Monday, March 18, 2024

Where is Christian nationalism?

The title here is really a secondary question. I should probably start from the framing question: "what is Christian nationalism?" 

The progressive side of our culture is amply supplied with sociological punditryhistorians of religion, and political scientists offering definitions of what has become a signal feature of our American times.

For today's purposes, I think I can go with a succinct definitoin from the (relatively) broad-minded U.S. evangelical publication, Christianity Today.

What is Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is 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.

With that in mind,  I can go to the related question here: Where is Christian nationalism?

Click to enlarge.

The Public Religion Research Institute came up with some answers recently, mapped here. Yes, the darker greens look a lot like one of those red state/blue state maps, though with slight nuances -- who'd have thought New Mexico had more Christian nationalists than Utah? Still the general picture is familiar.

But Pastor Daniel Schultz -- a United Church of Christ minister -- who has been trying to explain religious peoples' engagement with politics for a couple of decades, has some interesting takes on this map: 

Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of the population that embraces it is punching above its weight. Two states—Mississippi and North Dakota—reach 50% support, and only a handful land in the 40s. The rest of the nation ranges from the teens to the mid-30s. That’s a significant minority, to be sure, but a minority all the same. ...

That Christian nationalists are in a solid minority in places like Ohio, Texas, or Florida also demonstrates the perilous position of hard-right regimes in such states. Were it not for gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics, their agenda would be firmly rejected. To put things another way: there are a lot more places that could be opened up as swing states on the basis of rejecting Christian nationalism than the other way around.

... it may be the case that, much as it was before the Civil War, Americans are facing a theological reckoning as much as a political crisis. 

On the one side is an aging, dwindling group that asserts that its understanding of God blesses and endorses a traditionalist social order. 

On the other is a more diverse, more secular group suspicious of authoritarian faith and the ways in which invocations of religious values privilege inequality and repression.

The 2024 campaign will be finally [?] a decision about which of these views should dominate and which candidate gives the best expression to authentic American values.

Dan has always been in the optimism business. I find it hard to share his vision that a defeat for Christian nationalism in the 2024 campaign will get us over some kind of hump, but he's right to remind us we're up against a force that is dwindling.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Remedial kindergarten required?

If our system of government were parliamentary, we might not be so fixated on just who is the president. At least maybe this would be so. Jamelle Bouie offers some thoughts.

Americans are accustomed to thinking of their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framework that is only encouraged by the candidate-centric nature of the American political system as well as the way that our media reports on elections. Even the way that most Americans think about their country’s history, always focused so intently on whoever occupies the White House in a given moment, works to reinforce this notion that presidential elections are mostly about the people and personalities involved.
Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.

There it is. The impending election will be a contest between people who never learned to curb toddler emotions of greed and grievance and those who internalized what kindergarten aims to teach: we all do better when we share. And it's all too close a call which way we choose to go.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

An intimate view of a genocide

I find myself, once again, trying to fill in some understanding of the eastern reaches of Europe. My generation of Americans simply didn't get it that there was a swath of territory, roughly the nations and peoples between the Baltic Sea and the Black and Adriatic Seas, which were obliterated from our consciousness by the Soviet empire. Once this had been the heart of Europe; before 1990 for many of us, it barely existed. It is thirty years since the Iron Curtain evaporated, but I'm certain I'm not the only one who is catching up. To that end, I want to recommend a difficult history.

Historian Omer Bartov, an Israeli academic who teaches the Holocaust at Brown University, brings alive life and death in one small place in western Ukraine, before and after the Nazi slaughter. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz took two decades to write, collecting witness accounts, survivor stories, and old pictures. And, amazingly, it is readable and accessible.

Bertov explains his explication of local genocide this way:

By letting those who lived that history lend their own words to the telling of it and providing accompanying photos, this book attempts to reconstruct the life of Buczacz in all its complexity and depict how the Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish inhabitants of the town lived side by side for several centuries -- weaving their separate tales of the past, articulating their distinctive understanding of the present, and making widely diverging plans for the future.
Life in towns such as Buczacz was premised on constant interaction between different religious and ethnic communities. The Jews did not live segregated from the Christian population; the entire notion of a shtetl existing in some sort of splendid (or sordid) isolation is merely a figment of the Jewish literary and folkloristic imagination. That integration was what made the genocide there, when it occurred, a communal event both cruel and intimate, filled with gratuitous violence and betrayal as well as flashes of altruism and kindness.

Buczacz had been part of the thousand year Hapsburg empire which died conclusively in 1918 with what we call the First World War. During the subsequent period, until 1939, the town was both a battleground and a haven for the nationalisms of the day, ruled, badly by Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian-oriented Soviet partisans.

The three decades that followed the destruction and erasure of pre-1914 ... society belonged to the nationalists and ideologues, fanatics and zealots of a new breed, more willing to shed blood than to seek compromise, more determined to assert their hegemony than to preserve coexistence: impatient men with guns and bombs, often led by the half educated and thirsting for a fight. ... Jews were cast in the role of a minority whose status could never be truly acceptable to either of the warring parties. Jews could be ignored, tolerated, or expelled, but by the nationalism that had evolved in this region, could neither be recognized as a separate indigenous national group or assimilated as ethnically kindred ... both Poles and Ukrainians increasingly felt that the Jews were their enemy's friends ...

In 1939, Hitler and Stalin cut a deal to dismember Poland and seize the lands between the two powers. Russia overran Buczacz and brought in NKVD (Secret Police) to rule with the support of Ukrainian nationalists. Bertov reports the opinions of Jadwiga Janika, the wife of a Polish Army captain, about this period. 

"At the the moment of of the Red Army's invasion," she testified, "an indescribable depression dominated the Polish population. Conversely, there was lively enthusiasm among the Jews and the Ukrainians." ... The early wave of fraternal killings [Ukrainians of Poles] evoked questions about the meaning and reality of interethnic relations, friendships, and communities, certainly among Poles and Ukrainians, who frequently intermarried, but also among Jews, who recalled many gentile friends and acquaintances. People repeatedly asked, Why did our neighbors, classmates, teachers, colleagues, friends, even family members turn their backs on us, betray us to the perpetrators, or join in the killings?"

Many Poles were shipped off to Soviet Kazakhstan; to Ukrainian nationalists, the Poles were interlopers, "colonists." Some locals hope the joint hatred felt by Poles and Ukrainians for the Jews might serve as "an agenda for Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation."

Hitler's German forces overran Buczacz in 1941. The exploitation and eventual extermination of the Jews became a central item on the occupiers' agenda. First came the Gestapo - the Einsatzgruppen -- charged with eliminating "political and racial foes." After the first bloody wave, came the Wehrmacht, the regular German Army. Finally the occupation, and the final solution, was left to Security Police, often men who had held a similar job in peacetime Germany. They believed Germany had achieved permanent conquest; they brought their wives and children along.

The new order established by the Security Police ... was almost exclusively dedicated to the exploitation and murder of the Jews. ... Beyond the extraordinary bloodletting this undertaking entailed, perhaps its most scandalous aspect was the astonishing ease with which it was accomplished and the extent to which the killers, along with their spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region. For many of them, this was clearly the best time of their lives: they had almost unlimited access to food, liquor, tobacco, and sex, and most important, they became supreme masters over life and death.

And when they were done, they packed up and left, often returning to their previous occupations as if nothing had happened ...

[N]ormalization of murder, the removal of the Jews as part of a day's work, as background noise to drinking bouts or amorous relationships, along with puzzlement at the Jew's conduct mixed with anger at them for making it so easy to kill them -- these were part and parcel of the German experience of genocide ... Jewish slave labor was taken for granted ... Many of the German personnel used Jewish dentists ...

Jews were rounded up in groups of several hundred, marched to the surrounding forests, and shot. Over and over again. In total some 10,000 Jews from the Buczacz area were killed; only 2000 of those were transported to a death camp. The others were eliminated personally by gun shots. 

A (very) few Jews survived:

Jewish accounts of the German occupation in the Buczacz district are invariably about rescue and betrayal by local gentiles. This is why testimonies are filled with mixed emotions of rage and vengeance, on the one hand, and gratitude and guilt on the other ... The most instructive feature to emerge from these accounts is the ambivalence of goodness: even those who took in Jews could at any point instruct them to leave or summon the authorities ... Evil was less ambivalent: most of the perpetrators killed thoughtlessly and displayed no pangs of conscience ... But occasionally, out of impulse, the pleasure of displaying their absolute power over life and death, or even a momentary recognition of the victim's humanity, individual perpetrators could spare lives in capricious acts of goodness in the midst of slaughter. For those spared, such haphazard decisions were a momentous event that determined the rest of their lives and were never forgotten, even if for the perpetrators they could be nothing more than a blur in an ocean of blood and horror.

Bertov can't let go the conundrum -- what made the difference between the vicious criminality of so many of the Germans and the occasional acts of kindness or decency? Why did a few Jews live while others died? Accidents mattered. He reports the terrible saga of one Jewish teenager which captures the contingency of life and death:

Alicja Jurman faced the whole range of attitudes under German rule. Having already lost one brother to Soviet brutality, she lost another to Nazi forced labor, a third to local denunciation, and the youngest to a Ukrainian policeman. Her father was murdered early on in the [Jewish] registration action; her mother, denounced by a Polish neighbor, was shot in front of her eyes just before the end. Alicja herself was handed over to the Gestapo by her best friend's father, who joined the Ukrainian police; she was hidden for a lengthy period by an eccentric elderly Polish nobleman living on the edge of the village, a "splendid, beautiful man" who defied all threats from the local Ukrainians; she was denounced by a local peasant after escaping mass execution, but the soldier who spotted her told her to run, saying "you are an innocent girl, after all."
Both her survival and the murder of many family members, then, were largely the result of choices made by neighbors and strangers.

This is not something that can be made much moral sense of. This is a book of "fraught and traumatized memories [that] contain as much forgetting as remembering."

And then, in 1944, the Russians drove out the Nazis. More people were killed in Buczacz, whether for aiding the occupation or to settle scores. The whole area was given new national borders by fiat of the victors and "harmonized" by transfer of peoples -- there weren't many Jews left to come out of hiding. Poles were forcibly moved north to contemporary Poland, while Ukrainians who had lived north of the new border were moved into Soviet Ukraine. 

All three ethnic groups living in Buczacz and its district underwent extreme suffering although their agony peaked at different times and often at the hands of different perpetrators ... And yet, at the time and long after, each group sought to present itself as the main victim, both of the occupying powers and of its neighbors. Poles and Ukrainians were particularly keen on highlighting these martyrdom, in part out of fear that the Nazi genocide of the Jews would overshadow their own victimhood ...

Buczacz is today a Ukrainian backwater, going by the name of Buchach. 

• • •

Very relevant to the present day, one of the things I learned from Timothy Snyder's free Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine is that, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the governments of free and independent Poland and Ukraine agreed not to reopen the (legitimate) grievances of the parts of their populations who had been forced to move. This, and the desire to be part of European Union culture and society, is probably an essential part of how a Ukrainian Jew, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, can today be the elected leader of a (mostly) new kind Ukrainian nationalism.

Bertov's history also supports one of the pillar's of Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. The Holocaust reached its most horrific thoroughness where state authority, both before the war and under Nazi occupation, was least intact. Buczacz makes a terrible example of a long term war of all against all, interspersed with grudging co-existence over several centuries.


Friday, March 15, 2024

Friday cat blogging

 
We think Mio considers E.P's laptop a kind of heating pad. Not sure if that stare means "what you gonna do about it?" Shifting Mio is heavy lifting.
Janeway can pretend to be so demure -- right before she gets the zoomies and leaps over Mio and the couch ...

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Consider the alternative

Erudite Partner tackles the moral dilemma of our moment: can we, in order to block Donald Trump's ambitious fascist plans, vote to re-elect the enabler of Bibi Netanyahu's slaughter of Gaza Palestinians? Can we? She reports a recent conversation.

... [a] college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden—and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Oh, do I ever understand! My first vote for President was for Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a moral coward who dared not repudiate Lyndon Johnson's futile, endless war against the Vietnamese and Vietnamese nationalism. I had spent years working to turn a confused country around, yet I was stuck with only a lesser evil choice. The alternative was Richard Nixon who got us more war and finally corruption and disgrace. 

The E.P. reminds us what we'd get with the alternative to Biden:

... lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

In the California primary, I left the presidential line blank. I cast that vote before the campaign in Michigan to protest through voting "uncommitted" took off -- my protest was instinctive and it seems about 10 percent of Californians did the same without much organizing.  

But in the fall I'll be working to re-elect Biden in some swing state, I hope. Maybe I'll skip Biden again on my California ballot. But people located where their presidential votes matter, should consider the alternative.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Can we turn a corner?

Georgetown University political historian Thomas Zimmer waited a couple of days before offering his take on Joe Biden's State of the Union (SOTU) speech. He's a smart German commentator on American discontents; his perspective reminds me of the picture of our national history we owe to such 20th century observers (and participants) as Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn

I wonder, does anyone study Zinn's People's History of the United States these day? It remains relevant.

Zimmer sees the SOTU as signaling Biden's turn, facing the threat of GOP/Trump fascism, away from "let's all get back to normal" toward "let's advance a new vision of national possibility."

... if the rise of Trumpism is a manifestation, rather than the cause, of forces and ideas that have always prevented the nation from living up to the egalitarian vision it has often proclaimed, from realizing its truly democratic aspirations, then restoration is not enough. The answer, based on this acknowledgment, can’t possibly be to merely restore the deeply deficient pre-2016 type of “liberal” democracy, to just turn the clock back to a situation that resulted in Trump’s rise in the first place.
If the danger is truly as great as Joe Biden says, must we not look for a response that is commensurate with such an immense threat – one that propels America forward and transforms it into something closer to the kind of egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet?

Last week, Joe Biden insisted he would not walk away from the egalitarian ideal that all people are created equal, that he would fight against those who envision an America “of resentment, revenge, and retribution.” Trying to turn his age from a liability into an asset, the president proudly declared: “I was born amid World War Two, when America stood for the freedom of the world.” Deliberately or not, by referencing the global war against Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, Biden invoked the anti-fascist consensus that has indeed crumbled.

In post-1945 America, it was certainly never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics.
If Joe Biden can help us re-imagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward, I am all for it.

Marchers in 2020; never discount aroused people
Obviously, we need that new vision of a multi-racial, multi-gender, egalitarian nation for "defending democracy" to have true vitality.

It is broadening to have an historian from afar to comment on our condition. Here's Zimmer from May, 2023: 

The Unraveling of the United States of America
Here is my glass-half-full reading of recent U.S. history and our current moment: The reactionary counter-mobilization from the Right is not coming from a place of strength: Conservatives are radicalizing because they understand they are in the minority and feel their backs against the wall, leading to a veritable siege mentality. The Right is radicalizing out of a sense of weakness, and they are reacting to something real: Due to political, social, cultural, and demographic developments, the country has indeed moved closer than ever before to becoming an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy.
America has the chance to demonstrate that such a true democracy, one in which the individual’s status is not significantly determined by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or wealth is actually feasible under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious pluralism. It’s a chance of world-historic significance, as such a democracy has basically never existed anywhere. But we need to acknowledge that as of right now, it is, at best, an open question whether or not this vision of true democracy can overcome the radicalizing forces of reaction.
It would be a relief to take a rest from this struggle. But apathy is not an option.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Where's the housing?

I suppose I might have expected this if I'd thought about it, but this picture draws attention to the reality that "subsidized housing" -- living spaces built, owned, and/or sometimes managed outside the real estate economy -- is mostly a feature of older states in the northeast, with a pocket in the poorest states of the deep south. In the original graphic, you can click on each state and see the number of units per thousand people.

Rhode Island had the most subsidized housing units of any US state in 2022, with over 35 units per 1,000 people. Arizona had the least, with fewer than six units per 1,000 people. These figures represent all housing under contract for federal subsidy, occupied and unoccupied units.

The need for subsidized housing often outweighs the number of units available, meaning applicants can wait years to be approved. ...

... Between 2004 and 2022, the number of units under federal contract as subsidized housing, both occupied and unoccupied, decreased by about 11% nationally. In 2004, there were 17.3 units per 1,000 people; in 2022, there were 15.4.

It's hard to avoid concluding that where there has been decreased supply, there may be greater homelessness. On the other hand, having been inside plenty of public housing in my time, I'm aware that the government is often a lousy landlord -- as are the private firms that governments contract with for management.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Sign of the times

click to read the pole

Marin County aims to educate cyclists and joggers about the implications of climate change warming on sea level rise in San Francisco Bay. Even at the lowest, dark blue, base level of 2 more feet, this whole path adjacent to Mill Valley will be long gone. Just saying ...

Sunday, March 10, 2024

One cheer for shrinkflation

Apparently there's a wave of companies putting less of their stuff in packages without acknowledging by way of size changes that the same $2.69 for a small bag gets you less Fritos, for example. That's shrinkflation. When people notice, some howl.

Companies do this because it works.

Companies choose to shrink their products rather than charge more for a simple reason: Consumers often pay more attention to prices than sizes.

When quantity goes down, “people might notice, but often, they don’t,” said John Gourville, a professor at Harvard Business School. “You don’t get sticker shock.”


One of the goods to which this is happening seems be rolls of toilet paper. Four years ago, rolls came almost 5 inches wide and similarly thick, advertised as super and jumbo. Today, many rolls seem to be more like 4x4 inches.  

In this household, that's cause for celebration. One of our bathrooms comes with a neatly tiled, recessed TP nook. Before the current wave of TP downsizing, it was a struggle to find rolls that would fit. The current 4x4 size is just what the builders built for. The annoyance wasn't so great as to cause us to remodel, but it was persistent and nagging. Yay for this instance of shrinkflation; we don't want or need monster size toilet paper!

I'm sure this respite from the TP hunt will pass. Pretty soon the makers will try to upsell larger rolls of  paper as "abundance" and I'll be hunting for the little old rolls again ... The free market, ain't it great?

Saturday, March 09, 2024

It isn't just about the money

Joe Biden did well in the State of the Union speech. Given where the world is, he could hardly have done better, at least so I think. There's plenty to pick at -- and plenty to push against -- but just consider the alternative... He's still got game.

A lot of people agree. Just look at this representation of where Biden and Trump are getting their campaign contributions showing "Who's donating to whom?" Via JVL at The Bulwark who snagged it from the Financial Times.

Click to enlarge

Unequivocally, I'd rather be on the blue team than the Trump team here. I'm with team Teachers, Nurses and Scientists any day.

Obviously, Trump's got some big robber barons on his side, but he is emphatically not winning the dollar chase. Maybe the big money Republicans don't trust him either. According to CNN

President Joe Biden’s political operation has expanded its financial advantage over former President Donald Trump’s campaign as the two men hurtle toward an expected general election confrontation, new filings show. ...

... The Democratic National Committee outraised its GOP counterpart in January, bringing in $17.4 million and ended the month with $24 million in available cash. That far surpasses the $8.7 million in available cash for the RNC, which marked a slight uptick from the $8 million it reported having in reserves at the end of last year, but still represents its lowest total in about a decade.

Maybe Trump's potential donors assume he'll use their gifts to pay his legal expenses and don't want go there? Seems likely.

The presidential election will not be decided by campaign cash. The two guys are already well known to most every eligible voter. So no ad is going to change things much. But the Dems sure will be able to go heavy, hard, and early to define Trump as the self-centered conman he has always been. 

Here's a nice post-State of the Union sample: