U.S.: Centrist Democrats manufacture consent

Two passages from my reading today:

"The freakout among centrist Democrats is an expression of a deep, deep terror at the realization that regular people are starting to understand that the long-reining political paradigm does not represent them or their interest and are rapidly becoming open to alternatives. This is a very large threat to both their political power and their income. The commentators and pundits you’re no doubt seeing lose their minds have made an incredible living off peddling moderate political positions on behalf of the wealth class to anxious liberals and supposed independents. They’re hired constantly by the party and its stakeholders to do everything from give talks to strategize and make advertisements to going on corporate media to offer milquetoast opinions in order to manufacture consent. They get book deals, are invited to the wealth class’s shindigs, and are continually glandhanded into class solidarity. The Democratic Party, as a political representative and partner of the wealth class, is inextricably intertwined with these people and its purpose is their purpose.

Recently I published an article about the problem of the entrenched Democratic machine. An entrenched machine isn’t just reliant on stakeholders, it requires a superstructure that voices the party line and attempts to keep the base in check. This is why you are bombarded with “vote blue no matter who” rhetoric when it’s convenient and why it falls by the wayside when insurgent candidates emerge who better voice the desires of the base. This is why you are consistently fed article after article by corporate media about how “dangerous the Left is” while you’re also bombarded by pieces that normalize things like AI, flock cameras, anti-trans rhetoric, and the need for the party to “reach across the aisle” to fascists. When there aren’t alternatives - say, independent media or social media or insurgent candidates - you’re supposed to be convinced this is just the way things are."

— Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches Mailbag, August 17, 2026

"We should not bother to treat the arguments seriously. We should not behave as if transphobia is the bitter fruit of benign misunderstanding.

The mainstream, obscene contempt for trans people is no mystery. Americans may be bigoted but we are not imbeciles: we know that people fear what they do not understand, and we know that that fear can be harvested and manipulated for political gain. We know these things because we experience the fear and bigotry ourselves and we see them in our friends. Transphobia has been incubated on the center-left for at least as long as I’ve been reading what it has been printing. It has been proliferated for years by that great mirror of the vast American middle, The Atlantic which has been at the forefront of this “battle” since long before Trump announced his first campaign. And it is no coincidence that that organ continues to hector that Harris lost the election because Biden was too woke. “She talked about trans people too much” When? How I wish she had! “and about protecting immigrants” Did she? Did Biden? Somehow I can’t recall “and both of them bellowed with pride repeatedly that Harris was a black woman running for the highest office in the land” Right?? If we’re going to get slashed for championing the vulnerable I wish we could at least be guilty of the courage.

The Atlantic and its fellows in the middle package anti-trans sentiment in prettier packaging than Trumpites. The center left doesn’t want to be brave, it wants to be seemly. Bigotry is less vile when it is seemly. That is how much of America likes its hates. And we have so many of them. They are what propelled the unseemly hate to high office: Trump did not swell his base, he merely failed to ignite the fury of the opposition. The fat, comfortable middle refused to turn out and vote because the fat, comfortable middle has been fed on seemly hatreds.

The middle does not express its hates the way Trump does but, well, don’t they basically agree? After all, when we press them on it, the thing they most fear from Trump seems to be his unseemly manner. They don’t like a scene, and the scene is what they will spend the next four years screeching about while trans children grow fearful."

— Celeste Marcus, CIS Or Subhuman, Liberties Journal, November 2024

Also:

I wrote this because most journalists facing this pressure can’t. The paper we count on to check authoritarianism spiked an investigation into the Democratic Party because the party’s lawyers threatened to sue. Holding authoritarians accountable starts with holding your own side accountable.

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— Adam Bonica (@adambonica.bsky.social) August 17, 2026 at 11:05 AM

No, Trump isn't popular, but that just makes him more dangerous. If an election is real and fair, he'll lose it. He has to rig the election if he wants to stay in power.

Incredible polling news for Donald Trump: his approval is still above water in 3 states (Idaho, West Virginia, Wyoming). Those states are real and almost 4.4 million people live in them He is underwater in every other state in the country, plus DC (where he is -83) www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

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— Amanda Katz (@katzish.bsky.social) August 24, 2026 at 11:18 AM

"As for the “big tent”, the Democratic Party made it clear in 2024 that they have no room for people forced to live in little tents. Like the GOP, they mock refugees and support a genocidal regime, Israel, that creates them. They supported Israel’s massacre of Palestinians, literally covered their ears when voters begged them to stop it, and refused to take voter demands to Abolish ICE seriously. Their “big tent” does not include ICE captives or the anti-ICE protesters they demonized until recently.

The “big tent” is for DNC consultant glamping. It is pay to play, and pay to prey.

This may sound harsh — but you should be harsh on pedophiles, mafiosos, and genocidaires. You should question those who excuse them. Forming a coalition with people with whom you don’t agree on every policy, but with whom you do agree on basic tenets of freedom, is healthy and productive. Forming a coalition with people who murder and rape children, or with the enablers who protect those people, is not."

— Sarah Kendzior, Midterm Madness: Your questions answered on elections, tech oligarchs, dirty journalists, and more. Aug 29, 2026

"There are many reasons why the immediate response to the threat of a radicalized MAGA movement returning to power was so inadequate. Crucial among them was the fact that the question of how to react was being discussed amidst an engineered intellectual and political climate that actively privileged a position of acquiescence. The major narratives coming out of the 2024 election all strongly suggested that the only reasonable thing to do was to accommodate the incoming MAGA regime: The 2024 election was a referendum that revealed the “will of the people”! America has undergone a major “realignment” and a “rightward shift”! If so many people vote for Trump and his movement, how could they possibly be so bad? Doesn’t MAGA actually have some good ideas? Shouldn’t we seek common ground? Besides, liberal democracy is weak, defeated – you gotta face reality!

* * *

That is precisely the idea that animates the MAGA regime: Trump was installed by a referendum revealing the one true “will of the people.”

We must fight such assertions tooth and nail.

* * *

I want to be very clear: I despise the idea of the noble Trump/AfD voter who cannot – must not! – be blamed for their political choices. I resent the expectation that we all reach for exculpatory explanations, no matter how implausible, to preserve their innocence, to sanitize them as “regular folks” who can do no wrong. Perhaps they didn’t really mean it! They were deceived by cunning demagogues! They are forced to vote for the extremists because of economic desperation and because arrogant liberals were being so mean! Stop it. Have a little respect for these voters. I mean this sincerely: We ought to take them seriously, grant them agency. And that means we can hold them accountable for their political choices.

However, acknowledging this is still not the same as arguing that everyone who voted for Trump is an extremist who is fully on board with what the hardcore MAGA ideologues want to do to America."

Thomas Zimmer, Warnings and Lessons from the Struggle Against Trumpism, Democracy Americana, September 5, 2026

The Guide To Anti-Trans Democrats In The 2026 Elections, By State These are the Democrats that LGBTQ+ people may wish to avoid this election cycle. Erin Reed, Sep 08, 2026

"Imagine building a firewall. The wall remains intact, but the fire behind it keeps growing. At what point do you stop admiring the strength of the wall and start asking why nobody has put out the fire?

German politics has just such a firewall or Brandmauer, designed to keep the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) away from real power since the party emerged in 2013. No matter how many votes the AfD wins, the theory goes, Germany’s democratic parties will refuse to govern with it. After the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, when the AfD, led by Ulrich Siegmund, narrowly missed winning an outright majority, the Brandmauer is still standing, yet the flames beyond it are getting bigger.

* * *

At the same time, Germany’s institutional alertness to the threat of the far right has descended into ritual. Each AfD advance produces shock, condemnation and another firm promise that nobody will work with it. The language reassures Germans, like me, who remain inside the democratic consensus, but does little to reach those who have left it. Worse, it allows the established parties to frame protecting democracy as indistinguishable from the protection of themselves.

Germany’s democratic parties must now do something harder than blocking the AfD out of government. They need to show that pluralism can still produce decisive leadership, that economic change does not require abandoning whole regions and that German identity can mean something beyond ancestry or the colour of one’s skin. They must actively compete with the AfD and defeat its ideas—not merely try to quarantine it."

— Germany’s firewall against the AfD isn’t working As the party’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt shows, blocking the far right from coalition government is not the same as defeating it. Raza Hussain, Prospect, September 09, 2026

Equality Organizations Struggle Over How To Handle Anti-Trans Democrat Endorsements: Equality Ohio gives Amy Acton a B after calling trans women men. HRC endorses multiple Democratic candidates who have taken major anti-trans votes. EITM investigates. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, Sep 09, 2026

Elon Musk’s PAC Drops $100 Million On Anti-Trans Ads Targeting Dems Who Already Capitulated Anti-trans capitulations didn’t stop Musk from spending big to attack these Democrats. s. baum, Erin in the Morning, Sep 10, 2026

Democrats seem headed for big wins, but one avenue for self-sabotage would be adopting R's framing on trans rights. @billiejsweeney.bsky.social spoke with insiders incl Lanae Erikson of Third Way and Rep. Sarah McBride for this substanial piece of new reporting. assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

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— Assigned Media (@assignedmedia.org) September 29, 2026 at 7:09 AM

You can work together until you can't. s. baum reports:

"The [Equality] PAC further sent Erin in the Morning a similar statement for this piece. “As we have previously stated, we recognize that no Member will agree with us on every vote, and that disagreement is a normal and necessary part of the legislative process,” that statement reads. “But we have been very clear that there is a bright red line: we will not accept candidates or Members using Republican rhetoric that actively harms, scapegoats, or targets members of our community as a campaign strategy. In this case, the Congresswoman [Marcy Kaptur] crossed that line.”

Take the antidote: Psyching yourself up and in

Recent liturgy

"When people are burning books and trying to take away your access to education, what you should be doing now is reading.
When people are amping up the volume so that you don't know which way is up and left from right, go get quiet, right?
When you are feeling so disconnected from yourself, literally tap in.
When you are feeling like everyone around you is out to get you, go be in community, right?
Like, the antidote is in front of us. It is the opposite of what they are presenting. ... what you have to do is force yourself to do the opposite.
When I want to be alone is when I reach out. Right?
When I want to scream is when I get, like, quiet and still." — Danielle Moodie (48:28–49:10, 49:45–49:58)

And

"We don’t need to figure out a perfect world right now. What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality. We need to stop seeking escape and seek instead plug in, play a part, take some action out in this world that so desperately needs us. It’s time to accept reality, accept that it’s ugly out there, and accept that we’re the only ones who can change this world. The forces of fascism rely on you tuning out, running from reality, indulging in their fantasies. We have to reject their lies, reject the carrots they dangle, and instead run toward reality and toward active participation in this fucked up world." — J. P. Hill

And

"Rejecting fascism's reality generation – its illusions – is easier when you believe (correctly) that nothing is forever and that the pendulum never stops swinging. Sometimes it swings hard, sometimes it barely swings at all, but it always swings. Today you are told to believe the pendulum has been snapped off and thrown into a landfill. It's a nice story for those who want permanent power. Look closely though and you'll see the pendulum, ticking back and forth like it always has.

* * *

Opposing these people is as easy as not believing their bullshit. Laugh at the shadows cast upon that cave wall you keep in your pocket, the one that tells you what is real and what is not. Reject their messaging. Counter it.

* * *

The regime is commanding you to believe a lie: That is has no underbelly. Stop listening. Stop dooming."

— Denny Carter (Sept 25, 2025)

And

"There are times when I’m in denial about my own fear. ... I feel like I can start using the word evil, now, to describe those in power. They’re heeeeere, and they generate and foment hatred, they...encourage violence, they hoard wealth and resources, and don’t think twice about the harm they’re causing. They revel in it.

It walks, it lives, it breathes among us. It doesn’t require a soundtrack or admission fee. We may disagree on what to call them—authoritarians, fascists, whatever—but they, those in power, are the true evil, the real specters. They’re directing the waking nightmare we’re in.

Assemble your magic kits, your spells, your righteous poems, gather your wits, your allies, and your accomplices. See a showing of One Battle After Another. Take good care. I’m with you in spirit and in solidarity."

— Wendy C. Ortiz, "evil," Mommy's El Camino, October 5, 2025

Maybe this too, I guess

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Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism, Nov 21, 2024

The problem with telling people the world is ending: In the face of terrible crises, it can feel right to shock people into action. But what if that has the opposite effect? Jay Van Bavel, The Guardian, 18 Oct 2026

A laundering political trope: MAGA 'isn't like that — I mean, they're like that, but in different words'

A common trope:

Try to understand those people on the other political side. Why are they the way they are? Not for gauche irrational motivations, but for the dressed-up polite-company version of the exact same thing, which we've rephrased to sound rational.

Here, the NYT is applying this trope to asisst the image of Trump supporters...

And of course we get the obligatory laundering of Trump voters. The message in these op-eds is always the same: Democrats can never do anything right, Republicans can never do anything wrong and centrists can never address any issue on the merits.

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— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 7:48 AM

"not because they believe Mr. Trump's florid demagogy…but because they [believe Mr. Trump's florid demagogy.]"

— Scott (@smadin.net) Jul 27, 2024 at 7:50 AM

...and this trope is also commonly used to make the anti-trans movement sound reasonable.

Try to understand them. They don't hate trans people or wish to see them discriminated against or made unsafe, they just are [working for a society in which trans people will be generally oppressed].

There's mere repetition, but there's also plausible deniability, aka normalization.

Jason Sattler, "Trump's superpower is plausible deniability," Jul 27, 2024:

"You could say that repetition is Donald Trump’s superpower. And it’s definitely a strength. Anyone could do it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could do it! But we just don't. And I think you get why.

* * *

But there’s an even more potent and invidious power...

* * *

Someone who does talk about it is Ian Haney López, who wrote the book Dog Whistle Politics, where I learned about this strategy that has propelled Republicans into generations of political success. It’s called “plausible deniability,” which I think most people think of or discuss as “normalization.”

Sattler then quotes Haney López:

"What Trump understands is that if he can provoke the press, provoke the Democrats into calling him a racist, that actually helps him because he is telling a story to his base in which they are not racist, they are acting out of high principle, they're trying to defend country and community and family. But one of the core claims that's being made on the right is that demands for racial justice demands for integration demands for affirmative action demands for diversity, equity, inclusion, that those aren't actually animated by a sense of justice, but rather they're motivated by a sense of revenge and a sense of hatred of white people.

And in this telling the right is constantly saying to white voters, "People are racist against you. They blame you for things that you weren't responsible for. And they also think that you're racist just because you're white and that's racism against you."

In that context, Trump and J. D. Vance understand that there's this kind of complicated triple move that they can make. They can say something outrageous: “It's an invasion. They're poisoning the blood of the country.” That's move number one. Move number two, wait for people on the left to say, "Hey, invasion and caravan and blood of the nation. That's racist language.” And then they respond to that by saying, “I never mentioned race. I was just talking about immigrants. I was just talking about protecting our country and securing our border.” That's move number two. “I didn't, no racism here, nothing to see here.” And then comes move number three. Then they go on to say, “But, hey, wait a minute. You just accused me of racism. And that's the real racism."

In short: Say or do genuinely terrible things, and normalize it among your supporters as some manifestation of their true beliefs. Wait to be justly criticized. Say that your opponents are the truly terrible ones because they have deeply insulted everyone who agrees with you.

So when Trump "wears makeup and a wig like a clown," Sattler says, that very "clownishness itself is part of the plausible deniability. Even his fiercest critics feed that power by assuming there must be some harmless explanation for his laser focus on dividing and conquering America. There’s not."

Literally or seriously?

I feel this is connected to the "literally or seriously?" discourse.

I left this online comment on July 7, 2024:

"When Trump says he wants to be a dictator, that he'll jail everyone who stands in his way, that popularity in the form of TV ratings matters more to him than anything else, etc., we're told not to take him literally because he's "just joking."

But when he pretends not to know or support the people who are working to make his dictatorship a reality, we're told we have to take him literally and believe him.

The messaging from Trumpworld about when we have to believe Trump's words is dependent on whether our doing so would be advantageous to Trump.

If Trump's phrasing is ugly and can be used against him, we're asked to hear it, fear it, and forget it — to absorb the message in our psyche and yet to erase our conscious awareness of who said it so it won't affect Trump's public image and no one will hold him personally accountable for it.

But if Trump's phrasing is a carefully phrased lie to make him look good, we're asked to swallow it, amplify it as if it were true, and to assert our confidence in his benevolent intentions because he's told us directly what he believes.

Both communications are strategic. Either he reports his true intentions and demands we do the cover-up work for him, or he lies about his intentions and demands we believe what he said."

Trump has assembled least diverse US government this century, study shows: President has chosen white men for key posts at expense of women and people of colour, Brookings Institution finds, David Smith, The Guardian, 21 Nov 2025

"If you’re lucky, you’re asking: what the hell is a chud? A chud is the guy who insists “I ain’t political, bro” while speaking exclusively in dog whistles. He’s not MAGA-branded enough to scare the sponsors, but he’s never far from MAGA gravity. If MAGA has gone full gestapo empire storm trooper, the chud lives in the margins — in that cowardly, carefully curated space where ambiguity is a choice, not a condition."
— Daniel Crudup, The Rise and Fall and Stagnation of the Chud: They suck so bad yet exist so much. Feb 4, 2026

"Joe Rogan seems confused. Theo Von is not sure the Donald Trump now in the White House is the same person he voted for in 2024. And Andrew Schulz has done a full 180-degree reversal on Trump’s trustworthiness.

The Stand-Up Podcast Bros, it seems, are finally taking a seat.

Somehow shocked that a second Trump term would entail more than fun UFC memes and busty, hubby-seeking trad chicks in red hats, the pod-fluencers of the “manosphere” who helped persuade millions of young men to go full MAGA in 2024 are now confronting the realities of Trump’s 2025/26 Retribution Tour.

Geez, you mean Trump is really going to unleash legions of ICE stormtroopers clad in helmets, Kevlar vests, and balaclavas to round up mostly non-criminal immigrants — um, some citizens, too — and disappear them into detention centers? There was no way to foresee that happening, well, other than those “Mass Deportation Now!” signs delegates gleefully waved at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.."
— Tom Schaller, Manosphere podcasters have second thoughts: What have they wrought? Feb 27, 2026

"The Trump administration is urging a federal judge to reject a bid to stop an upcoming UFC fight at the White House, arguing that a lawsuit from two Virginia residents against the event was brought too late to justify judicial intervention now." (CNN, June 9, 2026)

Talking about a UFC fight at the White House: The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Nate Wilcox (June 10, 2026).

Judge OKs Trump’s UFC Fight Taking Place At White House The bloody tournament and other activities on the National Mall are expected to draw tens of thousands of people. Brandi Buchman, HuffPost, Jun 12, 2026

Two political communication strategies: De-silo and counterframe

De-Silo

The Ink spoke to Anat Shenker-Osorio about messaging. Her podcast, Words to Win By, is about political messaging. One approach is "to expand fights for justice so they encompass not just the concerns of one group, but those of the entire community." The Ink writes: "After our discussion about how such a shift had transformed the fight for abortion rights, we asked her about what other issues needed de-siloing. What immediately came to mind was the battle for transgender rights and against renewed hostility from the right toward LBGTQ+ rights overall."

Shenker-Osorio says:

"Marriage equality, by the way, is a perfect example of de-siloing. The story about gay marriage used to be, 'Well, we should feel really sad for these particular people because they don't have this right and here's why Bob and Jerry or Lisa and Cindy deserve this right.'

But success was all about shifting the argument from ensuring that those people can have their thing to marriage equality. Love is love. Love makes a family. That's a universalizing message. I'm a straight lady, married to a man and I also believe that love is love. I also feel that my relationship is made out of love and it's made out of making a family."

She continues:

"...trans folks have absolutely been siloed and that is the right wing’s doing. It's part of the tactic...anytime we exceptionalize an issue, we are left in this very vulnerable place where the only people for whom this issue has saliency are the people who view themselves as directly impacted."

Counterframe

Advice from Bryn Nelson:

"Understanding the tactics used to spread disinformation could help disrupt the storyline, [Francesca] Tripodi told me. Unmasking the motives of snake oil sellers also might reduce some of their clout. Simply fighting their lies with data, however, may be a losing proposition, especially when they insist that they too deal with facts, not feelings, while doing the precise opposite.

[Daniel] Kreiss said elevating the voices of conservatives who support the science of global warming or gender-affirming care may be another way to scramble politicized narratives with a memorable counter-frame. Emphasizing the public health crisis that can result from bans on evidence-based care, such as endangering women and increasing the risk of suicide among transgender youth, also might provide an effective rebuttal. In particular, Kreiss says, getting people to talk publicly about what they or loved ones lost after being conned by false narratives can help drive home the very real and often very personal costs of all the lies."

We Must Face Down the Expanding Anti-Reality Industry: Exposing the antiscience playbook reveals the antiregulatory motives of its deep-pocketed bankrollers, Bryn Nelson, Scientific American, May 24, 2024

If you're afraid of your own anger, it's hard to stand up to political bullies

"Dr. Mark Goulston on why Democrats keep losing: They're afraid of their own anger. Psychiatrist Mark Goulston says Democrats are traumatized and eager to hide their rage. To win, they will need it." Chauncey DeVega. Salon. July 11, 2022.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction to the interview:

"In a recent essay at Medium, Dr. Mark Goulston, a leading psychiatrist, former FBI hostage negotiation trainer and the author of the bestsellers "Just Listen" and "Talking to 'Crazy,'" offers a provocative explanation for the Democratic Party's weakness. He argues that Democrats are "highly conflict avoidant" and that such a temperament has made them "mincemeat to the vast majority of the GOP who is allegiant to Donald Trump."

In my recent conversation with Goulston, he expanded on this analysis, arguing that Democrats keep losing to the Republicans because they refuse to speak passionately, clearly and in declarative terms to the American people. He warns that Republicans, especially Trump loyalists, are bullies who embrace and welcome conflict, and that Democrats do not fight back effectively because they refuse to acknowledge the reality that bullies must be confronted and cannot be negotiated with or defeated with rational arguments. Goulston further explains that Trump's followers remain loyal to him precisely because of his antisocial and anti-human behavior, not despite it.

Goulston also explains that many members of America's political class and the news media are naive or in denial about the nature of human evil, and therefore continue to express shock and surprise at each new revelation about the obvious crimes of the Trump regime. At the end of this conversation Goulston shares the advice he would give to Biden and other Democratic leaders about how to break their pattern of self-defeating behavior and formulate a winning plan to defeat the Republicans and preserve American democracy."

You can check out the article at Salon.

Also:

Professor @esglaude warns that American society is mired in death and grieving from the covid pandemic and neofascism but is profoundly immature and unable to grapple with reality because of white racial innocence and other delusions.https://t.co/T5bYPL0f9E

— chauncey devega (@chaunceydevega) July 18, 2022

Also, telling extremist people that their ideas are within normal and acceptable bounds may just embolden them to become more extreme. It's as if you're giving them permission.

How does one gain political converts?

Pat Buchanan's 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower included the line "White America is an endangered species" and the accusation that white Americans who tolerate demographic shifts suffer from "ethnomasochism". In June 2018, Buchanan appeared on “The Laura Ingraham Show” and asked "whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character — political, social, racial, ethnic — character of the country entirely." While acknowledging that "separating migrant kids from their parents" looks bad "politically and emotionally," Buchanan says that the president nonetheless has got it right on "the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West".

What's he on about? Charles M. Blow, who quoted the lines above on June 24, 2018 — and who also cited a recent Brookings report that, since 2007, less than half of American newborns are "white non-Hispanic" and furthermore that, among white non-Hispanics, there are more deaths than births — says that "[w]hite extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety" is at the "core" of the Republican administration's current immigration policies.

Blow writes:

All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigration policy, voter suppression, Trump economic isolationist impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social justice protests. Everything.

Trump is president and is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologetically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. It is no more complicated than that. These immigrant children crying out for their mothers and fathers are collateral damage, pawns in a political battle to wring strict legislation out of Congress — medieval torture displays meant to serve as deterrents.

* * *

These immigration policies are for people who conflated America with whiteness, and therefore a loss of white primacy becomes a loss of American identity.

The hard-right endorsement of guns similarly manifests racism, as argued in a tweet from several months ago. The link goes to an academic paper from 2015.

One thing worth paying more attention to is the extent to which extreme pro-gun politics is demonstrably a form of white identity politics; the evidence in favor of this proposition is growing (per @aleka1972): https://t.co/9FzxxDrCKQ

— Christopher Federico (@ChrisPolPsych) February 22, 2018

But what to do about it? On June 25, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" discussed how to persuade the "42 to 45 percent of Americans" who currently support Donald Trump to withdraw their support. "How do they move away," he asked, "from a candidate, from a politician who is using race constantly, who is lying every day, who is subverting the rule of law every day, who works every day to undermine the power of the federal judiciary?" “I don’t think calling them racists and I don’t think kicking them out of restaurants," he said, referencing a current debate about three Trump administration officials who faced backlash in restaurants, "will move them. At the end of the day, politics is about making friends. It’s about converting people to your cause.” A guest agreed, saying that comparisons between the Trump administration and Nazi Germany are especially excessive and counterproductive, and he suggested that a better response is to portray the president as "simply not up to the job. That's it. He can't do the job."

This is a problem. What if Trump supporters are indeed motivated by racism, and what if the Trump administration is indeed uncomfortably close to authoritarianism — and what if calling out that truth causes his supporters to dig in their heels and thus worsens our collective situation? Should opponents of Trump paint him as someone who "can't do the job"...of what? Of enacting enough racist, authoritarian policies? Doesn't portrayal of him as an ineffective, hapless thug risk inspiring white people to turn to another candidate who is a more brutal thug? I suggest that we have to identify specific good things he cannot accomplish and identify politicians who are capable of doing those good things. I also suspect that pointing toward goodness will occasionally necessitate calling out racism and authoritarianism as goodness's opposite. Can we do this without offending and distancing some people? No. What will the result be? I don't know.

Scott Jennings wrote on June 25 that the left was wrong to think that "outcry over this decision" — namely, the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border — "would fundamentally alter the political landscape." After all, this policy is consistent with Trump's platform, and some of his supporters "may even like him more" for it. He added that "whatever Trump's family separation position cost the Republican Party politically has more than been erased by hysterical comments like those from Democrats like Rep. Maxine Waters, who called for the public to 'create a crowd' to 'push back on' Trump administration officials....voters may not want to trust control of the government to people who believe in mob justice over civil discourse."

Ryan Cooper in The Week on June 25 offered a different perspective: "For someone legitimately concerned about political incivility, the far right would rationally get about 90 percent of the attention." (David Runciman, in his book How Democracy Ends, released in the US in June 2018, made a similar point: “He governs from outside the bounds of democratic civility, which requires recognition that there can be truth on the other side. He is making a mockery of the system that is tolerating him.”)

Cooper continued:

But civility worriers have internalized the fact that the right could not possibly care less what they think or say (unless it is to laugh in their faces for being prissy and easily bullied). It feels pointless to hit Trump for being an indecent monster, because it basically is. Nobody will ever convince the hard right of anything; if we want to stop them they must be politically defeated.

So instead, the left gets half or more of the attention. Discourse anxiety caused by the president of the United States being a disgusting oaf gets transplanted onto a handful of powerless college students and peaceful protesters. The only accomplishment is to sow disunity and bitter arguments among the opposition to Trump.

But how to defeat the right without convincing at least some of them?

A.R. Moxon:

Here lies the danger of “appealing to better angels.”

Appealing to better angels is the echo chamber. Supremacists already believe they are good people. They believe they are supreme! Of course they believe they are good. In fact, they believe they are the best people, better than all the other people, and will tell you so if you ask them, or if you don’t. Reassuring somebody captured by a supremacist spirit that they are good? That’s the echo chamber. They know they are good. Me telling them that just reflects that belief back to them and to others, until the matter is lost in the wash of sound.

If I engage in the ceaseless effort to persuade them, I reflect back to them their own belief that they are the ones who must be persuaded before any change is possible.

If I continually make the exact same points in counter to their exact same points, I create the impression that I also don’t have anything new to say, and in my increasingly simplistic sloganeering I teach them to speak the language of justice in service of injustice.

By continually reaffirming the good in them, I allow them to reinforce an unearned moral high ground that they already intend to seize by force and to defend with murder.

* * *

I think “preaching to the choir” is actually the most persuasive thing that somebody can do, so that’s what I try to spend my time doing.

Persuasion? Great. Excellent. Good. But let’s not persuade by entering the same old echo chambers that reinforce supremacy’s self-established power dynamics. Let’s instead be persuasive by talking about the better world we can imagine, and then by joining with other people who have imagined it to do the actual work of making it real, without bothering to seek permission to change from those who will never give it, because they have built their identities around never changing.

The offer to explain observable things to people who have already demonstrated an unwillingness to observe them is not an offer to persuade them to change. It’s an offer to to be persuaded by them, to not change.

It’s a waste. It’s an obstacle to the real work.

It’s an echo chamber.

— Preaching To The Choir. A.R. Moxon. The Reframe. September 17, 2023.

The forces behind political polarization

If you say, Disagreement is a social problem, your interlocutor is prompted to respond, I agree. Perhaps that's why, as Thomas Zimmer writes, "The least controversial thing one can do in American politics is to decry 'polarization.'"

Of course "polarization exists as an observable phenomenon in distinct areas and dimensions"; the problem, Zimmer says, is with "a narrative" that "dogmatically demands we put it at the center of our interpretation of the present and accept it as the key challenge the country is facing today." By tending to ignore counterexamples of non-polarization, it highlights "what historian Matthew Lassiter has rightfully criticized as an 'artificial red-blue binary.'"

First of all, many Americans share values, including across liberal and conservative identities. Placing the focus on ordinary American voters who supposedly have diametrically opposed viewpoints (maybe they do, maybe they don't, so what?) may simply serve to obscure the problem that "authoritarian reactionaries [are] taking over one of the major parties." Zimmer posits: "Every serious scholar and observer of American democracy, politics, and history agrees that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would constitute an acute threat to the future of democracy and constitutional government in this country. Would we really be better off if Democrats *didn’t* see him and the party that has elevated him as a major problem?" See here: "One party is dominated by a shrinking white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That's not 'polarization.'"

Secondly, where among ordinary individuals the left-right gap is indeed "very wide, and has been widening," for example "on guns, pandemic response, the question of whether you should accept the results of an election your side doesn’t win or stage a violent coup," the blame doesn't lie on both sides; rather, "this has been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right." So for example, on acknowledging climate change as an urgent problem, "Democrats aren’t moving to an 'extreme' position, certainly not by international comparison – they are getting in line with what is the position shared by nearly all serious experts in the world. Meanwhile, a sizable percentage of Republicans is drifting further away into fantasy land."

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The excellent civil war history Battle Cry of Freedom meticulously accounts how the rise of a new technology (newspapers) empowered wealthy slavers to gin up race hatred + panic among poor whites so they would fight and die to protect the slaver’s wealth. I think of that maybe three times a day.

— Spencer Windes (like “winds a yo-yo”) (@spencerwindes.bsky.social) February 17, 2026 at 10:54 PM

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Jonathan Haidt explains in a recent essay that we become politically polarized when centripetal or centrifugal forces are imbalanced. These are the forces that draw us together or pull us apart.

“Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks.”

The “good kind of identity politics,” according to Haidt, is exemplified by MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech that ”framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption.” Identity becomes centrifugal “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions” identifying which groups have power over which others and furthermore when you say that they must “fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male.” When students are told to examine everything “in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people....This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.”

Polarization is a problem insofar as it prevents people from working together to maintain a democracy. “Here," Haidt says, "is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life.” Therefore the Founding Fathers of the United States designed a constitution as if it were “a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.” They “built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances. But they also knew that they had to train future generations of clock mechanics. They were creating a new kind of republic, which would demand far more maturity from its citizens than was needed in nations ruled by a king or other Leviathan.” Today, however, “our government is divided into two all-consuming factions, which cut right down the middle of each of the three branches, uniting the three red half-branches against the three blue half-branches”.

Haidt referred to a previous essay in which he argued that polarization was caused by the following trends. In his words:

1. The two parties purified themselves ideologically
2. As politicians polarized, so did many Americans
3. The urban-rural divide grew into a gulf, reflecting diverging interests and values
4. Immigration was rising, leading to larger racial and ethnic divisions
5. The net effect of all these trends is that partisans dislike one another more intensely
6. Meanwhile, rule changes and culture changes in Congress made it harder to maintain cross-party friendships
7. The media environment changed, making it easier for partisans to confirm their worst suspicions, and putting greater pressure on politicians to play to the extremes
8. As the costs of campaigns increased, politicians have become increasingly afraid of offending their party’s donors
9. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country
10. The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship

Nina Khrushcheva has a more specific observation about clock mechanics. She applauded moments in U.S. history where politicians defended the procedural checks and balances even against other pressing moral demands, such as when "Secretary of State Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, despite his hatred of slavery, in order to save the union" and when "Robert Taft denounced the Nuremberg Trials, despite his hatred of the Nazis, to defend the fundamental US legal principle that a person could not be criminally charged on the basis of a retroactive statute." (Both of these examples were featured in President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.) She notes the current initiative in late 2017 "to pass a tax bill that would benefit America’s wealthiest households at the expense of saddling the country with more than $1 trillion in additional debt" and she implies that the process could have benefited from "thorough public committee hearings" and with less willingness on the part of politicians to "trade their honor for the approval of their tribe."

Adam Garfinkle gives seven reasons for the decline of trust in society. The first three or four overlap with Haidt's reasons for polarization.

1. heterogeneous demographics driven by immigration
2. the lack of a "common language to discuss good and evil" and the rise of "Christian neo-fundamentalism"
3. less face-to-face interaction due to technology and class segregation
4. institutional and bureaucratic failure
5. media portrayals of the world as a mean place
6. breakdown of family leading to emotional insecurity
7. too much state intrusion

Being open to changing one's beliefs according to evidence

Various recent studies have found that American conservatives are more likely to share fake news, more prone to self-deception, and less likely to change their beliefs in response to evidence. They use simpler language and many of them are falling prone to authoritarianism. This is discussed in a July 2020 New York Times article.

Starting fights

Legal actions for political purposes can worsen polarization. In May 2018, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said: "It's important that we not exacerbate the dysfunction and the polarization in the society that helped Donald Trump rise to power in the first place." He explained that impeachment needs to be an action taken to rectify a specific abuse. "If we were to use the impeachment power simply as a substitute for buyer's remorse, saying 'We thought this guy was terrible, but he's even worse,' if we were going to use it against ambient badness, rather than clear abuse of power — we would really use the impeachment power to undermine, rather than save, our democracy."

Being guided by polarization

Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman conducted studies in 2014 and 2016 showing that Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change exist but they tend to support whatever policies are backed by their own party.

YouGov opinion polls in August 2018 found dramatic differences between Republicans and Democrats regarding opinions toward the n-word slur against black people. 90% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton, but only 53% of those who voted for Trump, agreed that white people should never use this word. Trump voters were even less likely to use the word "racist" to describe this behavior; while 86% of Clinton voters agreed that "it's racist for whites to use" that word, only 33% of Trump voters thought so. And while 86% of Clinton voters "wouldn't vote for [a] candidate who said it," only 26% of Trump voters held themselves to the same standard. The Washington Post story points out that, only twelve years previously, this gap barely existed; then, "55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans said that the n-word was offensive."

The United States is polarizing faster than other countries

In early 2020, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jesse Shapiro, Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, showed research that (according to a news release from Brown University) "present[s] the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in 'affective polarization' — a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined — the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden." The study shows that "polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased."

The US is polarizing asymmetrically

"Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. And much of the extremism in the GOP has been tactical, where some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guardrails as to what is permissible." (Julian Zelizer, CNN, Dec. 20, 2022)

Local journalism matters

Marc Ambinder wrote for MSNBC on Nov. 5, 2020:

there is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers. If you live in a town with a thriving local news ecosystem, you are more likely to vote.

Reporting

Norm Eisen discussed journalistic norms, telling Chauncey DeVega for Salon in May 2022:

"That [old] norm deems that if you're going to provide one side of the story then you have to provide the other side of the story. If something happens, you need to report it neutrally. Editorializing is for the editorial page. The inferences, the interpretation, that doesn't go in the news. But if you have a norm-transgressing figure like Donald Trump, then those journalistic norms have to adapt to that circumstance. We can't be static. That is why journalism in this country is stuck."

At first glance, reporting both sides might seem to reduce polarization. But maybe it's the opposite, since it keeps people stuck in a "debate" that perhaps they don't need to be in. If one side is clearly better (however "better" is defined), then what needs to be done is accept the recommendation of the side, take some action, and move forward, while continuing to listen to objections (if made in good faith) and maintaining nuanced awareness of the situation.

To be clear, I don't think there's much value in being performatively uptight about this stuff anymore. The world's a nightmare. Be a human being. Reporters who spend most of their time trying to convince everyone they've lobotomized themselves are the ones lying to audiences. https://t.co/irTOrtkrIT

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 18, 2023

Please see The Conspicuous Absence of White Identity from Yascha Mounk’s “Trap”, Dannagal Young, 3Streams, Oct 20, 2023. Young refers to a

"well-documented process of partisan 'social sorting' following the parties’ racial realignment, as Americans from distinct socio-demographic groups came to identify more with one of the two major political parties, leaving us with a Democratic party that is racially and ethnically diverse, suburban and urban, secular and agnostic, and culturally liberal, and a Republican party that is more homogeneously white, Christian, rural, and culturally conservative.

And while the sorting has certainly happened on 'both sides' its outcome has been decidedly asymmetrical, resulting in a Republican party whose homogenous identity alignment gives them exceptional 'group fit.' And when people 'fit' nicely into their social identity category (they look the way most of their team looks, worship the way most of their team worships, live where most of their team lives, and live how most of their team lives), their social identity becomes salient. When an identity is salient, it is easy to leverage, activate, and mobilize through identity threats."

Responding to an October 2023 profile in the New York Times, here's A.R. Moxon talking about the meaning of safety (No Beliefs, Just Intentions, The Reframe (Substack), Dec 17, 2023): One family in the New York Times profile "needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government." The other "wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time..." Moxon continues: "And I’m told the problem is that both sides are polarized, and both sides actually want the same thing, even though they can’t get over their disagreements over silly politics."

Urban-rural divide?

"Over the past 30 years, the American political landscape has been characterized by a growing divide between rural and urban voters, almost as if they’re on two opposing teams, according to Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

But the divide is confined largely to white Americans, Mettler and collaborators have found in an examination of the racial and ethnic facets of the trend.

When it comes to politics, Black and Latino residents of rural America differ far less, if at all, from their urban counterparts than do non-Hispanic white residents, the researchers report.

* * *

“A Rural-Urban Political Divide Among Whom? Race, Ethnicity, and Political Behavior Across Place” published in Politics, Groups, and Identities on March 31, with a summary of the findings appearing in the United States Politics and Policy blog of the London School of Economics, June 7. Mettler is corresponding author, and co-authors are doctoral students Trevor E. Brown, Marissa Rivera and Gisela Pedroza Jauregui.

— Growing rural-urban divide exists only among white Americans: Kate Blackwood, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell Chronicle, June 20, 2024

There's gonna be a lot of discourse about Hispanic voters. In January I ran around the RGV trying to figure out how voters we're feeling about Trump and Republicans and they had a lot to say! www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/hispanic-voters-swung-trump-south-texas-1235499072/

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— Nikki McCann Ramírez (@nikkimcr.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 10:00 AM

There are more surge voters than swing voters

Anat Shenker-Osorio says that the importance attached to "swing voters" is based on "median voter theory...a very old political science idea...[that] rests on the notion of the electorate as a fixed group of people. And so someone presumably occupies the ideological center of it."

In reality, though, "the composition of the electorate changes in every election," and the people in the ideological center (however exactly we may understand that) aren't the most important group to reach, if the question is how to win the election. There are always many people "who have never voted before, whether they've just aged into the electorate, never voted before because they just became naturalized, never voted before because they didn't feel like it, or are very unreliable voters." If they can be persuaded to vote, they're "surge voters" (new voters), and there are many more of them than there are "swing voters."

Five things Harris — and you — can do to close the deal Messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio on five dos (and don’ts) for the Harris-Walz campaign’s critical final sprint. The Ink. Oct 26, 2024

Sources

“The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities.” Jonathan Haidt. City Journal (Manhattan Institute). Dec. 17, 2017.

"Profiles in Cowardice." Nina L. Khrushcheva. Project Syndicate. Dec. 18, 2017.

"In Way Too Little We Trust." Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest. December 13, 2017.

Image by Oimheidi from Pixabay

I treat "both sides" and "down the middle" as a kind of mainia, a force that can take over the news mind, presenting new ways not to make sense. For reasons obscure, Amazon is doing a live election night program with Brian Williams as host. Here's @oliverdarcy.bsky.social on what might go wrong.

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— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen.bsky.social) October 30, 2024 at 8:46 AM

Scientists

I don't normally do this, but since I am very concerned about this Science letter www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... by the NAS president on the political polarization around science that is making the rounds. So let me say my 2c 1/

— Tobia Spampatti, PhD (@tspampatti.bsky.social) November 15, 2024 at 1:43 PM

September 2025

From a desktop screen: www.dcinbox.com enter search term & select "visualize"

Use of the word "evil" in official congressional e-newsletters, over time, by party

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— Lindsey Cormack (@dcinbox.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 7:52 AM

The "radical right" is responsible for two thirds of all deadly acts of "political violence" in the United States according to the right wing's very own Cato Institute.

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— Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 6:16 PM

‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...

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— Petter Törnberg (@pettertornberg.com) July 7, 2026 at 6:14 AM

It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2026, Petter Törnberg

My experience is that “polarization” diagnoses are often *designed* to do this. When someone talks about our present problem as “polarization,” I don’t automatically presume bad intentions, but I suspect them, and I proceed with caution.

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— A.R. Moxon (@juliusgoat.bsky.social) July 8, 2026 at 7:46 AM

Is the American soul sick? Differing perspectives in 'The Left Hand of God' and 'Tempting Faith'

Originally blogged on 10 December 2006 for JVoices.com, a site that is going offline. I compared two books on politics and culture published that year, Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God and David Kuo's Tempting Faith.

The Left Hand of God

God's "left hand" and "right hand," as Lerner defines them in his book The Left Hand of God, describe worldviews based on generosity and compassion (on the Left) and on competition and vengeance (on the Right). These two worldviews help explain the differences in politics and in religion associated with the Left and Right.

Lerner, a rabbi with Ph.Ds in philosophy and psychology who edits Tikkun Magazine, writes:

“...although the right may talk about love or invoke God, what they have in mind is the Right Hand of God. The Right Hand of God is the hand of power and domination, the vision of God in which love is presented as consistent with celebrating the pain inflicted on those who are perceived as evil. ... It’s this vision of a muscular religion, backed by a God of power, that ensures that no one will ever call them naïve, because in their actual politics they are not siding with the powerless but cheerleading for the powerful." (pp. 20-21)

The voices of fear and hope, the Right Hand and the Left Hand of God, “tend to operate below the surface of consciousness, [and] people often are not fully aware of which voice they are responding to at any given moment. Often they act in ways that seem on the surface contradictory... (p. 51) He explains that right-wing religious institutions manage to preach love while encouraging their followers to “align with a harsh, militaristic, and self-interested politics that is based on the (unstated) assumption that all that “love, kindness, and generosity" talk has no real world application outside of that church or religious institution." (p. 110)

I would quibble with Lerner on some points. First, the metaphor of God having two hands seems to imply that these two worldviews are different sides of the same coin and that they balance each other out, yet Lerner favors the Left and doesn’t advocate anyone running to the ship’s other deck, thereby creating a visual image of a one-handed god. Second, while solidly in favor of a woman’s right to have an abortion, he implies that the only truly spiritual emotional response to abortion is grief. Telling people how to feel generally does not work, and giving people permission to broach a taboo while encouraging them to feel guilty about it is, ironically, a classic Right Hand of God technique to gain power over them. Third, Lerner suggests that the question of same-sex marriage be solved by having the government refer only to “unions" while leaving the word “marriage" for religious institutions. He needs to consider how the ordinary inquiry “Are you married?" would translate into the invasive question “Are you religious?" Only the most determined atheists would delight in providing a negative answer, while millions of others in interfaith, spiritual-but-not-religious partnerships might feel “married" even though no clergyperson pronounced them so. But these opinions, which are slight missteps in my view, do not greatly mar the book, as Lerner does not claim to have all the right answers to these questions. He prefers to focus on the larger picture of a philosophy motivated by compassion, and this he achieves well. While acknowledging that people have shown meanness since time immemorial, he critiques the influence of a godless capitalism that has helped promote the anti-ethic of a “rip-off consciousness" — the idea that it is normal and acceptable to cheat one’s employees, customers, and government — leading to an all-encompassing “cynical realist" approach to life that replaces idealist, hopeful, generous intentions. Lerner believes that mixing spiritual values with left-leaning politics has the potential to bring about an ethical revival in the United States.

Tempting Faith

David Kuo’s Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction makes an interesting companion read because Kuo, like Lerner, diagnoses the political Right as being more interested in its own power than in healing the world. However, he speaks as a conservative political insider rather than as a progressive critic. Kuo was President Bush’s former Special Assistant and former director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Disenchanted after the faith-based charity initiative he helped to launch was stripped of most of its funding (he was promised he would be able to offer $8 billion in grants to faith-based charities, but ultimately only $30 million became available and it was controlled by another department [p. 211]) and applied in a discriminatory fashion (non-Christian groups were dropped from the application piles in at least one instance [p.215]), Republican speechwriter and politician David Kuo decided to reveal these inside power struggles.

As Kuo puts it, “Christian leaders are supposed to be putting Jesus above and before all things, enabling them to recognize and resist this seductive [political] power. Instead, it looks like they believe a political agenda is the most important thing." (p. xiii) If that is so, what drew him to the Republicans? “It is easy to say that I became a Republican because I went through a religious conversion, felt guilty about an abortion, or just needed a job. Those things are all true," he admits. “But if the Democratic Party had displayed a similar interest in addressing these cultural problems, I would have run to them. Instead, they embodied a hostility toward these issues and toward Christian involvement in the political world that was increasingly known as the last acceptable form of bigotry." (p. 52)

He gives some practical advice to those spiritually-inclined Leftists who would like to begin dialogue with spiritually-inclined Rightists: be curious about right-wing, right-hand-of-God celebrities and cultural influences. Demonstrating awareness of their existence is a form of respect. Ignorance harms well-intentioned diplomacy, as demonstrated by this blunder:

“They [Democratic aides for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid] asked me who to talk to. I started giving them names–like Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council. 'Who?' 'What’s that?' I mentioned the support for environmentalism at the National Association of Evangelicals and again they said, 'What’s that?' ... That Terry McAuliffe [leader of the Democratic National Committee’s faith-based outreach] didn’t even know the author of The Purpose Driven Life showed a staggering ignorance. Was it any wonder evangelicals preferred hanging out with Republicans?" (p. 256)

Lerner and Kuo arrive at different conclusions. Kuo recommends that Christians take a two-year “fast" from national political campaigns (from the 2006 publication of his book until the 2008 presidential election) to reconnect with their faith and values on a more personal level. (Kuo, newly diagnosed with a brain tumor, retired from the White House and became a fisherman, so that helps explain why he perceived the contemporary moment as a convenient and necessary time to take a break.) Lerner, by contrast, begins by asserting that “there is a real spiritual crisis in American society" that needs to be addressed (p. 14) and recommends that readers join his Network of Spiritual Progressives to begin infusing spiritual values into politics immediately; he does not suggest there is any greater insight to be gained by waiting. By contrast, Kuo says he once thought America had a spiritual crisis and that it was his job in the White House faith-based charity office to help fix it, but, after seeing the spontaneous outpouring of spiritual activity immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he concluded that “[t]he American soul wasn’t sick." (p. 188)

Books

Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

David Kuo. Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. New York: Free Press, 2006.