Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal.
.. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.
.. Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.
.. “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community.
.. For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. …
.. Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.
.. the boys in his conservative Christian high school embracing white nationalism speculates that the megachurch Christianity of these high school seniors is not facing the reality of the world around us. If true, then the pastors and other religious authorities in these kids’ lives are simply not forming them as Christians to live in the post-Christian world ..
Micromanager-in-Chief: Narendra Modi Upends How India Is Run
Prime minister is the most powerful Indian leader in a generation, working in secret and challenging bureaucrats; cabinet got 20-minute heads-up on cash crunch
It was a quintessential move by Mr. Modi, planned in secret with a handful of close advisers. He announced it to the country only hours before it went into effect. His own cabinet ministers knew just 20 minutes before the announcement.
.. A victory, particularly in India’s most-populous state of Uttar Pradesh, would give the BJP more strength in Parliament and momentum for a widely expected re-election bid by Mr. Modi in 2019. If his party loses, opponents will be emboldened to block more of his legislative agenda.
.. In 2014, Mr. Modi’s political party became the first in three decades to win a majority in Parliament, campaigning on a promise to restore the prime minister’s authority.
.. Critics ranging from human-rights groups to student unions have accused Mr. Modi’s party of propping up his popularity by stirring sectarian resentments and Hindu nationalism.
.. Even his staff is sometimes caught off-guard by his decisions. On Christmas Day in 2015, he called Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to wish him a happy birthday. Mr. Modi then decided on the spur of the moment to fly to the Pakistani city of Lahore to celebrate in person with Mr. Sharif.
.. “It’s command and control,” said Jairam Ramesh, a former minister in the opposition Congress party, of Mr. Modi’s relationship with his cabinet. “You don’t have alternative points of view. You don’t have discussion.”
.. According to an official who was there, the prime minister recalled a re-election campaign in Gujarat when he refused to match another party’s promise to make electricity free. Mr. Modi pledged only to make the power supply more reliable and was re-elected.
.. Late in the process, Mr. Modi asked that the new rupee notes be printed with the name of his “Clean India” public-sanitation drive. He also wanted the new money to show off the campaign’s logo: a drawing of Mohandas Gandhi’s round eyeglasses.
.. During the chaotic aftermath, Mr. Modi praised what he called the sacrifices of Indian citizens for the sake of the “historic rite of purification.”
.. One snag: The new rupee bills were designed to be smaller in size than the ones they replaced
.. But all 200,000 automated teller machines in India had to be manually configured so they could dispense the new money. The process ended up taking weeks, slowing the rollout of new cash.
Shekhar Gupta, a political analyst in New Delhi, said the cash exchange shows what can go wrong when “one man comes up with the ideas and everybody else just implements.”
What Does Steve Bannon Want?
One Harvard Business School classmate described him to The Boston Globe as “top three in intellectual horsepower in our class — perhaps the smartest.”
.. While he is certainly a hard-line conservative of some kind, the evidence that he is an extremist of a more troubling sort has generally been either massaged, misread or hyped up.
.. Where Mr. Bannon does veer sharply from recent mainstream Republicanism is in his all-embracing nationalism. He speaks of sovereignty, economic nationalism, opposition to globalization and finding common ground with Brexit supporters and other groups hostile to the transnational European Union. On Thursday, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he described the “center core” of Trump administration philosophy as the belief that the United States is more than an economic unit in a borderless word. It is “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being.”
.. Mr. Bannon, unlike Mr. Trump, has a detailed idea, an explanation, of how American sovereignty was lost, and of what to do about it. It is the same idea that Tea Party activists have: A class of regulators in the government has robbed Americans of their democratic prerogatives. That class now constitutes an “administrative state” that operates to empower itself and enrich its crony-capitalist allies.
.. He has a theory of historical cycles that can be considered elegantly simple or dangerously simplistic. It is a model laid out by William Strauss and Neil Howe in two books from the 1990s. Their argument assumes an 80- to 100-year cycle divided into roughly 20-year “highs,” “awakenings,” “unravelings” and “crises.” The American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II — Mr. Bannon has said for years that we’re due for another crisis about now. His documentary about the 2008 financial collapse, “Generation Zero,” released in 2010, uses the Strauss-Howe model to explain what happened, and concludes with Mr. Howe himself saying, “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”
.. They question whether the free market is altogether free. Mr. Ritholtz says that the outcome of the financial crisis has been “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else.”
.. “Think about it,” he said in a talk hosted by the Institute for Human Dignity. “Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis.”
He warned against “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” by which he meant “a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people.” Capitalism, he said, ought to rest on a “Judeo-Christian” foundation.
.. More controversially he holds that, since this political movement is generated within the sphere of Islam, the growth of Islam — the religion — is itself a problem with which American authorities should occupy themselves. This is a view that was emphatically repudiated by Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
.. As Ms. Jones sees it, a more reliable key to his worldview lies in his military service. “He has a respect for duty,” she said in early February. “The word he has used a lot is ‘dharma.’ ” Mr. Bannon found the concept of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, she recalls. It can describe one’s path in life or one’s place in the universe.
.. She regrets that Mr. Bannon “has found a home in nationalism.” But she does not believe he is any kind of anarchist, let alone a racist.
.. he is attached to a theory of history’s cycles that is, to put it politely, untested. Most ominously, he is an intellectual in politics excited by grand theories — a combination that has produced unpredictable results before.
The President of Our Dreams
Had it been not for such a deep crisis in the American political system and its so dramatic polarization (which began during Bill Clinton’s presidency and kept increasing ever since), the U.S. policy and priorities could have been adjusted in a much calmer way and by not so extravagant a person.
.. Interestingly, political adventurism, which reached its peak during George W. Bush’s presidency, did not cause such a strong outburst of isolationist sentiments.
.. But the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences noticeably radicalized the social and political atmosphere.
.. there came a man who talks not about leadership but greatness. Greatness, as he understands it, is the ability to become an example of success for everyone to follow (very much consonant with the Founding Fathers’ idea), without forcing anything upon anyone and putting on a show of force only when it is necessary for specific U.S. national interests.
.. total domination of the liberal-globalist approach was not a norm but an exception, a product of a unique situation that had accidentally developed after the end of the 20th century.
.. Trump is an American nationalist, inclined towards mercantilism in the economy and a strong-arm approach in politics. This is nothing new if one turns the page and admits the fact that the liberal era is over for the time being. Russia actually wanted to see such a president in the United States, not Trump personally but his type, understandable and not overly disposed towards political correctness. The dream has come true. We shall see how it will actually materialize.