Highly recommend Season 2 of this excellent podcast documentary about the far right in Idaho. Episode 2 in particular clarified for me the challenges of talking about people who are "the baddies" of American democracy but who absolutely do not see themselves that way. www.npr.org/podcasts/510...
People like Roger Stone or Steve Bannon or Jack Posobiec or Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Laura Ingraham or Ann Coulter or [fill in the blanks] are 100% "the baddies" and they are 100% proud of that. They want the blood of their fellow Americans, and will savor the taste of it.
But it's inconceivable to the Christian Nationalists we meet in this podcast that they might be the baddies, even tho they seek to turn the US into a nation in which everyone is a cis het Christian like them. This involves a complete disregard and disrespect for people who are different from them.
Ex-Evangelicals have written about this dynamic at great length and I don't have anything to add to their insights, but I do think that folks interested in building civic capacity around democracy should be mindful of the space between baddies who are more vs. less knowing and willful about it.
The guy I'm writing about, Walter Huss, was an absolute baddie--an antisemitic, racist, homophobic authoritarian jerk who became the chair of the OR GOP in 1978-9. But he also thought what we call him "being a baddie" was just him "being a servant to God's truth."
Here he explains his lifelong, fascistic obsession with/hatred of Jews. "They commit the act, I simply stated the fact. If they would abide by the Judeo ethic, people wouldn't hate them so much. They force themselves upon you & take over as much as they can. They bring on their own persecution."
If you were to say to many of the fascists who Walter Huss read and admired "you're a hateful violent person," they would have said "yes, indeed I am and proud of it." If you'd said that to Huss he would have said "I hate Communism & sin, but love all of humanity which is why I fight those things."
Closed-minded & socially authoritarian forms of Christianity that claim a privileged place in American life have been with us from the start. This is not new. What's new is that the explicitly political and theocratic iterations of this tradition have a big foothold in a national political party.
Imposing a rigid orthodoxy on a congregation or even a town is bad enough...but imaging/hoping that you can do it on a national level with the help of one of the nation's two political parties is a far more dangerous proposition.
In April 2022 when Mike Flynn's Reawaken America tour came to Salem, this is how the Christian Nationalist chair of our local school board described what was happening. Just "church stuff" being attacked by Antifa. Her husband (a 3% militia member) was at that time the chair of the county GOP.
I used to think, ok, I can see this in individual House districts. But at the state level senators will be elected who represent entire states. Until entire states took this far right turn. It's just astounding.
Are there any examples of cults & ideologues who clarify that they are bad people and think bad thoughts and are primarily motivated in causing harm, rather than inventing a million ways to make themselves into warriors & heroes?
There are a few that are so underground that experts get upset if you name them on social media, lest someone seek them out who wouldn't have heard of them otherwise. (I learned this the hard way)
Yes, I guess there will be that divider between those who wish to have some public awareness & image and those who imagine themselves powerful demons operating in the dark.
Is this species of victim blaming only in Huss' view of Jews or extend to other identifiable out-groups? We talk about permission structures, but that clip seems quite a bit of granting allowance/permission based on "their fault."
I think of the above baddies as more like leaches or worse who have no character other than to divide and hate for attention and money, etc. People like Doug Wilson are evil but seem to be sincerely evil. They aren't scamming, they're "living their authentic lives" which happen to be evil.
