Showcase the great progressive and moral voices

A year and a week ago I attended a gathering of United Methodists working for LGBT inclusion in the denomination. This was in preparation for the General Conference coming 2½ months later. Yeah, it was canceled. The canceled conference was to vote on a plan to split the denomination. We had recognized conservatives and progressives could no longer live together. That’s all on hold. A new date for the conference is 17 months from now. That’s why I haven’t written much about United Methodist issues. The blog Hacking Christianity by Jeremy Smith hasn’t had a lot to say, though I did see a post of interest. It talks about conservatism in the UM church, though it also describes conservatism and thus supremacy in general. Some of what he discussed:

In US politics, the majority powers redirect questions of structural inequality to perceived violations further away from those power centers. The strategy is to redirect ire away from the system that benefits the mega-rich, and towards those who are just slightly better off than you.

They try to get us thinking about those who make $100K rather than those who have $100B. Smith says the UM denomination (and I add the Republican Party) is an example of Girardian scapegoat theory. This definition was taken from a website describing it.

There is a point where there is so much group violence that unanimity (and thus peace and the avoidance of the collapse of the group) can only be restored when all become fixated on someone who can be held responsible for the collapse of unity and order within the group and then expelled, permitting the establishment of a new social unity over against the expelled one…they believe in the culpability of the rejected one (or group), and continue to bolster up this belief by forging prohibitions, myths, and rituals.

So much group violence. Smith didn’t discuss this and I only caught it in a second reading. Smith was referring to the denomination in which conservatives are harming LGBT people and they and progressives are objecting to that violence. In America the violence is being done against those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the poor, the Muslim, the black, the immigrant, the transgender. Again, conservatives are harming people and these people and progressives are objecting to that violence. It sure looks to me that a big part of this scapegoat theory is not only is there so much group violence but the perpetrators of the violence are blaming the victims for complaining. The only way out, according to this theory, is to expel the victims from the group. Smith added that once one group is

cleaved away, after the hand says it has no need of the feet, the leadership will turn to someone else within their group to fixate their organizational angst onto.

Smith cited the Anglican Church of North America. Once it got rid of LGBT people it turned its scapegoating on women. This tactic allows that conservative leadership to disavow responsibility of the split. It also allows the leadership to separate regular conservative members from responsibility. The members can say, “I’m not like that!” Katherine Steward, who wrote a book on Christian Nationalism, spoke about members who can be generous.

And yet all of their efforts are being harnessed in service to this agenda that is dividing our country with animus, degrading our politics, and empowering an extraordinarily corrupt and dangerous leadership. [The Leaders] work very hard to separate their people who follow them from the facts. Because if you can separate the people from commonly-agreed upon facts, you can control their behavior.

Smith wrote: “The question remains whether the majority is ready to claim responsibility.” The free Gaslit Nation episode is all about the filibuster and interviewing the guy who wrote the book on the filibuster (which I’ve mentioned). So rather than wading through all that again I turned to the bonus episode, the one without a transcript and requires a membership to listen to. This one is described as Mega – 53 minutes rather than the usual 20-30 minutes. This episode is titled Disappointing Dems & GOP Autocrats and answers questions listeners had submitted. If the Dems aren’t forging ahead on investigating all that happened leading up to January 6, are we wrong to think there isn’t way to get nasty guy supporters into Autocrats Anonymous? That’s correct. Videos at nasty guy rallies reveal how much of a cult his followers have become. The GOP is beholden to them, that’s their base. Investigations are branded as witch hunts and allow the nasty guy to claim being a martyr. Martyrdom like this is used to get sympathy from followers. Even so, Dems need to use their power to the fullest. Still need to go after the cult leaders, to get a record for history, to get some indictments going, and to dismantle the systems. The process has begun but Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, dismissed white supremacy as a problem. He’s not the man for the moment. We need a real Nazi hunter. Biden’s response to the GOP is too weak. We have a narrow window to respond to authoritarianism. It doesn’t respond to shame or rhetoric. It will respond to laws forced through. It needs strong explanation of what is important and what is still at stake. Biden is a particular problem because he was a part of the Obama administration that didn’t prosecute the criminal elements, domestic and foreign, that opened the door for the nasty guy. The nasty guy was not subtle about what he was doing. Nobody has asked Biden about why he and Obama didn’t stand up to it. Of course, a reason why he doesn’t say anything is it makes him look bad. Of course, it wasn’t just Obama/Biden. Heads of agencies, like the FBI, and Congressional leaders could have also spoken out and didn’t. They want us to believe this was all a fluke and a surprise. All these Democrats are saying “Nothing we can do!” But there is a white supremacy threat, a mafia threat, and a one party fascist threat. And Dems are not addressing those threats. How do we get Democrats to address the threat of GOP voter suppression? The GOP announced that as a goal at CPAC. How do we get Dems to use their power? Get rid of the filibuster. Call your own senators to pressure the conservative Dems to kill the filibuster. Also call Sens. Manchin and Sinema, the actual conservative Dems. In the Texas Freeze Beto O’Rourke and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez went there to help out. They were role models, helping everyone, including those who would have voted against them. This is being bipartisan in the way that matters, being compassionate, being respectful. But Dems didn’t show them off as great people, instead they attacked them from the left. This is discouraging to people under 50 who haven’t seen much of the American Dream. These people are pushing for progressive policies, yet the ones in control of the party are centrist. As for the GOP they have shown themselves to be so anti democracy one should not attempt to be bipartisan with them. Democrats should appreciate and showcase the great progressive and moral voices in their midst, such as AOC and Katie Porter. Americans are drawn to them. After the crime and corruption of the last four years this should be easy. But Dems aren’t. If the Dems don’t eliminate the filibuster they will get nothing done and be destroyed in 2022. They’ll soon realize that and act. Rudy Giuliani cleared out the Italian Mafia from New York, allowing the Russian (transnational) Mafia to move in. During that the nasty guy was an informant, and thus received FBI protection. “Informant” is not the right word, perhaps a euphemism, because it looks like the FBI has been a part of this transnational Mafia. And the FBI has let all the bad guys get into the White House and helped share state secrets. “Protecting an informant” doesn’t justify what the FBI did. And a lot of former FBI people are serving as pundits and refusing to talk (and preventing others from talking) about this FBI history. What to do when progressives appear to be just as autocratic as conservatives? More accurately, what to do when a quick moving and obvious autocrat is replaced by a slow moving one (Dems certainly aren’t trying to prevent more autocratic behavior)? Kendzior says yes, that is the big question. Even in a pandemic we hit the streets in protest, we worked to get a new president and flip the Senate, even turning Georgia Blue. And the Democrat response is not much. They ran on basic policies to all humanity to survive. And they’re blowing it. They need to bring their fire to the big issues such as voting rights. And to bring that fire to the other issues to help us get fired up on voting rights. If Dems don’t the likely response is: they didn’t do anything, why vote? However, if we lose our voting rights we have no chance to get them back. So we need to primary bad Democrats with more progressive candidates. And continue with mutual aid, be good to each other. Biden’s weak response to the killers of Jamal Kashoggi and to the attempted killing of Alexi Navalny will be a long term problem. When Putin and his fellow oligarchs die, who takes over? Their children, who have been shown that their fathers lived above the law. They will solve issues the same way – through murder. There is one big problem of throwing the nasty guy and fellow insurrectionists off social media platforms – their documentation of how they planned the insurrection is gone. Yeah, all of it is archived somewhere, but it isn’t easily available to counter the GOP attempts to erase what happened that day and why. The GOP is setting the frame – the Big Lie still lives – for future historians. And Democrats are letting them. The same thing happened in Reconstruction. A lot of that history was erased and kept out of textbooks. We need to protect and document the truth.