Governors races test Democrats’ rift

Party leaders worry the Bernie Sanders wing will apply ideological purity tests in the South in 2018.

Far from defeated, Sanders-aligned progressives are nationalizing their fight, showing less patience than ever for Democrats who don’t agree with them. And that’s generating fear and nervousness in the South — in places like Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee — where some promising Democratic candidates who are looking at running statewide in 2018 could face resistance from the left.

.. “It is critical to recognize that there is a different set of policy issues in the Deep South that are not in play in the coastal areas or the West,”

.. “The party needs to not see the progressive, Bernie wing of the party as a problem, but rather see it as an asset,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor. “The fact that, broadly speaking, candidates and operatives in the establishment wing see the Bernie wing — the activist part of the party — as a problem? That’s a problem in and of itself.”

The New Evangelical Moral Minority

If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better.

.. Moore was respectful, but he seemed puzzled by Land’s eagerness to defend Palin. “Dr. Land thinks that Governor Palin’s resignation was a shrewd move,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.” Later in the show, after Land had hung up, Moore offered a broader critique. “We, as evangelical Christians, are really, really prone, it seems to me, to become so enthused with political figures that we just automatically impute to them almost superheroic status,” he said. “Put not your trust in princes,” he added—Psalm 146:3. “Or in princesses, either.”

 .. For a long time, Southern Baptists had not only a faith but a cause. They saw God’s greatness reflected in the inherent goodness of the American South—and, more recently, in America itself.
.. And in the Obama era Land’s status as an old-fashioned culture warrior came to seem, to some members of the church, like a liability. In 2012, after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African-American, Land said on his own radio show that activists were seizing on the case “to gin up the black vote for an African-American President.” When he was criticized, he suggested that Zimmerman had behaved rationally; a black man, he said, was “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.”
.. his radio show was cancelled, and, under pressure, he resigned from the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which he had led since 1988.
.. admonishing Southern Baptists to think first—and often—about their own sins. The denomination was formed, in 1845, by white Southerners who split off from a national Baptist movement that was growing increasingly intolerant of slavery. Moore sees in his theological ancestors a cowardly and catastrophic willingness to ignore the uncomfortable. “If you call people to repentance for drunkenness, or for adultery, or for any number of personal sins, but you don’t say anything about slaveholding or about lynching,” he says, “you’re just baptizing the status quo.”
.. both view abortion as the defining atrocity of our age.
..Trump responded, inevitably, on Twitter, calling Moore a “nasty guy with no heart!” On CNN, hours later, Anderson Cooper asked Moore to continue the dialogue, and Moore flashed a crickety smile. “It’s one of the few things that I can agree with Donald Trump on,” he said. “I am a nasty guy with no heart—we sing worse things about ourselves in our hymns, on Sunday mornings.” He added, “That’s the reason why I need forgiveness from God, through Jesus Christ.” He had found a way to mock an insult with a prayer.
.. the so-called “Trump effect”: in October, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals agreed that an elected official who “commits an immoral act” in private could nevertheless behave ethically in public; five years earlier, only thirty per cent agreed with the statement.
..Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church, in Dallas, a flagship S.B.C. congregation, was probably speaking for many if not most Southern Baptists when he suggested that Trump was justified in responding to Moore’s “vitriolic attacks.” In Jeffress’s view, Trump is precisely the kind of protector whom Christians should support; he has said that, when it comes to defending America from Islamic terrorism and other threats, “I want the meanest, toughest son-of-a-you-know-what I can find.”
.. Moore thinks that the idea of a moral majority is wrong, and was probably wrong when it was created: he suspects that earnest, orthodox Christians have always been outnumbered. Like any believer, he wants his church to grow, but he doesn’t seem particularly threatened by the thought that it might not.
.. He says that Christians in America must learn to think of themselves as a marginal community, struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile secular culture. In such a context, Muslims might seem less like enemies and more like allies in the fight for religious freedom.
.. Southern Baptists. After centuries of regional dominance, the denomination has been shrinking: last year, the church reported fewer than three hundred thousand baptisms, the lowest number in more than half a century, and a decline of about a third since the peak, in 1972
.. At the annual meeting, he said, “Brothers and sisters, when you have a government that says we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the theological beliefs of that house of worship, then there are going to be Southern Baptist churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country who are not going to be able to build.”

Episode 223: How Did We Get Here? A History of the Religious Right

What really birthed the religious right? Why have black and white Christians swapped political parties over the last 60 years? Based on a class he’s teaching, co-host Skye Jethani takes us deep into the surprising history of 20th-century Christian political involvement. It’s a fascinating journey you won’t want to miss!

In 1976 Ford Adminstration threatened to revoke Bob Jones’s University’s Non-profit status, which started the religious right.

Background: 22:55

Bob Jones: 40:55

Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp

Between 1789 and 1850, the United States had twelve presidents. Ten of them owned slaves; the only two that didn’t were both named “John Adams.” The United States was a pioneering democracy, but its democracy was shaped by the demands of a slaveholding elite that had immense—and often decisive—authority over its government. Princeton historian Matthew Karp explores the consequences of this arrangement in This Vast Southern Empire. He focuses on the influence Southerners wielded over foreign policy, but Karp’s inquiry opens up new perspectives on much more, including the dynamics of proslavery ideology, the world-making ambitions of Southern elites, and the origins of a Civil War that broke American democracy in two.

..What John C. Calhoun really wanted, as Richard Hofstadter wrote long ago, was not for Southerners to leave the Union but to dominate it, which they more or less did in the thirty years before the Civil War.

.. It’s true that in many antebellum political arguments, Southern leaders emphasized the limited powers of the federal government. But when slavery and states’ rights came into conflict, the abstract commitment to limited government vanished pretty quickly. The outstanding example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode personal liberty laws in the northern states and required federal marshals to assist slaveholders in capturing runaway slaves.

.. On many important questions of foreign relations—the annexation of Texas, for instance—supposed small-government ideologues suddenly morphed into bold advocates of federal power. Proslavery Southerners also served as by far the most aggressive champions of U.S. military and naval expansion.

.. John C. Calhoun. He was the most incisive thinker the plantation elite had—Richard Hofstadter called him “the Marx of the master class”

.. But Calhoun was also a bold proslavery internationalist. He paid close attention to the politics of slavery and abolition in Europe and in Latin America, and he was very assiduous about directing U.S. power to sustain slavery in Cuba and Brazil.

.. Southern elites saw Britain as both a vital commercial partner and a potentially dangerous strategic enemy.

.. John Tyler believed that defending slavery against British abolitionism should be a top strategic priority for the United States. There were many dimensions to this effort, from naval expansion to Cuba diplomacy, but in some sense it culminated with the U.S. annexation of the Republic of Texas, which was in 1845 the fourth largest slaveholding society in the world.

.. the book is less about whether slavery was or was not “modern,” and more about the fact that leading slaveholders believed it was.

.. What slaveholders said, over and over again, was that “modern civilization” and African slavery were fundamentally compatible. Economically, they argued, slave labor was necessary to produce vital agricultural staples. And ideologically, slave labor fit in very well in a world increasingly dominated by free trade, expanding European empires, and hardening racist science.

.. In the book I look at two of the most famous Southern documents from early 1861—the Mississippi declaration of secession and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone address.” Both are very candid about the central importance of slavery, and in contemporary discussions they are often brandished as clear evidence that slavery, not state rights, drove Southerners to secede

.. Historians are so accustomed—as we should be—to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society, that for a long time, we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites. Done right, I think, these approaches don’t contradict each other—they complement each other.

.. when we look back at Davis and his ilk, we should not regard them as antiquarian curiosities, but as ambitious contenders for power in an uncertain mid-nineteenth century world.

.. in the very general sense that slaveholders were a small and self-conscious class, nationally powerful, internationally sophisticated, and totally confident in the future of their system—despite various warning signs all around the globe—their outlook is, in some ways, comparable to the outlook of today’s big capitalist class. And control of the American national state was—as it remains today—absolutely fundamental to the operation of ruling class power.

.. The key, though, is not only to isolate and weaken the gun lobby or fossil fuel industry, for instance, but to develop a popular and more comprehensive critique of the political-economic system—a twenty-first century version of the “Slave Power” argument. Slaveholders, after all, didn’t just represent a sector of the economy; they controlled the government. For all its weaknesses, I do think the Sanders campaign represented a major step forward in this larger project, and I’m probably unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities going forward.