I think it’s important not to lose sight of what happened this past January. As time marches on, and the press moves on to the latest stories, I worry that many of us might misrecall the significance of that day, or forget about it altogether. Indeed, it’s quite easy to grow desensitized and reduce moments of import to a footnote of the Trump presidency after the daily affronts to our sense of decency that saturated our media diet the last four years. While those daily utterances of abject nonsense will surely fade from view, episodes like the border separations and the chaos that erupted in the halls of Congress six months ago should remain firmly rooted in living memory. I’ve saved the texts and emails my wife and I received from family and friends who reached out to check on us, as well as the various videos of those at the scene, because I believe that such things ought to be preserved.

I believe this not only because any act of domestic terrorism constitutes a bookmarkable chapter in our nation’s history, but because of the enduring relevance of what transpired. After all, the people responsible are still with us, and more importantly, so are the underlying motivations that saw hundreds of Americans storm the seat of U.S. democracy. Those motives don’t disappear the moment a new president is sworn in. The bulk of the rioters, almost exclusively white and male, acted in furtherance of a Lie premised ultimately, as we’ll see, on entrenched racism. Whether commitments to far-right conspiracies and causes will wane or accelerate in the years ahead, and how to combat them, are questions pertinent to social activists, our election security apparatus, and, perhaps especially, law enforcement and the U.S. military.
 

 
According to a recent study from the University of Chicago, and discussed at length above, the rioters were 93% white and 86% male. Hardly surprising, but then there’s this: the vast majority were middle-aged or older, gainfully employed, and married with kids (though for many of them that may have changed in the intervening months). This is inconsistent with what we have found when looking at the socioeconomic makeup of white nationalist and other far-right militia groups like Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters, whose members tend to skew younger and match the jobless loner profile.

It’s important to note that although the study found extremist groups were in relatively short supply at the Capitol, it’s possible that the demonstrators who showed up shared an overlapping ideology with these factions despite no formal affiliation. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Year in Hate and Extremism report found that many extremists are not formal members of any organization. They are usually radicalized via online platforms and in the process may interact with organized antigovernment groups without joining them. Consequently, we need to look beyond connections to leading extremist organizations in discerning ideologues capable of engaging in hate violence.

Another interesting finding is that more than half of the rioters hailed not from deep-red counties and districts, as we might expect, but from counties that Biden won in 2020. A lot of them in fact were Trump supporters who traveled from the bluest parts of America to participate in the riot. One final takeaway from the study was that these largely white men were more likely to call home places where the white population had experienced marked declines compared to the Hispanic and Black populations, which naturally includes those blue-heavy urban locales Biden shored up.

The director of the project, Richard Pape, traces the driving ideology of those present at the riot to the “Great Replacement” theory, the notion that the rights of white people are being superseded by the rights of minority groups as the latter’s numbers eclipse the former’s in Western democracies. It’s a theory that picked up steam initially in Europe, and was adopted shortly thereafter by neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups in the United States. The insurrectionists were also united in their belief the election was stolen, of course, but according to Pape and his colleagues, it was profound concerns over racial replacement that made the difference between the violent demonstrators who arrived in Washington and the passive observers who remained at home.

One plausible explanation for the participants’ counties of origin might be that in places where far-right voters are grossly outnumbered by their blue-leaning counterparts, the feeling of being hemmed in by the prevailing ideology better animates one to express their political frustrations in more raucous, even violent ways relative to their co-thinkers in deep-red localities. Thus while sympathy toward GR ideas exists in both red and blue enclaves, it’s the predominantly blue areas where the pro-Trump contingent is more likely to act on their core beliefs because the politics they so despise — and the minorities they resent — are more ubiquitous and harder to avoid. It was the sense of futility bred from the absence of solidarity in offline spaces, combined with the misinfo circulating in online spaces, that spurred them to action.

In order to assess the risk of further seditious efforts by the far-right that could materialize in ways both big and small, Dr. Pape shares a rather troubling poll his group conducted in tandem with the National Opinion Research Council. They asked 1,000 American adults whether they still believe the election was stolen and, additionally, whether they would be willing to personally participate in a violent protest. The results indicate that 4% of American adults, or 10 million people, respond ‘yes’ to both questions, with the strongest predictor being belief in the GR. Worse, we know that active or retired military, law enforcement, and government personnel make up a significant chunk of this figure, as more than 1 in 10 charged in the riot check at least one of those boxes.

In hindsight, the dramatic conflagration witnessed on January 6th of this year was possibly the only way for the Trump era to end: with deluded bands of costumed, antidemocratic, white nationalist radicals armed with bats and chemical spray laying waste to America’s foundational institutions, egged on by their beloved truth-trasher and Deluder-in-Chief. But there is a danger in dismissing what happened as just another disgraceful, mock-worthy day in an era chock full of them. Nothing about the last six months has abated interest in the conspiracist ideas that culminated in the antics back in January. The extremism harbored in the hearts and minds of everyday Americans will be with us for a long time to come, waiting for the right opportunity to strike out against the targets of that hatred.

And while it’s far from clear how best to deprogram those enamored with tenets of extremism, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the central role those beliefs played in the insurrection, and why they continue to pose a material threat to the preservation and strengthening of our democracy. If we focus only on the proximate convictions surrounding the 2020 election as opposed to the guiding force of racial resentment rampant in white society, we run the risk of thinking that the energy of far-right movements will dissipate as the events of January 6th recede further into the past. The election may be over, but the anarchy at the Capitol was always about much more than the fraudulent counting of ballots. It was fueled by an insidious strand of racial paranoia that’s festered among right-wing groups for decades. Those who would brush off the events of that day as mere ‘politics as usual’ underestimate both the scale of the threat before us and the degree to which nutty ideas can inspire mass violence.
 

Further reading:

• The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists
• These Are the Rioters Who Stormed the Nation’s Capitol
• Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th?
• Off-Duty Police Officers Investigated, Charged With Participating In Capitol Riot
• Here Are The Police Officers And Other Public Employees Arrested In Connection To Capitol Riot
• Police Forces Dealing With Officers Involved in Capitol Riots
• ‘A nightmare scenario’: Extremists in police ranks spark growing concern after Capitol riot
• The warning signs before the Capitol riot
• FBI: U.S. Capitol Violence
• ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6

Image credits: Vox (feature); Jon Cherry/Getty Images

 
 
As an ex-vangelical myself, I always feel the need to comment on these sorts of things. I chalk it up to a mix of residual guilt on the one hand and a felt obligation to speak out on the other, each stemming from the fact I once counted myself among the rank and file of this deeply misguided demographic. More than that, I was an active participant on the wrong side of the culture war for several years before I decided to put my nose in a book not called the bible and lend an ear to those outside of my highly circumscribed bubble.

On the plus side, spending those first two decades of my life enmeshed in a retrogressive culture imparted an insider’s perspective that, combined with my post-Christian experience, can serve as a prism through which others may better understand the evangelical mindset. One development people have trouble wrapping their heads around is white evangelicalism’s close ties to anti-mask and other Covid-centric denialism, as covered in the The New York Times story linked above.

With more than a third of the country identifying as “born-again” or evangelical, and nearly half of white evangelicals saying they would decline vaccination, it’s looking more and more like a real possibility that this group could prevent us from reaching herd immunity and returning to some semblance of normal life. We need to talk about it.

It’s not that there’s some innately Christian reason for evincing skepticism about vaccines (or indeed about science), or a longrunning textual tradition that grounds conspiracist ideas about the pandemic. There is, to be sure, an emphasis in evangelicalism on faith healing and divine cures, and indeed some evangelicals may cite such convictions in defense of their contrarianism. There’s also the mark of the beast story from Revelation that some Christian and other groups have worked into their batshit theories about Covid vaccines being vehicles for implanting microchips in everyone (courtesy of Bill Gates of course). But these are not primarily what’s driving resistance within this group.

It’s less about religion than about politics. Evangelicalism is best understood as a political movement at this point in our nation’s history. Over the last four decades and change — ever since the Moral Majority movement in the Reagan years spearheaded by the late Jerry Falwell — especially white evangelicalism has more or less merged with the Republican Party in the US to the extent the two may as well be synonymous. It’s where the term “Christian right” found its origin. The two factions are so closely aligned that they serve as reciprocal echo chambers, each taking cues from the other in a concerted effort to crush liberal progressivism.

Throughout the past year, evangelicals’ preferred partisan authorities (i.e., conservative politicians and pundits) have parroted skeptical noises about masks and vaccines, and they’ve adopted these ideas in turn. Anthony Fauci’s scientific credentials are utterly irrelevant, associated as he is with Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia in their eyes. Even pastors and church leaders have been supplanted by Fox News and radio personalities. Time formerly spent in prayer and religious instruction is now devoted to consuming conservative media in its sundry forms. In short, their religious identity has become subservient to their political identity.

And it’s been this way in evangelical circles for quite some time now. When Trump arrived on the scene, most white evangelicals handed him their endorsement without a second thought: he was merely the next conduit for achieving their political goals and aspirations. That he despised the left as much as they do and rehashed the same familiar rhetoric they imbibe on a daily basis were the only ‘qualifications’ he needed. His religious cred was a factor as immaterial as Dr. Fauci’s scientific expertise. His white identity politics, meanwhile, only seemed to further endear him to this community. Unholy though it may be, the alliance between white evangelicalism and Trumpism was eminently predictable for anyone with insight into the Christian right. Not winning them over would have been the only real surprise, considering how far in advance this particular stage had been set for Trump’s brand of politics, and thus we cannot give him credit even for this.

This all begins to make more sense once you recognize that modern evangelicalism is only thinly related to the forms of Christianity that developed in the centuries since Jesus’ death. It has almost nothing in common, for example, with the more thoughtful piety of Augustine or Origen or Aquinas or Warfield, or even C.S. Lewis, each of whom held views that don’t line up with fundamentalist takes on scripture, salvation, or science. The evangelicalism so prevalent in American society today is more of a social pathology that expresses itself as religion. When you hear from Christians who articulate viewpoints at odds with mainstream science, the focus isn’t so much on religious premises as political ones; their worldview is grounded in a contrarian, anti-liberal, anti-D/democratic ethos that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and culture-war antagonism. The average white evangelical finds his or her central source of energy in political talking points, not religious convictions or creeds, and vaccine resistance is but the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.

Excerpts:

“The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.”

[…]

“White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”

[…]

“At this critical moment, even pastors struggle to know how to reach their flocks. Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.

Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.”

Further reading and resources:

• White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort
• The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind
• America may be close to hitting a vaccine wall
• The Right’s Fight to Make America a Christian Nation
• After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use
• ‘American Heretics’ Film Offers a Hopeful Vision for Religion’s Future

Image credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File

 
 
Rush Limbaugh has officially been canceled. Not “canceled,” mind you, like the Bill Burrs and Joe Rogans who take routine jabs at women and trans people and yet still manage to inundate your Netflix feed each and every time you log on. No, this time it’s permanent, more or less (less if Rush’s mini-me, Alex Jones, has something to say about it, though his future prospects are dubious at best these days).

Truth be told, Rush’s death hits closer to home than usual for me. People I was once very close with fell prey to his frenzied rhetoric over the years, and they’ve never been the same since. People who became so earnest in their hostility to outside ideas that they were no longer capable of rational dialogue. People who, whatever their strengths on an interpersonal level, became dialectically unreachable after years of siloing themselves in reactionary echo chambers. Before long, I began to identify which of those folks in my life truly were a lost cause — unworthy of my time, consideration, and mental energy going forward. I responded accordingly by removing them from my personal spaces, thereby relieving myself of the cognitive burden associated with interacting with them.

Many of those people were fans of Rush Limbaugh. If you’ve ever confronted a baby boomer for saying something absurdly obtuse or inaccurate, there’s an outsize chance it can be traced back to Limbaugh’s radio show. For decades, he filled the airwaves with aggressive bigotry and zany conspiracy theories, transforming everyday men and women (mostly men) into zealots for a thoughtless and particularly antisocial brand of right-wing politics. He provided a permanent platform for climate denial, allowing fallacies and misconceptions to spread further than ever before. His success, virtually unmatched by competitors on either side of the aisle, set the stage for Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Mike Cernovich, and other rabid tagalongs to pick up the torch.

Even as death’s door approached, Rush spent his final months on this earth peddling pandemic falsehoods and stanning for Trumpism. He told his impressionable audience on several occasions that the coronavirus is no more serious than the common cold and denounced lockdowns as a form of leftist overreach. Along with the virus, he helped spread the impeached president’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In doing so, he stoked latent unrest among the more extremist elements in our society and then downplayed the violence at the Capitol that ensued. The demagogic grifter, who once gleefully spelled out the “formula” for manipulating his listeners, profited off an ecosystem of lies and toxicity to the very end.

In a sentence, Rush Limbaugh was an utter abomination to the human race who sowed division and intolerance on a scale only a rarefied few throughout history have matched. He was a lifelong misogynist, a vile and disgusting racist, and a constant source of hatred toward gay and trans persons. His stigmatization of the LGBT community, especially, was ritualistic in nature and bordered on extravagance. During the height of the AIDS epidemic he aired a segment titled “AIDS Update” in which he read off names of gay men who had died from HIV while party horns and bells rang out in the background, with the lead-in music set to “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” by Dionne Warwick. There was a dark malevolence to his rhetoric that signaled a deeper moral rot, and I like to think that this, in addition to the lung cancer, played some role in his early demise.

Many op-eds will be published this week examining this man’s contemptible legacy, but the truth is that no one could ever hope to capture the plenitude of his wretchedness. This was a man who dedicated his life’s work to fanning the flames of acrimony in U.S. politics and seemed to take sincere pride in doing so. In fact, there may be no single person more responsible for the decay of political discourse in this country. He radicalized members of my own family and I won’t soon forget it. The broken, mean-spirited, empathetically challenged soul whose media empire ran on equal parts hurt and hate, should now be left in ignominy where he belongs, a stinging blight on American culture writ large.

Let it never be forgotten that the latter decades of Rush’s life were spent magnifying anti-intellectualism, normalizing hate, and creating discord in a nation that rewarded his efforts with obscene amounts of wealth and notoriety. He embodied everything that is wrong with America and represented the worst of us. While I find no joy in the knowledge that cancer has taken another human life, I am consoled by the fact that his passing will help ease some of the suffering his words have caused.

Note: This piece was adapted from a Facebook post published on February 17, 2021.

Further reading:

• Trump just gave Rush Limbaugh the country’s highest civilian honor. Here are some of the racist, misogynist, and all-around awful things he’s said.
• Rush Limbaugh’s homophobic comments against Pete Buttigieg are part of a long anti-LGBTQ history
• Did Rush Limbaugh’s ‘AIDS Update’ Mock the Deaths of Gay People?
• Rush Limbaugh’s bigotry set the stage for Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party
• Rush Limbaugh created the politics that Trump used to win the White House
• Trump dittoes Limbaugh’s bigotry with a Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Rush Limbaugh died from lung cancer after denying smoking’s risk.

Feature image credit: 2011 George Gojkovich | Getty Images

 
 
Settled in before the Superbowl with some fantastic reporting from Molly Ball on the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election. Her story for TIME describes the tremendous effort, much of it behind closed doors, by a broad coalition of people and organizations to shore up the election process and save the republic. To Ball’s great credit, she managed to capture a sweeping story of loosely coordinated, pro-democratic forces that united in the interest of election integrity. It’s a story about the recent past that carries deep implications for the future. In considering all that had to come together to keep us from spinning out, we’re reminded that the democracy in which we cache our hopes and dreams and ambitions cannot be taken for granted.

Getting groups that normally work at cross-purposes to see the bigger picture and speak with one voice is a hurdle as ancient as time. But it seems that’s just what a handful of determined individuals managed to pull off in the lead-up to the most contested election in twenty years. While much of the narrative centers around unionizer Mike Podhorzer, who spearheaded a lot of the discussions that took place, the aims of he and his allies ultimately required buy-in from entities all across the political spectrum. The unlikely convergence of labor and capital, of the AFL-CIO and US Chamber of Commerce, it turns out, was just what the doctor ordered in terms of delivering the right messaging to the American people.

First and foremost there was getting out the vote, no easy task amid the confines of a pandemic and the haze around mail-in voting. Then came announcing the count, certifying the count, and moving forward with the transition of power, with each step along the way sure to be undermined by an incumbent prima donna. We had a decent roadmap, after all, for how this would play out courtesy of Trump himself. The simplemindedness, recklessness, and sheer pettiness with which he approaches every conflict all but telegraphed his future actions. To this trove we could also add the playbook of other would-be authoritarians and full-fat dictators throughout history. We were not dealing with someone who would seek to win the argument through discussion or indeed by democratic will, but rather with legal tantrums and easily debunked propaganda.

But the scope of this effort required more than knowledge of Trump’s past conduct and the contours of democracy across historical time. It also required intimate knowledge of America’s election systems and in particular the American people’s unique susceptibility to disinformation and longstanding distrust of civic institutions. Advance messaging would be critical, as would applying pressure in the right places and to the right people in power. In some cases this proved to be the legislators in charge of certifying the results in battleground states like Michigan. Some of it played out in PR campaigns, some of it in the streets.

The results of this concerted effort more or less speak for themselves. But this story should give us pause — what if things had broken differently? What if more of the usual suspects had thrown in with Trump & Co? What if people in key positions had succumbed to the same wave of disinfo & paranoia that animated radical elements of our electorate? What if the primed messaging had been bungled, or come too late? What if the electoral college results had been closer in margin? What if committed people hadn’t shown up in the same numbers and with the same level of boldness to counter the attempts at disruption? The democratic order prevailed this time around with its institutions intact, but is it strong enough — are we strong enough — to weather the next storm?

If anything, this story demonstrates the fragility of our democracy, that it depends as much on longstanding institutions and norms as accidents of history and grassroots organizing. We ignore the lessons from this election cycle at great peril. In the end, the democracy we save is our own.

P.S. I do feel like this is a story that ought to be memorialized in some way beyond a long form article. The sporadic, decentralized nature of the pro-democracy effort may not lend itself especially well to a feature film, but a documentary should absolutely be on the table. Bless each and every one of these people. Excerpts (emphasis mine):
 

“This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

[…]

“The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.”

[…]

“It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.”

[…]

“Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey’s journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they’d pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

[…]

“Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.”

It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”

[…]

“As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.“

Further reading:

• The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
• A Stress Test for Our Democracy
• What Russia’s Meddling Can Tell Us About Their Motives and Our Indifference

Feature image credit: Michelle Gustafson for TIME

 
 
A documentary project that debuted in the summer of 2019 can now be viewed on YouTube in its entirety. Beautifully titled American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel, the film is made available courtesy of Secular Student Alliance. The first hour and a half is the documentary, while the remaining runtime features a Q&A with one of the pastors, Reverend Marlin Lavanhar. The film profiles two different church communities in Oklahoma, one mainline Christian, the other Unitarian, each helmed by pioneering idealists devoted to reclaiming faith from the clutches of right-wing contemporary evangelicalism. It’s a timely and personal glimpse into the hardscrabble realities of establishing a more tolerant church presence in rural America.
 

 
Oklahoma is often considered the “reddest” state in America. Every single county went to Trump in 2016. Naturally, it also happens to be the veritable epicenter of the Bible Belt, with Tulsa occasionally designated the “buckle.” Roughly 79% of Oklahomans identify as Christian, predominantly Southern Baptist. The idea of liberal, justice-oriented churches thriving in such an unwelcoming, if not outright hostile, environment would strike many as preposterous on its face. And yet, as the film shows, that’s just what’s happening thanks to a few blessedly dedicated iconoclasts willing to challenge the statewide hegemony of the Christian right.

The Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City and All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, as havens for free thought and social-conscious messaging, provide a clear contrast to the thousands of Trumpified churches dotting the countryside. Comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, these are places that speak to rational believers who wish to be part of a community that espouses a Christianity decidedly less embarrassing to empathetic adults capable of critical thought. Pastors like Robin Meyers of Mayflower articulate approaches to faith and the Bible that don’t line up with those of Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Mark Driscoll, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, Joel Osteen, and other evangelical heavyweights.

Central to the fissiparous nature of contemporary Christianity is hermeneutics — or the overall lens through which one views the Bible. The question of inerrancy is the elephant in the room that more often than not bogs down our theological disagreements, and though it’s never mentioned by name in the film, many of the issues explored run right into it. Debates over immigration and foreign policy, same-sex marriage, whether women can occupy leadership roles in the church, wealth and racial inequality, even climate change, all turn on the differing interpretive choices of one Christian tradition or another.

It’s a point of separation that’s highlighted especially well in the film thanks to the inclusion of New Testament scholar Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott. His didactic monologues help drive home that, at bottom, there’s a difference between how evangelical fundamentalists approach the Bible and how mainline Christians approach the Bible, and that difference matters. To be sure, biblical interpretation is a quandary that’s been with the church from the fourth century onward and, indeed, is responsible for much of the major denominational branching observed since that time. But the role of the Bible in relation to Christian identity, and the amount of deference due the texts in resolving the issues of our time, is the gravamen underlying much of the internecine Christian culture war today.

The cardinal theological and intellectual error committed by fundamentalists — apart from their ideological rigidity, perhaps — is their indifference to historical context. A collection of texts divorced from its original setting and intent sets up the expectation that the Bible can speak to whatever modern concerns one wishes to bring to it. Mainline Christians, by contrast, largely understand that a more responsible way to engage the Bible is not with a literal or scientific reading, but rather with one that seeks to understand these writings in light of their ancient context and the perspectives and concerns of its (eminently fallible) composers. The latter outlook allows the mainline Christian to dispense with the notion that the Bible must inform every aspect of modern social, political, and theological life.

Put another way, mainline Christians believe God is larger than the Bible, even while the Bible points to God, while fundamentalists in large part believe God and the Bible to be one and the same. For the evangelical fundamentalist, thus, the Bible is, in effect, an idol. By equating the Bible with God itself, they elevate a physical text to an object of mystical devotion. As Dr. Scott pointedly remarks early on, the kind of idolatrous attachment that treats the Bible as essential to Christianity is an awkward position to stake out since in fact there was no biblical canon until some three centuries following Jesus’ death.

Such a paradigm extends beyond mere theology and into culture, as we’ve witnessed in recent decades, most poignantly over the last four years. The unholy alliance between Trump and evangelicals — and white evangelicals in particular — is a topic that’s been probed at length by folks much smarter than me, but there does seem to be some connective tissue between regarding the Bible as a supreme and inerrant authority on the one hand, and the willingness to not only embrace a coarse strongman like Trump but to overlook his obvious lies and contradictions and insist he can do no wrong in the face of incontrovertible evidence on the other. Amid repeated setbacks in the arena of politics and social mores, evangelicals see in Trump a return to form, a chance to recover the patriarchal, white nationalist paradigm under which they’ve always flourished.

But if the Trump era has taught us anything about religion, it’s that one can no longer compartmentalize their faith from their politics. Self-aware Christians have awoken to the fact that siding with a president who dehumanizes asylum-seeking refugees by separating their families and stuffing them in overcrowded facilities is a monstrous affront to the gospel; that demonizing outsiders and ethnic minorities (categories to which, as a Jew living under Roman rule, Jesus belonged) cannot be reconciled with the texts of the New Testament; that abject cruelty for cruelty’s sake is incongruous with the lovingkindness exemplified in the figure of Jesus. Such Christians exist everywhere in America, including in Oklahoma.

Toward the end of the film, Reverend Carlton Pearson, who once served under televangelist Oral Roberts, says that he believes churches like Mayflower and All Souls Unitarian will be the “premier megachurches in the next 10 years.” I don’t know how his prediction will pan out, but I do think that something has to give in terms of the relationship between evangelicalism and Trumpian politics. For Christianity to remain relevant in a rapidly secularizing society, it must examine its theology in response to new evidence and information and to the forces of social change. It cannot continue clinging to discredited ideas, outmoded belief systems, and archaic cultural conventions while expecting to appeal to informed, rationally minded people in the twenty-first century — not if they want to stop seeing younger people, who tend to have much lower tolerance for bigotry and Trumpist behavior, disaffiliate.

To be sure, the roots of this culture will be difficult to extirpate. Fundamentalist churches have been committing open intellectual fraud on their congregations for decades now, adopting a kind of absolutism to ward off disagreement and branding anyone who disagrees with them as ‘heretics,’ atheists, and the like. As a result, their fervent members are none too disposed to step out of their echo chamber and honestly consider competing perspectives, conditioned as they are to rationalize away whatever dissonance happens to penetrate their carefully managed bubble. I hardly expect this social climate to deteriorate completely in the coming years, and I anticipate the voices that have fallen out of favor will incline toward more incendiary (and more infantile) rhetoric as the cultural battle lines continue to sharpen. But if these communities want to slow the hemorrhaging of young folks in particular, at a minimum they’ll need to shed their Trumpist associations.

As for whether a more mature and sensible evangelicalism will eventually displace what we see today across rural America, I’m admittedly less hopeful. I actually don’t think the regressive, reactionary strand of Christianity can be ‘saved’ from the dishonesty of the antiscience, anti-academia, anti-social justice industrial complex, because the patient could not possibly survive the surgery. The inhumility and incuriosity, to say nothing of the rampant hypocrisy, are too deeply baked into the cultural psyche. My hope, though, is that while evangelical churches may continue to exist, with all their backward ideological baggage intact, we’ll see them become smaller in size and shallower in influence as their more cognizant counterparts leave the fold for more mainline, progressive-postured churches.

Further reading and resources:

• Secular Student Alliance premiere of “American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel”
• Defending God, No Matter the Cost
• Creating a More Inclusive Christianity Takes More than Love Alone
• Review: The Unlikely Disciple
• Review: God Behaving Badly
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

 
 
As we allow ourselves to take a breath, let’s remember that the mere reporting of election results is only the first step in this process. We’re now in the “interregnum” between election day and the point at which both candidates respect the outcome. We’re already seeing the contours of a clash election analysts, academics, political strategists, and lawyers have warned us about for months: a struggle between the structural integrity of our political system and the integrity of the sitting president and his enablers. Whether our system is resilient enough to withstand the coming turbulence — and the degree to which we will see an orderly transition of power — hinges not so much on a clear and unambiguous election result but on the norms that sustain our democracy.

The concession speech, like the one Al Gore gave in 2000 thirty-six days after election night, is one such norm. I imagine I’m not alone in thinking we’re more likely to see the release of The Winds of Winter this holiday season than a genuine concession speech from someone who’s laid the groundwork for the very postelection contest we’re seeing unfold. Any such remarks on the matter will undoubtedly be diluted with more baseless allegations of fraud that will seep ever deeper into the psyche of his base. It would, in effect, be the concession speech equivalent of a non-apology. Whatever scenario we can come up with for how this plays out, from the plausible to the harebrained, the reality is that each is eminently more likely than one in which Trump humbly concedes the election to one Joseph Biden.

Symbolic though they may be, norms matter a great deal for the preservation of liberal democracy. The peaceful transition of power is itself a democratic institution, and a sign of a properly functioning civil society. We take it for granted in the Western world today, but peaceful transfer represents a key milestone on a nation’s path to democracy, as exampled in Armenia following the Velvet Revolution in 2018. Countries without it — and countries who lose it — have proven vulnerable to fascist regime change and slid headlong into increasingly undemocratic outcomes.

That 2020 would be a stress test for American democracy was always a given. How we will fare in the face of it remains an open question, and will depend on the integrity of our political leadership and, very possibly, our instincts as a people for direct action defenses of our institutions and norms.

As Barton Gellman in The Atlantic impressed upon us last month: “Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.”

Further reading:

• What If Trump Refuses to Concede?
• Here’s what happens if a U.S. president refuses to leave office
• What happens if a president refuses to concede?
• The Deadline That Could Hand Trump the Election
• The dishonest heart of the challenge to the 2020 election results
• Irreducibly Multiple: Notes on the US Election, by Amanda Armstrong-Price

Feature image credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

 
 
I’ve long been confounded by the ‘genuinely undecided’ voter. Not, to be clear, by people looking outside the two major parties (because hey, we’ve all been there), or by those who are aloof to politics and who pride themselves on their civic disengagement. I’m referring rather to those people who consistently participate in elections, regularly vote for a red or blue ticket, but are still on the fence about the two on this particular ballot. Indeed, “do you know who you’ll vote for this year” seems as absurd a question as “do you like ice cream?” For what it’s worth, the 2016 election met with similar incredulity on my part.

Fast forward four years, and we’re faced with two candidates who, apart from their age and race, could not be more different. With respect to policy agenda, experience and qualifications, character and competence, tone and temperament, and overall leadership style, the two may as well hail from different solar systems. And yet, there’s apparently a segment of prospective voters out there still hampered by indecision. We can’t totally write them off as ignorant screwballs or victims of misinformation, as Trump already has those folks well in hand. Their seemingly improbable existence cries out for explanation.

To help demystify this phenomenon, pollster Frank Luntz led a virtual focus group after Tuesday’s debate with 15 such voters from key battleground states in an attempt to gauge their reactions to the first debate. The discussion runs a little over an hour in length, and while it’s certainly not as illuminating as I’d hoped, it helped me understand the mindset of these voters a bit better. We get some insight into their media habits, how closely they follow politics, and how they fact-check different claims, although many of their responses aren’t exactly encouraging. If you’re short on time and would rather read about what went down than watch in full, Politico has a good recap.

I think many people’s running assumption to this point (myself included) has been that if you’re a living, breathing human with access to the internet, you doubtlessly have an opinion on Donald Trump in 2020. How could you not? But for those of us in major cities like New York and DC, it’s worth keeping in mind that we live in a bubble and that not everyone is keyed into politics the way we are. After all, we’re part of one of the least civically engaged democracies in the world, and that hasn’t changed. Even in 2016, which had the highest number of raw votes cast in any election in US history, some 40 percent of eligible voters never made it to the polls.

That percentage, of course, isn’t comprised primarily of undecideds, but of people who are unable to vote due to their life circumstances or voter suppression efforts, of people unwilling to vote on account of their generally apathetic approach to politics, and so forth. It’s important to understand, as well, the above assumption that everyone should be armed to the teeth with information just like we are stems, at least in part, from privilege; a good portion of the country works long hours, lives paycheck to paycheck, and barely has the time and energy to feed their families, much less stay plugged into politics and candidates.

No, the count of undecided voters is a much smaller figure. Historically, it hovers between 2 and 4 percent. Recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth both found that 3 percent of likely voters are uncommitted to either of the two candidates, a reportedly smaller share of the overall population compared to to the 2016 election. This may seem marginal, and it is, but in close elections even small sub-groups can have an outsize impact on the result. In a 2 to 4 point race, this bloc of voters in swing states — see the Rust Belt last election for exhibit A — could make all the difference.

As the election nears, the nine men and six women Luntz assembled for his focus group might well serve as a decent proxy for an ultimately decisive set of voters. They represent a number of the swing-iest states in the country, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Luntz puts questions to the group ranging from, ‘how are you still undecided’ to ‘how would you describe each candidate’s performance in the debate’, hoping to gain insight into their presumably idiosyncratic approach to politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given how disastrous the first debate was — my wife and I shut it off after five minutes, and judging from the post-debate reactions here and elsewhere, the American people deserve another stimulus check for suffering through that blight on human discourse, but I digress — most of the participants were not swayed by either candidate’s performance enough to move them off the fence.

Some of them, however, were so turned off by Trump’s antics that they seem to have made up their minds on the spot. (Whether this was their first time observing the sitting president’s behavior firsthand is unclear.) Luntz pushed back on this, skeptical that someone with so trenchant an opinion could actually have been undecided, in particular Ruthie from Pennsylvania, who described Trump’s performance as trying to “win an argument with a crackhead.” That said, more than half of the participants genuinely seemed stumped.

The group was in almost universal agreement that Biden came away the clear winner in terms of poise and demeanor, though even here they noted the constant bickering was akin to “two old white men in a retirement home arguing over who gets the pudding.” Which, like, yup. A familiar theme was that Biden didn’t represent a clear enough contrast to Trump in terms of his plans to remedy longstanding social tensions or to unify the country in this time of heightened unrest and ideological polarization. Nothing they heard from Biden on Tuesday, in fact, was enough to secure their vote.

Lastly, I want to draw attention to Kimberly from Ohio. Unfortunate from a representation perspective, she was the only Black participant on the panel. I do not know how Luntz and his team selected the participants, but it pains me that more non-white voices were not included. How can you expect to conduct a serious conversation about race relations in America or the consequences of elections on different racial groups with a crowd of white faces who tend to bear highly disproportionate effects from the outcomes of said elections? The absence of racial diversity grew more pronounced when the topic of Trump’s reluctance to denounce white supremacy came up.

At any rate, I found Kimberly’s responses to be the most insightful of the bunch. She gives a pretty impassioned defense of her undecided stance starting at the 37:22 marker. I found her answer sincerely given and compelling, and it rearticulates some very common themes you hear from the Black community around politics in this country. It’s worth taking seriously, as I’ve seen very few candidates on either the right or the left who seem to truly grok the moral injury of systemic racism and the enormous challenge of Black liberation and restitution.

Further reading and resources:

• Undecided voters call Trump ‘unhinged’ and ‘un-American’ — but are unswayed by debate
• Yes, there really are undecided voters in 2020
• The Undecideds: Sure, Biden and Trump are very different. But maybe neither is right for the job.
• Undecided voters in the 2020 election and swing states, explained
• US election: Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Persuading an undecided voter
• Undecided Voters Could Still Decide the Election. They Tend to Dislike Trump.
• How Can We Win

Feature image credit: CBS NEWS

 
 
Few may know this, but Timothy Snyder’s book actually originated with a Facebook post he published back on November 15, 2016 — one week after Donald Trump’s election. “Americans,” it began, “are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” Those wise words on how to oppose fascism were then expanded into a pamphlet of sorts, a timely DIY-style guide on how to defend democracy at home.

You can read the bulletin in its original form at the link above if you want a taste of the lessons imparted here. Rest assured, this isn’t one that you read once and put back on the shelf, never to visit again. Given the trajectory of the last two years, I find myself picking it back up from time to time, simultaneously awestruck and discouraged to find how relevant are its warnings and exhortations. As a reviewer on Goodreads so eloquently put it: “No matter your politics, fascism and authoritarianism arise when we’re looking another way, distracted, numb to history. The only way to get out in front of and stop a tyrant is to know what we’re looking for. A book like this can save our country and unite us toward a common goal of change, of striving for democracy, and protect us from the dangers of our own rotten impulses.”

The rise of fascism and Nazism that gripped our grandparents’ generation, and the historical contexts in which they emerged, offer a bounty of insight into understanding our present political and social order and the foreseeable means by which they can unravel. Never has there been a better reason to arm ourselves with the knowledge of the recent past than that we might anticipate and oppose budding incursions into civil liberties and free society.

The onslaught of corruption and incompetence evidenced in the current administration has failed to register much more than a hint of surprise among those of us who expressed concern from the beginning. For anyone familiar with the undemocratic maneuvers favoring the autocratic regimes of the previous century, warning signs were everywhere. As a friend remarked at the time, the early indicators of abnormalcy gleamed “like a flashing light at a railroad crossing.” When we referred to the despot-elect as a fascist, we meant it rather as a noun, not an adjective. We didn’t want to be right, but neither were we willing to bet our democracy that we were wrong.

A unilateral power play here, another broken norm there. As examples of executive misconduct stack up and political rivalries intensify, we find ourselves faced with a momentous decision as a nation. Do we continue on this foundering rollercoaster on the assumption we can disembark at will? This is a question that seems scarcely entertained by the president’s most fervid surrogates. Those continuing to pledge their steadfast support dawdle and dither with denial and deflection, chalking up the president’s around the clock imprudence to unorthodox methods and a heavy touch, and in so doing have all but lost their sense of right and wrong. The historical parallels here, as Snyder so poignantly conveys throughout this guidebook, are unmistakable.

Hitler, lest we never forget, also campaigned on a raft of false promises and hyper-nationalist bigotry. Like 45, he tapped into a disaffected bloc seeking economic restitution. And as we’re observing from our front-row seats in the Trump era, businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals at the time endorsed their demagogue du jour so as not to deviate too sharply from public opinion. They rationalized by telling themselves that Hitler’s wilder promises would never come to pass — that there were bigger issues at stake. How do we look back now at the millions of Germans who supported history’s darkest figure?

Normalization is the last gasp of democracy. Prewar Germany was filled with well meaning citizens as wise and as reasonable as today’s electorate who brushed off Hitler’s anti-Semitism and ethno-nationalist rhetoric as all posture and bravado with no bite. As a result, their institutions and their society gradually but surely slid virtually unnoticed from a state of normalcy in which freedoms were taken for granted into explicit despotism. What happened then can happen now. Indeed, if recent events have shown us anything, it’s that our political system and its outdated institutions are vulnerable to the kind of undoing authoritarians are especially primed to exploit. Our vulnerabilities are different from those of 1930s Europe, but the institutions on which we rely are susceptible all the same to bad actors and extreme partisanism.

The sweep of history unfolds over time, not overnight, something we as prisoners of the present tend to forget. Thankfully, the lessons and protocols haven’t changed. I found Snyder’s shrewd wisdoms inspiring, so much so that I fashioned them into a few of my own.

Resist the impulse to normalize. Lest desensitization and apathy set in, cling to your sense of outrage and keep it as well honed as the day is long. A loss of the latter will only ease the former along in historically dangerous directions.

When not guided by logic and reason, any fiction can be your reality. Indeed, an assault on truth and fact-based communication is fundamental to authoritarian regime changes throughout history. Adhere to facts and refuse to acquiesce to “alternative” unevidenced realities. Rebuff sophists in power who deliberately abuse the norms of civil discussion. Treat truth as the virtue that it is and reject con-man attempts to paint what is true as partisan fancy.

A compromise on or renunciation of verifiable reality is the most fatal step on the path to an undemocratic future. Rerouting from the current trajectory starts with civil resistance and noncompliance on the part of elected leaders, government workers, and ordinary citizens like you and me. As the past century’s European societies illustrate, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

I’ll close with two of my favorite quotes from this stunningly important book:
 

“Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.” (p. 72)

“Stand out. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.” (p. 51)

 
For more discussion of this book and the urgency of its insights, see this interview with the author at Vox.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading and resources:

• • Strength Through Unity: How To Spot Fascism Before It’s Too Late
  • The Road to Tyranny 
  • We overanalyze Trump. He is what he appears to be.
  • Autocracy: Rules for Survival
  • How to preserve the ideals of liberal democracy in the face of a Trump presidency
  • This Is Not Normal
  • Trump won, and Amy Siskind started a list of changes. Now it’s a sensation.
  • The War on Facts Is a War on Democracy
  • How did Hitler rise to power?
  • Hitler’s Rise to Power
  • The American Abyss: “Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”

Image credit: ALBERT ZAWADA, AGENCJA GAZETA

 
 
The movement Black Lives Matter emerged onto the social justice scene in 2013 following the murder of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, his killer. Founded by three women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — its goal has been to shine a light on the systemic injustice, expressed in violence and targeted discrimination, that haunts men and women of color across America, and to make equal rights and equal dignity a reality, not merely at the level of the law but at the level of everyday life.

As more names and more bodies have piled up behind Trayvon Martin, including Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Marlene Pinnock, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and countless others, Black Lives Matter has become a call to action that challenges all Americans to reckon with the horrors of police brutality and the modern criminal justice system and the endemic racial woes that have been allowed to fester in our society for far too long.

“Thus, it was the death and failure of our justice system to account for the unnecessary death of a black American that prompted three women to offer these three basic and urgent words to the American people: black lives matter.” So writes Christopher Lebron, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University, in the introduction to his excellent 2017 primer on the movement, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.

From the start, BLM has been a loosely organized grassroots movement with no formal structure. It has since grown and blossomed and now has an international presence. Accompanied by hashtags and T-shirts sporting the ubiquitous slogan, like-minded activists have formed dozens of local chapters that regularly engage in organized protests and political demonstrations. Its rapid cultural uptake has also inspired a number of sister groups like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and Campaign Zero.

Consistent with any movement or ideology that’s attained critical mass, BLM has taken on a number of different perspectives, interpretations, and goals. While the aspirations and tactics of those who act under its banner vary and may not always align with the views of its founders, the diversified movement is generally if not universally marked by an acute concern for human rights and its uncompromising demands for racial justice.

Lebron captures the unorthodoxy of the movement thusly: “Eschewing traditional hierarchical leadership models, the movement cannot be identified with any single leader or small group of leaders, despite the role Cullors, Tometi, and Garza played in giving us the social movement hashtag that will likely define our generation. Rather, #BlackLivesMatter represents an ideal that motivates, mobilizes, and informs the actions and programs of many local branches of the movement.”

While the decentralized, pro-communal ethos of BLM fosters greater intellectual and political diversity and allows for more fluidity in terms of organizing, its informal nature also leaves its core principles and ambitions open to interpretation. In practice, this suscepts the movement to unfair, distorted, or otherwise wide-of-the-mark characterizations, both by those seeking to sustain the injustice the movement is meant to dismantle as well as by those who operate under its name. Therein lies the impetus behind Lebron’s book. As he explains, “The Black Power generation had in the sharp and brave tome penned by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, a published manifesto and theoretical edifice. In contrast, no such text exists to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter.”

To construct his canonical text, Lebron marshals the generative insights of a roster of heralded black intellectuals like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, and Langston Hughes, charting their unique contributions to black intellectual and creative life. During the course of this process, he touches on everything from black political expression and civic engagement to issues of gender, sexuality, and artistic expression in the black community.

From this richly textured history we see how the legacies of previous black influencers have informed the racial struggle movements of contemporary times. By probing deeper into each of these legacies, Lebron manages to craft an eloquent, authoritative primer that grounds the Black Lives Matter movement alongside an enduring tradition of black resistance against the institutional inequality of American life.

As is to be expected with an intellectual history rooted in philosophical ideals, Lebron’s book is dense and not for the faint of heart. While the scholarly tone may be off-putting to some, he packs plenty of insight into its slim, 150-page frame. How much one gets out of this book may ultimately depend on the volume and flavor of ideological baggage with which one goes into it. Those harboring ill will toward the movement will inevitably find ways to nourish that enmity despite its broad informational value, while those already on board with the movement’s essential purpose and its means and methods will walk away rejuvenated in the fight for racial progress.

But no matter one’s politics, color, or creed, it is incumbent upon all decent people to lend a fair and honest hearing to our generation’s defining social justice movement. Lebron’s sweeping distillations of generations of black thought and insight are worth the entry price alone, and the ways in which he connects historical activism to modern day struggles should bring renewed clarity to those pursuing a more equal and just world.

I have little doubt that Lebron’s careful, compelling book will maintain its relevance beyond the current era, but I would be remiss were I to conclude this review without mentioning how today’s political environment shapes the urgency of its message. The ascendance of Trump and the all too familiar themes of white supremacy encoded in his rhetoric have brought the subject of race and racial politics into the national spotlight once more.

While it is true that white supremacists and their co-conspirators were around long before Trump, it’s become increasingly clear that the current president has emboldened this contingent like never before. We’ve observed an alarming uptick in hate crimes since the day he took office, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other human rights groups. That is to say, the disreputables to which demagogues like Trump cater are no longer concealed behind societal expectations of decency and civility, but are out in broad daylight, spreading their hate and dehumanizing minority groups in record numbers.

It is in these historical moments that our moral mettle is tested. Those of us with privilege are invited to join hands with the oppressed and push back against the surge of intolerance that threatens black lives and black dignity and all peoples subjected to indecent treatment — because complacency in the face of unchecked hate is a choice.

Excerpts

I’ve pulled a few of my favorite excerpts from the book to include here.

“Such shame seemed to take on a sharper and, if it can be imagined, more urgent tone after the Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery but had failed to usher in an era of genuine black freedom. While blacks were unshackled from plantations, whites reminded them that their freedom remained dependent on whites’ goodwill. But that goodwill was not forthcoming. Instead, the era of black lynching and Jim Crow filled the space formerly occupied by slavery. As Reconstruction crumbled under President Andrew Johnson’s hammer blows, institutions relied less on controlling black bodies for labor and started controlling them with segregation and brutal punishment. White supremacy increasingly became an unmediated relationship between common white and black Americans as well as between blacks and institutions that were de facto and often de jure agents of white power interests.” (p. 3)

“The notion of black criminality was essential for white supremacists. If blacks were going to roam American streets free, then they were a threat to the lives of good, upstanding whites, and the government could not be counted on to practice exacting justice. Completely unfounded charges of crimes were offered up to turn the gears of racial vengeance within communities and institutions. Once these gears began moving, almost no person or institution could or would prevent the ensuing barbarity…By some estimates, more than 3,400 black Americans were lynched between 1862 and 1968.” (p. 4)

“The essence of radical politics is using unsanctioned means to effect change to disrupt the status quo.” ( p. 63)

“In present times, a common refrain to the slogan “black lives matter” is the disingenuous retort, “all lives matter.” This retort subverts the message of the original slogan by semi-sincerely worrying that to insist black lives matter must somehow mean that black lives matter more than other lives–in other words, those insisting that all lives matter are really concerned about what they perceive to be a fundamental inequality in the status of lives based on race. To these individuals it seems arbitrary that equality would be qualified by skin color. Of course, to most black observers, this is the height of bitter irony since the precise substance of saying “black lives matter” is to instate a nonarbitrary form of equality that eliminates the systematic endangerment of black lives, whether at the hands of the police by gunshot or at the welfare office through resource withholding.” (pp. 81-82)

“Were Cooper a present-day activist she would most certainly admire Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the three black women who founded BlackLivesMatter.org. Their position has been that #blacklivesmatter must encompass black lives on both sides of the gender divide and across the spectrum of sexual identification. Cooper was one of the most important early feminist thinkers to argue that black women are worthy humans—their skin color was not a warrant for dehumanizing them; their sex was not a reason for rendering them invisible, mute, and usable.” (p. 83)

“For Lorde, blacks who did not support gay rights, especially those of black gays and lesbians, failed to see that the struggle of homosexuals was not of a different kind from their own, but, rather, was simply taking place in a different key.” (p. 94)

“James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. were powerful proponents of the role of love in American race relations. For them, love was the key to democratic redemption.” (p. 99)

“The use of nonviolent protest as a cornerstone for national moral progress remains one of King’s enduring contributions to American society, and it was grounded in the notion of love.” (p. xix)

“The average white American in the middle of the twentieth century did not grasp that “separate but equal” was a moral offense against blacks. Blacks saw deeper into that principle—they rightly perceived that separate meant quite the opposite of equal and that Jim Crow was white supremacy by any means necessary.” (pp. 101-102)

“Blacks, then, face a very tangible predicament. Baldwin’s call for blacks to love themselves is demanding, but his additional call for blacks to love whites despite the pains and torments of racial oppression can sometimes seem unreasonably demanding. It calls to mind a kind of schizophrenia in which my self-respect requires anger against white power but in which my soul also requires that I be compassionate despite the rage.” (p. 112)

“What has gone wrong in the claim that “all lives matter” is not that it is false. Rather, it is beside the point as a matter of both hubris and lack of imagination. Further, it obfuscates the question of identity altogether as well as the different kinds of value placed on various identities.” (p. 143)

“The person who wonders why Sandra Bland spoke back to the cop in question cannot see what Sandra saw—an imminent threat to her personhood. Bland’s, and everyone else’s death, then, is a false enigma, a puzzle easily solved with the key of white privilege.” (p. 155)

“Do or do not black lives matter? We still wait for America’s response. But the question has been asked, the conversation is being demanded, and there are yet other futures to be written if we so will it.” (p. 151)

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

 
 
On the matter of Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, there are some who have condemned the revocation of his press pass and put zero stock in any allegations of physical impropriety but who nevertheless think that his conduct at press conferences in general is in some sense untoward or unbecoming of a reporter. See this post for Exhibit A from a former Vox reporter, who sees Acosta’s antics as too expeditionary and crusade-y for his tastes.

You can view below the full exchange with Trump. In this clip you can see that it was not just Acosta but several of his colleagues who adopted the same approach, pressing the president to answer the question that was asked, and being shouted at and shouted down for doing so.

However odd it may seem, it’s Acosta who’s come under scrutiny, despite others in the room following his lead. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen heated exchanges between Acosta and members of this administration, either, and the longtime journalist has defended his approach in the past, saying that “this is a different kind of president…We’re going to have a different kind of playbook when it comes to covering the president. That means at times, you know, I bring a little attitude to what I do on a daily basis.”

While one can certainly harbor concern for the comportment of journalists like Acosta, perhaps we should be more concerned about the sustained attacks on the free press coming from the top, which, it must be noted given the subject in question, tend to be disproportionately directed at CNN. Perhaps we should be more concerned with an administration built on a foundation of falsehood and deceit than with those committed to challenging that foundation at every given opportunity. Perhaps we need more theatricality and hard-nosed inquiry in the press room, not less, to signal both to those in power and to the American people that what we’re witnessing isn’t normal and that resistance is still possible.

When faced with a White House that lies and spins and dissembles with seeming impunity and inches us closer to an Orwellian landscape with each passing day, the public needs unbowed stand-ins like Acosta whose duty to the truth overrides the traditional lionizing of those occupying the highest seats of power. Reporters, as our sacred link to reality, should take lengths to avoid conducting themselves as though we are in a business as usual scenario, as though this tantrum-throwing president were just like any other. Trump’s open disdain for the fact-recording community is a grave and ongoing threat to democracy and to the constitutionally protected press freedoms we take for granted. Pretending otherwise merely helps fascism along.

The argument for this view all but made itself when, in the wake of the infamous press conference, the White House tweeted out doctored video by way of InfoWars in an effort to justify barring Acosta from the press room. Their version was sped up to create the appearance that Acosta had karate-chopped the aide’s arm when she reached for his mic. In case it wasn’t obvious, this is Dictatorship 101. Why continue with the bother of inconvenient questions when you can simply oust the question-asker on cooked-up pretenses? Shouting down reporters and giving Acosta the boot were unprecedented enough, but circulating literal fake news — itself a fascist act — to justify fascist behavior is a monumental act of mendacity and gaslighting that should erase away any thought of impugning Acosta’s manner.

The extent to which journalism and activism should intertwine is sophisticated, to be sure. Some caution that leaning too much into the latter can compromise one’s ability to secure trust with the subjects on whom one is supposed to be reporting and that tacking too close to an agenda can undermine the profession as a whole. Others, such as Deepak Adhikari of Al Jazeera, go further and say that activism by its very nature is incompatible with the professionalism that serious journalism requires. In order to avoid undue influence over political and social matters, he contends, an effective journalist must sacrifice narrative in the interest of fostering an informed debate.

On the other side are those who see this framing as a false dichotomy, arguing that journalism is a form, or subset, of activism. Matt Pearce of the LA Times has written that “journalism is activism in its most basic form. The entire basis for its ethical practice is the idea that a democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function. Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism, even if it’s not the march-and-protest kind.” If reporters had no intention of influencing the issues they’re reporting on, he goes on to ask, why write about them in the first place?

In many cases one’s identity and life experience lend a sense of urgency to a story, making it difficult to set aside one’s personal perspective. A woman reporting on a policy proposal that seeks to cut abortion access, or an indigenous American covering oil and gas conglomerates whose projects encroach on native lands, for instance, will inevitably find it more cumbersome to navigate the boundary between journalism and advocacy, however diligently they conceal their bias. The same applies to anyone personally affected by a story, particularly those casting a light on human injustice. 

Maria Bustillos of Popula.com argues that even choosing not to take sides in a story is in fact picking a side because that choice serves the status quo: “All speech has a political dimension, if only one that cosigns the status quo through its failure to question or challenge. All forms of not playing are playing.”

Still, we are left with the question of what to do when lies are peddled by the powerful. Even if you see journalism and activism as discrete entities, what shared role might they have in holding errant politicians and institutions accountable? What indeed is the journalist’s role when confronted with blatant falsehood, day after day? Or, as CNN poses the question, are journalists to be passive players in the public conversation or active participants who shape that conversation?

In my view, speaking truth to power becomes an ever more essential aspect of the profession up against an administration that abuses it so casually and carelessly as do Trump and his sycophants. There is nothing normal, not in the United States at least, about using doctored content to deflect criticism. There is nothing okay with repeatedly referring to the press as the “enemy of the people.” There is nothing acceptable about an administration that systematically suppresses science and actively harms the well being of future generations. There is nothing common, decent or respectable about repeatedly attacking the special counsel investigation and appointing individuals who would reasonably be expected to undermine it.

For the press to fulfill its duty, truth must come first, and that is why mannerly yet resolute pushback and on-the-spot fact-checking ought to be part of the reportorial toolkit. While countering misinformation in real-time often has the scent of activism in practice, it is nevertheless essential for maintaining the integrity of the profession — even more so when what’s at stake is the continuity of the profession itself. As David Roberts of Vox so succinctly put it, “Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.”

Trump’s actions and Trump’s conduct in this latest episode are what should alarm us, not Acosta’s. Though some see Acosta’s conduct as a step beyond mere advocacy journalism, I can’t agree. Far from viewing his posture as improper, I see it as being sensitive to or in tune with the weight of the historical moment. Similar to how having climate deniers on your press panel creates a false sense of balance around a scientifically settled question, continuing to engage in good faith can send the wrong message by lending legitimacy to that which is neither legitimate nor factual.

Not only do I believe his adopting such a posture is warranted in this moment, I think less of reporters who fail to adopt a warrantably critical posture toward the complacently stupid and childishly hostile Trump and who decline to protect the shared norms on which political reportage relies. The press cannot afford to stay silent when their institution is put at existential risk by a political movement that rejects or is at best indifferent towards foundational values like transparency, objectivity, accuracy, professionalism, fairness and truth. As the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci once wrote, “There are moments in life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation — a civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.”

And what is the alternative here, really? Simply asking routine questions while playacting that everything is ordinary is equally unlikely to return meaningful or satisfactory results. Sarah Sanders won’t answer your question in a transparently honest fashion either way, and Trumpland would still write off CNN as fake news no matter how cordial its reporters. Better is it to take off the kid gloves and indicate to those in power that we see through the lies and repeated attacks, and have no patience for them. That we refuse to go through the motions as though this conduct is normal or acceptable, or attempt to lend some form of legitimacy to actions unworthy of a mature, self-respecting democracy.

If this is the “crusade” Acosta has decided to embark on, consider me on Team Acosta. Would that others would follow his lead. Indeed, if this galvanizes others of his caliber to take on a more adversarial stance in public, then his activist approach will have paid off. Once we have someone in the White House again who respects basic norms and core institutions and not a self-confessed sexual predator who fills the airwaves with lies and attacks on the free press, maybe then we can work on things like civility and decorum.

Further reading: 

• President Trump just threw a tantrum at reporters: “You are a rude, terrible person”
• Is Journalism a Form of Activism?
• Journalism and activism: This ‘Reliable Sources’ segment sparked a debate
• Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology
• What Russia’s Meddling Can Tell Us About Their Motives and Our Indifference

Feature image credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh