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 ..
White supremacism is ready to roar
“I’ve been to Europe and I’ve spoken on this issue and I’ve said the same thing as far as 10 years ago to the German people and any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves. I’ve said to them, ‘You can’t rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birthrate up and you need to teach your children your values.”
.. King told CNN that he is merely “a champion for Western civilization,” which he called “a superior civilization.” Which means, of course, that he considers other civilizations inferior.
.. a guy from Iowa who keeps a Confederate battle flag on his desk is definitely sending some kind of message. He tried unsuccessfully to block the federal government’s plans to remove Andrew Jackson’s image from the $20 bill and replace it with that of Harriet Tubman.
.. today’s white supremacism tends to shy away from overtly racial terminology. Listen instead for words such as “culture” and “civilization.”
.. The idea is that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave because its “civilization” is “European” or “Western” — euphemisms, basically, for “white.” According to this view, immigrants have been assets to the country only to the extent that they have fully assimilated into the dominant culture.
.. The first Africans were brought here in bondage in 1619, one year before the Mayflower. Americans have never been a single ethnicity, speaking a single language, bound by the centuries to a single patch of land. We have always been diverse, polyglot and restless, and our greatness has come from our openness to new people and new ideas.
.. King’s distress about birthrates can be read only as modern-day eugenics. If he is worried about the coming day when there is no white majority in the United States, he has remarkably little faith in our remarkable society — or in the Constitution
.. President Trump played footsie with the white supremacist movement during his campaign. His chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, waged civilizational war when he ran the Breitbart News site.
Trump Campaign: ‘Platform for White Supremacists’?
When I was growing up, white supremacist meant, first of all, those in the South who opposed equal rights for African-Americans: the right to vote, to swim in a public swimming pool, to enroll in the University of Mississippi. White supremacists may have ranged from openly terrorist to legally elected segregationists, but in terms of their beliefs, there was a very clear idea of what the term described. Internationally, apartheid rule in South Africa was a variant of white supremacy. So too was European colonialism, by then in its final throes.
.. Drum by defending him, in part by noting that the charge of “white supremacist” was in danger of becoming so broadly used as to become meaningless.
.. left-wing academia. There we encounter a definition of white supremacism, drawing on “critical race theory,” in which the term can refer to a political or socioeconomic system where white people enjoy a structural advantages over other ethnic groups. The term no longer means hatred of non-white groups or any effort to discriminate against them. Basically it has been stretched to mean that almost any institution where whites predominate—race-neutral or not—is racist.
.. It is evident in Jennifer Palmieri’s striking charge of “white supremacism”—unsupported by anything said by Donald Trump, or for that matter ever published on Breitbart, despite the tens of millions of words posted on that site.
..
The United States is entering into period of demographic transformation, where whites, politically and demographically dominant for all of the nation’s history, will become a smaller majority, and perhaps then a plurality. Whether this transformation will be assimilative or anti-white, peaceful or violent, remains to be seen. Those in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party throwing around loose charges of “white supremacism” are certainly doing nothing to make it go smoothly.
Scott
The Crisis for Liberalism
has no choice but to start arguing about how it lost its way.
A lot of that argument already revolves around the concept of “identity politics,” used as shorthand for a vision of political liberalism as a coalition of diverse groups — gay and black and Asian and Hispanic and female and Jewish and Muslim and so on — bound together by a common struggle against the creaking hegemony of white Christian America.
.. instead 2016 exposed liberalism’s twofold vulnerability: to white voters embracing an identity politics of their own
.. So where religion atrophies, family weakens and patriotism ebbs, other forms of group identity inevitably assert themselves. It is not a coincidence that identity politics are particularly potent on elite college campuses, the most self-consciously post-religious and post-nationalist of institutions; nor is it a coincidence that recent outpourings of campus protest and activism and speech policing and sexual moralizing so often resemble religious revivalism.
The contemporary college student lives most fully in the Lennonist utopia that post-’60s liberalism sought to build, and often finds it unconsoling: She wants a sense of belonging, a ground for personal morality, and a higher horizon of justice than either a purely procedural or a strictly material politics supplies.
.. Thus it may not be enough for today’s liberalism, confronting both a right-wing nationalism and its own internal contradictions, to deal with identity politics’ political weaknesses by becoming more populist and less politically correct. Both of these would be desirable changes, but they would leave many human needs unmet. For those, a deeper vision than mere liberalism is still required — something like “for God and home and country,” as reactionary as that phrase may sound.
.. it is precisely older, foundational things that today’s liberalism has lost. Until it finds them again, it will face tribalism within its coalition and Trumpism from without, and it will struggle to tame either.