Yesterday I engaged at a site called
r/changemyview (1.4 million members).
My post is here. It is based on comments by PD on this blog in another post. r/changemyview is a site for discussion, not debate or advocacy, making it very constraining and difficult to engage at without straying outside the rules. The rules are relentlessly monitored by bots. Bots flag apparent violations and give warnings, and then mods follow up. The mods there almost yanked my post twice because it looked too much like political advocacy and because my mind wasn't being changed -- I got two bot warnings for two different rule violations and talked my way (with the mods) out of them deleting my post (its still there so far today). r/changemyview is for people to post opinions and discuss reasons to change them, not to bicker about things. Conservatives and liberals hang out there.
One response was this:
In regard to your reply:
The culture of the United States and the values of Christianity are bound together; if the US abandoned Christian values for, say, Confucian ones, its identity would certainly change. More to your point, though, Christian nationalists, who have as their explicit agenda the transformation of the US government into a formally Christian institution, do not seem to me to wield sufficient influence to accomplish such an aim in so short a time frame.
Following this, various political leaders in the US already allow religion to influence policy, as it provides them with a moral framework - metaphysical and practical both. It is encoded into the US constitution (all men are created equal). If you don't believe, on account of this, that we are already in a theocracy, what further standard must be met? You can try to put an end to this, but as is often the case with arguments supporting strict separation between church and state, if you forbid any religious influence in politics the result would be that only the religiously unaffiliated would be eligible for office. In a country where the vast majority of the population has claims membership in some religion, this precludes the possibility of a genuinely representative democracy.
Fascism is infamously difficult to define in a useful way, as is demonstrated by this video. A distillation of this presenter's description might be the rallying of the majority by a charismatic demagogue around in defense of the status quo against agents of change. Yet it is trivial to apply this description to just about any central political figure with minor alterations of framework. Indeed, if you look to other definitions or descriptions of fascism they characteristically include small, seemingly arbitrary qualifications intended to gesture at a particular individual or movement. America could be described as meeting these qualification in the past, and I'm sure could be used to describe some political arena in America today. The question remains - what do you see changing in two to four years that will make the description of the entire country as neo-fascist apt? Plus, there is also the minor issue of clarifying how "neo-fascist" differs from "fascist".
As for a kleptocracy, I can see things worsening as corporations tighten their grip on tech infrastructure, since this poses a serious threat to the ability of individuals to communicate and access information regardless of their political affiliation. Likewise, the reaction of the finance sector to the Panama and Paradise leaks - the return to purely paper transactions to avoid such blunders in the future - continue to pose a danger to sovereignty and accountability. However, I don't think that the solutions you have provided will address this in the least. It is a structural issue; it can only be solved by obviating the entities involved, not destroying them.
In all of these cases, I can see typical fluctuations in the political landscape. While novel problems posed by internet exposure, big tech, AI, and soon enough, gene editing will need to be addressed, it does not seem that the problems we are facing are too much for our institutions to bear.
My response:
1. The evidence I am aware of strongly indicates that Christian nationalism, along with special interest money and hard core neocapitalist ideology are the two top influencers in the GOP. Christian nationalism is not well known or understood by most of the public, in part because that political movement intentionally tries to stay out of the public eye while influencing government as quietly as it can. The professional mainstream media does a poor job of explaining it. That's professional malpractice IMO. From what I can tell, the right wing media doesn't talk much about it. The six Republicans on the Supreme Court are all Christian nationalists. That's real power and influence.
The US Constitution was intentionally written to be secular, not religious, including not Christian. One can imagine that most non-religious people feel little or no affinity or identity with Christianity or any other religion. It is hard to see Confucianism or something else displacing Christianity in the US as the dominant religion for a very long time, if ever.
2. One can assert or believe that the concept of 'all men are created equal' is religious or Christian. It is in the US constitution, but my understanding of history was that it was secular and not meant to be an ideal or moral value grounded in any religion. History indicates that the Constitution was knowingly drafted to be secular, not religious or Christian. That raises a question. Do you believe that to be moral and good a person has to be Christian, or can atheists, agnostics, or people who believe in other religions or non-Christian spiritual beliefs can also be moral and good?
3. Asking what could change in two to four years would make the entire country neo-fascist arguably is one of the central questions question here, maybe the central question. Looking at what neocapitalism and Christian nationalism wants and how those movements have acted in the last 70 years or so, especially the last ~5-10 years, is in my opinion the best place to look for the most possible outcomes.
Neocapitalism: Neocapitalists want deregulated markets with little or no government interference or oversight. In reality that has usually played out by deregulation of companies with the flow of power going from government, which loses the power to regulate, to companies, which gain the power to act without the prior restraint. Power rarely, if ever, flows to individuals. Companies almost always use that power to advance their interest in increasing profits, which these days is almost always a matter of socializing costs, damage and risks, while privatizing and trickling profits up to the elites at the top. Despite propaganda to the contrary, standard neoliberal ideology holds that having a social conscience is subversive because it impairs profits, the only significant moral value for capitalism. Damage to humans, democracy or the environment is not a core concern of hard core capitalists.
Nobel prize winning economist
Milton Friedman was blunt about it: “Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” He believed that the only responsibility that a corporation has is to the shareholder.
Friedman explained himself in this 1970 article.
Big businesses operating in free competition without deception or fraud is a mirage.
Christian nationalism: Core Christian nationalist ideology (CNI) holds that the US was chosen by God to rule over all other countries. The people who should rule America are wealthy White men because men are superior to women and owning wealth is God's sign of moral approval. CNI includes (i) a American founding myth (falsehood) that the US Constitution is a Christian document intended to cement Christianity as the dominant force in government, society and commerce, (ii) White Europeans are above non-Whites from other places, and the non-Whites should be subservient to Whites, (iii) the LGBQT community is sinful, (iv) White people should be free to openly discriminate against non-Whites, non-Christians and especially atheists, agnostics and the hated LGBQT community, (v) a persecution myth (falsehood) that says that Christians in America are severely persecuted and Democrats are evil socialists-communists who want to round Christians up, put them in re-education or concentration camps and turn them into atheistic socialists or communists, (vi) there is no such thing as church-state separation because the US Constitution is a pro-Christian document, and (vii) all secular and pluralist education and public schools need to be replaced with private religious schools because secularism is evil and public schools teach secularism and pluralism.
The CNI attitude toward voters and elections is summed up nicely by
comments in this 40 second video from 1980 by Paul Weyrich, an influential hard core Christian nationalist. There, he publicly criticized "goo goo" government and universal suffrage. As Weyrich makes crystal clear, Christian nationalists have known for decades that they are in a minority and that is a big part of why the movement operates in as much secrecy as it can. CNI ideology also includes animosity toward government because government usurps the proper role of the Christian church in dictating how people should live and what they should believe.
What might one reasonably believe we would get if hard core neoliberalism is combined with hard core CNI, the two of which heavily overlap in the Republican Party? My read of it is this based on combining the two overlapping ideologies:
A. Complete collapse of church state separation with full blown political advocacy from the pulpit, For example, something along the lines of this: 'You will burn in hell forever if you vote for a Democrat. So, if you plan to vote for a Democrat, get out of this church right now and do not come back'.
B. Greatly expanded access to revenue flows from taxpayers to religious groups to fund their operations (this process is already well underway - billions already annually flow from taxpayers to religious groups and the tap is constantly being forced farther open by Christian nationalist Supreme Court decisions).
C. Significant curtailment of civil liberties for non-Christians and non-Republicans, e.g., impairment of voting rights, strict limits on access to abortions in Red states, and open discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, especially the LGBQT community and atheists.
D. Deregulation of businesses with (i) a concomitant flow of power from government to businesses, and (ii) decreased consumer protections, mostly resulting from the power flow to businesses.
E. Continued stonewalling and blocking of efforts to deal with climate change (mainly a neoliberalism thing).
F. Erosion of secular public education, while religious education continues to displace secularism and pluralism.
G. Continuing stagnation of wages and continuing increase in wealth inequality.
H. Continuing erosion of civil society, social trust and trust in government, inconvenient science (climate science) and the professional news media, all of will which continue to be attacked.
4. As far as kleptocracy goes, corporations have already gone a long way to subverting and corrupting government. The US Capitol is seen as a profit center that can generate great returns on investments (campaign contributions and lobbying). As argued by some, corruption has already been legalized to a significant extent. The process of subversion and corruption will continue.
This 6 minute video explains the relevance of money in politics, i.e., money matters, while what average want does not matter.
So, do you see the situation as typical fluctuations in the political landscape, or is it possible that the situation we are in is not typical of American politics at least since, say the end of World War II? Is the narrative I laid out reasonable or not?
Some of the comments from conservatives made it crystal clear, yet again, that conservatives see an imminent major threat to democracy from Democrats and none from Republicans. The reasoning is based on rock solid talking points, e.g., Democrats are violating our civil liberties by enforcing mask mandates. Given the severe constraints on what is acceptable that r/changemyview enforces, I did not know how to respond. So I didn't. Once again, the differences in perceptions of political and social reality between the right and left is almost pure black and white. There is no apparent way to engage, much less bridge, that vast gap, at least not at that site.
