The Future of Work: The Gig Economy, Healthcare, and California’s Proposition 22

While most people are paying little attention, a critical battle is being waged between the tech firms that produce the Uber-like jobs, the workers in that so-called gig economy, and the unions that wish to provide some sort of representation for the workers.  At stake is the definition of what is a job.  Traditionally, a worker with a job will legally have certain rights and benefits the employer is required to honor.  These conditions of employment produce a monetary cost to be borne by the employer.  Companies have long tried to avoid most of this burden by claiming that their workers are not employees but independent contractors.  The ensuing legal confrontations have kept lawyers employed but have not led to a solid definition of who is an employee and who is a contractor.  The issue became critical with the gig economy and the deep-pocketed tech firms who provide an income for armies of both part-time and full-time workers.  The tech firms view a requirement that their workers be considered employees as an existential threat.  A significant fraction of the gig workers considers their activities to be a full-time job which should accord them the earnings and benefits necessary to provide a living.  The unions are torn between battling for traditional employment status for the workers or being willing to create a separate form of representation for gig workers.  The tech firms seem willing to consider union representation for workers as long as they are not considered employees. 

This mess came to a head during the last election in the battle over California’s Proposition 22.  Josh Eidelson provided an assessment of the situation in the Bloomberg Businessweek article The Gig Economy Is Coming for Millions of American Jobs. 

“In April 2018, California’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a delivery company called Dynamex Operations West Inc. violated state law when it attempted to convert its drivers from employees to contractors. As part of its decision, the court established a sweeping new “ABC test,” named for its three parts. The court said workers were to be considered employees unless they did their work free of a company’s direct control, the work fell outside the usual course of the company’s business, and the workers had independently chosen to go into business for themselves.”

This would be a good contractor definition for the person who remodels your kitchen, but it would eliminate all the gig workers.  Uber and Lyft led the way in arguing for relief from this ruling.  Unions and worker groups endorsed this precedent and helped get the ABC ruling incorporated into law as AB5 in September of 2019.  

The companies would fight back by placing Proposition 22 on the November 2020 ballot with the goal of nullifying the ABC ruling and theAB5 law.

“Last year companies such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart spent a record $200 million campaigning for an Election Day ballot measure that would exempt them from the California law, arguing in ads and in-app messages that keeping drivers contractors would protect their ability to work.” 

The media were inundated with misleading ads suggesting that what was at issue were the jobs of people who had other incomes but wished to raise a little extra money now and again.  These good people would lose the opportunity to make that extra money unless Prop 22 was passed.  And it was. 

“Prop 22 also insulates itself from future reform efforts by preempting local laws and requiring that any tweaks by the state legislature comport with its intent and pass with a seven-eighths supermajority. All this has left many drivers feeling stranded in the worst of both worlds—as beholden to bosses’ whims as employees, without the corresponding protections.”

This conflict is not simply a California problem, it follows Uber and Lyft wherever they go.  The danger, or opportunity, depending on your perspective arises if the Prop 22 results become a precedent that spreads to other regions.  Eidelson was sufficiently concerned to issue the following statement as his article’s lede. 

“California’s vote to classify Uber and Lyft drivers as contractors has emboldened other employers to eliminate salaried positions—and has become a cornerstone of bigger plans to ‘Uberize’ the U.S. workforce.”

“Employees in related fields are already feeling the knock-on effects. In December, Albertsons Cos, the supermarket chain, started informing delivery drivers they’d be replaced by contractors. In California hundreds of Albertsons employees are being swapped for DoorDash Inc. workers, according to the United Food & Commercial Workers union. Albertsons declined to comment on the layoff figures but says that the move is happening in multiple states to ‘help us create a more efficient operation’ and that affected workers are being offered other jobs there. (Some workers dispute that last part.) Startups such as Jyve Corp., which sends contractors to grocery stores to stock shelves in lieu of employees, are seeking similar exemptions.”

“Companies in a range of industries could use the Prop 22 model to undermine or eliminate employment protections. A week after the election, Shawn Carolan, a partner at early Uber investor Menlo Ventures, wrote an op-ed heralding the potential to spread Prop 22’s vision of work ‘from agriculture to zookeeping,’ including to ‘nursing, executive assistance, tutoring, programming, restaurant work and design’.”

There is a lobbying organization called the Coalition for Workforce Innovation that promotes wider use of contract employees.  It is allied with trade groups representing many of the best known and largest corporations, and it is poised to take advantage of the California precedent. 

“Now gig companies are pressing their advantage. While pushing Prop 22 as a national model, they’re also aiming to secure deals with unions in states like New York and California that could codify some form of union representation as well as benefits without making workers employees.”

The business model of Uber and Lyft is to promote the efficiency of their platform by always having a number of workers roaming around the streets waiting for an assignment.  Users don’t have to wait but a few minutes for their ride, but that means there must be much time roaming.  The more efficient the platform, the lower the earnings of the workers.  This is a model that neither the workers nor the unions who seek to represent them should have to tolerate.  The situation of the unions involved is sad and disappointing.  If they give up on the employee issue, eliminating negotiation of earnings and benefits, what do they bring to the table?  The companies would love to create the precedent of union representation by throwing a few crumbs on the table assuming that might eliminate the employee issue forever. 

Society’s goals are not to be superseded by those of corporate efficiency.  It is necessary that we get this right.  We don’t want to allow the wholesale elimination of traditional terms of employment just because some lazy voters in California didn’t think this through. 

As part of “getting this right,” we have to ask the question: “Why are Uber and Lyft so determined to avoid gig workers as employees?”  There is a ready answer in their business model.  The goal is to provide a lot of service at low cost.  This is an inherently low-wage business.  Herds of low-earnings workers as employees generate enormous marginal costs, particularly in the area of healthcare.

Atul Gawande is a respected surgeon and author who was tapped to lead the highly-promoted collaboration by Amazon, Berkshire-Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase to produce a better way to deal with healthcare costs.  After about two years, Gawande was gone and had produced an article for The New Yorker, Why Americans Are Dying from Despair, which essentially declared that employer-provided healthcare was about the dumbest thing imaginable. 

Gawande’s article was focused on discussion of the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton as presented in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.  Their work illustrates the highly unusual increase in mortality centered on poorly-educated whites. Several causes for this trend can be identified, including drug and alcohol abuse.  Of interest here is the role healthcare can play in generating “deaths of despair” by diminishing employment opportunities.  Gawande explains.

“The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.”

“As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent. ‘For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,’ Case and Deaton write. ‘For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.’ Even as workers’ wages have stagnated or declined, then, the cost to their employers has risen sharply. One recent study shows that, between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income. At the same time, the system practically begs employers to reduce the number of less skilled workers they hire, by outsourcing or automating their positions.”

If your business is inherently low wage, like Uber and Lyft, you can’t avoid such workers, but you can avoid healthcare costs by claiming they are independent contractors.

Gawande was moved to provide this conclusion. 

“Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare. Democrats are split over whether our health care should involve a single payer or multiple insurers. But that’s not the crucial issue. In other advanced economies, people pay for health care through wage-based taxes. In some countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, the money pays for non-government insurance; elsewhere, the money pays for Medicare-like government insurance. Both strategies work. Neither undermines the employment prospects of the working class.”

If we took the time and made the effort to renovate our obsolete methods of providing healthcare, we could alleviate the pressures driving corporations to turn us all into low-paid day laborers.  And perhaps the gig economy could exist in a form that allows greater earnings and dignity for its participants.

  

Spending, Deficits, and the National Debt: Quit Worrying and Go Big

We are in a familiar situation: Democrats have control of the White House, and marginal control of the House and Senate, but are stymied by Republican attempts to stop progress on anything meaningful.  Their weapons are the filibuster in the Senate, and the argument that any substantial program will be too expensive.  The Republican goal is to rule the country as a minority party.  For this to happen, they must limit access to the ballot box for people who are not likely to vote for them; they must limit the application of majority rule; they must maintain the economic and social conditions that encourage strife between social groups.  Economic inequality is not a problem; it is a part of their plan.  Racial strife is to be maintained; it has been a part of their strategy for centuries.  One can draw a straight line across time from the economic and political philosophy espoused by the slave-state South to that of the Southern core of the Republican Party today.

The Democratic Party, as the representative of progressives and progressive policies, has been too timid in the past to push the types of policies that would be actual game changers.  In fact, in the past, it has been complicit in furthering the Republican agenda.  There comes a time when they can no longer afford to be weak and submissive in the face of organized Republican resistance.  They must recognize that they can overcome the Republicans’ weapons. 

The filibuster derives from a mistake made early in the 1800s.  In a change intended to clarify Senate rules, a right of a member to end discussion by requesting a majority vote was inadvertently eliminated.  This left no way to force an end.  This left the senate in the mode of assuming that no members would abuse this path in order to subvert the will of the majority on a major issue.

 It wasn’t until 1917 that the procedure was carried to an extreme.  At that point a group of isolationist senators talked for 23 days until the senate’s session came to an end in order to block Woodrow Wilson’s intention to arm merchant ships prior to formal entry into World War I.  The response to this action was to establish a mechanism for terminating “debate.”  The original notion was to allow a two-thirds majority to vote for “cloture” to end debate.

The filibuster again became an issue when it was used by southern senators as a means of obstructing attempts to combat their Jim Crow laws and Policies.  Minimal reforms were put in place, but it wasn’t until 1974 that significant changes were made.  With Watergate and Nixon’s resignation the election of a large Democratic majority forced the required majority from two-thirds down to three-fifths.

There is a valid argument to be made that the filibuster is important in preventing a majority from imposing onerous conditions on a minority.  The problem with such an argument is that it cannot conceivably apply to all matters of legislation.  Not all laws should require a supermajority.  Yet with the election of Barack Obama, the filibuster became a standard legislative block for any democratic initiative the Republicans chose to block—and they blocked nearly everything.  When Trump came along the Democrats returned the favor.  The behavior in the Senate has become absurd.

The Republicans threaten the Democrats by telling the terrible things they will do in the future if they are not allowed to block all legislation now.  Well, guess what, they have already demonstrated that they will do terrible things whenever it suits their fancy.  The Democrats should eliminate it entirely or modify the filibuster rule so that it cannot be used against all legislation. 

The other Republican weapon, the threat that “deficit” spending will bankrupt the nation and impose “an intolerable burden on our children” is nonsense.  The United States has monetary sovereignty and issues fiat currency.  That is, they spend, tax, and borrow in a currency that does not need to be converted into some other quantity such as gold or some other currency.  Such fortunate countries do not need to create debt in order to spend more money.  The United States issues government securities to indicate deficit spending but it is mostly a bookkeeping exercise that has also been useful in controlling interest rates.  And the threat that investors will drive up interest costs on our national debt by demanding higher rates of return on government bonds isn’t going to happen because the Fed merely has to purchase the bonds itself at whatever conditions it chooses, something it often does.

It seems that the economics profession suffers from a lack of perspective as to what money actually represents.  Anthropologists and economic historians who delve into its origins provide a better understanding.  There is a group of insurgent economists who are promoting what has been labeled Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  Stephanie Kelton defends this theory and its consequences in her recent book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy.  MMT and the national debt were discussed in Eliminating the National Debt with a Keystroke: Modern Monetary Theory.  Kelton attributes this rebirth of economic insight to not an economist but to a wise investor named Warren Mosler.  She provides this perspective.

“Warren [Mosler] saw things that most economists were missing.  To many of us his ideas sounded completely original, but most weren’t.  They were only new to us.  It turns out they could be found (and we found them) in canonical texts, like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or in John Maynard Keynes’s two-volume classic, A Treatise on Money.  Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others had long ago arrived at similar conclusions about the nature of money and the role of taxes, but the economics profession largely lagged behind.”

“Taxes are there to create a demand for government currency.  The government can define the currency in terms of its own unique unit of account—a dollar, a yen, a pound, a peso—and then give value to its otherwise worthless paper by requiring it in payment of taxes or other obligations.  As Mosler jokes, ‘Taxes turn litter into currency.’  At the end of the day, a currency-issuing government wants something real, not something monetary.  It’s not our tax money the government wants.  It’s our time.  To get us to produce things for the state, the government invents taxes or other kinds of payment obligations.  This isn’t the explanation you will find in most economics textbooks, where a superficial story about money being invented to overcome the inefficiencies associated with bartering—trading goods without the use of money—is preferred.”

The Federal Reserve can, and does, create money whenever it wishes to.  The so-called deficit is only a problem if there is more demand for services than the economy is capable of producing.  This causes inflation.  Until inflation ensues, the deficit can increase as much as necessary to produce the expenditures our nation needs to make.

To pay any interest on the national debt, the Federal Reserve merely produces a credit to whatever account it is due.  These transfers are tallied by tradition, but they have no economic impact.  The issuing of bonds in a value equal to the deficit spending of government is also a tradition.  Its main economic impact is that it provides a means of controlling interest rates.  Kelton suggests that the Fed could buy back all the bonds issued as easily as it pays the interest on them, with little if any adverse effects. If the Fed were to credit the value of the bond to the account of each bond holder it would merely be exchanging non-interest-earning dollars for interest-earning dollars.  The net wealth of the bondholders would be unchanged, but the interest earned would disappear in the future.  There would be no new surge of excess dollars into the economy.  The loss of income would be slightly deflationary. 

So, Democrats, you have the opportunity and the capability to invest large amounts of money in projects that will benefit a needy nation.  Our country is falling apart.  Fix it!

  

COVID-19: Infections, Deaths, and the Partisan Divide

Ramesh Ponnuru attempted to address a very serious topic in an article titled Virus Keeps Refusing to Follow Anyone’s Partisan Script.  His goal, apparently, was to forgive Republicans for their lack of seriousness about the pandemic.  His basic argument is contained in this passage.

“The more partisan the narrative, the worse it has fared. Liberals have spent much of the pandemic fretting about red-state irresponsibility. But the four states with the highest percentage of Covid deaths all vote consistently for Democratic presidential candidates. Florida, though a consistent target of progressive criticism, has a death rate well below the national average. Some conservatives, for their part, predicted that we’d stop hearing about the pandemic as soon as the election was over. Instead, the deadliest weeks came after it, and both politicians and the press kept talking about it.”

To begin with, the term “percentage” of deaths is ambiguous.  The appropriate metric is deaths per capita, or deaths per population number.  It is not clear what he is referring to.  In addition, deaths are not a partisan indicator.  No one has suggested that anyone who is sick from the virus decides whether or not to seek medical help based on their political party, or that the healthcare received is politically tinged.  And analyzing deaths can get very complicated.  The early pandemic hit most heavily in eastern cities with high population densities and no experience in dealing with this particular virus.  A lot has been learned since then.  Mortality rates will also depend on demographics: the fraction of the population that are seniors and/or minorities, quality of the healthcare system, number of members per household, population in nursing homes, and so on. 

A much more relevant metric for determining the effect of partisan differences would be infection rates.  After some head scratching, the experts have almost totally focused on mask wearing as the most effective way of avoiding infection.  And mask wearing is the most contentious partisan issue.  As one might expect the Democrats are more likely to wear a mask as common courtesy to others around them.  The Republicans are more likely to refuse to wear a mask as an expression of their individual license to do whatever they please.  So, how has this worked out in terms of statewide infection rates.

The worldometer website has been tallying statewide and countywide data on infections and deaths over the course of the pandemic.  Numbers from the end of the day of March 9, 2021 will be used.  The average infection rate for the nation as a whole, in infections per million population, was 90,207.  Taking any statewide number over 100,000 as an arbitrary indicator of a high-rate state, we find 14 in that category: Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and North Dakota.  Of those 14 states, 13 are red states, suggesting that Republican voters have managed to put themselves at greater risk of infection.  The partisan divide matters.

The highest infection rate was found in North Dakota one of our most sparsely populated states (with the second highest being South Dakota).  In the Dakotas, one must work hard to find somebody to be infected by. The ratios of per capita infections in North Dakota to the state with the lowest rate (in the contiguous states, it is Vermont) was 5.05. 

So yes, the partisan divide really does matter.

   

Christian Nationalists Work with Russia to Create Failed States in US and EU

Timothy Snyder paints a clear picture of Vladimir Putin and his intentions in his book The Road to Unfreedom.  The view of governance thar Putin propagates is that of a layered hierarchy with a powerful leader unimpeded by rules of law.  He would adopt for himself the fascist role of the “redeemer” who was destined by religious and historical forces to return Russia to its proper place in the world.  Putin would also develop the concept of “Eurasia.”  From his perspective, the geographic center of the world is Russia.  As such, it also deserved to be the civilizational center.  He promotes the notion that it was only the repeated attacks by its enemies that kept it from attaining its deserved place in the world.  The threats to Russia would come from states who use their principles of democratic succession of power and rule of law to entice other nations to follow their example.  The US and EU would then be enemies to overcome.  The danger they presented was not military, it was cultural.  Putin would resurrect traditional antisemitism with its notions of world Jewish domination plus a peculiar new thrust.  Putin would claim the world’s democracies were intentionally trying to corrupt Russian society with their sexual deviance.  The AIDS epidemic then became a Western plot, and the belief that homosexuality was acceptable behavior was aimed at corrupting and weakening the Russian people.  Russia’s response must be to weaken the Western democracies to the point that they were so dysfunctional that they no longer presented an example of better governance than his rule in Russia.

Putin’s continual focus on “deviant” sexual behavior is peculiar as a political strategy.  It led his internal critics to wonder about his own sexuality.

“The attempt to place heterosexuality within Russia and homosexuality beyond was factually ludicrous, but the facts were beside the point.  The purpose of the anti-gay campaign was to transform demands for democracy into a nebulous threat to Russian innocence: voting = West = sodomy.  Russia had to be innocent, and all problems had to be the responsibility of others.”

Putin often poses for photoshoots that make him appear to be an unmasculine person posing as a very masculine one. 

“Putin divorced his wife just as his anti-gay campaign began, leaving the champion of family values without a traditional family.  The question of gender identity clung to the Russian president.  In 2016, Putin asserted that he was not a woman who has bad days.  In 2017, he denied that he was Donald Trump’s groom.  That year it became a criminal offense to portray Putin as a gay clown.  An attentive female scholar summarized his position: ‘Putin’s public kisses are reserved for children and animals’.”

So, was the insertion of deviant sexuality into geopolitics driven by some internal sexual conflict or did Putin have some other tactical motivation?  One possible explanation is suggested by the research of Katherine Stewart in her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.  The nationalists she describes are promoters of a distinct form of Christianity that has become a political movement aimed at converting democracies to ones governed according to “biblical values.”

The origins of this faith system date back to the era of slavery when religious justification for the practice had to be provided.  It would be in the Old Testament that God’s permission for slavery (and other horrible stuff) would be found.  Slavery and the support of extreme property rights go together, leading to religious beliefs that support capitalism and its accompanying economic inequality: taxation is a form of theft, therefore it is evil; social welfare policies are not found in the Old Testament, therefore they are evil also; environmental regulations are against God’s will; women are to be sexually, socially, economically, and politically submissive to men; nonbelievers are enemies who can and should be punished; democracy is heresy; physical punishment is the best way to obtain obedience from children, even infants; sexual deviance is absolutely forbidden; and so on.  Many of the participants in this political movement are Evangelicals, but not all Evangelicals support it.  In fact, many correctly note that this movement cannot even be considered Christian.

Stewart provides this perspective.

“Anyone who cares about what is happening in American politics today needs to know about this movement and its people.  Their issues—the overwhelming preoccupation with the sexual order, the determination to unite the nation around a single religious identity, the conviction that they are fighting for salvation against the forces of darkness—have come to define the effort that has transformed the political landscape and shaken the foundations upon which lay our democratic norms and institutions,  This is the movement responsible for the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, and it now defines the future of the Republican Party.”

“Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers.  But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative.  It is not a social or cultural movement.  It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.  It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a ‘biblical worldview’ that also happens to serve the interests of its political funders and allied political leaders.  The movement is unlikely to realize its most extreme visions, but it has already succeeded in degrading our politics and dividing the nation with religious animus.  This is not a ‘culture war.’  It is a political war over the future of democracy.”

Ties to the religious nationalist efforts was long ago recognized by the wealthy as an alliance worth supporting in order to counter any “anti-capitalist” political trends.  This movement is well funded by the oligarchs of the world.  In fact, it has become firmly established as an international movement. 

“Under President Trump, the United States has become a flashing red beacon of hope for a new global, religious, right-wing populist movement.  It calls itself a ‘global conservative movement’ and claims that it seeks to ‘defend the natural family.’  But it is really about taking down modern democracy and replacing it with authoritarian, faith-based ethno-states.  You could call it a global holy war”

“Europe’s current spate of conservative activism and legislation, which appears to reverse the trend toward universal human rights, is not the result of spontaneous uprisings from ordinary citizens fed up with ‘the gays.’  In fact, this activism reflects an ongoing, well-funded, highly coordinated effort by multiple groups across states and even continents to roll back these rights in the EU and beyond.”

Stewart tells us that US religious nationalists approached Russia as a potential ally in its anti-democratic movement as soon as the fall of the Soviet Union.  Within this context, Putin’s sexual focus could also be interpreted as an accommodation to the religious nationalists in order to use them, as the capitalists had, to further his own attack on democracy.

“Russian leaders’ evident interest in manipulating America’s Christian nationalists for their own purposes did little to discourage those nationalists from clamoring for still more Russian involvement in American affairs.  In the run-up to the 2016 election, the passion for Russian family values among America’s religious extremists grew still more ardent.  In 2013, Bryan Fischer, then a spokesman for the American Family Association, called Mr. Putin a ‘lion of Christianity.’  In 2014, Franklin Graham defended Mr. Putin for his efforts ‘to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda’ even as he lamented that Americans have ‘abdicated our moral leadership.’  In December 2015, Mr. Graham met privately with Mr. Putin for forty-five minutes.  And in March 2019, with the apparent blessing of Mike Pence—or so Graham says—Graham travelled to Russia to meet with a number of Russian religious and political leaders…According to the social media account of one Russian official, the tête-á-tête was for the purposes of strengthening relationships between the U.S. Congress and the Duma.”

“The Cristian nationalists’ affection for Mr. Putin and all things Russian goes much deeper than a tactical alliance aimed at saving souls and defeating ‘homosexuals’ and ‘gender ideology.’  At the core of the attraction lies a shared political vision.  America’s Christian activists have not overlooked Putin’s authoritarian style of government; they have embraced it as an ideal.  During the 2016 presidential campaign Mike Pence hailed Mr. Putin as ‘a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.’  The Christian Nationalists haven’t shied away from the fusion of church and state that characterizes Putin’s regime.  On the contrary, it appears they want to emulate it.  They love Russia, it seems, because they hate America with its form of secular, constitutional democracy.”

Religiously driven voters clearly own the Republican Party and they are poised to take advantage of that fact.  This moves Stewart to finish her work with this conclusion. 

“It seems sadly fitting that so many of the self-appointed patriots of America’s Christian nationalist movement should have found themselves working with foreign powers intent on undermining our national security, our social fabric, the integrity of our elections, and the future of American democracy.  This is a movement that never accepted the promise of America.  It never believed that a republic could be founded on the universal ideal of equality, not on a particular creed, or that it might seek out reasoned answers to humanity’s challenges rather than enforce old dogmas.  It never subscribed to the nation’s original unofficial motto, E Pluribus Unum, that out of many, we could become one.  From the beginning, its aim was to redeem the nation by crushing the pluralistic heart of our country.  The day when it will have the power to do so is fast approaching.”

 

Christian Nationalists: America’s Taliban

Katherine Stewart provides us with a startling introduction to an abhorrent form of “Christianity” in her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.  The origins of this faith system date back to the era of slavery when religious justification for the practice had to be provided.  It would be in the Old Testament that God’s permission for slavery (and other horrible stuff) would be found.  Slavery and the support of extreme property rights go together, leading to religious beliefs that support capitalism and its accompanying economic inequality: taxation is a form of theft, therefore it is evil; social welfare policies are not found in the Old Testament, therefore they are evil also; environmental regulations are against God’s will; women are to be sexually, socially, and economically submissive to men; nonbelievers are enemies who can and should be punished; democracy is heresy; physical punishment is the best way to obtain obedience from children, even infants; and so on.

Stewart points out that while many of these people consider themselves evangelicals, not all evangelicals are included in this movement, and some would not even agree that these people are actually Christians.  These nationalists have nothing to do with the Jesus Christ described in the New Testament, so they really aren’t Christians in that sense.  They are more like the ancient Hebrews who believed they had a covenant with God.  For the religious nationalists, this old covenant has been replaced by a newer one in which they are God’s chosen people.  Since they are neither ancient Hebrews nor Christians, perhaps religious nationalist is the best descriptor.  In fact, the nearest analogy for them and their beliefs is the Taliban fighting for a form of theocracy in Afghanistan.

The nationalist movement would be born from pro-slavery theology, switch to maintaining segregation, then in the New Deal era begin collaboration with wealthy capitalists to oppose social legislation being pushed by Roosevelt.  This alliance greatly benefited the nationalists, providing them with plenty of money to fund efforts they were already predisposed towards.  The billionaires have been consistently assisting the movement ever since.

Stewart provides this perspective. 

“Anyone who cares about what is happening in American politics today needs to know about this movement and its people.  Their issues—the overwhelming preoccupation with the sexual order, the determination to unite the nation around a single religious identity, the conviction that they are fighting for salvation against the forces of darkness—have come to define the effort that has transformed the political landscape and shaken the foundations upon which lay our democratic norms and institutions,  This is the movement responsible for the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, and it now defines the future of the Republican Party.” 

“Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers.  But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative.  It is not a social or cultural movement.  It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.  It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a ‘biblical worldview’ that also happens to serve the interests of its political funders and allied political leaders.  The movement is unlikely to realize its most extreme visions, but it has already succeeded in degrading our politics and dividing the nation with religious animus.  This is not a ‘culture war.’  It is a political war over the future of democracy.”

In accordance with their Old Testament leanings, a king seems to be the appropriate form of leadership once the existing form of government is overthrown.  Was there ever anyone more likely to be impressed by being recognized as a God-chosen king than Donald Trump?

“’It is God that rises up a king,’ Trump evangelical advisor declared in a TV interview about her longstanding relationship with the president.  After Trump won, Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham and one of Trump’s most trusted evangelical advisors, declared, ‘God’s hand intervened’…Even former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said God ‘wanted Trump to become president’.”

“Whether by design or—more likely—the unfortunate accident of character, Trump seems pleased to play the role that his followers have assigned him.  He is obliging them by behaving like a monarch—or, as some might say, a mad king…Trump demands military parades, threatens to punish his critics, refuses to cooperate with government investigations, and claims he is above the law.”

“…Trump’s king-like behavior seems far from troublesome.  On the contrary, it may satisfy their craving for a certain type of political leadership.  When God sends a ruler to save the nation, He doesn’t mess around; He sends a kingly king.  And kings don’t have to follow the rules.”

To further their objectives, the religious nationalists required a complete rewrite of US history.  They have assembled a number of lies, but the most fundamental is the false assumption that our country was originally formed as a Christian nation, but followers of a “social gospel” wrested it from the Christians.  It is their duty to regain control of this original Christian nation.”  The second great lie is that the principle of separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution was intended to mean not that the state should by protected from religious incursion, but that religion was to be allowed to go about its business and be protected from any imposition by the state. 

If one tells lies fervently and repeatedly, eventually some people will begin believing them, particularly when the lies match what people wish to be true.  The nationalists, with their plutocratic funding, have made advances in perverting our historically democratic political and legal institutions.  Stewart provides many examples to provide credibility for her concerns.  The attack on public education, the attempt to provide state supported religious education, the collusion with conservative Supreme Court justices, the bible study classes organized for legislators and administrators at all levels of government, the attempts to rewrite history, the attempts to sow division between the two parties, and the collusion of our religious nationalists with Russia and Vladimir Putin in efforts to undermine democracy in the United States and in the European Union all deserve detailed discussions which hopefully will come in subsequent posts. 

Religiously driven voters clearly own the Republican Party, and they are well aware of that fact.  Consider this quote from one of the nationalist leaders. 

“If you take the Evangelicals who are 27 percent of the electorate and you add to them 11 percent of the electorate that are frequent Mass-attending Catholics, folks, its 38 percent of the electorate, and 56 percent of the Republican vote nationwide.  If that vote goes away, the Republican Party ceases to exist as a reliable political party.” 

Much of the remainder of the Republican voters consist of self-serving oligarchs, white nationalists, anti-Semites, militia members, racists, misogynists, and status-threatened whites.  The party has truly become a “basket of deplorables.”

Listen carefully to what Republican politicians say.  There is little talk of policies, other than voter restrictions; there is talk of maintaining power.  Getting reelected is all that matters.  Hopefully, you now have a better idea of why they want to retain power.