Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

On Substance and Signaling, in Trumpland, Topeka, and Beyond

[This is an extensively rewritten version of an essay I wrote for Kansas newspapers last Sunday.]

In a recent substack post, my old friend Damon Linker made an obvious, but still important, observation:

One thing I think I and many others got wrong during the first Trump administration was to spend far too much time allowing ourselves to be triggered by things the president was saying—in his social media feed, at rallies, and in press conferences….[T]here’s a reason why journalists…began to joke about the importance of taking Trump seriously but not literally. That’s because he frequently communicated in a very different way than presidents usually have, often speaking from anger and in an off-the-cuff and ill-informed way. In many cases, his primary goal was to trigger the libs rather than clarify what his administration would be doing in the near future. That made his comments a distraction from what his administration was actually doing or aspiring to do.

Trump is, in many ways, a unique case (though it seems likely that such won’t be the case in the future, unfortunately). Generally speaking, our democratic political culture, in terms of how the public and the mass media internalize and reflect the ways in which representatives--both those in office and those hoping to be elected to such--seek votes and articulate priorities, has organically come to recognize that some statements from politicians are “mere” signaling, whereas others are “actually” substantive.

I put those qualifiers in quotation marks because, among the many other democratic ills which Trump’s influence on our political culture over the past decade has introduced, the recognition of even basic value distinctions like those—specifically, the idea that signaling a position to one’s political allies is, well, just that: a matter of positioning, rather than a matter of substantively working towards an actual, achievable solution--is harder than ever. Still, the assumption that some statements made by politicians need to be taken literally, even if they aren’t serious ideas, remains a hard concept to many voters to accept without resistance, because it runs directly against our inherited experience, going back through the whole history of America’s struggles to make mass democracy work, regarding what responsible government even means.

This may seem like I’m dressing up a mundane reality of democratic politics into something more weighty than it deserves to be. Because all politicians lie, right? So who cares that the lies of Trump, and an unfortunately large number of those who have followed his example, seem categorically different? Elected representatives spending their time on meaningless bills or resolutions that show their support for causes promoted by major interest groups or another donors, rather than getting down to the business of building actually substantive legislation—isn’t that just to be expected?

Maybe. But still, I care in particular about these sorts of lies, because they help to make the distinctions upon which much of the public’s ability to connect to their own elected representatives depend upon even harder, necessitating both 1) changes in the way the media does its work, such as Damon describes in his above-linked post, and 2) even more work on the part of those who the substance of legislation affects more directly.

As an example, consider the ongoing arguments over medical support for individuals who identify as transgender, since these debates are particularly rife with serious concerns that are based on matters that are not, in fact, literally true. To put it another way, these are our elected leaders taking actions that some might justify as “merely” signaling serious intent, even though there is little or no literal substance “actually” behind their intentions.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson recently affirmed that, with the Republican legislative majority even stronger after the 2024 elections, the leadership will bring back the push to ban, among other types of gender-affirming care, transgender surgeries sought by those Kansans who are under 18 years old. The last effort to do so ended with a veto from Governor Laura Kelly and a veto-override attempt which failed by only two votes. It’s reasonable, now that they have additional votes on their side, that the Republicans would try again. Why? Because the significance of the signal doing so would send, a signal of their “seriousness” about the threat of young people being pushed into receiving surgeries when they’re too young to know whether it’s what is best for them, hasn’t changed.

Of course, the literal reality of the situation, the actual substance of the subject of the proposed legislation, hasn’t changed either. (Note: I recognize that there are other gender-affirming concerns tied up with this, regarding the availability of puberty blockers and other medications to minors, but since Masterson himself led with the extreme issue of transitional surgeries, I’m comfortable treating that as a separate issue.)

I know many legislators, and I sympathize with how difficult their job can be, particularly those on the state and municipal level. On the one hand, they are closer to their constituents, and can more directly hear and respond to many diverse local appeals. But on the other hand, their funding, the parties which structure most of their ability to reach out to voters (and thus both do good work as well as protect their jobs), so profoundly entwined with America’s nationalized media environment, and with major interest groups and organizations that usually care little for specific local budget or policy matters, and instead are focused on creating signals that serve primarily to rile up or placate key donors and constituencies across the country. I can understand a politician coming to the reasonable conclusion that have to play the signaling game, if only to make sure they have the opportunity to also focus on the difficult, substantive matters that may actually affect those whom they represent most.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t members of the Republican super-majority in Topeka who, for a variety of reasons, may well be sincerely concerned—maybe even horrified—by the prospect of someone under the age of 18 receiving gender modification surgery, and see banning such as a necessary action in the name of public health or morality. I’m sure more than a few fit that description. But most of them, I suspect, are actually well-read enough to recognize that they are crusading symbolically against an almost non-existent concern.

Here is where the literal substance of the matter gets serious. There’s no definitive evidence of any Kansas medical center ever performing complete gender transition surgery on a minor, and nationally the numbers for such surgeries, according to data reported by the American Medical Association, are incredibly low: out of all gender-affirming surgeries in the United States in recent years, perhaps 2 out of every 100,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 15 and 17, and 1 out of 1,000,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 13 and 15. Beneath that age, the number is zero. So, as I wrote, an almost non-existent concern.

(Another note, for the record: after an earlier version of this piece was published in Kansas newspapers, I was contacted by a concerned individual who insisted that my information was wrong; that gender re-assignment surgeries have in fact been performed on Kansans under the age of 18. The data which this individual relied upon had been collected by Do No Harm, an organization devoted to “protecting health care from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Their reported information on Kansas lists a total 22 “surgery patients”(though their breakdown of hospitals actually record a total of 25; I’m unsure why three are excluded); they obtained that information by looking at insurance records, focusing on claims that involved procedure codes which are used for “confirmed surgical gender transition procedures,” though they allow that those procedure codes could have been used for “surgeries related to intersex conditions” or “congenital conditions or other non-gender transition-related reasons.” I appreciate the additional information, but 1) since I don’t see any breakdown in the ages of the minors who supposedly received these surgeries, unlike the information from the AMA, and 2) since there is apparently no way to effectively distinguish between corrective and elective surgeries among these numbers, to say nothing of there being to no way to capture the individual complexities and differences present in any of these instances, and 3) since a total number of 22, or even 25, surgeries performed in a state with a total of nearly 706,000 people under the age of 18, is a number so much smaller than even the national number, that I can’t see how sticking with my judgment of this proposal being an act of signaling in regards to an essentially non-existent phenomenon can be faulted.)   

To return to my main point: when Senator Masterson says that the Republican super-majority are going to do something, we need to take him seriously. There’s a serious message they (the Republican leadership, certainly, and presumably at least some other members of the caucus) want to send regarding the disapproval the Republican majority feels toward “transgender ideology,” and connecting it to the issue of minors receiving gender-affirming surgery is a major part of the signal they intend to send. But is there an actual, literal, substantive basis for them spending time on sending this message? The answer there is, on my review of the data, no.

This pattern—when the data and the message don’t match--holds for many other issues as well. The number of transgender athletes seeking to play sports competitively in the category of their chosen gender is tiny, yet everyone seems to have a story about some transgender woman with an unfair advantage at their daughter’s high school. It’s the same for illegal immigrants, who are far more law-abiding than the rest of the population, yet every story about an undocumented resident who commits a crime will be shared over and over and over again.

On a certain level, one must simply accept this as a political reality, one that the type of lies and misinformation which our President-elect has specialized in, is only making more complicated. It is true that most people, lacking both the time and inclination to become experts regarding any given matter, depend upon—and make decisions upon—the conveying of key signals, whether involving law or morality or anything else. This is something that interest groups have long known and made use of—and which too many politicians have come to rely upon in preference to the unglamorous, necessary work of finding substantive compromises on actual, literal concerns. As for those who do have expert information on what is literally happening—often because they actually are one of the people being symbolically discussed (a person with sexual dysphoria, perhaps, or a Dreamer, or more)—the battle to call attention to the actual data, and introduce substantive arguments to push back against the signally, is never-ending. But also necessary, all the same, and never more so than today.

Still Processing the Day Before Yesterday

Yesterday I did as I have regularly done for 16 years now, and replaced my Wednesday morning, post-Election Day classes with an open conversation, to which I invited any and all who are interested, from around Friends and throughout Wichita and beyond. I’ve had some real successes, I think, with these post-election forums—both in terms of just responding to students’ questions about election minutiae as well as in providing an opportunity for people to vent—but yesterday’s couldn’t have gone better. For close to three hours, going into and through the lunch hour, over 40 students, former students, faculty, administrators, friends, and a couple of television journalists shared thoughts, ideas, concerns, and—in the case of multiple individuals—despair. (The queer students and first-generation immigrants who talked about feeling less safe in an America that has just returned to the White House a man whose campaign regularly promulgated lies about their communities were particularly poignant.)

Processing despair is something I’m seeing all around me, as well as within myself. Donald Trump will be president, will almost certainly never face justice for his crimes and unconstitutional actions, and will be able, with the strong support of a party which, despite its own divisions (and, I still suspect, to its own eventual corruption), will unitedly assist him in pursuing—or, more accurately, get his lackadaisical approval to present in his name—policies that I consider harmful and wrong. That’s depressing, and there are millions of people feeling that depression right now, including people I love dearly. What all of their processing of these depressing facts will lead to remains to be seen. Everyone shares social media stories about people planning to leave the country after an electoral defeat which they find appalling, but in this case I do know one person actively working in that direction, convinced as he is that Trump is going to lay the foundations of an undemocratic, authoritarian state that we won’t be able turn back from.

I don’t think that’s likely, but I do think it’s possible. I also think that the best way to deal with such possibilities is to involve oneself—or, if you’re already involved, get involved even more—with one’s local community, culture, service opportunities, and politics. So today I went to another meeting about parking in downtown Wichita, got into some entirely graspable, non-theoretical, non-fascist arguments with local leaders and others whom I both agree and disagree with (many of whom surely voted for Trump), and it was wonderful. No doubt I’ll once again have something to say about it all soon.

In meantime, I’m an extrovert—I process through talking, writing, sharing thoughts and worries and ideas—as well as a political nerd, and so I have thoughts about Tuesday, beyond my early morning reflections from yesterday. None of them are original, but I may be able to suggest some additions or comparisons to or among them. Basically, I am seeing four main lines of argument emerging among the hot-takes and the as-yet-incomplete electoral and exit polling and survey data out there, at least among the actually serious pundits and observers I follow. The goal is to account for the electoral reality that was clear by late Tuesday night: that support for Donald Trump and the Republicans increased has increased (in general overall, save with white women, but especially among Hispanic men) and that support for the Democratic coalition, under the leadership of Kamala Harris, dropped dramatically (particularly among self-defined Independents).

First, there is the anti-establishment/anti-incumbent/anti-government argument, expertly expressed by my old friend Damon Linker here. Basically, we see throughout the world a profound distrust in all governing institutions and in anyone who defends or seems to represent those governing institutions. Which means that meaning that Harris’s affirmation of Biden’s government programs, her invoking the support of established institutional bodies or agencies or leaders, or her trying to rile people up by accusing Trump (accurately!) of attacking said institutions and programs, just can't capture as many votes as people thought it might (particularly on the basis of the apparent effectiveness of that argument for Biden in the 2022 midterms).

Second, there is the economic argument. So many people have either explicit or, more commonly, vague concerns about their own economic prospects or stability (remember that most people who report concerns about the economy also report that they are personally doing okay), particularly as regards big ticket items--buying a house, paying for college, surviving surgery—that inflation-inflected costs which are, both historically and comparatively, manageable  (gas and food prices) are legitimately magnified in peoples' (particularly low income or entrepreneurial/self-employed peoples') minds, and thus economic worries punch above their weight.

 Third, there is the racism and sexism argument, in all its varieties (though I like the way Tom Nichols expressed it here). One doesn’t have to believe that the majority, or even a plurality, of Trump voters are committed white supremacists to recognize that the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to voting against their own partisan socialization and/or social group when given a message they like or at least are okay that is expressed by an older white male just might be larger than the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to doing the same when the message is expressed by a black female. The messenger matters, in other words.

Fourth, the structural or small-d democratic argument, which Ezra Klein partly makes here. The argument is that, when Biden declared that he was running for re-election after the 2022 midterms, certain restrictions were locked in as far the Democratic party was concerned. There was no Democratic primary, which had two results: 1) it provided the Republicans with an actually persuasive (even if duplicitous) argument that the Democratic nominee had never won an election on her own, thus undermining, particularly among low-information voters, arguments against Trump's authoritarianism, and 2) it robbed Harris and the Democrat party itself of all the procedural campaign advantages (name recognition, position polishing, candidacy distinguishing, etc.) which come along with the way general elections operate in the United States. In lacking this, Harris went into a profoundly shortened general election (and it’s worth noting that almost no one who is actually experienced in presidential campaigns thinks her team actually failed to make the best of a bad situation) without a strong positive message that fit the mood of the electorate she actually needed to win.

All of these are obviously true to one degree or another, and there are different ways in which we can see them amplifying one another. For example, the one might argue—as both Chris Hedges and David Brooks have argued, though in very different ways—that the lack of any kind of genuinely radical, Sanders-esque, and therefore “disruptive” economic proposals to addresses the immense costs of housing, medical, tuition, etc., coming from the Harris campaign, made it easier for Trump to claim the mantle of the person with the true “challenge the status quo” economic plan, thus covering both arguments #1 and #2. (Yes, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were both truly impressive progressive accomplishments, but their very lack of visibility strengthened the ease to which voters, if they even knew about these laws, would have considered them—not unreasonably—as just more of the usual tweaks to an economic system whose fundamental unfairness cannot be denied.) And that’s just one example of the ways all these diagnoses, as well as others that, as the election analysis continues on, are bound to emerge. other ways of processing this massive (though, actually, in terms of the number of people who actually voted in the election, maybe not actually quite “massive”) failure will emerge.

Will it turn out to have been a realignment election? I am instinctively doubtful, partly because I’m not sure the comparatively smaller number of people who actually voted in the election justifies such a broad conclusion, and also because last time I thought so I turned out to be quite wrong. So I hold to that possibility—the hope that Trump is something which, for all the harms I believe his administration will cause, both at home and abroad, to our economy and our foreign policy but maybe most of all to our once-actually-striving-to-be democratic political culture, we will live through, and find some new, probably much diminished, but still worthwhile ordinary politics on the other side. That is what gives my frustrated, still-processing brain a little bit of peace, at least; maybe it will to others as well.

Not a Mea Culpa, But Like Unto It

When Trump won in 2016, I was genuinely flummoxed—disappointed and angry and frustrated as well, of course, but mostly just confused. It signaled the breakdown of practically every electoral pattern that I'd spent the previous 25 years schooling myself in. One of the results was that, while I'm not sure I ever fully believed all the screams about Trump as a Russian agent and all the other "resistance" stuff (what if Clinton called upon the Electoral College to reject Trump as unfit and just pick some other Republican as president? what if the deep state simply refused to acknowledge him as Commander-in-Chief and created a shadow government behind closed doors?), I gave it all far more credence and sympathetic attention than any subsequent, actually reasonable assessment of the situation showed it deserved.

This time, I'm not confused; I can see how it is both politically and electorally possible for a stupid, corrupt, wanna-be authoritarian to craft a message that works, relative to the other option on the table, for what will be, in the end, probably over 75 million Americans—almost certainly only a tiny fraction of whom are themselves inclined to fascism, and probably only a moderately larger fraction of whom rejected the other option on the table for what might be considered fascist-adjacent reasons. I didn't want to believe that, to randomly guess, some 60 million American voters would actually either disbelieve Trump's criminality and authoritarianism or consider it forgivable in light of various issues (like my mother's belief that Trump will keep America out of wars). But the evidence is there, and it's eminently believable.

For 20 years, since Bush's re-election in 2004, I've heard Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives, Christian socialists, and whatever else the people on what is mostly my side of our endless political divides call themselves, look at Republican candidates and look at election results and say: "too bad for America; it was nice while it lasted." As much as I sympathized with the sentiment behind that phrase, and as much as was—and probably always will be—open to taking seriously the presumptions behind it, I really don't think I ever fully believed it. As Dr. Manhattan made very clear, nothing ever ends, so I don't believe it now either. But good grief, my fellow 66 million Americans who made the what I believe to be the right choice, if we don't (and I truly do include myself in that "we") see this as the conclusion of one more iteration of the story of the boy who called wolf, then where the hell are we?

Some Thoughts on the Republican Donald Trump, and All the Other Republicans, Mormon or Otherwise, I Know (and Sometimes Love)

[Note: this is a long and very party-centric set of musings for the day before the presidential election ends and the real electoral and legal chaos begins. For many, that’s a turnoff. But I’m both a scholar of American politics as well as a politics nerd, so that’s what you get. Read on, if you feel so inclined. And yes, this an expansion/revision of a piece published by Insight Kansas, in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere, over a week ago. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

For a great many people—though not, I think, quite as many as some people suppose—in America over the past eight years or so, the problem of Donald Trump and the Republican party is entirely straightforward. Trump is an awful person, who represents awful things—as my fellow Kansas writer Joel Mathis summarized it on Saturday, his whole approach to representative politics has always involved divisiveness, cruelty, and threats of (and sometimes actual) violence--and so anyone who supports him, and any party he is part of, must be, by definition, awful, full stop.

Both personally and professionally, I have a hard time imagining how anyone with a lick of political sense could fail to recognize how potentially counter-productive doubling-down on that attitude is—to say nothing of how arguably un-Christian it is for those of us who take the command to love one’s enemies seriously, and who therefore should be very conscious of the costs to our ability to draw a line between our opinions and electoral divisiveness, cruelty, and possible violence, when it comes to labeling any other human being or group of human beings by definition “awful” (or “evil,” or “garbage,” or “scum,” or "demonic," or “deplorable,” or whatever you prefer). I’m not denying that it’s hard to avoid that doubling-down; civil discourse, maintaining a full-throated defense of one’s beliefs while showing love and respect to others, is really hard when basic civic norms seem to have collapsed. But still, I think that is what both democratic citizenship and Christian discipleship call on us to do. The fact that many smart and good people I know, who appear to me in all other areas of their lives to sincerely affirm both of those aforementioned principles, apparently do in fact double-down on all-or-nothing anger nonetheless, just shows that it’s my imagination that’s lacking. 

Do I think Trump is an awful human being? Yes, absolutely; my opinion of him—“personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, stupidly (and often gleefully) divisive, and politically destructive”—hasn’t changed in the past four years. Do I think that everyone that supports Trump is therefore also awful? No, because “supports” is a broad term, one which technically includes everyone from Stephen Miller, a convicted felon and an unrepentant racist immigrant-basher, and my mother, a wonderful 79-year-old woman whom I love dearly. I mean, they both voted for Trump, so QED, right?

There is a cohort of the politically awoke and online—though again, I am convinced, by both the data on split-ticket voting and personal observation, that the polarizing “Big Sort” of American voters into two rival tribes hasn’t eliminated cross-party familial and social relations nearly to the extent some believe—who might well insist that, whatever the manifold differences between my mom and Stephen Miller, in the present environment they belong in the same category. I can understand that formulation, in the same way I can understand—and even defend as coherent—that formulating of political opinions which leads people to become single-issue voters: that literally nothing else matters except where a candidate stands on stopping abortion, or where a candidate stands on ending the war in Gaza, etc. But however coherent it may be to conclude that if X is awful—a fascist, perhaps, or even, in Trump’s maddeningly nonsensical claim, a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”—then everyone who does something so extreme as to cast a vote in favor of X must therefore be fully baked into X’s awfulness, no matter what they claim, it remains, I am convinced, a deeply unhelpful and, frankly, immature thing to believe.

 [Note: in terms of Trump himself, I continue to think “fascist-adjacent” remains the best label. He isn’t the only authoritarian-wanna-be to have occupied the White House or tried to do so, but the cult of personality, exclusion, and resentment which his rise has lent dominance to within an major political party is, I fear, quite arguably unique in our history (Huey Long, maybe? or Theodore Bilbo?), and deserves to be noted, and feared, as such.]

So, a little pedantic social psychology here. Human beings, both singly and in groups, always act in ways that can be assessed on multiple planes of judgment: historical, religious, strategic, aesthetic, and more. To ignore those different planes—which usually means ignoring all the sorts of things you can know about a person that you’ve actually spent face-to-face, real-world time with, someone you’ve listened to and lived alongside, and instead just focusing on random statements forwarded on social media—is to do something intensely reductive, and therefore almost certainly something that fails to take your fellow human beings seriously, in the way that I think the fundamentals of Christianity, to say nothing of the basic premises of any belief in democracy, particularly of the participatory sort, necessitates.

True, the too-often evil vicissitudes of political life sometimes necessitate reductive, immediate distinctions; you can’t save someone from a lynch mob if you insist upon deliberating as to whether or not extra-judicial mob action might be necessary in any given circumstance. But casting a vote simply isn’t the direct equivalent of that, because absent a voter explicitly affirming such, I just don’t see how someone can meaningfully—in the sense of providing evidence which proves a particular conclusion—discover in the casting of a ballot the same intentionality as swinging a rope over a branch. Passionately insisting on the contrary, that actually every vote fully incorporates the most extreme intentions that anyone can historically connect to said vote, only suggests that one must believe we’re at the point where the electoral agency expressed by actual voters no longer matters—that the incorrect yet sincerely believed intentions of my mother and every other Trump-supporting Republican I know is wholly irrelevant. And if that’s the case, why are you worrying about votes at all? Best of luck with your revolution, I guess. (Though I hope you’ll choose to retreat and form an intentional commune rather than engage in armed revolt, because the record of the latter is atrocious and while the former is often inspiring.)

My mom’s vote for Trump (she believes he’ll keep America out of foreign wars) doesn’t surprise me. She’s a life-long American Mormon, and American Mormons who were born in the 1940s and committed themselves to the socially conservative family model that mostly took over American Mormon culture during the 20^th century, particularly after World War II (the Old Right-style anti-communist paranoia of Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson being the key factor here), were pretty consistent supporters of the Republican party, and that has only very recently slowly begun to change. My father was a life-long Republican too, and while I want to believe that he would have been like a number of other Mormon Republicans I know—my wife’s parents, some of my brothers, a couple of my oldest friends in my local Mormon congregation here in Wichita, to say nothing of Mitt Romney, the most famous Mormon Never Trumper of them all—and recognized the awfulness of Trump and voted against him accordingly, I actually suspect that he would have stuck with the GOP until the bitter end. Socializing one’s voting history, religious beliefs, and regional environment together can do that, sometimes.

This is the sort of thing that leads some to insist on the terribleness of party politics and partisanship in general; in particular, in the case of my religious tribe, it leads some of those of us who want to nudge the great bulk of the Republican-voting Mormon faithful in a properly anti-Trump direction (especially if they live in Arizona!), to double-down instead on the curious statement the Mormon church leadership made in 2023: that in addition to encouraging members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of my church) to be active citizens and affirming the church’s official neutrality—positions they emphasize every year—the church leadership insisted that “members should…vote for those [candidates] who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy.”

In the same way that I can recognize as coherent (even if stupid) single-issue voting, I can recognize that straight-ticket voting, just supporting every Republican or Democrat down the line, can seem a coherent response to certain conditions—like, for example, party having been so fully captured by single cause or candidate that attempting to stop that party on every level seems like the only reasonable way to express one’s discontent. But thankfully, ticket-splitting is something that, in this moment of intense polarization, is very much an active variable in trying to understand the shape of the 2024 elections. That’s true even here in Kansas, where the historical dominance of the Republican party—there is very close to 2 registered Republican voters for every 1 registered Democrat here in the Sunflower State--exceeds the levels of the Mormon corridor.

A month ago, I spoke at the Dole Institute at the University of Kansas about “The Ticket-Splitting Voter.” (You can watch the whole thing here.) One of the other speakers at the event was Stephanie Sharp, a Republican who served three terms in the Kansas House, who is one of the prime movers behind Women 4 U.S., a national organization of self-identifying conservative women determined to work against Trump’s return to the White House. Meeting and talking with her put me in mind of Mormon Women for Ethical Government—an officially non-partisan body that does not engage in any political recruitment, to be sure, but it’s impossible to read their recent defenses of the election system and condemnations of any refusal to accept election results as anything except a rebuke of Trump, what with his constant lies about the 2020 elections and his preparations to lie some more starting this week. MWEG’s membership obviously includes many Democratic and unaffiliated voters, but given its grounding in American Mormonism, and the fact that it got off the ground essentially as a direct response to Trump election in 2016, the sense in which it, like Sharp’s group, and like dozens of other groups like it, all aim to connect with Republican women turned off by Trumpist Republican leaders whose message of protecting women comes off as condescending is hard to deny. Hence, the essential split-ticket voter of the 2024 election: the Republican woman who supports conservative candidates down the line, because that’s what she believes, but votes for Harris at the top of the ticket, because what he represents takes their party in a direction they don’t want it to go. There won’t be remotely as many such split-ticket voters as there will be women—or men, for that matter—who vote a straight-party line, but there may be enough of them to make a difference.

Parties have always included within them various factions, and party leaders—whose primary aim is to win elections, of course—will always be incentivized to paper over those divisions, insisting that their party is a “big tent” which can handle dissent over various issues. But dissent over the party’s own presidential candidate? The Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party, despite its grievances, made its peace with and grudgingly supported both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, and it seems likely the same will go for Kamala Harris. Yet the complete absence of anti-Trump Republicans of real national prominence from the current GOP campaign, from the 2012 Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney to Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence, as well as multiple important Republican voices essentially washing their hands of the GOP, all suggests an even deeper problem on the Republican side.

Even here in Kansas, with its Republican dominance, Trump is commanding only 48% support in the polls, far less than the 56% he won in both 2016 and 2020. The final numbers when all the ballots are counted will almost certainly be above that—I don’t know anyone who thinks there is even the remotest chance Trump could fail to win Kansas. (Ditto for Utah, where Trump’s approval rating stands at a low but still solid 54%.) But the Republican party is facing a real problem here as well as nationally, whether or not it is a problem that will be manifest in the next Tuesday’s results. It’s a problem evident in the decision of a close friend of mine here in Wichita, a deeply conservative man who has voted Republican his whole life, and has basically no political agreement with any of the policies and proposals of the Democratic party, and yet is going to vote, however symbolically, Harris—because of the January 6 riot at the Capitol which Trump abetted, because he is convinced that Trump is going to allow Putin to do whatever he wants in Eastern Europe, because of his personal corruption and disrespect for the rules of the office, and much more. How can a party present itself as representing his preferences, and at the same time that of another friend of mine, a man who—much more typically for Kansas Republican voters—has gone full MAGA, and is convinced that not only did Trump win in 2020 but also that every action he took or winked at in the wake of that election, including the violence of January 6, was entirely justified?

Some Republicans are responding to this divide by denouncing Trump, like Stephanie has, and organizing to help stop his re-election—but that’s exceptionally rare. More common, among those at least willing to speak are, are Republicans like Steven Howe, a current member of the Kansas House, who back in January condemned Trump’s “deceit and lies” and plead with his own party to turn away from their support for the former president, but then came back around to his party and fell in line when November loomed. And then there is U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, the only one of the Republicans Kansans have elected to Congress who has declined to endorse Trump for president. While he’s never condemned Trump directly either, this is a man who, if you’ve paid attention to his careful speeches over the years, clearly has little respect for the nominal leader of his own party. Again, there is basically no chance any of this electorally significant in either my state, in the same way the pleas of well-connected Mormons in Utah will have basically zero chance of moving the great mass of Republican voters in the Beehive state. But it simply underscores a partisan difficulty that will have to be addressed, one way or another.

Parties have endured in American politics because there is no better way to respond to the incentives of our political and electoral system than by organizing into groups which reflect particular interests by promoting particular candidates. The fact that those parties, once their candidates are elected, are going to work to entrench their influence by fully socializing themselves into the institutional and ideological structures through which those who voted for those candidates operate, is simply a by-product of the logic of our constitutional system itself. I’m fully on board with imagining alternatives to that system—but in the shorter term, the reality of cross-party voting, and the potential rise of fusion voting, might be the only routes available to making parties, which at one time genuinely did, however indirectly, manage to reflect and moderate and promote the best versions of the preferences of those who voted for them, do so again.

Of course, in my view, the even shorter-short term solution to the partisan dilemma both posed by and facing (to whatever degree the leaders of the party are willing to admit it) the Republican party is the defeat of Donald Trump. Which, across this country, hundreds of thousands (and potentially even more) of registered GOP voters will contribute to—but many millions more, including my mother, and most of the members of my Mormon congregation, and much of my family and most of my friends and neighbors here in Kansas, won’t. That’s okay. Frustrating, depressing, potentially frightening, but okay, and I mean that—I’m convinced that if Trump becomes president as a result of either outright Electoral College votes or whatever legal and electoral chaos will almost certainly erupt in less than 48 hours, the country will stumble forward (though whether the legitimacy of our constitutional democracy will remains to be seen).

But will the Republican party? Will those stymied Republicans return to the GOP, or join the Democrats, or push for some other yet unforeseen party or party-like formation? I don’t know. But I suspect that any Republican--particularly those of the Mormon persuasion, given that the party re-alignment this division may potentially give rise to could well, given the processes of socialization, impact religious and cultural assumptions which play major roles in one’s church affiliation and much more—who thinks the era of Re-Elected-Trump, or Post-Trump, will be an easy, or easier, one to navigate are probably in for a surprise. (Hopefully whatever surprise the first of those possibilities might pose for the United States won’t be a whole lot worse.)

Dear Mormon Voters of the American West (But Actually, Mainly Just Arizona): Let's Try This One More Time, Okay?

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

The presidential election campaign will come to an end 50 days from today. A lot could change in 50 days, but probably won’t. Ours is a deeply divided nation, as anyone who pays attention to politics already well knows, and that division is significantly the result of structural and sociological factors which there is no reason to believe anything less than divine interventions, at least in the short-term, could alter. Now, as a Mormon actually believes that occasionally there really are divine interventions into history, I do in fact hold out hope for some dramatic change in our calcified political culture. But assuming such is not likely, I, like all the other Latter-day Saints for Harris/Walz out there, have to look in the meantime for small ways that we--and today, I mean specifically my religious tribe--can make whatever meaningful differences we can over the next seven weeks or so.

Thankfully, there’s actual evidence in support of that hope. More than eight years ago, I speculated hopefully on the possibility that American Mormon voters, fully two-thirds of which consistently cast ballots for Republican candidates--and yes, that number has declined slightly in recent cycles, but it still remains mostly constant--might actually balk at the appalling Donald Trump carrying their party’s banner as a presidential candidate, and vote for a non-Republican in sufficient numbers to actually interfere his path to victory. None of that happened.

Instead the Mormon corridor, Idaho through Arizona, embraced the Orange Man, or at least contained a majority of voters who concluded that a narcissistic, vindictive, paranoid, borderline racist and sexist liar, adulterer, and con man was a better choice for the presidency than someone who wouldn’t appoint opponents of abortion rights to the Supreme Court, and directed their states’ Electoral College votes accordingly. (We can curse that stupid 18th-century leftover another time; I made my case against it over a decade ago, and haven't changed my mind since.) And the nation, including all us American Mormons, got the Trump administration as a reward. Which thankfully came to an end in 2020.

What changed in 2020? Again, as everyone who follows politics knows, the changes that mattered were overwhelming in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The place that my people--or rather, the portion of my people who recognize that supporting Donald Trump for president is, as my blogging colleague Sam Brunson recently argued, basically antithetical to any proper understanding what it means, as a 21^st-century American, to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ[1]--had in those changes was extremely minimal. But that’s not the case for Arizona, the fifth of the seven so-called “battleground states” which Biden was able to get win back from Trump nearly four years ago. There, Arizona Mormons mattered. And they need to again.

This isn’t anything new to the political junkies out there, or even just ordinary folks who pay attention to political news. The role which Latter-day Saint voters--and especially, when you really drill down on the demographics, white married middle- and upper-middle-class female Latter-day Saint voters--played in Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory, and could play in Harris potentially prevailing in the Grand Canyon State in 50 days, has attracted the attention of Newsweek, Daily Kos, Axios, Esquire, NPR, Politico, and more. The numbers, after all, don’t lie. It seems likely that about 6% of all the votes cast for a presidential candidate in 2020 in Arizona were cast by members of the Mormon church; that makes for about 200,000 votes, and Biden won that state by less than 11,000, whereas Trump had prevailed over Clinton in 2016 by over 60,000 votes. Did an ideological or political minority among Mormon voters more generally make up the majority of that 70,000+ vote switch in 2020? Did they make up a plurality of it? Did they merely contribute to that switch? Whichever way it was, it was a noticeable difference, one which the sensible minority of LDS voters across the state and elsewhere are rightly busy building upon as I write.

Of course, it would be nice to believe this could be replicated elsewhere in the Mormon corridor, but Utah and Idaho are, frankly, lost causes for at least another generation or more. (I suspect that the entrenchment of a long-standing local conservative LDS leadership culture in states with a much higher relative portions of self-identifying Mormons—42 % in Utah, 26% in Idaho—works against the likelihood of dissident LDS voters being able to leverage their ballots productively within their own groups, but I don’t have the data to judge.) That’s not to mitigate the praise owed to multiple organizations in both states that have been fighting the good fight. Mormon Women for Ethical Government, for example, a wonderful organization with chapters throughout the Mormon corridor and beyond, didn’t exist in 2016, but since that time has done important educational and empowering work among LDS voters and others (officially non-partisan work, to be sure, but given that they describe Donald Trump as “a U.S. president who used his position to generate anger, willfully deceive the public, divide our nation, and weaken our systems of government,” it’s really not hard to see where they stand).

But it is in Arizona, the land of life-long Republican and convinced Harris-supporter John Giles, the Mormon mayor of Mesa, where these kinds of grass-roots actions may genuinely make a difference. Not a huge one; as Giles himself admitted--to his frustration--to the Mormon Land podcast, most of his (and my) co-religionists are too committed to Fox News-enabled narratives about the immigrant or the transgender threat to actually take step back and consider how wrong-headed their continued allegiance to a party led by Donald Trump actually is. That’s why he hopes his party will suffer a resounding defeat come November, so the GOP can--or so he hopes, anyway--start to rebuild itself into something actually constructive. Again, barring some kind of divine event, that almost certainly won’t happen, unfortunately. But little victories matter, sometimes even matter in a big way.

Consider: what if Trump’s current 1% advantage over Harris in Arizona--which even the Trump campaigns knows is soft, resulting in a desperate scramble to activate every low-propensity MAGA Republican voter they can find--drops by half, or even disappears, over the next three or four weeks, with wise LDS voters knocking doors, making calls, placing signs, donating funds, politely signaling in church meetings, and overall just basically modeling for their fellow church members (again, perhaps mostly white, college-educated, middle- or upper-middle-class married female church members) that being a supporter of Vice President Harris and Governor Walz doesn’t turn you into anything disturbing, certainly not anything as disturbing as one of Trump’s ridiculous and pathetic rants last Tuesday? What if they consistently leaned into, in private conversations and social media posts, the LDS Church’s own profoundly (though of course never formally) anti-Trumpish statements and actions when it comes to immigration, posing it against Trump's insistence that suburban women desperately want to be protected from dangerous, low-income, non-English-speaking people moving in next door, and by so doing slowly turn at least a few more faithful, committed, believing, church-attending Mormons in Mesa and Chandler and Gilbert and Tempe and Tucson towards reason, thus evaporating much of Trump’s advantage across the state? That would force the Trump campaign, in the final month of the campaign, to make some hard choices, either of which would benefit the GOP's electoral defeat in the state: they could double-down on securing Arizona, pulling needed resources out of Pennsylvania or Georgia, or they could stick with their current plan, and potentially let Arizona trend away from them. Which, if you do the Electoral College math, would make it possible for Harris to still win even if she ends up capturing only three of the remaining six battleground states. (Well, actually four, because Harris will carry Nevada, as Clinton did in 2016 and Biden did in 2020; the LDS vote won’t make that much difference there, but between them and Hispanic voters and union members, it’ll be enough to win. Harry Reid’s reach, bless his soul, remains long.)

So anyway, Grand Canyon state Mormons, this is your moment: be the White Horse that never showed up in 2016, but which charged through Arizona in 2020, and needs to do so again. Do something vital for the health of our country, despite the majority of our tribe not agreeing with you. It’s important, darn it.

---

[1] While I’m in complete agreement with Sam, I personally wouldn’t put things that way, because I think not voting to make a fascist-adjacent crook president of the United States, while obviously the morally correct position, is also a terribly low measuring bar for determining what, politically speaking, it means to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Religious fan of socialism and communalism that I am, I’m not even sure you can live, much less vote, as a 21^st-century American, with our daily lives awash with so much technological excess, economic selfishness, social exclusion, and environmental disregard, and still be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank goodness I believe God is going to save us all anyway, because damn, we all (myself most definitely included) will surely need it.

On Fascists, Jesus, and Woody Guthrie

I’m awake early this morning, thanks to a headache, after going to bed late last night following 2 ½ hours of talking about yesterday’s terrible news at a local news station, filming comments for their late night and early morning news segments, and I’m thinking about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and also Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

There’s certainly a truth in that statement, and those of us who think Trump was a terrible president and would (perhaps will) make an even worse one the second time around should not be so blinkered as to deny that truth. But it is not the whole truth, and unless one assumes the human beings are machines that simply respond to the inputs they receive, with no conscious thought, no reflection, no personal judgment whatsoever along the way, a larger truth must be insisted upon. And this is where, perhaps especially because this is Sunday, I get religious. (I owe this particular reflection to the late-last-night comments of my fellow Kansas writer, Joel Mathis.)

The story that has come down to us through the text known as the Book of Matthew has Jesus preaching a sermon, where among many other civilization-changing principles, He is presented as saying in chapter 5, verses 43 through 46 (most famously in the translation found in the King James Version of the Bible):

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”

It is notable, I think, that Jesus is not presented as having said that one’s enemies aren’t actually that—that they are actually your neighbors, actually your fellow human beings, your fellow children of our “Father which is in heaven,” and therefore lovable. No, instead the received text presents Him as saying acknowledging enemies as exactly that: enemies, opponents, those who disagree with and “despitefully use” and even “persecute” those to whom He is speaking (which, for believers like myself, means all of us). He is calling for us to turn away from hate—and thus also, I think it is reasonable to say, violence—when it comes to even those who we see as enemies to that which we hold dear.

This is, in some ways, the most difficult of all Christian teachings. So difficult, you might say, that even the greatest American leaders, even leaders as familiar with the teachings found in the Christian Bible as Abraham Lincoln, chose to lessen its sharpness when confronted with the enormities it implies. In his First Inaugural Address, he insisted as he finished “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Every political expression must, of course, be guided by a sense of prudence, and articulated in reference to both the aspirations and the reality of the polis that one is speaking of—and, in Lincoln’s case, was trying to save—and so I’ve no criticism of what Lincoln was attempting to rhetorically accomplish at that moment in 1861, when the divisions over the evils of slavery had led to the point of secession and war. But it is nonetheless worth noting that Jesus presented a different possibility: that the affection can and should still exist, even if the bonds which tie people together, which prevent them from seeing one another as an enemy, have been broken.

What does that mean, in practice? Well, if worse comes to absolute worse, it may mean pacifism in the face of direct violence, it means showing love even when those being shown love respond with persecution and death. But less than that point, it could mean Woody Guthrie’s condemnation of fascism—with a guitar.

Of course, by the time Guthrie first started writing that message on his guitar, it was 1943, and America’s involvement in the world war against the Nazis of Germany, the fascists of Italy, and the war party which had take control of Japan, had been in full swing for over a year. Yet Guthrie himself connected that message to something much broader than even that global conflict, to a fight that extended back to the Great Depression and the struggle against “economic turmoil and social disintegration” in general. That Guthrie supported the war effort was undeniable. And yet, it remains important I think, that his machine was not a gun, not a weapon, but a musical instrument. A guitar. Which, unless you use it to bash someone over the head, and maybe not even then, can’t kill anyone. But it, and the music it makes, can kill the ideas and movements that make fascists. Who were clearly people that Guthrie regarded as an enemy. He was no pacifist, and made no criticism of soldiers fighting in World War II. Yet still, hold onto that image: the image of fighting fascism with music, not (or at least not only) violence.

As I wrote above, every political action and expression should be guided by prudential judgment: we really should think, as much and as often as we can, about where and when to apply whatever tools and talents we have to promote that which we believe. That’s the churn of participatory democracy, and it’s something I believe in, as both good and wise. It is possible—it’s always possible—that some moment will be revealed as a Rubicon, the crossing of which leaves all conversation and argument and democratic contestation behind and suggests that guitars must be turned into guns. All I can say in the face of that logical point is: resist it, the way Jesus called us to resist it, the way that image of a defiant, guitar-wielding, fascist-“killing” Guthrie resists it. That resistance may, ultimately, be the most prudent, most purely (if naively) democratic action of all.

I’ve been pretty clear that I consider Trump a danger to the flawed but nonetheless real virtues of the flawed but nonetheless still functioning liberal democracy called the United States of America. “Fascist-adjacent” is the term I’ve used, and until and unless Trump himself shares evidence otherwise, I’m going to consider him an authoritarian, or at the very best a quasi-authoritarian threat, to whatever political goods America’s dysfunctional system can still provide. But I’ve also recognized that something similar can be said about practically every American president in my lifetime. That doesn’t wipe away the concern; that doesn’t make me think “oh well, if Johnson and Reagan and Obama were in some ways similar, then clearly our 45^th president can’t be all that different, or all that bad.” I can still, and should still, recognize and respond to dangers when I see them. But I won’t respond with violence, and I denounce anyone who does, or who apologizes for such. Violence can’t save us from a political danger—in fact, it can only result in the closing down of the politics that we are trying to save. That’s the message I take this morning from Jesus, and Woody Guthrie (who were probably more similar, in the end, then latter would have ever expected). I pray it’s a message others will take too.