One of the reasons I value reading atypical writers such as Jennifer Rubin is paragraphs like this:
The unpleasant truth for those expected to say “there are fine people” in both parties is that, aside from a few stray governors and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), there really are not fine people running the Republican Party. They have sold their souls to Trump and either passively or actively bought into white supremacy and religious authoritarianism (which weirdly has as its most vocal proponent the attorney general). They waged war on the Constitution and objective reality. There is nothing redeeming in any of that — or in the right-wing media machine encompassing the deluded true believers and money-hungry charlatans willing to throw red meat to an audience they suppose consists of uneducated bigots. [WaPo]
[Bold mine.]
If a traditional Republican critic had written that, I would have ignored the crack about religious authoritarianism, even though it jibes with my own observations, because the writer would be a traditional opponent.
But Rubin is ex-Republican. I can expect that she had her nose deep in Republican politics, and knows the culture. So when she says religious authoritarianism, I see it as confirmation of what I’ve been observing and hypothesizing.
And as Goldwater warned so long ago.
Incidentally, I appreciated the juxtaposition of white supremacists with the religious authoritarianists. Obviously, each will try to dominate. It’s my guess they’d reach an uneasy accommodation, punctuated by occasional violence, until one had reached a position to subjugate the other. It’d be a bloody business.
