In
the past few weeks, Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo has deepened our
understanding of the right-wing attempt to impose Christian nationalism on the
United States through support for Trump and the MAGA movement. On March 9, Kovensky explored
the secret, men-only, right-wing society called the Society for American Civic
Renewal (SACR), whose well-positioned, wealthy, white leaders call for
instituting white male domination and their version of Christianity in the U.S.
after a “regime” change.
On March 19, Kovensky
explained how that power was reaching into lawmaking when he reported on a September 2023 speech
by Russ Vought, a key architect of the plans for Trump’s second term, including
Project 2025. In the speech, which took place in the Dirksen Senate
Office Building, Vought explained the right wing’s extreme border policies by
explicitly marrying Christian nationalism and an aversion to the pluralism that
is a hallmark of American democracy. Vought argued that the U.S. should model
immigration on the Bible’s Old Testament, welcoming migrants only “so long as
they accepted Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.”
These
religious appeals against the equality of women and minorities seem an odd
juxtaposition to a statement by United Auto Workers (UAW) union president Shawn
Fain in response to the claim of the Trump campaign that Trump’s “bloodbath”
statement of last Saturday was
about the auto industry. Fain is also a self-described Christian, but he
rejects the right-wing movement.
“Donald
Trump can’t run from the facts,” Fain said in a statement to CBS News. “He can
do all the name-calling he wants, but the truth is he is a con man who has been
directly part of the problem we have seen over the past 40 years—where working
class people have gone backward and billionaires like Donald Trump reap all the
benefits….
“Trump
has been a player in the class war against the working class for decades,
whether screwing workers and small businesses in his dealings, exploiting
workers at his Mar a Lago estate and properties, blaming workers for the Great
Recession, or giving tax breaks to the rich. The bottom line is Trump only
represents the billionaire class and he doesn’t give a damn about the plight of
working-class people, union or not.”
In
the 1850s the United States saw a similar juxtaposition, with elite southern
enslavers heightening their insistence that enslavement was sanctioned by God
and their warnings that the freedom of Black Americans posed an existential
threat to the United States just as white workers were beginning to turn
against the system that had concentrated great wealth among a very few men.
While white southern leaders were upset by the extraordinary popularity of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel that urged
middle-class women to stand up against slavery, it was Hinton Rowan Helper’s
1857 The
Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It that made them
apoplectic.
Hinton
Helper was a white southerner himself and showed no abolitionist sympathies in
his deeply racist book. What that book did was to show, using the statistics
that had recently been made available from the 1850 census, that the American
South was falling rapidly behind the North economically. Helper blamed the
system of slavery for that economic backwardness, and he urged ordinary white
men to overthrow the system of enslavement that served only a few wealthy white
men. The cotton boom of the 1850s had created enormous fortunes for a few lucky
planters, as well as a market for Helper’s book among poorer white men who had
been forced off their land.
White
southern elites considered Helper’s book so incendiary that state legislatures
made it illegal to possess a copy, people were imprisoned and three allegedly
hanged for being found with the book, and a fight over it consumed Congress for
two months from December 1859 through January 1860. The
determination of southern elites to preserve their power made them redouble
their efforts to appeal to voters through religion and racism.
In today’s America, the right
wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s
rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights
and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has
moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981
while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt.
Yesterday the
far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes about two thirds of
all House Republicans, released a 2025 budget plan to stand against Biden’s
2025 budget wish list. The RSC plan calls for dramatic cuts to business
regulation, Social Security, Medicaid, and so on, and dismisses Biden’s plan
for higher taxes on the wealthy, calling instead for more than $5 trillion in
tax cuts. It calls the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that permits
the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices
“socialist price controls.”
Biden
responded to the RSC budget, saying: “My budget represents a different future.
One where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and
biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks. A future where we restore
the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. A future
where the middle class finally has a fair shot, and we protect Social Security
so the working people who built this country can retire with dignity. I see a
future for all Americans and I will never stop fighting for that future.”
Biden’s
version of America has built a strong economy in the last two years, with
extremely low unemployment, extraordinary growth, and real wage increases for
all but the top 20%. Inequality has decreased. Today the
White House announced the cancellation of nearly $6 billion in federal student
loan debt for thousands of teachers, firefighters, and nurses. Simply by
enforcing laws already on the books that allow debt forgiveness for borrowers
who go into public service, the administration has erased nearly $144 billion
of debt for about 4 million borrowers.
At
the same time, the administration has reined in corporations. Today the Department
of Justice, along with 15 states and the District of Columbia, sued Apple,
Inc., for violating the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. They charge that the
company, which in 2023 had net revenues of $383 billion and a net income of $97
billion, has illegally established a monopoly over the smartphone market to
extract as much revenue as possible from consumers. The company’s behavior also
hurts developers, the Department of Justice says, because they cannot compete
under the rules that Apple has set.
At
the end of February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the
merger of Kroger and Albertsons, a $24.6 billion takeover affecting 5,000
supermarkets and 700,000 workers across 48 states. The merger would raise
grocery prices, narrow consumer choice, and hurt workers’ bargaining power, the
FTC said. The attorneys general of Arizona, California, the District of
Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming joined the
FTC’s lawsuit.
The
benefits of the administration’s reworking of the government for ordinary
Americans have not gotten traction in the past few years, as right-wing media
have continued to insist that Biden’s policies will destroy the economy. But as
Shawn Fain’s position suggests, ordinary white men, who fueled the Reagan
Revolution in 1980 when they turned against the Democrats and who have made up
a key part of the Republican base, might be paying attention.
In
June 2023 the AFL-CIO, a union with more than 12.5 million members, endorsed
Biden for president in 2024 in its earliest endorsement ever. In January the
UAW also endorsed Biden. Yesterday the
United Steelworkers Union, which represents 850,000 workers in metals, mining,
rubber, and other industries, added their endorsement.
Just
as it was in the 1850s, the right-wing emphasis on religion and opposition to a
modern multicultural America today is
deeply entwined with preserving an economic power structure that has benefited
a small minority. That emphasis is growing stronger in the face of the
administration’s effort to restore a level economic playing field. In the
1850s, those who opposed the domination of elite enslavers could only promise
voters a better future. But in 2024, the success of Biden’s policies may be
changing the game.
—Heather
Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/russ-vought
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html
https://rsc-hern.house.gov/about/membership
https://hern.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_budget_including_letter_web_version.pdf
Benjamin
Frank Gilbert, “The Life and Writings of Hinton Rowan Helper,” The Register
of the Kentucky Historical Society, 53 (January
1955), pp. 58–75.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/21/doj-sues-apple-over-iphone-monopoly.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/kroger-albertsons-grocery-merger-blocked-ftc
https://aflcio.org/press/releases/afl-cio-votes-endorse-president-biden-re-election
https://uaw.org/uaw-endorses-joe-biden-for-president-of-the-united-states/
Twitter
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aaronlarnavarro/status/1769830953419956673
Laurie_Garrett/status/1770813449292890558
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