Of Dictators and Hate Groups and American Democracy

 Let me say for the record, I do not hear much political talkw ehn I am out and about. I usspect most people have more to do than sit in front of their televisions watching Fox News O r MSNBC. I write posts like this because I am not sure that ignoring Trump's calls for a dictatorship will go away. 

Column: Believe Trump when he vows revenge on the media. MAGA shock troops are already on the attack

The name of the relatively obscure MAGA Republican attorney Mike Davis, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and worked for Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, has reportedly been bandied about for the position of attorney general in a second Trump administration. Davis is a walking, talking testosterone-poisoned MAGA caricature, promising to “rain hell” on Washington if he gets a Cabinet appointment. “We’re gonna put kids in cages,” he told a MAGA Republican YouTube host in September. “It’s gonna be glorious.”

He has threatened to jail and deport the left-wing MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag,” Davis tweeted last month.

 I had a conversation with a bus driver today who repeated the talk about a stolen election and Biden's corruption. I have a bet with him that the Republican impeachment talk will backfire on Biden.

Catholics have supported right-wing groups, abortion driving them onward and into the arms of Protestants. Catholics predominate on the United States Supreme Court. This would have bothered earlier generations of American right-wingers. I know I had relatives who would ahve raised eyebrows at theis situation - if it were 50, 100 yeara ago. I wonder if Ameircan Catholics know their history any better than do most Americans; they may find allies enemies in short order. For those wondering about that hisotry, read 100 years ago, the KKK planted bombs at a U.S. university – part of the terror group’s crusade against American Catholics from The Conversation.

The KKK is most infamous for violently terrorizing African Americans. But in the 1920s its hatred also had other targets, especially outside the South. This version of the KKK, known as the Second Ku Klux Klan, harassed Catholics, Jews and immigrants – including students and staff at Catholic universities like Dayton, where I am a historian of American religion. All of this is the focus of my 2013 article, “Hearing the Silence.”

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Actually, being Christian wasn’t enough. To be 100% American, in the Klan’s view, meant that you were a white Protestant Christian.

In the years between 1890 and 1920, a flood of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came to America, a large percentage of whom were Catholic or Jewish.

While the Klan was – and still is – strongly antisemitic, in the 1920s its members were particularly worried about Catholics, as there were many more of them. This was certainly the case in Dayton, where 35% of churchgoers were Catholic, thanks to an influx of immigrants who worked in the city’s factories.

In response to the Catholic “threat,” at least 10% of Daytonians – some 15,000 people – joined the KKK in the early 1920s, with some estimates placing the number as high as 40,000. 

Pay attention to that formulation of American while reading ‘The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism 

Itching for a fight, Carville is challenging the speaker to a debate at Louisiana Christian University, a small Southern Baptist campus in the town of Pineville.

Carville calls LCU “the epicenter of Christian nationalism”.

“The debate I want begins: ‘Resolved, Christian nationalism is a greater threat to America than al-Qaida,’” Carville said. “I want students to see real debate and make up their own minds about what kind of America we want.”

Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported Pressler paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by a man who alleged that Pressler sexually assaulted him as a high school student in Bible study. The law school never materialized.

I had no idea Franco had sucha  hold on Americans until I read Jason Wilson's Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?

Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US.

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Nevertheless, in October, Josh Abbotoy asked in an article at religious-conservative outlet First Things: “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” The article was a development from a May post on X, formerly Twitter, in which Abbotoy had more affirmatively claimed that “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco”.

Abbotoy is a former Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, and executive director of American Reformer, a far-right Christian website. The article did draw some criticism from others on the right: James M Patterson wrote that “There is nothing in 1930s Spain that can instruct Americans about their Constitutional order.”

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The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy.

For Bray, they offer the same “rightwing arguments against ‘pure democracy’ that have existed for hundreds of years: if you give people too much power and autonomy, it’s going to be chaos and lawlessness, and a strongman will need to step in and limit or suppress it entirely”.

For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”.

I doubt many Spaniards want to see a new Franco. As I told my bus driver today, too many people nestled within  the comforts of and cossetted by the protections of liberal democracy want to see the end of that same liberal democracy will find the results are not beneficial to them. We have a lot of stupid running about America saying stupid things without knowing what the loss of freedom menas fo rthem. They think they will be protected by the cause they promote. They should look at the careers of Ernst Rohm and The Old Bolsheviks.

In closing, I will let the Only Band That Matters have the last word on Franco:

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