New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees criticized his NFL colleague, saying he respects Kaepernick’s right to protest whatever he wants, but drawing the line at this form of protest. Brees calls the American flag “sacred.”
.. 2. On the other hand, Drew Brees is wrong: the American flag is not sacred. I mean, I understand why he believes that it is, and I am sure it is sacred to him, as it is to tens of millions of Americans. But should it be? Do we worship the nation and its symbols? At what point does loving one’s country — patriotism — become an idolatrous form of nationalism?
.. 3. What if the United States government, as well as American culture, began to oppress Christians in a serious, deliberate way? How would I feel about standing up for the National Anthem myself? I would be hard pressed to do so, precisely because the state would be violating the one thing I do hold sacred: the Sacred.
.. Most people will see Kaepernick’s stunt as just that: a stunt. But the day may come when things like this have more power than mere shock value. Though Kaepernick’s action is wholly political, with no discernible religious content to it, it ought to make Christians think about our own relationship with the nation and its symbols.
‘New Nationalism’ Amounts to Generic White-Identity Politics
The consensus that voters are revolting against economic conditions ignores other ways that they expect Trump to protect America.
In a fairly representative analysis, Politico’s Michael Hirsh explained the “new nationalism” as “a bitter populist rejection of the status quo that global elites have imposed on the international system since the Cold War ended, and which lower-income voters have decided — understandably — is unfair.”
Why Trumpism Will Outlast Donald Trump
Think he doesn’t represent anything besides himself? Turns out a whopping 65 percent of white Americans say they’d consider supporting a nativist third party.
.. Is the Trump campaign about the man or the message? In other words, will Trumpism survive Trump?
.. I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party?
65 percent.
Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself.
.. those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly.
.. if Republicans, in an attempt to appeal to independent voters and the growing minority population, pivot away from Trump’s rhetoric, they could face internal upheaval, and perhaps even widescale defection to a third party from this 65 percent of whites. On the flip side, if Republicans do allow Trumpism to define the party, they risk ushering in an era of unprecedented Democratic dominance. Current polling predicts a Democratic landslide.
.. From six months of fieldwork in post-industrial cities in the British and American Rust Belts, I observed a remarkable sense of loss. Lost wealth in many cases. But more poignantly, I observed a sense of lost status.
.. For Democrats, their challenge is to draw white working class voters into their diverse coalition by convincing them that challenges in the household and workplace are general working class challenges that have very little to do with being white.
Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco
the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.
.. The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution.
.. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.
.. Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian.
.. 1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
.. there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
.. 2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
.. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
.. 3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.
.. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”
.. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
.. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
.. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation
.. Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
.. the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies
.. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order
.. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens
.. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
.. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
.. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.