David Neiwert: The Ascendancy of Fascism

Backup copy for future reference. 

Formatting is not good but content remains legible.

How fascism ascends: 2020 election may be the crisis of democracy that opens the door to a coup

David Neiwert
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday September 24, 2020 

American democracy almost certainly faces a real crossroads this year: If Donald Trump—who just this week refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:
Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”

• Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
• Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
• Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
• He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
• Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”
Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing pundit Candace Owens that the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normal that they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

Even within a certain bandwidth of progressive thought—primarily Glenn Greenwald and his million-plus-follower Twitter cohort—the response to the rise of a fascist threat to American democracy is greeted with a kind of sneering dismissiveness. Recently, that was how Greenwald and Co. reacted when Max Berger, the cofounder of the Jewish anti-Israeli occupation organization If Not Now, tweeted: “The most surreal part of living through a fascist coup is that we’re not even talking about it as such.”

Greenwald quote-tweeted Berger in reply:

Liberal stars have spent 4 years convincing their followers of 2 claims:
1) Their domestic opponents are Nazis, fascists, and White Supremacist Terrorists.
2) Russia is lurking everywhere, an existential threat to US democracy.
Ponder what that means for how they’ll wield power.

Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, Lee Fang, appeared to chime in later that day:

What motivates the ruling class is a routine desire for maintaining power and self-interest. But political storytellers need lurid emotionally driven narratives, so the far left invents a white supremacist elite in charge of the country, just as the far right imagines a pedo cabal.

This line of argumentation is nothing new for Greenwald, who has previously dismissed concerns about the rising tide of white nationalism by suggesting that the politicians and activists raising those concerns were analogical to the right-wing “neocons” who used Islamophobic rhetoric to bash Muslims after 9/11. In these tweets, he’s extending that argument to suggest not only that the threat of white nationalism is an imaginary concoction existing solely as a club to bash the right, but that Democrats are the real fascists, or at best loony-tunes conspiracists, as does Fang

This is nothing short of an outright denial of established facts. The reality we are confronted with daily—that the United States (and the rest of the world, with no small assist from Russian interests) are awash in a tide of white nationalism and its attendant violence, and that moreover this tide has been enabled, encouraged, and empowered by Donald Trump, both on the streets of America and within his administration—is not something that can be erased with a sneer.

Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he answered: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the radical right.

More recently, the appearance at the very least that Trump is deliberately encouraging a violent response to his political opposition has been growing. When far-right militiamen have gathered in places like Richmond, Virginia, and Lansing, Michigan, to shake their weapons in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and other elected government officials, Trump has tweeted out his encouragement. When a teenage militiaman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two fatally, Trump defended him while mischaracterizing the shootings. When far-right conspiracy theorists created a hoax rumor that antifascists and leftists were responsible for the wildfires sweeping the rural West Coast—resulting in armed vigilantes setting up “citizens patrols” and highway checkpoints, sometimes with the encouragement of local police—Trump retweeted a meme promoting the hoax.

The reality currently confronting Americans is that the extremist right has been organizing around a strategy of intimidation and threats by armed “Patriots”—embodied by street-brawling proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and the “III Percent” militias, along with their “Boogaloo” cohort, all of them eager to use their prodigious weaponry against their fellow Americans in a “civil war.” And what we have seen occurring as the 2020 campaign has progressed is that the line of demarcation between these right-wing extremists and ordinary Trump-loving Republicans has all but vanished.

Finally—and perhaps most importantly—Trump has empowered far-right white nationalist and conspiracy theorist elements within the walls of his administration, and pursued an agenda friendly to extremist elements. The architect of Trump’s immigration policies (not to mention his eliminationist scare campaigns about immigrant caravans and refugees from the Middle East) has been senior adviser Stephen Miller, whose deep ties to white nationalists were exposed last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Trump’s resulting policy agenda has been a white nationalist’s dream.

Trump’s see-no-evil approach to white nationalism meanwhile has translated into a deliberate blind spot within federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, where a whistleblower recently revealed that he was directed to skew intelligence assessments to minimize the threats of both white nationalist terrorism and Russian interference in American elections.

These are all established factual realities—in stark contrast with the utterly fantastical world of QAnon and other conspiracy theory universes that Fang seems to think they are comparable with—though Greenwald, who after all resides in Brazil, appears unfamiliar with them. Certainly his well-established blind spot for far-right extremism contributed to his decision to continue harping on Berger’s remarks a few days later, tweeting:

The United States is currently living under a “fascist coup,” and we must destroy the Nazi dictator who has seized power by spending the next 60 days vigorously campaigning against him and then obtaining more votes than he in the regularly scheduled election to be held Nov. 3.

Greenwald’s subsequent tweets in the thread laid out his argument further, pointing out that even though the Nazi party won a plurality of votes in the 1933 German election, paving Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship, “once in power, he wasn't susceptible to being removed by a democratic election because he was a fascist dictator.”

This is a remarkably simplistic approach to historical fascism, both in the 1930s and currently. First, as historian Robert O. Paxton explained in his definitive text The Anatomy of Fascism, neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever even won their positions of national leadership through election. Rather, they were appointed by conservative establishment powers because their democratic states were mired in significant crises of legitimacy—crises they had major roles in inflaming themselves.

Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted.

Moreover, as Paxton pointedly observes: “We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.”

Greenwald’s formulation of the history completely misapprehends the nature of fascism itself, as well as how it spreads and seizes power. As Paxton explains, fascism is not a single, readily identifiable principle but a political pathology, best understood (as in psychology) as a constellation of traits. He defines it thus:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Fascism is moreover highly mutative, changing shape and appearance as well with each successive phase of its development. Paxton identifies these five stages:

1. The initial creation of fascist movements
2. Their rooting as parties in a political system
3. The acquisition of power
4. The exercise of power
5. Radicalization or entropy

In each phase, fascism behaves differently and pursues different agendas, often in sharp contradiction of the ideals and policies it had previously embraced. What Greenwald is describing with regard to Hitler is fascism in its fourth stage, exploiting the powers Nazis already had obtained—while the “fascist coup” Berger describes, and indeed what we are currently experiencing in the United States, is the process: namely, fascism in its third stage, that is, in the process of acquiring enough political power to declare a dictatorship.

This process can vary according to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the established democracies that it infects. The fascists in prewar Germany and Italy—where the systems of democracy and their institutions were both comparatively recent developments and accordingly unstable—were able to rise to power through discrete and explicitly fascist political parties, seizing the political stage from outside the normal parameters of the established democracy, as it were.

In the United States, Paxton explains, fascist elements have always been present—and indeed, many threads from American history contributed powerfully to the ideologies of European fascism—but there has never been the “political space” for them to form discrete fascist parties capable of winning broad support.

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a hot of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more "un-American" after the great anti-Nazi war.

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around and anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic messages broadcast from his church on the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.

As Paxton explains, in the United States, as in France and elsewhere, fascism typically failed in the second stage because it failed to become a cohesive political entity, one capable of acquiring power. But make no mistake, he says: It can happen here.

It would, true to its mutative nature, adapt its shape, appearance, rhetoric, and agenda to its peculiarly American audience:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans. No swastikas in American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Around such reassuring language and symbols in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in the schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

Similarly, the mechanism by which fascism can acquire power is more likely to adapt to the nature of the nation it infects. Whereas both Italian and German democracies were relatively new and unstable when fascists overwhelmed them, American democracy is the most robust and mature in the world, with over 200 years’ history behind it. Its democratic institutions are more deeply established and less susceptible to attack—which is a large reason why fascism has failed to previously obtain the political space required to attract a large enough following to succeed as a discrete party.

I have contended for many years—since at least that 2004 Orcinus series on what I then called “pseudo fascism”—that in America, fascism is far more likely to worm its way under the foundations of our democracy by taking over an established party, “the transformation of an existing party into a fascist entity from within — not necessarily by design, but by a coalescence of political forces already latent in the landscape.”

As I explained then, this mechanism was suggested by one of the significant American fascist "intellectuals" who arose in the 1930s named Lawrence Dennis. He penned an ideological blueprint entitled The Coming American Fascism. Dennis predicted that eventually, the combination of a dictatorial and bureaucratic government and big business would continue exploiting the working middle class until, in frustration, it would turn to fascism. What's especially noteworthy was the political path he foresaw for this to happen:

Yet how infinitely better for the in-elite of the moment to have fascism come through one of the major parties of the moment than to have it fight its way to power as the program of the most embittered leaders of the out-elite.

This indeed is what has occurred. Rather than being guided consciously, this transformation has happened almost spontaneously as the forces that fascism comprises gradually have come together under their own gravity. As I explained, the takeover really occurred within the realm of movement conservatism, which by the 1980s had almost completely subsumed the Republican Party:

The primary impetus has been the change under which conservatism became a discrete movement intent on seizing the reins of power. In the process, the means—that is, the obtaining of power—became the end. And once the movement became centered around obtaining power, by any means necessary, then ideology became fungible according to the needs of its drive to acquire power, just as it was with fascism. This virtually guaranteed it would become a travesty of its original purpose. The nature of today's "conservative movement" is no more apparent than in how distinctly un-conservative its actual conduct has been: busting budgets, falling asleep at the wheel of national security, engaging wars recklessly and without adequate planning.

Two things occurred to the conservative movement in this drive for power:

• It increasingly viewed liberals not merely as competitors but as unacceptable partners in the liberal-conservative power-sharing agreement that has been in place since at least the New Deal and the rise of modern consumer society. Ultimately, this view metastacizes into seeing liberals as objects to be eliminated.
• It became increasingly willing to countenance ideological and practical bridges with certain factions of the extremist right. This ranged from anti-abortion and religious-right extremists to the neo-Confederates who dominate Republican politics in the South to factions of the Patriot/militia movement.

The combination of these two forces exerted a powerful rightward pull on the movement, to the point where extremist ideas and agendas have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream right, flowing into an eliminationist hatred of liberalism. In the process, their own rhetoric has come to sound like that on the far right. A lot of the dabbling in far-right memes has been gratuitous, intended to "push the envelope" for talk-radio audiences in constant need of fresh outrageousness.

Back in 2004, however, the primary reason not to fear the ascension of fascism directly was that there was not, at that point, a crisis of democracy and its legitimacy, even though George W. Bush’s 2000 victory via the Electoral College decidedly set the stage for the current crisis, as did the right-wing authoritarianism his administration and its cohorts unleashed. Paxton agreed that the danger was not imminent despite the growth of far-right groups in the American body politic: "Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setback and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream,” he wrote.

However, that caveat has vanished because the 2020 election is unmistakably a looming crisis with effects we are already feeling. And that crisis has, historically speaking, always been the trigger that opened the door for fascists to seize power, as Paxton explains:

Fascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion. That suggests its spatial and temporal limits: no authentic fascism before the emergence of a massively enfranchised and politically active citizenry. In order to give birth to fascism, a society must have known political liberty -- for better or for worse.

… In other words, it's clear that the "crisis of democracy" necessary to create a genuinely fascist dynamic is a real potential that lies around many corners on our current path. The key, then, is to finding the path that does not take us there.

Paxton concludes The Anatomy of Fascism with this warning:

Fascism … is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past.

While there is no shortage of voices denying the reality of the fascist threat we now face, American democracy really does stand on the precipice in the 2020 election. Should we step off, then only the abyss awaits.

Turkey's Alevis & Myths of the Mountain Goats

 I came across this treasure at Middle East Eye & realized if I didn't save it at my blog it might vanish into the bottomless web archives. There are more images at the link and hyperlinks are the same.

~~~~

Turkey's Alevis and the myths of the mountain goats

Turkey’s long-oppressed Zaza Alevi minority have a mystical connection to nature, especially the sacred mountain goats of Dersim

By Nick Ashdown in Dersim
7 December 2020 10:19 UTC

Ali Ekber Frik, a 74-year-old dede, or spiritual leader, tells an old story in a low, raspy voice, his plump fingers playing with prayer beads. He’s in Ovacik, a small town in Turkey’s Tunceli province, known by locals as Dersim, in eastern Anatolia.

Behind him a shepherd watches over his flock of sheep near a graveyard as the late afternoon sun envelops green rolling hills in its warm glow.

“Perhaps 150 years ago, three people came from Kemah [a nearby town] to the foot of the Munzur Mountains, and they were very hungry,” he says.

“Seeing a fire in a cave, they approached and saw that four or five people had butchered a mountain goat, and were waiting as it cooked. The travellers said: ‘We are very hungry, we came here for a piece of bread, but we don't eat mountain goat and if you ask us, you shouldn't either,’ and they immediately left, even though they were starving.”

Ali Ekber Frik explains the significance of Dersim’s
mountain goats in Ovacik, Turkey
(MEE/Nick Ashdown)

The travellers, like Frik, were Alevis, Turkey’s largest religious minority, and they consider the mountain goats sacred. Dersim is chiefly inhabited by a long-persecuted people who are a minority of a minority.

They are Zaza Kurds, otherwise known as Kirmanc, speaking a dialect different from Kurdish peoples found elsewhere in Turkey and the region. Their form of Alevism is also different from that followed by the related Bektasi Alevis, who are ethnically Turkish and have been more influenced by Shia Islam.

Ferociously independent, Dersim was never fully under government control until an uprising in 1938-39 was crushed by the state.Alevis suffered repression, surveillance and massacres under the Sunni Ottoman sultans who considered them heretics.

These same mountains that protected the Zaza Alevis before the advent of modern warfare became the site of their massacre. Soldiers dropped bodies from cliffs into the Munzur River and lit fires at the mouths of sealed caves, sucking the oxygen out of the people trapped inside.

They consider not just mountain goats, but all living things sacred, and all things that contribute to life, such as the sun and water. They worship nature itself. Older generations in Dersim say prayers to the sun and moon, but they say this practice is now being lost.

The Zaza Alevis’ heterodox, mystical belief system known as Raa Haqi, was influenced by pre-Islamic Anatolian shamanistic practices, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Armenian Christianity, and only later by Shia Islam. Unlike most members of Turkey’s other Alevi communities, many Zaza Alevis reject the label of Muslim.

Dersim, particularly in the Munzur Valley National Park, has the most diverse ecosystem in Turkey. The Park is teeming with over 1,500 plant species, 43 of which are endemic, and is home to animals such as the brown bear, Eurasian lynx, wildcat, gray wolf, and wild boar.

“We call mountain goats, honey bees, and weasels in the mountain sacred. Because they don’t harm anyone, they are sacred. We don't kill them,” explains Frik.

To show the value of nature in their beliefs, he recites an old poem about the sacredness of trees, and the role that wood has played in holy objects, such as the cradle of the Kaaba (the holiest site in Islam) or the saddle of the Imam Ali, whom Alevis revere.

“That is how much we value trees, since time immemorial, and the trees love us back. Even though our forests burn, they never give up on us,” Frik says. Turkey, as elsewhere in the world, has experienced an uptick in forest fires due to climate change.

This reverence for nature is why Dersim residents are so disturbed by the hunters who sometimes come to take their sacred mountain goats as trophies. The goats, some species of which are endangered, are protected by Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs, but the government says older animals are allowed to be hunted in limited quantities, and that 60 per cent of the money earned from the tenders goes back to local villages.

This past summer, activists launched a campaign to ban mountain goat hunting in the region and the Dersim Cultural and Natural Heritage Conservation Initiative filed a lawsuit requesting cancellation of the tenders. The ministry responded by suspending a tender it had opened to hunt 17 goats, and promised to conduct an investigation, taking into consideration local customs and beliefs.

Local environmentalists don’t particularly care whether the hunting is done legally or not, they are horrified by it, and want it forbidden without exception. “We’ve watched as killers coming from outside the province and from different European countries hunt Dersim’s most important species,” said activist Hasan Sen of the organization Munzur Protection. “The authorities close their eyes to massacres.”

‘The property of saints’

For the Alevis, killing such holy creatures isn’t just senseless and immoral, but a dreadful sin. Transgressors are traditionally outcast and labelled as duskun, or "fallen". “In the old days when people did this, they would be sent into exile,” says 68-year-old dede, Zeynel Batar, in the village of Kedek.

“There was a guy in our village who’d go after the mountain goats. We warned him many times not to. One day he plunged off the rocks and died. They didn't even wash his body in the square.”

Though Zaza Alevis consider all wild animals holy, mountain goats, of which there are several local varieties, are especially sacred. “They are the property of saints,” Batar explains.

“These goats eat special grass but when it’s wintertime the mountains are full of snow and what do they eat? Their food comes from the unknown, brought by the saints.”

Three mythical saints are said to be the goats’ shepherds - Sarik Sivan, Sıx Ahmet Dede, and Duzgun Baba. Duzgun - which might be a Turkicised version of a Zaza word meaning sharp rocks or cliffs - is the most famous of them.

On Duzgun Baba mountain, near the town of Nazimiye, 27-year-old dede Kaya Celik climbs the stairs carved into the mountainside and recalls the legend of the holiest of the shepherd saints.

Though there are many versions, according to most, Duzgun’s original name was Sah Haydar, and he was the son of an important religious leader, Kures Baba. Haydar was known for having well-fed goats, even in the winter when food was scarce, and this made his father curious.

“One day, Kures Baba follows his son and the flock and sees that when Haydar touched the oak trees with his staff, the trees would turn green. This was a miracle! When his father sees this, he is both proud but also shocked that his son has surpassed him,” Celik says.

But then, one of Sah's sheep picks up the scent of the shepherd’s father and sneezes. Sah Haydar chuckles and says, “What’s wrong little sheep, did you smell my dad Kureso Khurr?”, using a nickname with which a son shouldn’t call his father in a culture where elders are revered. He turns around, and seeing that his father really is there, leaps to the top of the mountain in shame, disappearing into another realm. After that, he was remembered as Duzgun Baba, and the mountain bears his namesake.

“A couple of animals followed Sah, and his father brought the rest of the flock down. We believe that the goats wandering around this mountain right now are those that followed Duzgun Baba, and are therefore divine,” Celik says.

Higher up on the mountain, past the Alevi shrine, or ziyaret, with a fountain pouring ice-cold water into the mouths of grateful pilgrims, a young man named Murat Babayigit nimbly scales across the jagged rock surface, pointing to a very narrow cave, just large enough to crawl through.

“Duzgun Baba’s bed is in this cave,” Babayigit says. “It’s a sacred place. You feel content up here, happy.”

Still higher, at the very top, lies Duzgun’s grave, a large pile of grey stones, surrounded by various smaller cairns. The sun and moon - both sacred to the Alevis - are presiding together over opposite ends of the early evening sky.

Powerful bond

The endless, jagged mountains seen from here have protected the people of Dersim and other marginalised communities for hundreds of years during various waves of persecution.

In the 1990s, thousands of villages and hamlets in over a dozen provinces in the east and southeast were emptied and scorched by the military, in government operations against the armed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The Turkish interior ministry later launched a project to return Kurds to their homes, called the "Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project". The government-funded project ran from 1999-2015 at a cost of 200m Turkish lira, which at the time was the equivalent of $72m, but was criticised as ineffective by Human Rights Watch.

According to the Interior Ministry, during the fight against the PKK, 62,448 houses were emptied and 386,000 people were forced to emigrate. Now just 28,834 houses are occupied by the people who used to live in them. A total of 187,000 people returned to their villages in 14 provinces, including Dersim.

Over the years, sporadic tensions and clashes have been reported in the province - in 1994, six teachers in Dersim were killed by PKK fighters. Last year during clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military, one soldier was killed and three others wounded.

But this long history of unrest has only strengthened the people’s bond to the land, the animals and each other. “Alevis went to the mountains to run away from tyrants, and when they got there, they saw the mountain goats,” Frik said.

“Every time we go there - when we take our flocks there, when we plant garlic, when we pick mushrooms - we are together.”

Umair Haque -- American Democracy’s Broken Because Minorities Have to Keep Saving It From White People

American Democracy’s Broken Because Minorities Have to Keep Saving It From White People

In case you hadn’t noticed, yesterday, Donald Trump posted a 46-minute long video demanding that the election results be “overturned…now!” That came shortly after Bill Barr admitted that Trump’s attempts to legally tamper with results were both baseless and absurd — and the Attorney General is a die-hard Trumpist if ever there was one.

So why is Trump persisting with his coup? Hasn’t it failed? 

Well…yes. But also…no. Coups can succeed or fail on several levels. And Trump might not have walked away with the ultimate prize — but he’s not walking away empty-handed, either. The proclamations of the outright triumph of American democracy are premature.

It’s true that Trump’s coup has failed at any coup’s primary goal, which is to seize power. Trump’s legal challenges have mostly all been thrown out, by dumbfounded and irate judges, no less. For Trump, losing a crony like Bill Barr is like the first mate of the Titanic heading for the lifeboats. His electoral college tampering is looking increasingly unsuccessful, too. The reality, at this point, is that Trump isn’t going to be in power for another term.

Not now, that is.

Yet Trump’s coup has been remarkably successful on two other levels. 

Levels which themselves have torn a hole in the already tattered fabric of American democracy. He’s accomplished something as ugly as it is bizarre as it is ominous.

The first level on which Trump’s coup has succeeded is with the Republican base. 

70% of Republicans believe the election was rigged. That’s not just a majority — it’s a massive supermajority. That’s not, say 50.1% of them, which would be bad and sinister and foolish enough. It’s 7 out of 10 of them.

Who are Republicans, anyway? Well, here I have to share a truth with you that’s funny, ugly, telling, and…you’re not going to like it. Republicans are white people who like to lie because they’re ashamed of being Republicans. I know that sounds harsh, so let’s look at some basic statistics together. 51% of White voters say that they “lean Republican.” That seems like a pretty even split, right? But the problem is that they’re not telling the truth. Over the last fifty years, an average of 55% percent of white people have voted Republican in every electiono. No Democrat — not one, from JFK to Obama — has ever won a majority of white voters.

So to say that “70% of Republicans believe the election of rigged” is, more accurately, to say this: 55% of white people voted for Trump, the precise historical average, and 70% of that 55% believe that the election was rigged. That’s not an outright majority of whites — but it’s pretty close. It’s a massive, massive number of Americans. How many, to be precise? Well, you can simply put the number at about 70% of the Trump vote. That’s at least 52 million people.

Now, it’s worth bearing in mind the context for all this. It’s not as if the last four years have been…normal. They have been the worst four years in modern American history, by a very long way. First, there was the fascism…the concentration camps, Gestapos, purges, (actual) Nazis, “family separations,” and so on. Then there was the failure even for “real” Americans, whose incomes fell, suicide rates soared, and mobility cratered, as America became a nation of poor people. Finally, there was what fascism and stupidity and hate and ignorance tend to result in, which is mass death. How many Americans are dead of Covid today? Two hundred and seventy four thousand.

That’s the context in question. To call Trump’s Presidency a failure is the understatement of the century — yes, really. 

America has the worst Covid outcomes in the world. And it’s exploding all over again. And yet 70% of Republicans, most of whom are white people, believe that the election was rigged…against the worst President in American history…the worst leader on the face of the globe, apart from maybe the kinds dictators of failed states Trump longs to be. (That’s not just my opinion, by the way, but from 200 political scientists.)

Think about that for a moment. Because when these “voters” say “the election was rigged!” they’re also saying: “None of the above matters to me. Not the mass death from Covid, not the fascism, not the kids in cages, not even the skyrocketing suicide rate amongst the only people I consider to be ‘real’ human beings, white people. None of that matters. I don’t care!”

So what does matter to them? Their political preferences and priorities are crystal clear by now. Here’s what Republicans don’t want. Any kind of public goods, from public healthcare to higher education to retirement — that’s not so odd, by the way, because even Democrats don’t want that. That’s troubling enough — that both sides in American politics agree it shouldn’t be a modern, functioning society.

But what’s really ominous is how far backward Republicans want to rewind the clock of modernity. To the Wild West? This faction believes that carrying a gun is the right that matters most. To the Taliban? Sure: that faction believes that religious law should rule civil society. To… Handmaid’s Tale? Sure: Amy Coney Barrett, Justice of the Supreme Court, belongs to a fanatical religious sect in which men make all the decisions, and there’s no separation between private and public life, which, if Americans saw it in a Muslim country, would be called something like “Iran.”

Even democrats don’t think America should be a modern, functioning society, like Canada or Europe. That’s why Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders didn’t win the primaries then — and are being loudly, publicly snubbed by Biden now. But Republicans go way, way further than that. They seem to believe — genuinely, in a heartfelt way — that America should be some strange cocktail of a fascist state, a theocracy, and an apartheid state. They seem to want to create a medieval dystopia, where women have few rights, minorities are hated subhumans, the chosen people carry guns everywhere, and purity of faith and blood are what decide a person’s fate and destiny.

(We minorities call that “Hillbilly Elegy.” That’s a joke. If you get it, you get it.)

In that context, Trump’s coup has been super successful. 

Republicans — meaning American whites have never wanted to live in a modern democracy. They have voted, historically, as a social group — meaning a majority of whites — and as a political bloc — meaning “Republicans,” which is what they call themselves to put a polite gloss on “white people” — against all the following things: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, desegregation, public education, healthcare. The list goes on and on and on.

Let me distill that.

“Republicans” is a euphemism for “white people,” and as a social group and political bloc, American white people have, in their majority never — never wanted to live in a modern democracy. A society of equals, where minorities and women and so forth have the same rights as everyone else, a truly free society, where everyone has the basics, a society that’s fair and just, where everyone is treated with dignity and gentleness and respect. They have never wanted to live in such a place.

Never. Not since the days of JFK — who eked out a narrow win, thanks to minorities — right down to now.

What Trump has done is give license to white people — aka “Republicans” to openly stop believing in democracy. 

See the process of decay: during the Reagan Revolution, American whites had to at least pretend to pay lip service to democracy, and so, too during the Bush years. But now they don’t. Trump has let them openly begin to state what they have always really believed and voted for — against democracy, because a modern, functioning society wasn’t something they ever wanted to have.

Basically, if you look at the numbers, maaaybe about 25% of Republicans aren’t white. 

What a coincidence! That’s roughly the same number that believes the election wasn’t rigged. White people are still 77% of America. It’s a very, very bad thing when 70% of a political side —almost entirely made up of a single ethnic group, which is a society’s majority —openly stops believing in democracy, just because they didn’t get what they wanted. Which, incidentally, was less democracy in the first place.

If we saw all this happening in another country, what would we call it? What would we say if, for example, 70% of conservatives in a Muslim country thought an election was rigged because it didn’t result in dictatorship and authoritarianism — coincidentally, the same 70% who hated other religious groups? If, for example, 70% of one kind of ethnic group, the majority, who hated the rest, stopped believing in democracy, just because they’d lost an election in which they sought the right to repress and subjugate everyone else even harder? We’d call it what it is: a racist meltdown. A social collapse made of bigotry and hate.

That is still where America is.

Yes, Biden won the election. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. 

It revealed just how racist, bigoted, and frankly idiotic the vast majority of American white people really are. They didn’t seem to care about the horrors of the last four years, they gave all that a free pass, if not cheering encouragement, and then when they didn’t get the right to inflict more damage on everyone, including themselves, they threw a massive baby tantrum, and threw all the toys out of the crib.

Biden’s victory is a vivid demonstration of just how broken America really is. Minorities won the election for Biden — a story that white pundits aren’t telling because they don’t want it told. They’re telling the opposite story — of a handful of minority communities in which Trump’s support, predictably, increased. Like Cuban exiles, who lean arch-conservative. So what? The larger story —and the truer one — is that minorities saved America from fascist collapse.

But let me tell you something you probably don’t know.

That’s what they’ve been doing for half a century now.

Who gave JFK his historic victory? Minorities did. And without that, America would probably never have had desegregation. Remember — whites have never voted for a Democrat as a majority. If American whites had had their way, if their preferences had prevailed, America would still be a segregated society. To this very day.

Stop and think about that for a second. It’s chilling and eerie to us minorities, and it should be to you, too.

Let me put all that much more bluntly.

Minorities have been saving white America’s stupid ass from authoritarian fascist collapse for half a century now.

And at every step of the way, American white people have resisted. They have refused to learn a damned thing. They have voted, over and over again, to keep democracy as limited and backward a franchise as humanly possible. As a social group, in their majority, they have never wanted anything but what Trumpism has promised them.

America’s white people are it’s biggest problem. They do not live in the modern world, and they don’t want to.

Trump’s coup has been massively successful in that regard. It has taught white Americans that they can keep on pulling backward, resisting the arc of history, the gravity of modernity, that they can keep on hoping to live in a backward, medievally ignorant, broken, crushingly poor, authoritarian society — as long as they get what they always wanted: supremacy.

That’s no small feat. Maybe it was always on the cards, if you understand the cruel history I’ve tried to tell above. And it doesn’t bode well for the future. Because either Trump is going to run again, or his kids will run, or someone even more stupid and evil and grotesque will. Before you ask if that’s possible, go ahead and imagine President Ted Cruz, or President Tom Cotton.

A nation cannot survive, often, when it has become like America. 

When its majority hates everyone else, because it hates the idea of everyone else being a person, being a human being, being free and equal, pursuing life and liberty and happiness, because what it really wanted, all along, was to be above them, dominating them, enslaving them, owning them. And if it can’t have that, it won’t accept any kind of social compact at all.

That is the perilous place America finds itself in. Just a tiny number of minorities less, the ones who’ve saved its ass from total implosion for the last fifty years, and America would be even more of a third world country than it is now. An authoritarian state, and probably an apartheid state to boot, not to mention vastly poorer. Its white people, as a majority, appear to be every bit as ignorant, remorseless, and cruel as the majorities in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. If they can’t have it all — they don’t want anyone to have anything at all. There is no social contract they will agree to whatsoever, which is what “Wahhh! The election was rigged! I don’t believe in democracy!” really means. American white people have nothing in common — nothing whatsoever — with their cousins in Europe or Canada, who agree happily to modern social contracts where everyone has the basics, and then plenty beyond that, no matter their color, race, or creed.

America’s white people seem to truly be different — deeply, gruesomely so. They never accepted modernity and democracy. And they still don’t.

Umair
December 2020

NYC Mayor Dinkins Remembered

Jonathan Pie on Donald Trump

Jonathan Pie is a fictional character created and portrayed by English comedian Tom Walker. A political correspondent, Pie appears in a series of online videos in which he rants and explodes in anger about the state of British, American and Australian politics, with the videos being presented as though he were a real reporter speaking his personal opinions to the camera before or after filming a regular news segment.

Replacing rentier capitalism is one of the defining challenges of our age

*** Backup copy for future reference. ***

Replacing rentier capitalism is one of the defining challenges of our age

Two new books reveal how our economy is increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners – and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.
Christine Berry
6 November 2020

As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, it’s increasingly clear that the UK’s broken economy – an economy based on the extraction of rent – is deepening the pain. In August, people were prematurely cajoled back to the office, amid rising panic at the ‘hollowing out’ of city-centres built on inflated commercial property values. In September, students were herded back into overcrowded university accommodation, which duly became the epicentre of the second wave. Many suspected that this predictable disaster was allowed to unfold at least partly because of the dependence of universities and private landlords on rental income from student halls.

Meanwhile, the divide between private renters and homeowners yawns ever wider. While buy-to-let landlords have been able to access mortgage holidays, their tenants struggle with escalating rent debt. Social movements are gearing up to resist evictions after the temporary ban was lifted. While the government’s stamp duty holiday has helped house prices to bounce back, there is no sign whatsoever that jobs and living standards will do the same.

Housing itself is just the most egregious tip of a very large iceberg. Everywhere you look, COVID-19 is widening the gulf between those who own assets and those who owe debts. Buoyed by central bank interventions, capital markets have seen the promised ‘V-shaped recovery’ – but for everyone else, this is now a distant fantasy. Our economy and our politics seem increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners, and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.

Vast sums are siphoned off to failing private providers – including £12 billion for our disastrous test-and-trace system – while government quibbles over the relatively tiny amounts needed to ward off outright destitution (£65 million for Greater Manchester to weather its local lockdown, £21 million a week to feed hungry children). Rishi Sunak might be trying to revive the old chestnut that “there is no money left”. Yet increasingly, people are beginning to suspect that the problem isn’t the amount of money available, but where that money goes. This is intimately bound up with the question of where power lies.

Two very different new books aim to help build our understanding of this landscape, and how we can navigate it to build a new economy. ‘Rentier Capitalism’ by geographer Brett Christophers (out on 17 November from Verso Books) is a serious and detailed study of how the UK economy became dominated by rent extraction. What does this mean? Christophers combines the orthodox economic understanding of ‘rent’ – essentially, excess profits beyond what would be achieved in a competitive marketplace – with the heterodox understanding, which focuses on ownership and control of assets.

Accordingly, he defines rent as “income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition”. It’s debatable how much is really added by the orthodox emphasis on competition – or whether it’s entirely coherent to mash up heterodox and orthodox analytical frameworks in this way. But, leaving these theoretical debates aside, the real heart of Christophers’ argument – and what makes this book so important – is the emphasis on ownership.

Christophers meticulously documents how the ‘commanding heights’ of the UK economy – its most successful sectors, from finance and property development to pharmaceuticals and utilities – are all riddled with rentierism. Most intriguing is a chapter on ‘contract rents’, in which he argues that the entire outsourcing industry is a textbook example of rentier capitalism. The likes of Serco, he argues, are not experts in actually doing anything. They are experts in winning government contracts – essentially, monopolies on the delivery of public goods, which provide guaranteed flows of income (rent) for years or even decades. These contracts are the assets on which their shareholder value is based.

One might be tempted to respond that a contract to deliver a service feels somehow different from, say, a piece of land or an energy resource: the former is, at least in theory, a reward for work, while the latter is simply a gift from nature, allowing the lucky owners to profit with no work whatsoever. This is a much more clear-cut case of unearned rent. Yet recent events have given Christophers’ argument a new relevance. Watching Serco’s profits soar as its calamitous test-and-trace system crumbles around our ears, the extractive nature of its business model has been laid bare for all to see.

Christophers’ dual emphasis on asset ownership and low competition also illuminates how we got into this mess, and the nature of the system we need to change. He argues that neoliberalism was never really about free markets, as is often assumed: it was about private ownership. In this respect, the rhetoric of neoliberalism never matched the reality. Markets for the control of assets were massively expanded by neoliberalism, through processes such as privatisation. But this was never accompanied by any serious efforts to promote competition in those markets. Instead, successive governments allowed ownership and control of assets to concentrate in the hands of a small number of big players.

One partial exception to this was housing, where the Right to Buy ‘bought in’ large swathes of the middle classes to this economic model. This helps to explain why it has endured politically for as long as it has. As Keir Milburn argues in ‘Generation Rent’, it also helps to explain why that political consensus is now fracturing along age-related lines, as young people are locked out of the housing wealth accumulated by their forebears. Or, as Christophers puts it: “Nothing today bespeaks exclusion from the ‘common wealth’ more than being locked out of home ownership – and nothing bespeaks the likelihood of remaining excluded more than paying half of one’s income in rent.” Without fundamental change to the UK’s economic model, these divisions will surely only continue to grow.

‘Rentier Capitalism’ does not have much to say about what this change should look like – although it does end with a few pointers. But then, this is not really a book about solutions. It is a careful and compelling argument about the nature of the problem, an important and urgent contribution to our understanding of modern capitalism. Yet its analysis raises the question: if our entire economy is structured to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an ever-shrinking ownership class, how can we hope to challenge this power effectively? It is this question that concerns the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’, Alice Martin and Annie Quick (out now from Polity Press).

This is a much shorter, more accessible affair – but it packs an impressive breadth and depth of thinking into its 140 pages. It argues that the changing nature of capitalism – specifically, the rise of financialisation and rentierism – poses major challenges for traditional trade union organising models. But at its heart is a bold claim: unions can reinvent themselves and build the social power to truly challenge financialised capital. Indeed, they are the only actors in the economy who can.

Like Christophers, Martin and Quick point the finger at rentier power as a cause of low pay, high inequality and declining worker power. But their reasoning for this is in some ways more innovative and interesting. Christopher focuses mainly on the outsize market power of corporations to squeeze labour and dictate terms. He also points out the growing divide between a small minority of highly-paid professionals tasked with protecting assets (think lawyers, accountants and executives) and a huge precariat who do the actual work. But Martin and Quick argue that rentierism disempowers workers by its very nature. If companies can make money by sweating assets, including through various forms of financial engineering and landlordism that do not rely directly on the labour of their own workers, the power of levers like strike action is drastically reduced.

This, of course, poses much deeper questions: if profit under capitalism is no longer only about the labour relation (and it’s worth noting that this is a claim some Marxists would dispute), how far are models of the economy built on the factories and mines of the nineteenth century still relevant? Do we need to reorient our compasses beyond the world of work altogether? As both books argue, rentier capitalism feeds off multiple kinds of exploitation – of customers by suppliers of energy and water; of borrowers by lenders; of tenants by landlords. What these all have in common is the exploitation of those who don’t own capital or resources by those who do.

In response, Martin and Quick argue that we need a more expansive concept of trade unionism – one rooted in solidarity with the whole working class, “expanding the bargaining unit” out beyond the workplace to the communities and citizens who are also being exploited by finance capital. Care workers should make common cause with those they care for and their families; railway workers should organise with passengers; energy workers should ally with energy consumers and local residents. They cite inspiring examples of unions and social movements organising around rent and debt – from the Chicago teachers demanding affordable housing to the El Barzón movement, campaigning for debtors in Mexico.

Both books highlight economic democracy as the ultimate answer to rentier power. Martin and Quick define this as “moving power for economic decision-making from those who own capital to a much broader group – the workers, renters and carers, from whom capital owners profit.” But – as they do later acknowledge – it’s also about democratising the ownership of capital itself. As Christophers notes, transforming ownership of assets would mean that “society’s economic resources would be subject to much more dispersed and democratic control than they are under capitalism.”

There is much more to be unpacked on what democratising ownership really means. Martin and Quick – understandably, given their focus on trade unions – talk primarily in terms of worker ownership. But, if we accept that the labour relation may not always be the primary site of exploitation under rentier capitalism, are there sectors where worker power just isn’t the answer? If the socialist argument is fundamentally that ownership and control should be in the hands of those who truly create value, has modern capitalism morphed to such an extent that this no longer necessarily means wage-labourers in a given industry?

Perhaps the most obvious example is big tech. Companies like Facebook and Google tend to rely on a relatively small number of highly-paid knowledge workers, while their business model rests on extracting value from the data of millions of users – accruing massive unaccountable power in the process. Worker ownership of these companies might not get us very far towards a more just economy. Co-operative ownership by the platform’s users just might – or, perhaps, public ‘data trusts’, turning this asset into a shared resource rather than a private commodity. Likewise, the best examples of democratic banking tend not to be worker-owned: they are either public banks, or community and consumer-led co-operatives.

Of course, there are plenty of sectors where labour is still the source of value and the key site of exploitation – with care being an obvious example. Even in the tech sector, beneath the shiny apps and platforms, companies like Uber and Amazon still rely to a substantial extent on exploiting the labour of drivers and warehouse workers. Here, worker empowerment is still the right response to the injustice at play.

An understanding of rentier power also raises the question of exactly what we need to democratise. Martin and Quick deploy the traditional socialist language of “the means of production”, while Christophers hints at the need to go beyond this. Many successful rentiers are essentially gatekeepers to the resources we need to live a good life and participate in society – housing, energy, water, broadband access. The fact that they are essential is both what makes them such a reliable source of profit, and what makes this profiteering so morally unacceptable. Accordingly, much new thinking on the left – from energy democracy to universal basic services – is really about democratising the means of subsistence, or perhaps the means of wellbeing.

Arguably, these resources should be taken out of the market altogether, treated as basic universal rights rather than commodities. Democratic ownership should be less about socialising the rents these assets generate, and more about eliminating the potential for rent extraction altogether. Ultimately, it should be about reorienting our economy towards meeting human needs. The language of production and productivity isn’t always particularly helpful in this context – indeed, for activities like care, it is almost irrelevant.

These are interesting conceptual questions, but the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’ would rightly respond ‘so what?’ Their focus – relentless and refreshing – is on what, practically, we can do when faced with seemingly unchallengeable rentier power. The challenge they pose is: if not unions, who?

In today’s somewhat bleak political landscape, we need to get serious about building strong counterweights to the power of extractive rentier capital. We need to be smarter about finding sources of leverage and using them to create change – and we need to start somewhere. It’s a formidable challenge; but, as both of these books powerfully demonstrate, it is one of the defining challenges of our age.

~~~~

What is the future of the US Left after the elections?

The US elections have exposed a deeply polarised society where far-right populism is alive and well. How will progressives respond?
Join us for a free live discussion on Monday 16 November, 5pm UK time/12pm EST.

Hear from:
Jeremy Gilbert Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and the current editor of the journal New Formations.

Seyla Benhabib Professor Emerita of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Senior Research Scholar and Professor Adjunct of Law at Columbia University.

Spyros A. Sofos Researcher and research coordinator at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University.

Walid el Houri (Chair) Researcher, journalist and filmmaker. He is partnerships editor at openDemocracy and lead editor of its North Africa, West Asia project.

In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot

File copy from Washington Post

In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot

By Stephanie McCrummen
NOVEMBER 6, 2020

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — She had made sure her sons voted and her daughter voted, and she kept pressing friends and people in grocery store lines. “Did you go vote?” Cynthia Kendrick had asked them over and over, and in the last hours, she said to her procrastinating daughter-in-law, “Come on, let’s go.”

She drove over to a polling station in a library, her final effort to turn out every single Democratic vote she could in her corner of Atlanta’s Fulton County, and now that voting was over, she settled in front of the television to find out what kind of country she was living in.
“Turn it up, baby,” she said to her husband, Gabriel, a disabled veteran who sat next to her in their house in the mostly African American community of East Point, where the voting lines had been long and enthusiasm so high that at one polling station, volunteers cheered as the last people hurried through the doors to cast their ballots Tuesday night.
“Please, Lord,” Cynthia said now, leaning in as a CNN anchor began talking about Georgia.
“Georgia seems to be giving Trump a run for his money,” the anchor said.
“My mind is going all over the place,” Cynthia said in response.
She thought of what a Joe Biden victory could mean: “In terms of pure humanity, he can relate to us. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has compassion. I saw this morning where he went to the graves of his children.”

She thought of what a President Trump victory could mean: “We’re going to be a white supremacist nation. We’re going back to before the civil rights era. We’re setting up for that.”
“Georgia, too close to call,” the anchor was saying now. “North Carolina, too close to call.”
She was 60, worked as an industrial buyer and was the center of a large, blended family of six grown children, including a teacher, a soldier, an account rep for a credit card firm, a nurse, a heavy equipment operator, and the youngest, Chance, a college student, who was now coming through the front door — past the word “love” that Cynthia had stenciled on a wall — and into the living room, where she had hung posters of jazz musicians and otherwise tried to make her home a welcoming place that valued family, responsibility and all of the things she was trying to keep believing her country valued, too.
“Who’s winning?” her son Vaughn, the heavy equipment operator, called from the kitchen table.
“Still the same,” she called back.
“Y’all got it done?” she asked Chance.
“Yep,” said Chance, who had driven a friend four hours to vote in Tennessee, where he was registered, and then drove him back, and now he sat in the living room watching the returns, too.
“All right, baby,” said Cynthia, returning her attention to the television, where the anchor was saying, “In Michigan, Trump leads… In Ohio, Biden leads,” and she tried not to think about another four years of waking up every morning asking, “Lord, what did the Trumpers do now?”

It was Trump and everything that had come with him. Charlottesville. The Proud Boys. A White former classmate who felt free to lecture her about how Black men got killed by police because they did not behave properly. It was the White woman in the grocery store going on a racist rant until Cynthia finally said, “You know you don’t have Secret Service protection, don’t you?” It was the footage she watched over the weekend of a Biden bus being surrounded by Trump supporters on a Texas highway, all of which was forcing her to reconsider the seminal memory of her childhood, when her grandparents took her with them to vote at an event hall in New Orleans in November 1964.
She had always focused on certain details: her grandfather polishing his tan shoes the night before, her grandmother dressing up in a gray suit and cardigan embroidered with flowers, and all the pride and possibility that moment contained.
Now her mind focused on the rest: The jar of dog feces a White man threw at them as they were leaving the hall. The Black man who fired a gun in the air after that. The rifle her grandfather used to hold when he sat on the front porch in the evenings.
She thought again about a Trump victory: “I’ve been considering carrying a firearm. I’ve been to the shooting range. I’m beginning to feel like we need to be able to protect ourselves. I’ve got to protect my family. I think he wants to start a civil war.”
She switched to another news channel where Trump’s face filled the screen. She switched to another channel. She scrolled through her phone and read more results out loud to her husband. Louisiana, Trump. Alabama, Trump.
“How did so many people think this man is qualified?” Cynthia asked.
“This is too much, baby,” said Gabriel, who decided to go to bed to avoid further stress, and soon, Vaughn went to bed, and Chance went to bed, and it was only Cynthia still awake in the house in East Point, an African American woman among the millions of African American women whom the Democratic Party had always depended on in moments like this, and who listened as the anchor said, “You see Georgia here.”
“Oh, Lord,” Cynthia said.
“And we’ve got Fulton County over here — the Democrats are going to need something massive out of the metro area,” the anchor continued, pointing roughly to the spot where she was sitting in the glow of the television near midnight. Rather than staying awake another hour imagining all the scenarios whereby Trump might try to steal the election, she took half a sleeping pill and tried to go to bed.
But she couldn’t, not right away. She found herself thinking about the night in 2016 when she went to bed and woke up to Trump. She thought about the fences now installed around the White House and the plywood covering the storefronts in downtown Atlanta, and she soothed herself by telling herself what she always did: “We’ll survive. We’ll go on with our lives.”

She woke up Wednesday and tried to do that. She went to work. She went to the gym to blow off stress. She came home and returned to the couch. Chance sat next to her.
“Georgia,” the anchors were saying again.
Cynthia put on her glasses. She leaned forward.
The president’s lead was shrinking, and now analysts were talking about Trump filing lawsuits to stop the counting.
“They’re going to stop counting the votes?” Chance asked, sounding incredulous.
Cynthia told him that was only a “desperation tactic” by Trump as she realized that whatever Trump might declare was becoming less and less important in America. What mattered was what the maps were showing on her television screen, and now those maps were zooming in again on Georgia, and then zooming in farther to Atlanta, and then farther still to Fulton County, and now a split screen was showing live video of workers counting ballots.
“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said as she realized that it was Chance’s vote, and Vaughn’s vote, and her daughter-in-law’s vote, and her husband’s vote, and her own vote that could put Biden in the White House.
She began to feel herself relax, and as Trump’s lead shrank further, she relaxed some more, and as the anchors kept talking about what seemed to be happening, she found herself saying the most hopeful thing she had said in four years: “It’s over."

Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results

 Once again I attempted to post something to my Facebook page and the algorithms decided to keep it off my "newsfeed" (which I keep open and frequently refreshed). But the "home page" got it, so sooner or later it may or may not get the same distribution as a cartoon, food recipe or cat video. In any case, I have this blog to keep up with stuff like this so here is the backup copy of a very timely message tossed across the transom by one of my Facebook friends.

~~~

Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results

The United States has never had a nationwide general strike.
Here's what that would look like

MATTHEW ROZSA
NOVEMBER 1, 2020

In the event that President Donald Trump loses in the upcoming election but refuses to give up power, some American unions are contemplating a general strike — meaning a major strike in which a significant percentage of workers from every sector of the economy withhold their labor. 

Many analysts, psychologists, the president's advisers and even the president himself have suggested that he will not accept the results if he loses, which could trigger a larger political crisis or unrest for those who want to force him out. Back in 2016, Trump infamously refused to accept the legitimacy of the election results if he did not win.

Historically, mass strikes have been effective means of forcing political outcomes; such labor actions can effectively shut down all economic activity, crippling business and factory owners who rely on their workers' labor in order to profit across all sectors.

"Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers," the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, declared in a resolution approved earlier this month. "The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America's labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic."

They added, "We are determined that the next president of the United States will be the person who is the choice of the people of these United States through the process our Constitution and laws provide."
The resolution also warned individuals who "seek to prevent eligible voters from voting, to prevent our votes from being counted, to prevent the electors we choose from being seated, or to prevent those electors' choice as president and vice president from being inaugurated" that "we will not let you take our democracy away from us. America's working people are determined and prepared to defend our democracy."

That message was reinforced on Oct. 22 in a phone call by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka with various union leaders, according to The Guardian. During that call, Trumka reportedly explained that until the election on Nov. 3 labor leaders should focus on maximizing turnout for Trump's opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. If Trump loses and resists a peaceful transition, Trumka added, the AFL-CIO should then consider its options in terms of how unions can compel him to leave office.

"We believe democracy is stronger than Trump," Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to Trumka, told The Guardian. "We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We're getting ready if they're not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters." He also added that for the time being "a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy."

It is a slogan that many American unions are starting to embrace, however. Local labor federations in Rochester, Seattle and western Massachusetts have already approved resolutions saying that they should consider a general strike if Trump steals the election or loses but refuses to step down.

So what exactly would a general strike look like? Such a thing has not happened in the United States in a very long time.

Speaking to Salon in April, labor activist Steve Early said there has never been a nationwide and comprehensive general strike in the United States, but noted that there were smaller general strikes — or at least work stoppages comparable to general strikes — in Seattle in 1919, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934 and Oakland in 1946.

"There are no cons—just a lot of formidable obstacles to making this happen, such as too many unions telling their members they can't participate because they are covered by binding contractual no-strike clauses and general strike participation would expose their unions to damage suits by employers," Early said.

Unfortunately, general strikes have often been crushed by law enforcement. For instance, the 1919 Seattle General Strike — which was prompted by Seattle businesses refusing to increase workers' wages despite wages being kept down during World War I — ended with police officers and vigilantes rounding up the labor leaders responsible behind it. General strikes can also lead to violence, such as when police in Greece clashed with strikers in 2012 when Greek workers protested austerity measures.

While there has never been a nationwide general strike in the United States, Trump refusing to accept the results of an election defeat could be the catalyst to set a new precedent. The president has repeatedly stated that he may not accept the election results unless he is declared the winner, a prospect that has alarmed many constitutional scholars.

"History teaches that would-be dictators should be taken at their word when they declare an intent to remain in power regardless of election results," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email last year. "That's a strong reason for patriotic citizens of all political persuasions to work toward an electoral landslide that would minimize Trump's opportunity to cling to power. But nothing could reduce the probability of that abnormal behavior on Trump's part to zero. If Trump refuses to leave, even judges appointed by him could well align with the legitimate winner's predictable request for an emergency injunction to pry him from his lair in the White House."

He added, "If Trump defies judicial orders to give up power — including the nuclear codes — there could well be a military coup, backed by tens of millions of citizens taking to the streets, leading to Trump's forcible ouster. Failing that, there might be a massive popular uprising, backed by Fox along with the other cable networks and social media platforms, that could well erupt in terrible bloodshed. However, one defines a 'constitutional crisis' — a much-overused term — Trump's refusal to abide by the electoral outcome would certainly qualify as such a crisis."

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Donald Trump: The End-Times President

Alex Morris is a Senior Writer for Rolling Stone covering culture, subculture, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and various other social issues. Her work has appeared in New York (where she was a Contributing Editor for over a decade), Glamour, Marie Claire, Billboard, Details, Southern Living, and many others.
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in NYC with her husband, her two children, and her firm belief in the Oxford comma.

Donald Trump: The End-Times President

How fundamentalist Christians who believe in the apocalyptic myth of “the rapture” could be shaping Trump’s agenda — and American life

By ALEX MORRIS

Last month, as infernos raged across the West Coast and President Trump countered scientific consensus on climate change, saying, “I don’t think science knows, actually,” Americans of various persuasions got a glimpse of the apocalypse. For many on the left, the fires presented Armageddon in microcosm, proof of the destructive, ongoing processes that imperil humans and the planet alike. For many on the right, however, the fires were a different sort of sign, and Trump’s comment was a dog whistle reassuring those in the know that science would be allowed to imperil neither God-given profits nor God’s plan for his own creation and how it might come to an end. Not with Trump in charge, anyway.

It would be hard to decisively connect the dots here if you weren’t raised, as I was, to believe in a very specific idea of Armageddon. Well before I learned the history of all of America’s actual wars, my conservative Presbyterian church taught me about the battle that would bring about the end times. I was taught that the 38th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel prophesized that one day — any day now, really — a “place in the far north” (interpreted, naturally, to be Russia) would team up with “many nations” (certainly including Iraq and Iran) to attack a “peaceful and unsuspecting” Israel. This would lead to a cosmic battle in which God would come to Israel’s defense, true Christians would be “raptured,” or spirited away to heaven, and the wicked of the Earth would be left to suffer the trials and tribulations of God’s wrath during a horrific seven-year period when the Antichrist would reign supreme and a totalitarian world government called the New World Order would be established. Finally, Jesus and his raptured church would return, vanquishing the Antichrist and ushering in a thousand-year golden age, at the end of which Satan would be permanently defeated and all Christians would live in glory in a newly created heaven and Earth. “The generation that saw Israel become a state will witness Jesus’ return,” I was repeatedly told by those who saw, in the tea leaves of recent history, the end times drawing near. Sometimes, if my house was especially quiet, I’d momentarily panic that everyone had been raptured up without me.

These ideas have been called heretical by Catholics and mainline Protestants (of which, it should be said, I am now one). But to the roughly 80 million evangelicals in the U.S., they have become a dominant — one might even say the dominant — strain of the faith. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans think that Jesus will definitely (23 percent) or probably (18 percent) return to Earth by the year 2050. A full 58 percent of white evangelicals hold this view. The Left Behind series, a collection of novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late fundamentalist minister Tim LaHaye that dramatizes this theology, has sold more than 80 million copies (as of 2016) and has been made into multiple feature-length films. “When I first started researching, I had this idea that I would be studying a subculture,” says Amy Frykholm, senior editor at The Christian Century and author of Rapture Culture. “And then Left Behind happened, and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a subculture. This may be the dominant American culture, and the rest of us are subcultures.’ I mean, this is mainstream.”

And never has it been more mainstream in American politics than under the Trump administration. Unlike Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Trump does not appear to believe in end-times theology or even in Christianity in general, but his lack of apparent belief in anything has freed him up to seek out and uniquely cater to whatever group would show the most allegiance. It’s therefore unsurprising that he has filled his administration with fundamentalists, whose devotion to his presidency may be based on a conviction that they’re playing for the highest of possible stakes — that their actions on the political stage could play a role in bringing about the Second Coming and that their fight for Christian values affects how God will judge them when that day comes.

Until Trump took office, Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries, which organizes bible studies for political leaders (and, according to the organization’s Statement of Faith, teaches rapture theology), held group meetings in the Senate and House, but not the executive branch. With Trump in office, Drollinger saw an opening, starting a bible study for White House staff in March 2017 that a number of Trump’s Cabinet members have attended, including former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and former EPA head Scott Pruitt. The organization’s public list of sponsors includes Vice President Mike Pence (who has described himself as a “born-again, evangelical Catholic”), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. David Jeremiah, the protégé of Tim LaHaye whose own series of nonfiction tomes attempt to present rapture theology in a more academic format, serves on Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board (LaHaye himself served as the spiritual adviser to former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, but did not make it into the White House’s inner sanctum).

“Never have evangelicals had the access to the president that they have under President Trump,” Robert Jeffress, a prominent rapture theology pastor, told me in 2019. “He has made a unique effort to not just win their votes in 2016 but also to listen to them afterwards. If anything, [access] has increased. He has certainly made good on his promise to have an open-door policy.”

In lending such unprecedented credence to a fundamentalist strain of evangelicalism, Trump has not just sanctioned its worldview in the halls of government, but he’s allowed it to become further politicized. “George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, was a minister’s [son], but he didn’t overtly bring that to bear on how he doled out justice,” says John Fea, a scholar of Christian nationalism and author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Indeed, Ashcroft maintained that “it is against my religion to impose my religion” on people. One does not get the same separation-of-church-and-state vibe from Trump’s end-times acolytes. “Here, we have Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence literally making appearances in front of the home crowd, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Salem radio shows, Liberty University,” says Fea. “It’s not even a wink, wink. It’s an overt appeal to this kind of evangelicalism.”

At a 2015 “God and Country Rally” in Wichita, Kansas, Pompeo endorsed a prayer that had condemned multiculturalism and homosexuality, telling those assembled, “We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.” In a 2019 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, when asked whether he believed that God might have put Trump in office to save the Jews from Iran, Pompeo replied, “I am certain that the Lord is at work here.”

In numerous speeches, Pence has likewise catered to the rapture theology idea that America’s fate is tied up with that of Israel. “We stand with Israel because we cherish that ancient promise that Americans have always cherished throughout our history: that those who bless her will be blessed,” he told Christians United for Israel, a conservative Christian organization led by the televangelist John Hagee. For his own part, Hagee’s website has this to say about the end times: “Gravestones will be toppled over. Funeral homes from every region will report that those who were dead have resurrected and suddenly disappeared. Cars will be parked beside freeways, their engines left running, their passengers mysteriously missing. Airplanes will fall from the sky as pilots who are Believers are called home. The news centers report that churches around the world are flooded with people who are sobbing uncontrollably. They know. They have missed the rapture.” Not coincidentally, Hagee has been calling for the U.S. to enter a war with Iran for at least the past 15 years.

Certainly, the most overt proof that these beliefs are influencing policy can be seen in the administration’s actions in the Middle East. For those not steeped in rapture theology, the decisions to move the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, and assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen Qasem Soleimani may have seemed risky at best, nihilistic at worst — potentially destabilizing acts with little geopolitical upside. Yet many fundamentalist evangelicals rejoiced, presumably seeing in these actions proof that Trump is on their side even if he isn’t in their pews. Lest any of these believers missed the point, Jeffress gave the opening prayer at the dedication ceremony for the new Jerusalem embassy; Hagee was chosen to give the closing benediction.

End-times theology’s influence doesn’t end there, however. As with any worldview, it is comprehensive, creating its own internal logic and compelling its followers to adhere to it. To limit its scope to Israeli relations and to equate it with a collection of pulpy novels is to fail to see rapture theology’s true pervasiveness and the growing role it is playing in American domestic politics and the fabric of American life. It’s to fail to see its awesome power in the here and now.

The concept of a second coming of Jesus has been central to Christianity since the earliest days of the church. But the idea of the rapture — that Christians will magically be spared the trials and tribulations preceding the Second Coming — didn’t exist until the late 19th century, when a British preacher named John Darby reportedly borrowed it from the visions of a teenage girl he knew. During Darby’s five trips to America between 1862 and 1877, the country was in the throes of, or still recovering from, the Civil War, and the escapism of the rapture appealed to white Southern Christians who were only too pleased to learn that “‘Oh, we’re going to be taken back to the glory land where we have our plantations in heaven,’” says Zack Hunt, a former minister and author of Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong. “That’s where you begin to see the ball rolling with a lot of this end-times theology. Before that, it doesn’t exist in the church.”

For much of the next century, then, rapture theology was about escapism — creating a subculture with its own schools and rules and focus on personal salvation — and was concentrated in the South within fundamentalist communities, finding a home among those who rejected evolution and women’s lib and adhered to a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. It wasn’t until about 50 years ago that the ideas started to take on an unhealthy political bent. The 1948 creation of the state of Israel meant that the end-times clock was ticking, and the founding of NATO and the U.N. foreshadowed the emergence of a New World Order run by liberal elites in cahoots with the Antichrist, who might be anyone from Gorbachev to Obama. The end-times Christian’s main calling had once been to save as many souls as possible before the rapture occurred, but after the advent of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority — a political crusade initiated by anger at the government for its attempts to desegregate private Christian schools — the mission became more overtly political and wrapped up in the idea that God would judge not just individuals, but also nations. As the world sunk further into depravity, a Christian’s charge was to push back against that depravity, to fight evil at every turn, and at every level of government.

“Instead of wanting to escape, they get this need for control,” says Diana Butler Bass, a religious historian who specializes in American fundamentalism and grew up in the evangelical church. “There’s this idea that safety isn’t possible unless they have some ability to shape policy.” Godliness would not be achieved through fights for equality or social-justice reform, as some 19th century Christian social movements had attempted, including abolitionism. Rather, America would be saved by adhering to a sort of biblical legalism, an interpretation of “holiness” that attempts to force the values of the group (God, family, and country, in that order) on those who don’t share those values, or don’t share them in the same way. “It’s this slow putting into place policies of order,” says Bass, “policies of control, policies of authority, policies of hierarchy as a way of containing chaos, trying to create a biblical world in order that we can move into whatever that next phase will be, when Christ will return.”

Adherents of rapture theology view almost every issue through that lens. “It pervades people’s thinking,” says Larycia Hawkins, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who formerly taught at the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois. And this is true not only when it comes to politicized issues, but also when it comes to simple interactions, daily duties, how one perceives current events. Rapture Christians look to the world for signs of what God is doing and what God is telling them to do, and in looking for signs, they inevitably find them. “The wars, the rumors of wars, the fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the earthquakes in places that have never had earthquakes,” Hawkins says, “these are signs of the Earth groaning to be restored — not because the Earth is broken, but because people are broken, and it takes Jesus to come back and redeem the soul.”

Understanding this unlocks an understanding of much of the Trump administration’s agenda, which seems tailor-made to appeal to this theological mindset. Inside this worldview, environmentalism is a lack of faith in God’s power over his own creation, so gutting the EPA, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, and scoffing at climate science makes perfect sense. Conservative judges aren’t just saving the unborn, they’re also bulwarks against all manner of Satan-sanctioned liberalism, protecting the faithful from persecution and reversing LGBTQ protections. Socialism is a plan to subvert God’s dispensation of riches, so it’s not wrong to kick more than a half-million people off of food stamps amid a pandemic. Women’s rights seek to subvert the hierarchy God created for the home, while immigration leads to pluralism, a watering down of America’s Christian essence. The coronavirus is a punishment that entered America through its most liberal cities, and a proactive response to the virus is an overreach of a government that would emasculate men by usurping their God-given autonomy over the safety of the family. Inequality is proof of mankind’s brokenness, which only Jesus can heal. “Whether or not you believe in the rapture or tribulation or any of this stuff, the reality is it affects all of our lives in very tangible ways,” says Hunt.

The Trump administration’s pursuit of this agenda has been so thorough that the president has become emblematic of this belief system to many who adhere to it. The rise of “Patriot churches” and televangelist Pat Robertson’s recent assertion that “Trump is going to win the election … and the fulfillment will take place of Ezekiel 38’s prophesy” are not about simply bringing Christian principles to bear on governance, as politicians have certainly done throughout America’s history; they are inserting Trump into the narratives of Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism (the belief that restoring the Holy Land to the Jews is a prerequisite to the Second Coming), respectively. And Trump’s appeal to both of these ideologies, despite their unpopularity with a majority of voters, shows the extent of his compact with his evangelical base.

In fact, the very unpopularity of much of what Trump has accomplished is part of the point, allowing fundamentalists to find political success and primacy while still casting themselves as persecuted and oppressed. Under the guise of a crusade for “religious freedom,” they have indeed found a perfect companion in Trump, whose popularity thrives on the politics of grievance, and who has inherited (and squandered) a fortune and yet still manages to see himself as a put-upon man of the people. “Part of Trump’s appeal to this demographic is his embrace of vengeance toward his enemies. That’s a huge component of end-times theology,” says Hunt. “The idea is that the church or the faithful is going to be raptured up into heaven, and then there will be this seven-year period of tribulation where all these terrible plagues and bowls of wrath are going to be poured out on Earth? Well, what’s really happening is all of the faithful are sitting there watching their enemies get their comeuppance. They’re finally seeing all the people who made fun of them for going to church or ridiculed them for being pro-life or told them they were wrong for opposing gay marriage are now getting their just due. So there’s this carnal appeal to end-times theology. And you see Donald Trump kind of prefigure that in a really perverse way.”

And he’s only too happy to do so. Trump understands the inherent power of a worldview that delineates a stark line between good and evil, that preaches of persecution at the hands of imagined foes, be it the mainstream media or the liberals making up the fictitious international ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles central to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Put another way, he understands the allure — and utility — of framing everything as an epic fight.

Such a framing not only distorts truth and objectivity, but “it also tells the person who holds the truth that their truth is more important than other people’s truth. And it frames it as benevolence,” says political analyst Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People. End-times Christians are often what Hunt calls “otherwise good people,” those trustworthy souls who stock their church’s food pantries and leave a note on your windshield if they accidentally ding your car. Their political aims may seem impossibly selfish and short-sighted from the outside, but they wholeheartedly believe that they are fighting on the side of angels. “One of the problems of this mindset is that it creates an alternate reality — and also a permanent state of artificial austerity to fund schools and infrastructure and health care and have better lives, because we’re being treated like we’re in the middle of a world war that doesn’t actually exist,” says Sexton. In other words, policy decisions that would improve people’s earthly lives pale in comparison to those that continue the fight for American holiness. “We’ve been looking for apocalyptic battles because we believe ourselves to be the champion of God in the universe,” Sexton continues. “We’ve been fighting phantoms.”

And Trump, more than any previous president, has been egging evangelicals on in that fight, whipping up a fervor that will not go away no matter what happens in November. Whether Trump gets another term or not, America can expect the myth of the rapture to continue to influence U.S policy through his court appointments. We can expect a re-litigation of concepts that were settled long ago, from Roe v. Wade to prayer in schools. We can expect other conservative candidates to continue to overtly cater to this group, but possibly with a political competence even more effective at achieving the ends the rapturous believe are necessary to American salvation. We can expect political losses, no matter how significant, to be challenged, because democracy is not as important as the supposed will of God.

More than anything, we can expect that rapture theology will not go away, will not cede the privileged position Trump has granted it. And from that privileged position, we can expect that it will continue to tear Americans apart. “I mean, you have one group of folks who are trying to expand health care coverage and another who are fighting a cosmic battle between good and evil. What conversation can be had?” Hunt sighs. “There’s not one.”