say these days, where was the lie?

A century ago, racism was the coordinating principle of global affairs. W.E.B. Du Bois indulged no idle speculation when he wrote, “Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the statement ‘I am white,’ the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality?” The world-embracing hubris of it is what most stood out to Du Bois. People had found reasons to dominate each other since the dawn of time. But now, Europeans and their settler state descendants had not only come up with a bizarre conspiracy theory called whiteness, they used it to organize society and politics across the globe!

The ideology of whiteness fueled ecstatic visions of earthly conquest as divine calling. From Afrikaner ministers in the Dutch Reformed Church to prominent social gospelers in the United States, many white Protestants eagerly awaited the consummation of God’s plan, when their divinely chosen white race would fulfill its mission. Josiah Strong supposed that “God, with infinite wisdom and skill,” was “training the Anglo-Saxon race” for the day it would “spread itself over the earth.” In that glorious day the “inferior tribes” would be revealed as “only precursors of a superior race, voices in the wilderness crying: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” These days, the Christians imagined as white are more likely to be embarrassed and uneasy about it than to be carried away by fanciful flights of eschatological genocide.

Horror at the depths to which racism could take humanity in the Holocaust, and even more important, the challenge of anti-racist and independence movements all across the Global South in the second half of the twentieth century, dealt a body blow to white supremacy from which it has never recovered. Henceforth, denial moved more than ever before to the very center of racist ideology. As the late George Fredrickson pointed out, the Holocaust was so discrediting that the classic racist position is not to defend it, but to deny it had ever happened!

To be sure, denial has always been part of any racial order, even the most brutal ones. The paternalist defense of slavery, for example, provided the planter a psychological shield when his brutalized conscience accused him. And Germans carried out their genocide more in a spirit of fear than hatred. Indeed one might say racism is denial. As Frederick Douglass put it in one of the great speeches of American history, “Man is man, the world over. This fact is affirmed and admitted in any effort to deny it. The sentiments we exhibit, whether love or hate, confidence or fear, respect or contempt, will always imply a like humanity.”

Our case for optimism, then, must not ultimately rest in the perennially confused psychology of the racist. But the centrality of denial, its organizing role both on the level of psychology and systems, seems to me relatively new. And, crucially, it suggests an exhausted ideology. Racism is losing its power to inspire, much less organize coherent political projects.

The idea that the horrors of the Holocaust discredited racist ideology has often been overdrawn (indeed, I’ve made this case myself elsewhere). If racism was no longer fashionable, a disturbingly large number of Europeans missed the memo. In the 1960s, during my parents’ lifetime, the Portuguese dictatorship busily sent tens of thousands of white settlers to Angola in a classic case of racist settler colonial domination. In the 1980s, during my lifetime, racist South African security forces and commando units wreaked havoc across southern Africa. A British Commonwealth committee estimated they contributed to 1 million deaths and made 3 million people homeless. But these political projects have been so thoroughly discredited that people are shocked to discover they even existed in a world so close to our own.

Even in the most obvious state of exception in a decolonizing world, South Africa, denial ruled the day. The regime not only portrayed itself as a bulwark against communism. It established native “homelands” and granted them fictive “independence” in an elaborate bid to deny and obfuscate the essentially racist character of the apartheid state. Even the prototypical exemplars of modern racist social organization did not want to admit what they were doing.

And so this stark fact remains: racism crested in the era of global war and has receded through the era of decolonization, civil rights movements, and the rise of global human rights.

Against this sweeping historical change, what do the racists offer? In 2017 a motley crew of a few hundred demonstrated in Charlottesville before one of their number launched a terrorist attack and killed Heather Heyer. Organizers promptly retreated, concluding they had made a strategic error because the American public was so revolted. Trump’s equivocations about the terrorists became a political albatross rather than a source of strength. He and his enablers quickly spun new tales of denial to try to bury the episode.

Terrorists used to be able to take over whole states and defy the federal government to do anything about it. Now their would-be sympathizers recoil in disgust. I know the headlines often seem scary today, reading of proud boys and boogaloos and militias. But these lonely cosplayers can only dream of the power and acclaim racists like themselves used to amass a short time ago. Social media is not our friend in our efforts to achieve perspective. A Florida man yelling “white power!” as he rides by on his golf cart is not the stuff of which racist revolutions are made. For racists, times are hard, even with one of their own in the oval office.

Trump’s invocations of racism have often been startlingly old-fashioned. This is, I admit, infuriating. From the blood and soil nationalism evoked in the “send her back” chants, to playing on stereotypical racist fears of racial pollution through rape and housing integration, to crafting an immigration policy of which even the Dillingham commission could be proud, it often seemed as if Trump was trying to play racism’s greatest hits. Yet even as his fans got a thrill out of it, they experienced this pleasure within a carefully maintained framework of denial. Not only did they deny the fact that they had joined a racist movement, they continued to imagine that they didn’t like racism at all.

Anti-racists often treat this stunning blindness as a sign of racism’s entrenched position in American life. From one vantage point that’s true. This “colorblind racism” often feels intractable, and it really does cause profound pain and suffering for people of color, not to mention psychological strain for white people. But from another vantage point, this denial is a flashing red light declaring that racism as an ideological project is exhausted. These folks aren’t even good at hating people anymore. Their heart isn’t all the way in it.

A century ago—far less, in fact—populist demagogues could mobilize a crowd with a proud message of white supremacy till kingdom come. Now, even Trump’s most loyal mass constituency—white evangelical Christians—declares an avowed belief in a brand of Christian universalism. Christ died for all and anyone who accepts Jesus as savior is headed to the same heavenly destination. The doors of the church are open to all, regardless of color. Believe me, I’ll be the first to say this Christian universalism tends to be remarkably immune to practical ethical content, but I argue it does make these white Christians feel cross-pressured. Their racism makes them uncomfortable. This is not a confident ideology ready to make new converts. It’s a tired and fearful perspective on the world, and the demographic groups most likely to cling to it are shrinking.

My students at Temple University are black and white, Asian and Hispanic. Their families come from India and Vietnam, Cameroon and Armenia. They tell me they’re prepared to disrupt racism. The historian in me says this is the conceit of the young. But then, maybe I’m not thinking historically enough. Is it really so hard to believe that the most diverse and racially integrated generation in American history will turn out to be the most anti-racist generation?

I’ve been skeptical that the massive black lives matter protests of this summer signify much. But let’s at least stipulate this: never in American history have so many people of such diverse backgrounds come together to demand racial justice. It remains to be seen how much this will matter in the long run, but for now, let’s take a moment to be grateful this good thing has happened.

The burden of an optimist’s case is that it must not become another species of the denial it claims to critique. It must not descend to that point of wishful nonsense where, as Kimberlé Crenshaw has put it, “sober assessments of how far we have come” are replaced “by congratulatory declarations that we have arrived.”

From racist policing to a yawning wealth gap that shows no sign of closing, racism remains an urgent burden that is a matter of life and death in the present day. Most worryingly for the future, these material forces are reproducing race as we speak. The future will belong to the anti-racists insofar as we put a wrench directly into these systems of power and finally interrupt the reproduction of their ideological justification. This is what freedom movements across the global south did. They didn’t wait around for Europeans to have a change of heart. They served notice the old systems of power weren’t coming back and they ushered the racists off the stage to the margins of history. Many a racist settler died embittered and resentful. For the world’s future it didn’t matter if they never learned their lesson. What mattered is that they were pushed to the sidelines where their racism no longer commanded armies and bureaucracies.

The racists are losing. This is a case for optimism, not complacency. The only thing that ever moved the world toward freedom was people acting together to make power, take power, and use it to free human beings from domination. In the fog of war it can be hard to tell if one is fighting a depleted enemy in a rear-guard action, or a well-supplied force waging the next phase of a long campaign. Trumpism is a desperate defense of an exhausted and pathetic ideology. In its heyday, racism killed millions and held the globe in its thrall. Today, it’s the succor of a lonely man and his feeble hangers-on. They, too, will be ushered off the stage of history.

Yes, Lord, so may it be.

In Praise of the Resurgent American Left

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/bernie-sanders-ny-gt-img.jpg

After panning Sanders’ campaign yesterday, I offer this addendum today: the reinvigorated left is a wonderful development for American democracy and for all those who desire a more just society, even those of us who are not leftists.

Liberals who are sympathetic to the need for profound change in American society—though via reform rather than revolution—should be cheering the rise of the left for at least three reasons.

First, a visible and vocal left serves as a check on the invariable liberal impulse to tack to the center—no matter how awful that center is on the merits. With a viable left as an alternative, liberals must worry not only about appeasing the reactionary right. They must also address their left flank by making meaningful change on behalf of working people.

A rough analogy: As awful as Cold War era communism was, its very presence as a potentially attractive alternative was salutary in some democratic societies because it compelled the gains of capitalism to be widely shared. As I said, this is only an analogy—the American left’s desire to be more like Denmark does not portend gulags folks!

Second, a reinvigorated left challenges the American foreign policy consensus that has focused on imposing capitalism rather than prioritizing human rights. This consensus is grossly immoral, and makes the United States less safe besides. It also places an absurd faith in the power of military force to accomplish good in the world. Liberals, for all their supposed grounding in evidence and reason, have pursued this bloodthirsty militarism despite the overwhelming evidence of its futility. The left sees more clearly than do liberals that imperialism is coercive and inimical to human freedom, even in its supposedly benign American guise.

Third, a viable left serves notice to the American political system that liberalism is an ideology! It opens up a broader range of possibilities for Americans to imagine, and a larger field on which the American political debate can play out. It moves liberal shibboleths from the realm of common sense to their appropriate status of contested ideological claims.

There’s still a long way to go in making the left critique more visible and more effectual in American politics. Just this week a New York Times reported piece referred with a straight face to Pete Buttigieg’s “common-sense centrism.” Such nonsense was the norm when a dormant left was all but written out of the American political conversation. Liberals should be glad their claims are no longer common sense.

The polarizing style of the left is admittedly obnoxious, but then, it wouldn’t be a left if it thought liberals were its natural allies. Liberals are very good at explaining why gradualism is the only reasonable path forward. The left is needed to goad us, to remind us that this gradualism is not only a statement of what is possible; it is an ideological and temperamental disposition. The left is here to expand what is possible. May its influence grow.

Some Super Tuesday Thoughts

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/02/2020-02-26T151826Z_1823731088_RC2F8F9AU422_RTRMADP_3_USA-ELECTION-BIDEN-1200x800.jpg

Behold! I emerge from my bunker to offer a layperson’s thoughts on yesterday’s primaries.

Here are the numbers that really stood out me. According the exit polls, in the Super Tuesday states Biden won black voters 56-19. Meanwhile Sanders won Latino voters 50-24. What gives? Yes, we can point to the relative youthfulness of the Latino population, but does that entirely account for such a dramatic divergence? It is fascinating to see these two constituencies–one the backbone of the party and the other a rising “sleeping giant”–so out of step with each other.

I’m interested in the alternative timeline where Bernie tried to appeal to regular Democrats while retaining his core principles, rather than running as a factional candidate. Maybe he would have struggled to thread that needle but it must be said that he didn’t even try.

I would have more faith in Bernie’s theory of the case if he had produced some hard evidence of it by now. I really like the sound of historic turnout in November, driven by an unprecedented surge of young voters and people alienated from the political process. But if you can’t produce it in the primaries why should we expect it in the general?

I was struck by the contrasting tone of Bernie and Biden’s speeches last night. Biden made an open and explicit call to anyone within the sound of his voice to join his campaign. There’s a place for you in this campaign, he said. The message was: this campaign is for you. That’s just good politics folks! Without sacrificing any of his principles or policies, Bernie could have offered a similarly welcoming message. At least try to welcome Democrats! But instead, the tone of his speech was factional, as likely to turn off Democrats as woo them. This is just bad politicking!

There may well be more twists and turns ahead in this primary, but Biden appears to have reassumed front-runner status. The main people responsible for this surprising outcome? Ordinary black voters, first in South Carolina, and then across the South yesterday.

I can’t get this quote from one black South Carolinian out of my head: “Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves.” For many black voters, the pursuit of a political revolution may be a luxury they cannot afford. I feel no great enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But my personal experience and historical study have led me to see black political behavior as something of a conscience for the nation. I am not quick to dismiss it.

My historian’s take (which isn’t worth much since we’re famously bad at prediction) is that it has fallen to us to preserve the democracy black activists created in the 1960s. As the GOP turns against the rule of law and tries to hollow out our institutions, we take on the frustrating role of protecting imperfect institutions. We become, literally, the conservatives. That’s the role black South Carolinian’s played last week.

What the Sanders-left seems rarely to understand is how much worse things can become for poor people in a Potemkin democracy. Many black voters bear the memory of it in their bodies.

I’m inspired by what black voters did yesterday, even if I feel very ambivalent about Biden. I think they know what’s at stake. We need to vote in every midterm. We need to take sporadic voters with us. We need to wage a generational fight for decency and democracy. It’s a grind rather than a grand revolution, but it’s noble work worth doing.

A White Evangelical Trump Supporter Responds to Christianity Today

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 3 Comments
Image result for graham and nixon

In the wake of Christianity Today calling for Trump’s removal from office, how will white evangelical Trump supporters respond? I’d like to share one telling anecdote from a white evangelical Trump supporter in my social circle.

But first, some context. Some news outlets yesterday seemed to report this story naively, as though the house organ of the 81% has turned on Trump. Of course, that’s not what CT is and that’s not what happened.

Since its founding in 1956, CT‘s moderation (in tone as much as anything) always made it an awkward mouthpiece for a white evangelical movement whose mainstream was populist and reactionary. CT spoke not for the masses of ordinary white evangelicals but for a relatively highbrow audience of the educated evangelical elite.

Indeed, as a historian and researcher, I’ve come to take it as axiomatic that whenever I open the pages of Christianity Today, I must assume I am entering into an elite conversation rather than opening a window to the white evangelical id. This is true whether I’m reading about civil rights in the 60s, feminism in the 70s, or homosexuality in the 80s.

And it’s true in 2019, when CT calls for Trump’s removal from office. It is an important moment, but we should not assume it will make a significant impression on ordinary white evangelicals, who may never read anything CT writes anyway. But what of the white evangelical Trump supporters who do have some sense of the legacy of Christianity Today?

Here’s where my friend comes in. This is their response to CT’s editorial:

Christianity Today is no longer considered a reasonable voice for conservative Christians, regardless of it’s founder. Since the writer cites some of the founding principles put forth by Billy Graham, it should be very interesting to see Franklin Graham’s response. I don’t think we’ll have to wait long.

I suggest that this is likely to be a fairly representative response. I’d like to probe a little more about how and when CT lost its status in this writer’s mind as a “reasonable voice for conservative Christians.” It may have been yesterday!

The real tell here is the way the writer positions Billy Graham and Franklin Graham, suggesting that Franklin’s forthcoming attack on Christianity Today will tell us what we need to know about the magazine’s faithfulness to the legacy of its founder and to evangelicalism. Networks of relationships and identity, the authority of the Graham family name, substitute for any substantive claim of errors in CT’s commentary.

And, importantly, this authority is imagined. Franklin does not faithfully represent Billy’s views, but my friend seems to think that he does. In reality, Billy spoke openly of his entanglement with Nixon as a moral failure and one of the great regrets of his ministry. Franklin has been aggressively working against that aspect of his father’s legacy. He has tied himself resolutely to Trump, defended him at every turn, repeatedly made false statements, and continues to encourage white evangelicals to be partisan culture-warriors.

Of course, all of this is exactly why Franklin’s opinion counts. If Franklin were trying to carry on his father’s moderate post-Nixon approach to politics, my friend would simply add the Graham family to the growing list of people and sources “no longer considered a reasonable voice for conservative Christians.” Franklin’s opinion matters more than CT’s precisely and only because Franklin is belligerent and willing to take the fight to the libs.

In this framework, what counts as authentically Christian is a moving target. It’s constantly shifting with the political winds and the markers of orthodoxy laid down by conservative politics sites and Fox News hosts. CT is definitionally out of bounds for conservative Christians not because it has transgressed Christian ethics in any obvious way, but because it is insufficiently reactionary in its tone and politics.

In the white evangelical mainstream, advocating traditional Christian ethics is more controversial than supporting Trump. CT has taken a noble stand. Just how much this stance will reach into the nerve centers of the reactionary and populist mainstream remains to be seen. Let us pray CT’s influence grows.

Impeachment Is Obviously Right. How Do We Live With That Knowledge?

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
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On a historic day like this, it is all too easy for us to take refuge in moral sanctimony (“Can you believe how awful the other side is?”) or moral relativism (“Whose to say what is right on something as messy and partisan as impeachment? Let’s just agree to disagree”).

In reality, impeachment is a moral question, and defending Trump is an immoral answer to it. (Yes, I hear myself. I know I’m socially located and all the rest of it, but this is not a close call. Sorry!)

But we must not suppose that the lesson to take from this is one of Republican perfidy and Democratic virtue. On the contrary, the sobering truth is that we rarely do the right thing simply because it is right.

We are experts in aligning our perception of what is moral with our self-interest. When the two of them come into unavoidable conflict, it is self-interest that wins the day most of the time. Some people do escape this trap. We tend to remember them as saints and sages.

It is self-serving and unrealistic to suppose that the moral clarity of the event tells us a great deal about the moral stature of its participants. Republicans face the difficult choice of doing the right thing or protecting their self-interest. In choosing self-interest, they are merely doing what most of us do in most such situations. Democrats are in the much more enviable (and unusual) position of alignment between truth and partisan interest. We should not be sanguine about how they would behave if the shoe were on the other foot.

So today, I don’t want to deaden my conscience with the pretense that both sides in the impeachment struggle have equal moral claims. That’s an absurd proposition. It’s alluring because it allows us to better get along with others and think well of them. But it’s a cheap shortcut. The real challenge is to be openhearted and generous and kind without searing our conscience in the process. Trying to downplay the evils of Trump’s hatred against women, his cruelty and racism, might make some of your social circles more peaceful. But at what cost?

Neither do I want to reach for the self-righteous escape hatch. I recognize Republicans’ hypocrisy and self-interest precisely because I’m so experienced in my practice of these character flaws. Rather than assuming the moral clarity of this moment tells me something profound about the moral fiber of Trump supporters, I want to implicate myself in their unjust behavior.

What Has Happened To Evangelicalism? The History of Church Growth Offers A Clue

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
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In recent days an evangelical twitter tempest has reemerged, this time over the question of whether Jerry Falwell, Jr. is an evangelical leader. This is a more specific variation on the perennial question of who is an evangelical, and the Trump-era twist on it: what has happened to evangelicalism?

On one side are some evangelical elites and evangelical scholars who continue to insist on a theologically-defined evangelicalism rooted in David Bebbington’s work. The upshot of this definition is that you can make a distinction between “real” evangelicals and evangelicals in name only.

But other scholars, including sizable numbers of evangelicals, have come to see this theological definition as analytically unhelpful. To some critics, it smacks of contemporary movement boundary policing more than serious historical inquiry.

Among the more notable examples of this critique in recent years is Timothy Gloege’s 2018 Religion Dispatches piece, “Being Evangelical Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.” Basically, if a so-called evangelical is behaving badly, you can just write them out of the movement and rebrand it. Sorry, not sorry.

When Gloege’s article resurfaced this week, Baylor historian Paul Putz replied,

Calvin College historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez added this important question:

In a small and suggestive way, I’d like to take up Du Mez’s question. My argument is that we need to think more carefully about how whiteness has structured the evangelical ecclesial experience. I’m going to focus on this simple proposition, with the understanding that reality is not so simple. For one thing, we should not pretend that the shaping effect goes in one direction. If we need to think more carefully about white evangelicalism, we definitely need to give more attention to evangelical whiteness.

At a glance, it might seem that historian Seth Dowland tackled this last year. In a great piece on “American Evangelicalism and the Politics of Whiteness,” Dowland wrote:

Over the course of the 20th century, the evangelical coalition entwined theology, whiteness, and conservative politics. The histories we tell about that movement demand attention to all three aspects. By using theological markers to define evangelicalism, we miss the ways cultural and political forces have shaped the movement. To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes. It’s next to impossible to understand these commitments through the prism of theology alone. But when we understand evangelical as an identity forged in the contexts of Jim Crow segregation, a struggle against second-wave feminism, and fears of a tyrannical federal government, the origin of these commitments becomes clearer.

Evangelicals are not any whiter, demographically, than mainliners or Mormons. But they have rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation. They have proven to be loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims. The triumph of gay rights, the persistence of legal abortion, and the election of Barack Obama signaled to them a need to fight for the America they once knew. The history of American evangelicalism shows us a group of believers who find the most in common when it comes to race and politics.

Notice that though Dowland is paying attention to whiteness, the mechanism by which the ecclesial and political may be related is not at all clear. In other words, Du Mez’s outstanding question remains: what is the connection between devotional life and practice, identity, and these “hot-button” issues?

To offer a suggestive answer to this question, I offer this proposition: what if we think about whiteness in ecclesial contexts as crucial religio-racial grounding for the attitudes, ideas, and behaviors that we commonly recognize as political? What if evangelicals learn whiteness in their churches and then enact it politically?

Here I would like to submit a brief for the importance of my work on the Church Growth Movement (article forthcoming in Religion & American Culture, January 2020!).

The CGM taught quite explicitly that racial integration was a threat to church growth. More broadly, the CGM was a distillation of an evangelical mainstream that often equated success with faithfulness. But what does it mean to be successful in a racist society? What does it mean to grow your church in an era of white flight and racial reaction? When major white evangelical leaders deliberately launched their churches in fast-growing wealthy suburbs, they weren’t just expressing their faith in the power of the gospel. They were making a solid investment in the advantages of whiteness.

In 1991, a Christianity Today cover story described the Church Growth Movement’s successful conquest of evangelicalism. If by the 1990s it no longer seemed to have the institutional heft of its heyday, that was because its basic ideas had become so widely diffused and adopted. It took a while, CT explained, for evangelicals to “become comfortable with success.” But the CGM had helped evangelicals become part of the “successful mainstream,” and they were now getting used to it. “Outright critics,” CT said, “are now hard to find.”

They had become comfortable with success, and critics were hard to find. The first claim was true; the second was false; the phenomenon linking them both was race. For decades, black evangelicals criticized the CGM, and the evangelical mainstream writ large, for pursuing success at the expense of racial justice and racial reconciliation. Critics were not hard to find. It’s just that they were black.

For our purposes, what’s crucial about these black critiques is that they came from an ecclesial context. The problem, as many black evangelicals saw it, wasn’t necessarily political conservatism as such. The problem was the overt investment in whiteness within churches and other evangelical institutions. At the height of the Church Growth Movement’s influence, John Perkins blasted the evangelical mainstream for “not bothering with breaking down racial barriers, since that would only distract us from ‘church growth.’ And so the most segregated, racist institution in America, the evangelical church, racks up the numbers, declaring itself ‘successful,’ oblivious to the…dismemberment of the Body of Christ…” This was theological and ecclesial critique, not a hit against the Christian Right.

And similar critiques have continued ever since. In Bryan Lorrit’s 2018 book, Insider Outsider: My Journey as a Stranger in White Evangelicalism and My Hope for Us All, he writes:

To maintain its seat at the head of the table, white evangelicalism must be in control; it needs power. If white evangelicals are not in power, they won’t choose to be present in any substantive measures. They won’t join our churches or go to conferences historically attended by different ethnicities. They must be in power.

I can’t emphasize this enough: Loritts is talking about the dynamics within evangelical spaces. He’s talking about ecclesiology. A movement that lives or dies on success, and that has been unwilling to divest itself of power within the church, has not responded well to losing cultural and political power outside the church. The white evangelical movement acts politically as its historical ecclesial behavior has conditioned it to act.

Historian Steven Miller has argued that the late-20th century saw America’s “born again years,” a time when evangelicalism successfully entered the mainstream. But as my suggestive little story is meant to illustrate, this was a story of white evangelical church success. A movement that put so much stock in outward signs of success seemed to be thriving as long as the broader cultural and political environment was trending in its direction.

But the new millennium brought the gay rights revolution, rapid racial change, declining church attendance, and all the other hot button issues we talk about in our politics. These put white evangelicals back into a defensive posture. Their moment of success seemed suddenly brief. With shocking speed they found themselves again an embattled minority against a hostile culture.

The urge to lash out and grasp for power, the urge we see embodied in a figure like Jerry Fawell, Jr., is not a case of politics getting the better of white evangelicals’ theological commitments. It’s an expression of the movement’s ethos and history as it has been structured by investments in church growth and mainstream success. This is white evangelicalism. This is evangelical whiteness.

What’s A Pro-Life Democrat To Do?

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 1 Comment
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I’m a pro-life Democrat. You wouldn’t know it from the positions of party leaders, but there are millions of us. Joe Biden’s reversal on the Hyde Amendment last week signaled that, whoever wins the party nomination, millions of pro-life Democrats are unlikely to have their views represented in 2020. Indeed, activists appear to want to drive pro-life Democrats out of the party entirely.

What in the world is a pro-life Democrat to do? I second what John Fea said a couple months ago in a post about Jimmy Carter’s brand of pro-life politics: “I think there are a lot of pro-life Democrats out there who would agree with Carter, but they do not make their voices heard for several reasons:”

1. They do not want to be ostracized by the Democratic Party.

2. They are afraid that if they defend the unborn they will be accused of not caring about women’s rights.  (This, I believe, is a false dichotomy).

3. They do not want to be associated with the divisive and unhelpful “baby-killing” culture war rhetoric of the Right.

4. They do not endorse the Christian Right/GOP playbook that teaches the only way to reduce abortions is to overturn Roe. v. Wade.

I think this is exactly right. To put it simply, let’s unpack the phrase, pro-life Democrat. I’m pro-life because I’m a Christian and cannot be otherwise. I’m a pro-life Democrat because I don’t believe patriarchy and free market radicalism have anything to do with protecting life; indeed, they are inimical to it.

I can’t make common cause with the right-wing anti-abortion movement. It is thoroughly embedded in the broader activist right, which tends toward dishonesty, racism, and sexism. The imperatives of capitalist extremism govern their activism, so that policies that would reduce abortions are not pursued simply because such policies would upset wealthy people.

But before I become too critical of right-wing activists for letting capital dictate the extent of their efforts against abortion, I can, as a pro-life Democrat, ponder my own similar position and my own complicity. Do I not speak up for fear of causing a break with Democratic activists with whom I otherwise agree? Do I fail to speak with appropriate moral conviction for fear of electoral or social consequences?

I do not believe the right-wing anti-abortion movement is promoting a helpful pro-life agenda, nor do I think overturning Roe v. Wade will usher in the utopia they imagine. But my alienation from the most viable and visible pro-life movement does not free me to sit on my hands. In fact, it adds to my responsibility to act creatively to protect life outside those right-wing channels.

I don’t pretend to know at this point what that should look like. I am already trying to pursue a lifestyle that I believe aligns with a Christian ethic of life, but I do not intend to trumpet those personal choices here. In this case I’m thinking more of public advocacy and financial support. What organizations are worthy of our money, our voices, our retweets? Yeah, I said it, retweets matter!

If any readers have given significant attention to these things or are already supporting an organization that you recommend, I’d like to hear about it. I’d like to put my money where my mouth is. Given the data we have on why women choose abortion, it seems intuitively obvious to me that we can significantly reduce abortions simply by empowering poor women. Imagine that.

Abortion Concern In Evangelicalism Is Primarily A Rhetorical Move

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

I was paging through Ed Stetzer’s new book some weeks ago and was reminded of these astonishing bits of data from that big Lifeway/Billy Graham Center research project last year: in the 2016 election, only 5% of “evangelicals by belief”* cited the candidate’s position on abortion rights as the most important factor in their vote. Much larger numbers of “evangelicals by belief” went to the polls with the same concerns as non-evangelical Americans: the economy, health care, immigration, and national security (these results are for all evangelicals by belief, not just white evangelicals).

But let’s be as fair as possible. 7% of evangelicals by belief also cited supreme court nominees as their most important consideration; abortion may have loomed large for those voters. And it’s possible that many evangelicals approached the election with abortion as a secondary or tertiary concern that factored into their vote. Still, I find these results remarkable. When evangelicals are asked to name the most important thing determining their vote, abortion barely registers. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that abortion plays a rhetorical function in right-wing politics out of all proportion to its actual power to drive evangelical moral concern.

As the 2020 election approaches, you’ll hear a lot of commentary about abortion and binary choices and the lesser of two evils. There are a small number of evangelicals who are sincere in their commitment to protect the unborn. With them I have no quibble. Though I disagree with many of their tactics and am concerned about pervasive sexism in the pro-life movement, protecting the unborn is a noble and righteous work. But the tenor of evangelical political discourse in the coming year and half will be an elaborate gaslighting effort. For most white evangelicals, abortion is a rhetorical shield to avoid answering for their enthusiastic embrace of an evil ruler.

A recent Foxnews poll highlights this again. White evangelicals broadly have warm and happy feelings toward Trump and his administration’s policies! Most white evangelicals seem to like racism and have unusual amounts of fear and hatred toward people who are not like them. Some results from that poll, among white evangelicals:

77% approve of Trump’s job performance.

75% have a favorable opinion of Trump himself.

3% think abortion is the biggest issue facing the country today. 33% think immigration is the biggest issue facing the country.

38% think the Trump administration is “not tough enough” on illegal immigrants; another 40% think it’s “about right.”

71% support building a wall on the border.

92% would be satisfied if Trump receives the 2020 Republican nomination (so much for the binary choice defense!). [Clarification: this question obviously only includes white evangelicals who are Republican primary voters].

Abortion is a very serious moral problem with no easy solutions. It is a shame that its primary role in evangelical politics is as cover for shameful behavior.

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*The survey defined respondents as “evangelical by belief” if they “strongly agree” with the following statements:

The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe

It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior

Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin

Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation

The survey seemed designed to rehabilitate evangelical reputations in the age of Trump, but instead it only reinforced the evidence that, broadly speaking, mainstream polls of self-identified evangelicals provide a roughly accurate picture of opinion. As data has consistently shown in recent years, more committed evangelical churchgoers tend to be more committed Trump supporters.