I’ve been mulling Erick Erickson’s missive of yesterday and what it reveals about the far-right, but I’m not really sure what to pull out of it that he might acknowledge. Here’s the first paragraph that caught my attention:
I voted straight Republican this year except for my local sheriff and district attorney, two positions I do not think should be partisan anyway. I would not vote for a politician who supports abortion rights. Abortion is a euphemism for legally sanctioned murder. I would not vote for Joe Biden, a man who I think actually is nice, but whose policies are terrible and will wreck our recovering economy.
The abortion position remains an unreasoning emotional position. I’ve spent quite some time trying to reach it logically, and it doesn’t work. Either every bit of sperm is sacred, as a certain group of comedians once said, or his position is arbitrary. That he uses it as the single issue on which he rejects the Democrats is desperate and, arguably, un-American.
But his position on Biden is far more interesting. If Biden and the Democrats do, in fact, win mastery of the Executive and the Legislature, then I would encourage Erickson, and all serious anti-Biden voters[1], to sit down and write out what’s going to happen that they believe will be bad for the country. It’s necessary to be both honest and fair; by the latter, I mean, using a hypothetical analogy to President Trump, recognizing that if Trump had supplied the proper leadership to close up the country early, the economy would still have gone down before recovering, and that would have not been fair game for the Democrats. Some roads lead into valleys before reaching the heights.
So write them down and, in four years, honestly evaluate them. For those regarding expertise that you don’t have, seek out non-partisan sources for help – sources such as National Review are not acceptable. If your expectations have been fulfilled, celebrate! Your mental model of politics, society, and the economy works.
But if your expectations are proven wrong? You have a few choices:
- Walk away. Become an independent who is aware of your shortcomings, and work to resolve them.
- Stick around and try to correct the far-rights’ misconceptions.
- Stick around and take advantage of the other far-right denizens.
- Stick around and marinate in the far-rights’ conspiracy theories.
Similarly, if my reader is a far-right conspiracy theorist, and of far right conspiracy theories there appear to be quite a few, I would encourage my reader to take a similar action. For example, using one conspiracy theory I ran across, you could write down your expectation that within six months of Inauguration Day President Biden will be sidelined through Vice President Harris’ inappropriate use of the 25th Amendment.
List more than one, as that makes your study statistically significant, and if they all turn out negative, maybe it’s time to walk away.
The second paragraph, far removed from the first:
Stop nodding and agreeing, Democrats. Your morally corrupt, atheistic precious Obama did the same thing. He persecuted nuns and gave license to local authorities persecuting Christian bakers and florists and also gave license to sympathetic Christians and “Christians” to claim it isn’t really persecution because no one got shot in the back of the head.
Skipping the part where Obama has always claimed to be Christian and attended church regularly – unlike Trump, whose attendance is reportedly desultory – I’d like to focus on his derogatory use of the word atheistic. I don’t think the far right will ever welcome, or even accept, those who have embraced the concept that there is no spiritual realm, no divinities, who believe we evolved, and as individuals we come to life in understandable biological processes, live for a while, and die. I’ve heard, over the years, questions from the faithful about How can atheists possibly be moral? a question which I think can be answered, once one accepts or at least stipulates to the absence of divinity, and accepts evolution as a working theory.
Source: Pew Research Center
But that morality can be constructed in a secular fashion cannot be accepted by the faithful, as it destroys a key part of the mythology of the divine, at least in Christian circles, as symbolized by the Ten Commandments – the gift of the rules of living. Given the gradual sinking of Christianity’s standing in American society, and the concomitant rise in popularity of the ‘nones’, as they’re collectively called, I have to wonder if far-right extremism is going to continue to be a growing problem in American society. Their opposition, in the absence of religious teaching of tolerance and love, and their feelings of persecution due to the shrinkage in their numbers and political influence, will result in sporadic far-right violence, paradoxically damaging Christianity, both bad parts and good, by its very existence.
Erickson’s worries about ‘persecuted bakers’ has a slight bit of merit; I’d prefer to see the bigoted bakers, as history will judge them, simply driven out of business by customers voluntarily going elsewhere, rather than legal authorities using the power of the State. It would drive home the fact that accepted the morality, nation-wide, is that homosexuality and the freedom to marry is now accepted; that condemning homosexuals, however well meant, over an immutable characteristic, is unjust and results in impairment for those so targeted, or to be graphic: they could be hurt or even dead due to the attitudes of these bakers over which he worries. Erickson may carp that it’s immoral according to the Bible, but then we don’t stone witches any longer, either. Morality, at least that listed in the Bible, has never been immutable; whether or not homosexuals are evil or not mentioned in the Bible becomes irrelevant when the standards of justice, as we understand them today & tomorrow, disagree with the Bible. We’re not a Christian nation; we are a Christian-influenced nation, which means we get to throw out the bad bits as they’re discovered. And that’s good for us. Of course, some of the good bits are temporarily discarded as well, as we see with the birth and growth of prosperity churches, an abomination of the Christian faith as far as this agnostic can see. I hope the realization that judging folks by their (self-proclaimed) financial worth, and that God will judge you by the same, is simply a road to disaster will come sooner than later.
Erickson continues on with some concerns, unknown to me, about nuns and persecution, probably having to do with abortion – because what doesn’t with him? – and thus it permits him to be bitter that the country hasn’t turned to evangelical Christianity as its saving grace.
Your side is burning down America with an American press blaming Donald Trump when it’s your activists and leaders encouraging it. And your last guy played with cigars and interns in the Oval Office and you made so many excuses for him that you incentivized a whole lot of the present President’s supporters making excuses now. But God forbid we point that out and make you confront it or point out some of you only apologized for it as an expedient way to now move on to criticizing the present President’s flaws.
The problem for Erickson is that he has to find a moral failing on the left equivalent to that of White Evangelicals desperate clinging to President Trump, in spite of his worldliness, profligate sinning, and profoundly awful incompetency. So Obama becomes an atheist and a persecutor of nuns, rather than just a member of a different Christian sect. Clinton – at least, I think he’s referring to the former President – had consensual sex outside of his marriage with an intern, which was a very poor choice by him due to the power relation between them, but not an unique or even unusual practice for those in positions of power, regardless of their political persuasion[2], throughout history and largely regardless of the identity of the power structure. Erickson’s bitterness is a little hard to take seriously in the face of Clinton’s successes, while Trump’s many moral failures – lying, caging children – easily eclipses Clinton’s failures.
The thing is, I think Erickson’s in earnest.
I’ll give up on this, simply noting that the ‘nones’, of which I’m certainly a default member, will still face a rocky road ahead of them if they seek political power, i.e., contribute to the leadership of the country. There have been very, very few acknowledged atheists or agnostics in Congress or the Executive branch; it’s almost a requirement that one exhibit some sort of religious observance in order to be accepted by the American electorate.
One can only speculate on the magnitude of the cost of this bigotry, exhibited throughout the political spectrum, to the nation. How much political talent has not been of use to the United States because of this notion that only the religious can exhibit moral behavior?
It’s the same question that racial bigots and misogynists cannot answer without referencing ideology or theology of extremely dubious quality.
1 As contrasted with those Trump voters who are voting for him simply to get the Democrats’ goat. They are not serious citizens, and are not amenable to the liberal democracy’s great advantage over competitor political systems, reason. Which, come to think of it, appears to apply to the far left as well.
2 I must confess Erickson’s cigar reference escapes me, even though I remember wearing a Halloween costume featuring the cigar, and my companion wore a frock.
