News bits: Israel bombs refugees; CN note; The one-way ratchet to kleptocratic tyranny

That speaks for itself. Source.

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A NYT opinion comments about Mike Johnson and the radicalized GOP:

Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence on the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.

“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”

Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”

What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today describes it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”

Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”  

The MAGA movement, in Podhorzer’s view, was unleashed with the Tea Party movement in 2010, well before Donald Trump emerged as a dominant political figure, and the elevation of Johnson marks the most recent high point in the movement’s acquisition of power: “Mike Johnson becoming speaker is better understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA,” he writes.

White Christian nationalists, Podhorzer contends, “were once reliable votes and loyal foot soldiers for almost any Republican candidate since the 1970s,” but they “rebelled when John McCain and other establishment Republicans treated Obama’s win as legitimate.”

Notice what radicalized the right into an authoritarian monster, i.e., the legitimate election of a black president. Consider the implications of that.

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From my cognitive biology and social behavior-colored view of politics, it has seemed to me that for years, the ARR (authoritarian radical right) has figured ways to slowly force the two dominant authoritarian ideologies into power (aggressive Christian nationalist theocracy and brass knuckles (unregulated) capitalism). The workings of this kind of authoritarian politics strike me as sometimes akin to a one-way ratchet that inches closer and closer to the goals of killing democracy and establishing some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism.

The Hill published an article that exemplifies the one-way nature of anti-democracy politics designed to force pro-democracy forces into losing situations: 

GOP sets political trap for Democrats with Israel bill

House Democrats will face a tough vote this week when Republicans, led by newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), consider a $14.3 billion Israel aid bill that includes cuts to IRS funding to pay for the package but no assistance to Ukraine.

The vote is sure to highlight the long-standing chasm between Israel’s staunchest Democratic allies, including President Biden, and pro-Palestinian liberals who have accused Israeli leaders of human rights abuses and war crimes in Gaza. Illustrating that divide, 15 Democrats last week declined to endorse a nonbinding resolution proclaiming U.S. support for Tel Aviv following Hamas’s deadly attacks last month.

But Republicans’ inclusion of the IRS cuts adds an additional complication, forcing the bulk of Democrats into the no-win scenario of sacrificing one priority in defense of another.  

If one looks at the tactic here, it is clear that the ARR can keep setting up loser scenarios for Dems on many occasions, maybe most of the time. All the ARR forces need to do is package something they like or are neutral to with something they dislike. By forcing Dems to save one thing they want by being forced to sacrifice another, the ARR ratchet takes another step toward its ultimate goals.

 

Sure, one can argue that the Dems would then need to restore what was lost to reverse the original sacrifice. But as we know, the American federal government was set up for it to be hard to do much of anything. The ARR has the powerful advantage of it being far easier to block or kill something than it is to build and then maintain it. When one want to get rid of a democratic government and regulations, the defenders are in a much weaker position and in the long run, they are likely to lose.

Q: Is the one-way American ratchet to kleptocratic tyranny (theocracy, autocracy, plutocracy) something mostly real, or is it mostly a mirage in Germaine's mind?