Roy Moore Is The Anti-Trump, And That’s Exactly What Makes Him So Dangerous
I heard a commentator on CNN say the other day, “we are living in the ebbing tide of religiosity, and unless this country has a come-back-to-Jesus moment, we are going to see a lot more events like Charlottesville, because these young white men need something to believe in.” Not so fast, my friend.
The success of the left-wing in the past three years has much to do with the inherent superiority of policy proposals such as single-payer healthcare, tuition-free public college, $15/hour minimum wage and other entitlement expansions. But it also largely has been due to, and cannot be separated from, the fact that being a leftist is fun, it is exciting, and it is a social activity. From a remote social media vantage point, the Boston counter-protest looked a lot like Lollapalooza. 20,000 people, young and old, singing songs, unified, but absolutely successful in their goal of being opposed to hateful speech because they had the numbers and the energy. The ability of leftist activity to be fun and social does not undercut the seriousness of many of the left’s organizing aims, but in fact enhances the left’s ability to recruit and maintain members. From Chapo Trap House to Bernie Sanders to Bree Newsome to Carlos Rosa, the inchoate leftist movement has a diverse set of leaders largely unified in purpose and passion, if not tactics, imagining a world as it could be, not working with a world as it is, and they are recruiting more every day. By contrast, the roughly 100 members of the alt-right isolated in the gazebo that day in Boston looked like they were having a positively miserable time standing together publicly behind their beliefs.
The tremendous physical barrier of empty space, reinforced by the police, between the 20,000 leftists and the 100 alt-right members only reinforced that wearing a MAGA hat in public is a recipe for social exclusion. One simply cannot put one’s Trump support on one’s OKCupid — the alt-right has had to invent special dating sites like Nazi Tinder just so that they can get laid. In fact, right-wing discourse is so toxic to stand behind publicly that there are entire “Altbook” networks where alt-right members have pidgin versions of their real Facebook profiles, but where they can post, share, and like overtly right-wing views. It is truly telling regarding the nature of explicit right-wing discourse in today’s society that our era’s Young Republicans, who decry the safe space in theory, necessitate and have constructed safe spaces of their own both physical and virtual. Being publicly alt-right is social suicide, but being a Christian in the One Nation Under God will always, always be a safe choice.
A recent article on the right-wing web journal Jacobite, an alt-right blog that serves as counter-programming of sorts to the socialist website and journal Jacobin, entitled “Political Violence Is A Game The Right Cannot Win,” made an illustrative point about the differences between the way the right and the left in American politics organize:
The first thing righties have to understand about Lefties is that lefties have a lot more practice building their own institutions, and assuming control of existing institutions, than their counterparts on the right do, and they share their practical experience with each other. Righties who like to build churches will build a church and worship in it. Lefties who like to build churches will build a church, write a book telling people how to build churches, go out and convince people church-building is the thing to do, run workshops on how to finance, build, and register churches, and then they’ll offer to arrange church guest speakers who’ll come preach the Lefty line.
Righties need to do a better job of teaching each other. And not just teaching the right-winger closest to them. The most organized groups on the Right are the pro-life and RKBA activists; everybody else on the Right should be learning from them.
Though perhaps “righties who build churches” have not had much interchurch organization in the past, intrachurch organization, organization within the church and within the community where the church exists, is essential both to the day-to-day religious activity that takes place in these churches and for the fulfillment of the church’s larger faith-based goals. Evangelical Christians can be the poorest poor and the wealthiest humans, they can be black, they can be white, but the one thing they are, and this is the key, is organized and committed — as well as largely conservative in their policy preferences and issue set coherency. Megachurches are where impressionable, God-minded people come to be radicalized by capitalist pastors like Creflo Dollar, who repackage Nietzsche’s will-to-power as what Jesus would have wanted you to do (much like how Mike Cernovich repackages will-to-power for the alt-right in his Gorilla Mindset and MAGA Mindset books). In the mind of pastors like Creflo, who preaches to a late night audience of millions on cable and flies around in a private jet to different megachurches, being super-rich is a manifestation of God’s plan for you, the megachurch consumer. That is why they advocate for the flat tax in these megachurches (the Koch brothers want a 17% flat tax, while Trump wants 15%), and when the collection plate comes around, thanks to dangerous new deregulation from the Trump administration, all the dollars from that collection plate can go right into the coffers of political campaigns. The Citizen’s United decision set fundraising inequality in political campaigning back several election cycles, but if this unlimited political giving from churches and other religious institutions remains unencumbered, it could have equally devastating effects. Now, churches have every reason to organize with each other to fulfill shared political aims rooted in faith.
I am not suggesting that the left or leftists have nothing to fear from the alt-right or its members. But the characterization of the alt-right’s most passionate activists as resource-poor, poorly-organized, and perpetually online is largely accurate. What fundamentalist Christians and the alt-right have in common in framework, however, is the seeking of, as KellyAnne Conway put it, “alternative facts”. From “intelligent design” to the virgin birth, which fundamentalists regard as fact, Steve Bannon understands that Christian fundamentalists, like white nationalists, have a worldview premised on illogic. It is also a worldview premised on the inerrancy of its leaders plans: whether “the Donald” or God Himself, every decision He makes, every event that occurs to oneself is all part of a twisted game of 3D chess. Because of this, both the alt-right and the Christian fundamentalist right can be easily used as “useful idiots”, foot soldiers to fulfill Bannon and Mercer’s toxic vision of the American dream; a white apartheid state in North America.
Naturally, the team of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, with assists from Seb Gorka and Sarah Palin, have already identified the potential in grooming candidates that can appeal to both the alt-right and the fundamentalist Christians, with an eye on the 2020 election and an understanding that Donald Trump will not make it to Iowa before Mueller closes in. They understand that these candidates must possess outsider credentials so that they may adopt the illiberal populist framework that made the Trump campaign so successful. They also understand that their integrity must be unquestionable — they must have demonstrated, unlike Trump, that they have put their beliefs and their God above their safety and their financial security. To this end, they are supporting Roy Moore in the Alabama primary against Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump’s pick, Luther Strange. The Moore vs. Strange runoff has already made the Alabama special election the most expensive race in state history. A loss for Strange, who possesses orthodox center-right policies more in-line with “the swamp” than the drainage thereof, would reveal McConnell and the Republican Party’s dirty little secret: they have completely lost control over their own nominating process, and it is Bannon and Mercer who are running the show.
All one has to do is watch this five-minute clip to understand the pure retail political power that Roy Moore possesses. In many ways, he is the anti-Trump. He wears paisley ties, sure, but it goes deeper than that. Whereas Trump freestyles and bulldozes rhetorically, Moore pauses to read the room and allow his audience to process, modulating his voice at key intervals with the skill of a stump revivalist. He possesses a deep knowledge of American history that he can twist and interpret to his benefit. While he reads from historical documents on the stump and name-checks the Battle of Gettysburg, George Washington, and other figures and events with the ostensible intention that he seeks to educate and teach his audience, rather than merely rile them up, he cherry-picks facts and carefully omits others that would call into question his general thesis. Mentioning Washington’s argument for the necessity of virtue and morality in America as a reason why America must return to Christ, he ignores that fellow Founding Father™ Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1779 in the Virginia Statute for Religion Freedom, said:
[N]o man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
One can already tell that Roy Moore is going to keep the Washington Post fact-checkers very busy with his frequently deployed weapons of appeal to authority, historical cherry-picking, and subscription to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The problem is none of his prospective voters read the Washington Post — not on the newsstand, and definitely not on Facebook.
You cannot run the typical Democratic playbook against a candidate like Roy Moore. Evangelicals are resistant to attacks of “deplorable” because they have God on their side. You cannot attack a man of God in the same way you can attack Donald Trump. You also cannot tone-police Roy Moore. A recent The Hill article found this quote by Roy Moore from the above video problematic: “We were torn apart in the Civil War — brother against brother, North against South, party against party. What changed? Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting. What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God.” The fact that he said “reds” and “yellows” certainly indicates he has not kept up with the racially progressive lingo of the past several decades, but people on the right tend to reject this sort of tone-policing prima facie because they hear the overarching message of what Moore says. If the larger point of Moore’s speech is that the races must unify, picking and choosing magic words that indict the overall quality of that message can be perceived as mere efforts by the left to lead towards more racial division, in their thinking.
As we can see, Roy Moore is no Trump-lite or Trump clone. In style alone, this is the conservative answer to Barack Obama, an articulate, principled outsider who gives great speeches. “Hitler gave great speeches, too” was a common refrain from McCain supporters in 2008. Well, we haven’t even talked about Roy Moore’s policy proposals yet.
Politically, Roy Moore is to the right of Donald Trump. Not only does he want to build the wall, repeal Obamacare, eliminate Common Core, encourage school vouchers, institute the flat tax on income, and defund Planned Parenthood, but he is determined to re-litigate the culture battles with respect to LGBT rights. He believes not only should there be no transgender people in the military, there should be no homosexuals in the military period. He believes marriage should be between one man, and one woman. He opposes civil unions for gay and lesbian people. He believes the United States should not support the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a human rights treaty that articulates the international human rights of children, which has been ratified by 196 countries around the world.
Finally, Moore wants to go to Washington and mandate a national day of prayer and humility. Going to Washington and mandating that the political establishment humble themselves before God may sound like the right thing to do, but make no mistake — this is fascism plain and simple, with Christianity being the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The combination of these political beliefs with his background as a former State Supreme Court judge who once hung the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, saying that “I wanted to establish the moral foundation of our law” demonstrates that most importantly, he is sincere and committed with regards to these positions. He will not leave his voters in the lurch like Trump the con artist. This is why Bannon believes in him, this is why billionaire hedge funder Rob Mercer believes in him, and this is why the left should know him. He is the latest vehicle for their toxic ideology, and they will never stop funding people like Mr. Moore until their tens of billions of dollars in ammo is completely exhausted. They will never stop until the effects of the deregulation began with Citizen’s United, and continued throughout the Trump Administration, are completely reversed.
So how does America stop Moore and demagogues like him? Exposing Roy Moore will be very difficult. One will get nowhere attempting to debate Christians into becoming atheists. What is achievable is demonstrating to his audience of pious Christians that Roy Moore, like Trump before him, is a false idol, the sort of golden calf that so infuriated Moses when he came to deliver the true word of God from atop mount Sinai that he smashed the Commandments — all 613 of them — that were written by God’s fingers Himself on large clay tablets. Exasperated, Moses climbed back up Mount Sinai as the stunned Israelites watched from below. After 40 days, he emerged from the summit with a new set of tablets, bearing all 613 Commandments, but this set was different. It did not come from the hand of God. Rather, they came from the hand of Moses, whose hand enscribed the words from God’s voice. Exodus 32–34 tremendously undercuts Moore’s Christian fundamentalist ideology: Whether Moses was inerrant in copying the word of God is between God and Moses. The word of God is not truly set in stone; the word of God is for believers to interpret as best as they can, and their destinies are theirs to create as they themselves see fit. Therefore, to stop a candidate that places the power solely in God and in himself as the one true arbiter of His will, anyone to the left of Moore must run a candidate that places the power squarely in movement politics and in the hands of the voters.
In the meantime, when the media paints Luther Strange’s defeat as a loss for Trump or a win for Trump, it is one’s duty to ignore that, and recognize it as a loss for America that a candidate this radical was allowed to get this far. America may have one shot to prevent Roy Moore from altering the course of our politics forever, and that is the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, who is currently beating Moore in a general election by four points. But at last count, Doug Jones has raised $158,000 total to run against Moore, and the Democratic Party, being complete and utter fools without a 50-state strategy despite what Tom Perez assured Democrats he would personally oversee, is asleep at the wheel when it comes to fundraising for Jones, a former hate crime prosecutor with a sterling reputation locally. Though he is not a perfect candidate, please give what you can to Doug Jones. He may be the only one at this crucial early stage who can stop America from having another Republican president, funded by Bannon and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and fueled by an army of small-dollar fundamentalist Christian voters, volunteers and donors, in 2020.
