Me no talk good… 
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Which is why I don’t think Theocracy is the end game. Fascism is. The corrupted christian church is just the most readily available and easily accessible tool at hand. It’s country (and world) -wide and has millions of followers already, with a history of supporting horrid ideas like slavery and the persecution of foreigners and queers.
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That’s because the mouthpieces for the extreme GOP position lie. That’s all that “Team GOP vote for anyone with an R on their jersey” needs to provide themselves cover to maintain the pattern. And debating with them only legitimizes their position.
I highly recommend the Ali Velshi piece on MSNBC about the history of the US anti-abortion movement. It’s roots come from segregation and the Brown v Board decision. How the right looked for a replacement wedge issue to drive voters to the polls, and they found traction with anti-abortion.
It all comes from the same place of hate and power-worship. It doesn’t matter if they don’t believe in extreme anti-abortion positions. They believe in something else hateful and selfish, and the coalition that the GOP has put together based on hate and power depends upon each other to survive. So they might not support forced birth but they will vote for it because it’s a package deal with service to their own little bundle of hate that carry around inside them.
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Which kind of brings us around to the original topic. Kind of.
There are a bunch of dupes who believe what they believe (however odious most of us here might find those beliefs) but they aren’t necessarily consciously advocating for fascism. They’re being pulled along in the tide, and will likely end up supporting a fascist regime if they survive long enough.
This kind of gets at that window of communication @orenwolf and others were talking about. Maybe there is a way to get through to some of them. Good luck, those of you who are trying!
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I’d argue that it’s Christian fascist theocracy, though. There is a pretty long history of European Christians specifically seeking to impose their faith on others, after all. There is something about that combination of faith and fascism that animates a segment of the Christian far right… Some of this is a reaction to the real and perceived failures of secular modernity. And they’ve employed the language of opposition to capitalism, too (much as fascists did in the 20s and 30s). I think that it was more likely that during that period, the appeal to family, church, and the state was partially cynical, but it seems that the current crop are pretty authentic in their deployment of these things as their driving force.
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I don’t think I’m disagreeing? I just get the feeling that if the dust ever settles after this then the Christian side will be an afterthought. The religion will fall away and it will be all about power and control and the original shape of it will be lost to the worship of Strength and (white) Power. If people already believe in one thing then it’s so much easier to get them to believe in two.
Like, the actual flavour of theocracy doesn’t matter - it just so happens to be Christian in this iteration. Again. Fucking Nazis, again.
So, yes. I agree with what it is right now, but it could turn so much worse if we don’t keep saying “No!” to those people.
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That’s the problem.
They do understand. They think there’s a larger game where what happens on earth largely doesn’t matter because Jesus. That they are trying to bring about the end times, that Jesus is going to come back and cast us sinners into hell, and create heaven on earth. That they are part of this great plan to make America Great Again and that we are under “Judgement” from God for our wickedness.
They FULLY understand that what they’re doing will catch some innocents up in their genocides in what, I imagine ,they’d call “accidental victims.”, but they also believe that those innocents will be given mansions in heaven so it’s all good.
Since death, and pain, and all that aren’t finite conclusions for them, NOTHING they do wrong has any consequence because they’ve “won their mansion in heaven.”
That’s what we’re dealing with here. Yes, they want abortionists and women who get abortions to be put to death for murder. Yes, they are pro death penalty. Yes, they know it gets the wrong people sometimes but , “God will sort them out.”
That’s why there’s just no room to debate/discuss.
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That was the idea the first time it happened.
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Think I would have preferred proof I was wrong instead.
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Could be… But we know the particular flavor right now, of course. Religion has been a particularly strong recruitment tool in recent years, because for the faithful, it’s deeply personal and is existential to them. It was pretty easy to convince them that they are living in the end times and that Jesus wants them to fight for his reign on earth.
Also, there is William Pierce and his church that was influenced by Positive Christianity…
His is/was not the only white nationalist church either.
Depressing, I know…
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We don’t really have to care which particular fashions they’ll be wearing this time and what precise manifesto they’ll have if they win before deciding to stop those fuckers this time.
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The evangelical right is 99% there with the prosperity gospel crap.
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Wait, no, fuck!!
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Back in 2016, then-North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory was praised by many social conservatives for supporting NC House Bill 2 —the so-called “North Carolina bathroom bill,” which banned transgender Americans from using public restrooms for the gender they identified with. Christian fundamentalists praised McCrory for, as they saw it, being willing to defend “traditional values.” But in the 2022 midterms, ironically, the right-wing McCrory finds himself being slammed as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by MAGA extremists.
While I understand where you’re coming from, to those who have to live with the effects of the policy that results from the GOP rhetoric, it makes no difference whether the person implementing that policy is doing it for attention or because they are hateful assholes. Right now in Alabama, the state is forcing any trans person under 19 to detransition. That will be a death sentence for some of those that are unable to escape.
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i go back to what i said before about creating boundaries.
white people who believed fervently that the enslavement of other humans was okay – they were never going to be convinced by “talking it out”. and they just continued on afterward into reconstruction the same way as before.
the white people in the “middle”, the tide of people who tacitly approved slavery by going along with it – maybe they could have their minds changed, but the only way to do it wholesale was to actually just outlaw slavery. it was the only thing that would reach them all at the same time, not one at a time.
this happens with a lot of things. people don’t know how to change, even when they want to or might be open to doing so.
as a completely different example. take the concept of being “out”. people realizing their friends, family, and neighbors were gay… it changed everything. and gay marriage? support skyrocketed after those marriages started to become legally recognized.
generally: exposure to things helps people become comfortable with it. so if you want to change people’s minds, change what they see. which means not worrying about changing minds on civil rights issues.
people will come along eventually… we’ve seen them do it time and time again. but you have to change the laws first
( same goes for gun control in my opinion. start by well regulating guns. people will see the world has not fallen apart, that actually it improved, and the vast majority will ultimately be fine with it. )
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Are there legions of people who vote Republican without understanding the implications of their vote? Yes, there probably are. The book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” addresses this very issue.
However, I do not find their lack of understanding exculpatory. Far from it, I would almost go so far to say that their blithe, willful ignorance is almost worse than straight-up malice. Every vote for a Republican has real-world harms on real people. Not caring enough to know that is still a sin in my book.
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The Internet and its ability to efficiently harness wedge issues and widely spread “sticky misinformation” to huge audiences.
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Do they really not understand, though? Over the past few decades Republicans have become pretty overt about what they are about. Their platform is simply about stoking culture wars and hurting anybody who doesn’t fit in a narrow-minded world view. They aren’t even trying to hide this anymore. They are no longer “saying the quiet part out loud” by mistake.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, “I don’t approve of how Trump [something], but”… and there’s always a “but” and it’s almost always followed by some selfish rationale. These are people who will literally excuse any terrible thing Trump or Trump Republicans do as long as someone is getting hurt in the process. Clearly people liked what he said given the tens of millions of people that voted for him twice and gave him a consistent 90% approval rating among his party. A significant chunk of the population continue to refuse to believe that Trump lost the 2020 election. To them, progress is a zero sum game — if someone else gets ahead, it’s setting them back.
The original post talked about moving the Overton Window, but the Overton Window has moved so far toward the right wing extremes that the other end of the window is little more than “Republican Lite” at this point. We’re somehow in a world where Liz Cheney is now considered a moderate Republican, FFS.
Probably not, but the difference is that by and large Democratic policies are intended to help people, not hurt them.
Republicans are extremely good at marketing and messaging and have no problems blatantly lying through their teeth to get ahead. They have been so good at this that for decades they have made it so that Democrats can barely do anything when in power because they are so busy fighting defense that it becomes impossible to get ahead which only depresses turnout during elections and furthers the cycle. Meanwhile Republicans continue to game the system to further entrench their minority majority power across all facets of government. Furthermore they are the ones who can further dominate the discussion because they own so many media outlets thanks to Reagan-era deregulations. The right has OAN, Fox News, and NewsMax on cable, and then Sinclair dominates local network coverage across the country. How many progressive TV stations or cable networks are there? (The answer is none.)
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It had better be a very large book…
