GQP Increasingly Embracing Fascism In New Poll

As Dean Obeidallah explained earlier this year after the MAGA/QAnon violent seditious insurrection on January 6, The GOP was sowing seeds of fascism and violence long before Trump:

“Fascism” is a word we tend to throw around often, and often with little regard to its true definition. But in the case of President Donald Trump and for parts of the GOP, it applies not hyperbolically, but accurately.

At its essence, fascism — while exhibiting other characteristics, such as attacking democratic institutions and stirring up anger — employs undemocratic methods, especially violence, to acquire and retain power. At the moment, an American fascist movement that uses violence to acquire and hold on to power is no longer a hypothetical; it is already underway.

This is why the siege of our nation’s Capitol by Trump supporters to prevent the congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory cannot be dismissed as a one-off. These events are just a show of coming attractions.

The Hill reports today, Stunning survey gives grim view of flourishing anti-democratic opinions:

Those who buy into former President Trump’s lies over the 2020 election and those who watch the far-right [fascist propaganda] channels that amplify his rhetoric are increasingly embracing anti-democratic opinions and even contemplating political violence, according to a new poll.

The poll from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute paints a troubling portrait of a growing segment of the public that is increasingly unmoored from reality as it embraces [QAnon] conspiracy theories about child abduction and stolen elections.

It found a deep divide between those who trust right-wing media outlets and the rest of the nation — and even a divide between those who trust Fox News and those who trust outlets like One America News Network and Newsmax.

The poll found about 3 in 10 Americans, 31 percent, believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, including two-thirds of Republicans and a whopping 82 percent of those who trust Fox News more than any other media outlet.

Among those who trust far-right outlets like One America News Network and Newsmax, 97 percent say they believe the election — which even Trump’s own cybersecurity and election security officials agreed was the safest and most secure ever conducted in the United States — was stolen.

One in 5 Americans believe in the core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy that “there is a storm coming soon,” while 1 in 6 believe the United States government is controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking ring.

The same share, 18 percent, say they agree with the statement that America has gotten so far off track that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The poll found 30 percent of Republicans agree that violence might be warranted, compared with 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats. Those who buy into the farthest-right media outlets are even more likely to contemplate violence; among those people, 40 percent agree.

“I’m not an alarmist by nature, but I’m deeply disturbed by these numbers. I think that we really have to take them seriously as a threat to democracy,” said Robert Jones, the founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute.

The rising acceptance of political violence is playing out in courtrooms in Washington and across the country as rioters from the Jan. 6 insurrection face charges and, increasingly, prison sentences for their roles in the mayhem. One man who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor was sentenced to six years in jail in August. On Thursday, two members of a neo-Nazi group were sentenced to nine years in prison for a scheme to attack a rally of gun control supporters in Richmond, Va.

The FBI has reported in recent years that white supremacists pose a critical threat to the safety and security of the United States.

Jones said the growing share of Republicans and arch-conservatives who buy into the false and violent rhetoric are transforming one of America’s two major political parties into a party of racial and religious grievance, one that sees the ominous other encroaching on what it means to be an American.

Just 29 percent of Republicans say life has changed mostly for the better since the 1950s, before civil rights movements ushered in new protections and more rights for minorities, women and the LGBT community. The share of white evangelical Protestants and white Catholics who say life was better 70 years ago — when the average American made far less and lived for a shorter time than they do today — has also declined precipitously in recent years.

“There’s a kind of wistfulness and nostalgia, the power of the mythical past,” Jones said. “It is an ethno-religious identity, it is a white Christian America and specifically a white Protestant America that people are harkening back to.” [Jim Crow state sanctioned racial segregation America.]

Paul Rosenberg explains How extremist Christian theology is driving the right-wing assault on democracy (excerpt):

If this development perplexed many on the left, it was less surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.

[O]ne of the movement’s leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:

Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society — in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that “he has made us kings and priests,” and check the rest of that verse, it says “for dominion.” So we are kings for dominion.

Rachel Tabachnick provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy”:

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as “Christian reconstructionism,” come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word “theocracy” in favor of “theonomy,” for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, “Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth.” The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the “seven mountains” of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.

[C]hristian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is “about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions.” This dispensation would include, “according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion.”

Note: Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism is something which only began in the 1950s in response to the Supreme Court striking down “separate but equal” state sanctioned segregation (racial apartheid) in Brown v. Board of Education. It is racist white Christian Nationalism which is foreign to the American religious tradition (outside of the old Confederacy). What they actually seek to “restore” is white supremacy under the guise of religiosity. This fundamentalist cult religion is anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian, and adopts the language of white nationalism. Embracing the QAnon conspiracy theories is antithetical to Christianity.

The Hill continues:

John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former top official at the Republican National Committee during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, said the data reflected a wholesale reinvention of a Republican Party that once aspired to Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill.

“Back in the 1980s, Republicans aspired to be the party of hope and opportunity. Now it is the party of blood and soil [a Nazi slogan.]. The culture war is front and center, and for many Republicans, it is close to being a literal war, not just a metaphorical one,” Pitney said. “Republicans have a nostalgia for an America that never really existed.”

The poll found Republican voters far more likely than Democrats to argue that religious or nativist traits are important to being an American: 9 in 10 Republicans, but only two-thirds of Democrats, say speaking English is important to an American identity. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans said both being born in America and being a Christian are important to being an American; more than half of Democrats said those traits were not important to an American identity.

Eighty percent of Republicans said America is in danger of losing its culture and identity, and 98 percent of far-right television viewers agreed [Tucker Carlson and his white nationalist “white replacement theory” rhetoric]; just a third of Democrats and half of independents said the same. More than half of Republicans, 56 percent, said things have changed so much in America that they often feel like a stranger in their own country; just 31 percent of Democrats agreed.

More than half of Americans, including 55 percent of independent voters and even 9 percent of Republicans, say the Republican Party today has been taken over by racists, while just 45 percent say the party is trying to protect America from outside threats.

Forty-four percent said the Democratic Party had been taken over by socialists, a number that has not risen in recent years.

Brian Karem at Salon is right: Dumbass nation: Our biggest national security problem is America’s “vast and militant ignorance”: “The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.”

Trump, who based his first campaign on a pledge to end “American carnage” and who rose to the pinnacle of the Republican Party at which he remains today by pledging to build a wall on the Mexican border, is not entirely responsible for the transformation of Reagan’s GOP, experts agreed. Instead, some said Trump took advantage of an environment of fear and angst that already existed, directed it toward the ominous other and became something of a metaphorical bulwark himself.

“Trump walked onto a stage that was already set. The set was painted, the props were there, he turned out to be considerably effective at using those props and strutting about that stage, but it’s not a stage of his creation,” Jones said. “He metaphorically presented himself as a wall against these changes, and he presented himself as the only thing standing between his followers and a changing America.”

[At] a time when politicians — and Trump, most prominently — are pitting groups against each other, [economic] anxieties manifest in the divides that are widening today, Jones said.

“Americans are feeling the economic crunches and they don’t just see it as a result of the pandemic,” Jones said. “That doesn’t help turn the flame down on these cultural conflicts, it exacerbates them. If people are feeling like the pie is too small and it’s a zero-sum game, that’s not a great place for political compromise or finding common ground.”

The Public Religion Research Institute poll was conducted from Sept. 16 to 29 among 2,508 adults over the age of 18. It carried a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.