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.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Monday, November 16, 2020
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.
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.
Friday, November 6, 2020
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."
NOVEMBER 6, 2020
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."
Monday, November 2, 2020
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
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.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Donald Trump: The End-Times President
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 MORRISLast 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.”
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