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| Photo by Aaron Kittredge |
For the last few years, I've been asking a question: Will we know when American democracy ends?
I don't know. But it seems to me there's a real possibility it happened Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that presidents -- well, Donald Trump, but supposedly all presidents -- have "absolute immunity" for official acts committed while in office. If the president is above the law, if there is no real way to stop him from abusing his power (and impeachment doesn't really count at this point; it's a dead letters) then ... what, exactly, restrains a president from acting tyrannically?
So there's that.
But that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about my friend Will Bunch, and his latest column at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which takes to task all the journalists who have focused obsessively on Joe Biden's age in the days since last week's disastrous debate.
Dropping names — Whitmer! Shapiro! Warnock! — like a groupie backstage at a heavy-metal concert, floating wildly implausible scenarios, stretching so hard for historical analogies that several probably blew out a hamstring, America’s pundit class managed to achieve a level of groupthink that surpassed the brainwashers of The Manchurian Candidate. All argued that for the good of the country he loves, Biden — hoarse, barely audible, and visibly confused a few times during Thursday’s Atlanta presidential debate — must immediately end his candidacy.
[snip]
And look, I’m not going to argue that Biden’s health is not an issue. His debate performance was troubling, but I also think those of us determined not to see Donald Trump become president again should take a deep breath — even if that’s not the clickbait headline that many are eager to write. Biden needs to do more to assure the public about his energy level, and we also need to see the polls. Any decision should be based on the paramount thing — the thing that should be getting 72-point headlines: stopping dictatorship. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote Monday in her dissent, this is a “five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.”
[snip]The reality of what’s happening in July 2024 — that an authoritarian-minded president, with help from a politicized and unethical Supreme Court, is on track to lead a nation where all power is being vested in him, his MAGA movement, and the corporate polluters — is THE story, and Biden’s health is a subplot in that drama. The current president is walking slowly, but it’s the American Experiment that’s on a ventilator. Journalists aren’t doing their job: performing basic triage and focusing on the sickest patient in the room. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
I don't often disagree with Will. And he certainly nods toward the need for Biden to satisfy voters about the state of his health and intellect. But ultimately he treats this as an "either-or" situation. And I don't think it's that.
For me, my concern -- and focus -- on Biden's age is a function of my fears of a second Donald Trump presidency.
I don't want Trump to be president again. I think it would be a disaster for democracy, if there's much left to save. And I think it would accelerate America's decline with unbelievable speed, because that's what authoritarians who try to reclaim the glorious past tend to do.
Biden doesn't seem capable of personally making that case at this point. I'm not sure he's up to the task of governing for four more years, honestly. And most immediately: Polls show that nearly three-quarters of voters think Biden is too old and impaired to handle the job. There are already these concerns in the electorate. The debate made them worse. And it's not clear Biden can fix that in the next few months.
I doubt it, frankly.
Which means the one thing we need Joe Biden to do -- to stop Trump in his tracks -- is the one thing that increasingly seems out of reach. I don't need Biden to be president. I do need Trump not to be president. That means Joe Biden's age (and widespread voter concerns about them) isn't a "subplot."
These aren't two different problems. They're the same problem.
A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again.
That's maybe not the reaction you would expect to have to "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," a deeply reported look at how (mostly white) evangelical Christians have deeply compromised their supposed values to embrace the corrupt and vulgar Donald Trump — not just lending him their votes transactionally, but enthusiastically embracing his slash-and-burn style of authoritarian politics. The corruption, grifting and thirst for power on display is all pretty well-documented by now, but it's still galling (again) to read it all in one place.
Is *this* what Jesus would do?
Alberta doesn't think so.
Jesus "talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life," Alberta writes. "Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek ... Blessed are the merciful ... Blessed are the peacemakers”) were never conducive to a stump speech."
That’s not very Trumpy.
Alberta brings an interesting set of credentials to this book: Yes, he's a reporter for The Atlantic — part of the hated liberal secular establishment — but he's also the son of a pastor, a devoted Christian himself who (we learn late in the book) is studying at seminary. Alberta is a man who wants the church to be the best version of itself, and that means doing everything it can to glorify God.
What we have here, then, — as I've suggested in recent newsletters — might be the most unapologetically Christian book for a general secular audience that I've read in ages.
How Christian? Put it this way: Alberta devotes several passages throughout the book to the exegesis of Greek words found in the New Testament, the kind of exercise I haven't experienced much since I took Bible classes at a Mennonite college some 30 years ago.
It's also not the kind of thing I'm sure readers of The Atlantic have been exposed to much.
A question I've had about white evangelical Christians in recent years: If they really believe what they profess to believe — that Jesus died on the cross for their sins and was raised to life again, that God is the creator of the universe, that believers will have the ultimate victory in the form of eternal life, that all of this is temporary and fleeting — then why are they acting like this?
One obvious answer is power. "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate," the conservative Dana Loesch said during the notorious 2022 Senate race in Georgia. "How many times have I said four very important words. These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue."
The only meaningful virtue for some folks, it seems. But power isn't the only factor here.
* For Chris Winans, the pastor of the church where Alberta's dad spent his career, it's idolatry of sorts. "America," he tells the author about his parishioners. "Too many of them worship America." Lots of Christians see the nation as their primary citizenship and allegiance — as opposed to, say, the Kingdom of God — and act accordingly.
* Fear, both real and false. "These people were scared," Alberta observes after visiting conservative activist Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom conference. "They were scared, in part, because of economic and cultural instability. But mostly they were scared because people like Reed were trying to scare them; people like Reed needed to scare them. ... The job of a political is to win campaigns. To win campaigns, Reed realized long ago, his most valuable tool was fear."
* Habits of the mind. Most of the folks in the church pews are there for only a few hours every Sunday, if that. But many of them spend the rest of the week listening to far more hours of conservative talk radio or watching Fox News, marinating in apocalyptic anger that paints Democrats and "RINOs" as enemies instead of people deserving of God's love. That shapes the minds and souls of parishioners accordingly.
The result? One of the frustratingly hilarious running themes of the book is how often its subjects — some in positions of leadership or influence in church circles, some not — just flat-out contradict the doctrines and scriptures of their religion. They either don’t know or care about the tenets of their supposed faith. "We’ve turned the other cheek,” Donald Trump Jr. says at one point, “and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay?” That thing Jesus said? No longer operational.
* Or maybe it's just a lack of faith. "You see, the kingdom of God isn't real to most of these people," one pastor tells Alberta. "They can't perceive it."
Why don't white evangelical Christians act like what they believe is true? Maybe they don't really believe.
This doesn’t seem to be good for the church. The number of self-identified Christians in America is shrinking at a steady clip, and while Trumpist politics don’t explain the whole thing, they probably haven’t really helped.
A book like this isn't just supposed to diagnose the problem. It's supposed to offer solutions. It's here that Alberta struggles a bit — though to be fair, nobody has really figured out how to deal with the problem. He points to conservative Christians like Russell Moore and David French who have been cast out of their communities and demonized for their failure to make Donald Trump the lodestar of their faith. He also points to women in the church — a lawyer and a journalist — who have forced institutions like the Southern Baptist Church to account for sexual predation and corruption in their leadership ranks.
So why, for all the terrible things described here, did I find myself tempted to return to the church while reading Alberta's book?
I think it's because Alberta seems passionate about a kind of faith tradition that I was once immersed in. The Mennonites I grew up around were in America because they believed that Jesus had set an example of nonviolence that they were duty-bound to follow, and so had fled their European homelands rather than serve in the armed forces. They really believed in stuff like "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."
And so do I, still. I can't explain it. Absent a faith tradition, those words seem almost illogical. Why would anybody pray for their persecutor? I don't have a good answer. All I know is that this is a violent world, and that the idea of loving your enemies is just so profoundly counter-cultural that it has to mean something, right? (Conversely, that's one thing that bothers me about the current crop of Trumpist evangelicals: If you think God is telling you to do something you already want to do ... maybe it's not God talking.)
If that's the case, why don't I actually return to the church?
Well...because I still don't know if what the church says — about the universe, about God, about itself — is actually true.
I don't have faith. It's kind of a problem. So I am not returning to the church, at this point anyway. I've always left the door open.
But I do want the church to be its best self. That doesn't mean evangelicals would adopt my politics, or suddenly become progressive on issues like women's rights, abortion and LGBT issues. It does mean that you'd see more Christians acting like they loved their neighbors, even amidst disagreement. And that’s what Tim Alberta seems to want, too.
Trump’s Menacing Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews
This Semitic sorting never ends well, because justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern:
And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”
In one column, Douthat offered his own approach to assessing fringe ideas. “To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize,” he explained. “But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations."
