A train of thought about rising authoritarianism

CONTEXT

Nowadays, my thinking about politics tends to go back over events and trajectories I've considered multiple times before. Based on their track record, my level of trust in Trump and MAGA elites is nil. That makes sense. Evidence is abundant that they and their motives are morally rotted. That's obvious to almost everyone not trapped in MAGA's demagoguery, lies, slanders, cynical emotional manipulation, bigotry, racism, crackpottery, etc. To most of those trapped minds, MAGA's moral rot is inconceivable and simply not true.

COMMENTARY

A NYT article (not paywalled), How a Scholar Nudged the Supreme Court Toward Its Troop Deployment Ruling, triggered alarms. It instantly elicited a very bad smell, so to speak. The MSM reporting says, more or less, the USSC put the brakes on Trump's efforts to convert America into a military dictatorship. The MSM boobs framed the decision as slapping Trump down or something about like that. My intuition was that (1) the MSM's reporting was dreadfully misplaced, and (2) something really bad had happened in that shadow docket decision. 

Was my intuition right? Yes, it was mostly right. In a long Q&A session with Pxy, I analyzed my reflex assessment. It was basically right. The USSC shadow docket decision wasn't so bad for Trump or the continuing rise of corrupt authoritarianism. Trump is free to continue to build his dictatorship that includes a military police state. 

The MSM reports that the decision seriously limited Trump's power, but the MSM got that wrong. MAGA elites can use different paths to the same end. But why decide this at all? For political reasons, that's why. The three MAGA judges can use this decision to try to hide their pro-kleptocracy and pro-dictatorship sympathies. The decision is MAGA political theater in support of dictatorship and corruption. The three Democratic judges are trapped and powerless to do squat about it.

Pxy's analysis and commentary is TL/TC*/DR. So, I'll post just two of my 7-9 queries. You can probably guess the gist of Pxy's responses to these two.

* TC = too complicated

• This was the last query in the whole Q&A series -- it raises the matter of the one-way ratchet (and this) from democracy to dictatorship I have raised here before: Were the three Democratic judges in a lose-lose situation in this shadow docket decision?

• This query deals with the MSM's constant reporting failures: Your analysis asserts this: "The answer appears to be: treat mainstream media as compromised, seek alternative sources, read critically for structural distortions, and recognize that defending democracy requires building information infrastructure that corporate media can no longer provide." I deal with MAGA people online all of the time. They have been taught to deeply distrust the MSM. Now, with the MSM being compromised as you assert, and I believe to be true, there is no source of authority left to point to. Almost all political discourse has been corrupted into shouting matches over opinions, regardless of whether facts support or contradict those opinions. That is my current experience. Even when I cite rock solid facts that support my arguments, the facts are rejected out of hand by many MAGA people as lies, and I am insulted as a liar, stupid, a communist or something else bad. How the hell can anyone carry on a rational discussion any more? To me, this collapse of trust in facts, sound reasoning, experts and the MSM are harbingers of the failure of our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. Am I over-reacting here?

Onesies for the little MAGAfers!

Democrat chances in 2026.

 Depends off course which pundits one believes. Which media outlet can spin the likelihood.

So, how about a dose of reality?

The underrated factors limiting the power of a blue wave next year

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/democrats-2026-midterm-flips-redistricting-data/

There’s a key factor limiting the power of a potential Democratic surge next year: the number of seats that are realistically competitive.

Even as this year’s election results have left many in the party encouraged they can mount a massive blue wave, next year’s battleground is a far cry from 2018 — with fewer Republican-held seats for Democrats to easily target.

Gerrymandering is the major cause of the shrinking House map. Even before some states redrew their maps this year — and others potentially do so early next year — partisan redistricting after the 2020 U.S. Census had already left fewer battlegrounds on the table. After the 2020 election, for example, there were 93 congressional districts that had been within 10 points at the presidential level. But when the maps were redrawn, there were just 79 such districts.

BUT.............

In a wave year, Democrats can still play in some truly red seats. 

Snowflake's bold prediction: The Blue Wave will win the House, but not the Senate.

The fusion of Christianity and capitalism

These assertions triggered some thoughts: "America isn't a Christian nation. It is a capitalist nation that has used Christianity as a tool for profit and it continues to do so."

The statement is highly consistent with historical, sociological, and legal trajectory of the US. It is reductive but captures a dominant reality: American Christianity and American capitalism have fused. The latter usually shapes and controls the former. In particular, the current legal trajectory of American Christianity is it imposition by the six Christian theocrats that dominate the USSC. They are well on their way to imposing Christian religious belief and rights above all other rights. That is theocracy, the opposite of secularism. 

Forgotten and distorted history

As is always prudent when thinking about unregulated capitalism, an inherently immoral, authoritarian endeavor, keeping an eye on where power and wealth tends to flow helps keep less distorted reality in sight. Contrary to the popular narrative of a linear religious founding, the modern concept of America as a unified "Christian Nation" was significantly engineered in the mid-20th century as a political weapon against the New Deal. The capitalists of the time, just like the ones now, hated the New Deal.

Historians have documented the rise of the Christian Libertarian Alliance. In the 1930s and 40s, corporate leaders operating under the National Association of Manufacturers allied with conservative clergy to rebrand unregulated capitalism as a core tenet of Christianity.

Those elites didn't just reframe capitalism, they reframed freedom. Their alliance sought to dismantle the New Deal's freedom from want, which implied government welfare. That was to be replaced by freedom of contract and freedom of unregulated markets. By linking capitalism to God's will, they successfully framed government regulation not just as bad economics, but as pagan statism and other very bad things.

The result was no surprise. Integrating Under God into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and In God We Trust as the national motto in 1956, were not returns to 1776. They were but Cold War-era branding exercises that sanctified the American capitalist economic system against godless communism.

The claim that Christianity has been used as a tool for profit is most visibly validated by the systematic transformation of religious holidays into engines of consumer spending. In the 19th century, Department stores like Macy's, and Wanamaker's transformed Christmas from a religious feast with a rowdy carnival to a domestic, gift-giving mandate. Santa Claus was standardized by Thomas Nast and Coca-Cola marketing to drive 4th quarter retail solvency.

Similarly, in the 1870s, milliners and clothiers converted Easter from a religious observance of the resurrection of Jesus into a spectacle of new spring clothing. The Easter Parade was started as a display of new spring clothing, not a religious procession. In the 1980s, capitalism sink its claws into Halloween and transformed it from a localized prank night into a multi-billion dollar season by candy manufacturers and costume retailers. It's now the second-largest commercial holiday.

Sacred rest vs. sacred retail hours

Arguably, the repeal of nationwide Sunday Blue Laws is the smoking gun for the dominance of capitalism over Christianity. When the religious imperative to keep the Sabbath holy clashed with the commercial imperative to maximize retail hours, the laws were repealed across the country. The Christian Nation effectively voted that shopping was more sacred than holy rest.

Regarding the flow of power and wealth

Finally, what about the flow power and wealth? Also no surprise there. 

In recent decades, the language of religious freedom has been weaponized to transfer power from the public sphere to private corporations. The USSC invented the corporate "soul" in its 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. The USSC’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was a critical turning point. By granting closely held corporations rights previously reserved for human beings, including the right to a religious conscience, the court allowed commercial entities to opt out of a number of federal laws. The law that triggered that lawsuit specifically, was the Obamacare's contraception mandate.

The Hobby Lobby decision granted corporate owners commercial interest the power to override the public interest, e.g., universal healthcare access, by claiming a religious shield. It is not It is not merely the case that the state is becoming religious. More importantly, corporations are adopting the legal privileges of religion to evade state regulation. and social obligations.

Circling back to the opening assertions, America isn't a Christian nation. It is a capitalist nation that has used Christianity as a tool for profit and it continues to do so, one can argue that the statements are accurate from a both a sociological and a historical perspective. Yes indeed, millions of Americans practice a genuine, non-commercial faith. But that does not change the fact that the institutional function of Christianity in American society has been that of a chaplain and quiet enforcer supporting capitalism's wealth and power goals. 

And us deceived and betrayed taxpayers are supporting and empowering it, whether we know it or not, or if we do, whether we like it or not.

Sources: 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030/ 

https://newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-how-capitalism-and-christianity-aligned-america

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/sunday-blue-laws/

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7756407M/Consumer_Rites

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122132/the-battle-for-christmas-by-stephen-nissenbaum/

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/573/682/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00213624.2019.1594528

Exactly what did DOGE do? Exactly what MAGA intended it to do

The NYT and other sources have reported on the cost-benefit of DOGE. Although the DOGE initiative was billed as cost cutting and saving, that was never a credible description of intent. Instead, it looked like and actually was primarily an effort to intimidate federal workers, and begin to disrupt and weaken public interest functions such as protections for consumers, workers, federal employees and the environment. And as usual for MAGA operations, Trump and MAGA elites lied about it. One analysis found actual savings were about 3% of what DOGE claimed.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk from January to May 2025, claimed to have saved the federal government between $150 billion and $199 billion through widespread cuts to contracts, grants, and federal employment. However, comprehensive analysis by The New York Times, the Cato Institute, the Partnership for Public Service, and other authoritative sources reveals the claims are false. Federal spending actually increased during DOGE's tenure. Many of its largest savings claims were demonstrable lies. DOGE probably cost taxpayers more than it saved when accounting for lost tax revenue, rehiring expenses, and productivity losses.

Project 2025 explicitly outlined plans to dismantle federal agencies and the administrative state before DOGE was announced. Russell Vought, a key DOGE architect, was a Project 2025 author who explicitly stated the goal was to put federal workers in trauma in 2023. In a 2023 speech Vought, now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, attacked federal workers explicitly, saying "We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains"​, "We want to put them in trauma"​, and "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected".

The obvious problems with bureaucrats doing their jobs is that they get in the way of dictatorship and kleptocracy. They clearly need to go.

Thus, Project 2025, Trump's history, and the broader MAGA agenda made the actual anti-public interest intent clear from the beginning. Taking the "cost-cutting" rhetoric at face value was and still is irrational when all evidence pointed to MAGA's anti-public interest goals.

From the Trump and elite MAGA point of view, it was MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! 👍 for DOGE.

How a person sees things can depend on their point of view.