Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.
.. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.
.. institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.
.. For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.
.. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank
.. he feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion
.. But it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
The Huge Cultural Shift That’s Helping Trump Win Evangelicals
In Mississippi, where evangelicals turned out in record numbers—and white evangelicals accounted for a whopping 75 percent of Republican voters—Trump won by double digits.
.. He seems like he’d be more comfortable on Tinder than in a church pew.
.. America’s evangelicals just aren’t all that evangelical any more.
.. Even nominal churchgoers like Reagan have done what no European politician would ever do: pledge their prayerful allegiance to Christ. Along the way, they have repeatedly promised to restore school prayer or stop gay marriage or overturn Roe v. Wade.
What they have delivered, however, is defeat after defeat in the culture wars.
.. Moore has repeatedly whacked Trump—a man whose “attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord”—as a reprobate unfit for the presidency.
.. Moore essentially admits this: in a recent op-ed, he announced that until voting habits change, he won’t even to refer to himself as an evangelical anymore. He lamented how so many of his coreligionists “have been too willing to look the other way when the word ‘evangelical’ has been co-opted by heretics and lunatics . . . as long as they were on the right side of the culture war.”
.. the group that used to refer to itself as a “moral majority” is at best a tiny minority, and a shrinking one at that. “We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America,” he told NPR recently. “Now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined—defined by commitment to core evangelical values—there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.”
.. During the civil rights era, Falwell denounced black ministers for their political activism. In a 1965 sermon—delivered the day the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led marchers from Selma to Montgomery—Falwell criticized the “left-wing” leaders of the “so-called freedom movement” for stirring up hatred and violence. “Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners,” he said.
But Falwell had a change of heart. Today he is remembered as the fundamentalist who, by co-founding the Moral Majority in 1979, officiated at the marriage of economic and cultural conservatism—the birth of the New Religious Right. Christians did not live in isolation, he reasoned. So it was not enough merely to save souls. You had to save the nation. And who better to convert it than pastors like himself?
.. Back in 1976, Falwell had supported the born-again Christian Jimmy Carter for president. But Carter disappointed many of his fellow evangelicals by taking on the tax-exempt status of Southern “segregation academies” and refusing to fight the good fight on abortion. So Falwell and his friends cozied up to the Republican Party.
.. Its alliance with the GOP meant that its members would fight not only to overturn Roe v. Wade but also to oppose the SALT II treaty, teachers unions, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In addition to calling the nation “back to biblical morality” he called it “back to patriotism.” And for him true patriots supported nuclear weapons, massive increases in military spending, a balanced budget amendment, tax cuts, and consumer capitalism. “The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs,” he said... Though it’s common to talk about the Republican Party having been captured by white evangelical activists, if you really look at the way the two groups have interacted over the years, it’s more accurate to say that evangelicals have been captured by the Republican Party. They ape its talking points about welfare cheats rather than the Bible’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed.
.. Today, when born-again Christians hold up posters at rallies that read, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for President Trump,” when they say they are sick of false promises from supposedly pious presidents on abortion or gay marriage and just want a strong man in the White House who can stop illegal immigration or keep us safe or just “smash things,” what are they saying? They are saying that their political identity has trumped their religious identity. They are saying that they are conservatives first and Christians second.
.. Cruz’s father is a traveling evangelist and a preacher of Dominionist theology who believes that Christians like his son must take dominion over “seven mountains”: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.
.. In fact, it is exceedingly difficult to find any moment when Reagan, Bush, or any of today’s Republican candidates put biblical faith over conservative principles.
.. When the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the Baptist Press praised it for “advancing the cause of religious liberty, human equality, and justice.” Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978—when the nascent Religious Right was casting about for ways to attack Democrats as moral relativists stuck in the “Bad Sixties.”
.. Views about abortion or gay marriage are more salient than beliefs about the Trinity or infant baptism.
.. The result is a population of self-identified “evangelicals” who find it harder and harder to see the difference between the teachings of the Bible and the policies of their beloved candidates.
.. Classically that narrative ran from sin in the Garden of Eden to redemption on the cross. Today it takes place in an America that has fallen from its founding glory yet will, by God’s grace and Trump’s hand, be made great again.
.. it can seem like there aren’t any evangelicals left in the Republican Party; there are just Republicans who happen to go to church.
The Art of Subversion: What transgressive tastemaker John Waters teaches the right.
“You need to prepare sneak attacks on society. ‘Hairspray’ is the only really devious movie I ever made,” Waters boasted during his 2015 commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design. “The musical based on it is now being performed in practically every high school in America—and nobody seems to notice it’s a show with two men singing a love song to each other that also encourages white teen girls to date black guys. ‘Pink Flamingos’ was preaching to the converted. But ‘Hairspray’ is a Trojan horse: It snuck into Middle America and never got caught.
.. Conservatives, by contrast, never fought the culture war with the intention of winning converts. Instead, they simply watched their circles become smaller, older, and more exclusive. They reduced themselves to remnants of the Moral Majority and became more concerned with winning elections than winning the culture of the future.
.. He was part of that change, helping to bring it about, but he did it without ever seeming like an angry ideologue. “I always used left-wing politics, I love the Yippies and the comic terrorism,” Waters told the British Film Institute. “I think it could be effective today, you humiliate your enemies by comic terrorism, by embarrassing them, and doing ridiculous stunts and hoaxes against them.”
.. What’s more, “I respect everything I make fun of,” the filmmaker wrote elsewhere.
.. Conservatives hardly ever take on their peers in fear that they will be considered unfashionable, be disinvited for radio and cable news show appearances, and lose the chance at becoming the next established figurehead. The right needs its own brand of radicalism if it’s going to fight the culture wars from its new place as the underdog, the new counterculture. It’s not enough to create an endless series of pie charts about how the wage gap is a myth; conservatives need to create a moment that people will grab onto because it is interesting, fun, and has a purpose. No one ever started a chant because they read a pie chart.
The Culture Of Trumpening
It is because of the increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost.
.. Evangelicals tried for years to fight for the culture—to win the argument for their traditional views regarding marriage, family, and the value of human life. Now they want to fight on different ground: political correctness.
.. Evangelicals (and Catholic conservatives) may have concluded that by now, the deck is stacked against them, and the only thing standing between them and liberal authoritarianism that is going to demolish their (our) institutions is a combative SOB who doesn’t care what Enlightened Opinion thinks of him.