Fascism: Evangelical conservatives are still pressing for the end of American democracy

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The same conservative evangelical “churches” that decided habitual liar and lifelong sex predator Donald Trump was, at long last, the American savior they were looking for have not—and this should come as no surprise—dulled in their fascist support for ending democracy rather than abide Trump’s very real election shellacking. That’s the news from a New York Times piece checking in with the Colorado Springs crowd, where hard-right pastors are inviting in hard-right election conspiracy theorists who continue to declare that “fraud” cheated Trump out of a win because … well, because nothing, that’s why.

It’s the same nonsensical claims and the same known-crooked actors. Still, Republicans eat this stuff up because Republican media has been “grooming” the base to accept ridiculous lies about whatever needs to be lied about. Evangelical conservatism has more than flirted with fascism as a counter to American democracy, which hasn’t been going their way for a lot longer than that.

When you’ve got a movement already wedded to the notion that Americans should abide by hard-right evangelical beliefs by force of law, it’s not hard to sell them on theories that voting itself has become illegitimate. They don’t want to know the facts. They just want someone to tell them “facts” sufficient for smashing the place up and rebuilding America as a palace of their own personal prejudices.

The quote around which the Times builds up the rest of its story is from a “one-time Republican congressional candidate” presenting his PowerPoint slides about “Socialism.” William Federer announces that it’s the failure of the January coup to overturn the election that means “lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”

Showing people a slide deck to explain why historic “socialism” means you need to erase our nation’s democracy is a niche approach. Most of the street thugs who want to end democracy, like the Proud Boys, aren’t about to sit through a slide show. Most of the rich financiers of such schemes have no interest in hearing somebody else’s opinions on why democracy should end—if you were rich enough to have opinions that matter, they already would have heard them.

Slap some references to an Antichrist in there, however, and the Colorado Springs church circuit will eat that up. These are people who already believe the devil controls animals they don’t like, weather patterns, and certain traffic lights—tell them that all of the Americans voting against them are merely demon-possessed puppets whose votes shouldn’t be counted to begin with, and you will get a lot of gray heads nodding along and posting your thoughts to their Facebook feeds.

Now comes the part where I’m supposed to come up with some pithy observation about this, and to be honest? I’m at a loss. You’ve got a whole movement here that would not exist if any of its participants could tell hucksters from huckleberries. Once you have decided to hoist the banner of a bunch of criminal weirdos (Michael Flynn; Tina Peters) because you are so convinced that a reality television host infamous for dishonesty, cruelty, perversions, and general maliciousness is your path to Jesus—and that all of this necessitates nullifying democracy and arresting all the “libs” who oppose you—then, at some point, the rest of the nation is allowed to give up on trying to understand you.

The televangelists who flocked to Trump early in his term were all of the most maudlin grifters, the gilded weirdos with private jets who never did a speck of genuine good for anyone in their whole damn sorry lives, and it made perfect sense because any American gullible enough to be drawn to one of them would be gullible enough to laud the other.

You want pithy? Yeah, you and me both.

I will continue to maintain, however, that humanity has long obsessed over its most brilliant members, devoting books to every physicist or mathematician or artist or researcher whose contributions upend the world and make it a better place. Still, hardly anyone is willing to point out that those people are such outliers because the majority of our species has always been sluggish, prone to delusions, and prone to worse than delusions. At least 80% of us are teetering on the edge of our evolutionary limits in learning how to use a toaster oven. Our technology has evolved around us, but we ourselves, as creatures of meat, are still wired with the same brains that see the outlines of human faces in tree bark and get frightened from it.

Fascism is an irrational movement that has contempt for reality, substituting whatever outlandish fictions are necessary in order for the paranoid to justify oppression or the outright murder of whoever is not them, and nobody involved here gives the slightest damn about whether there is evidence of election fraud. The “evidence” of the Republican conspiracy theorist is that they lost when they wanted to win, which means their enemies did something, which means it’s time for erasing everything and starting over with new rules to make sure such insults no longer happen.

Oh, and also, these assholes are almost certainly complete racists, just to throw that out there. As our Times kicker, we get the casual aside that one of the Colorado Springs pastors hosting these delusion-hoisting frauds is also anti-COVID-safety and anti-“gender identity,” but that “critical race theory” is “a hill for me to die on.”

Of all the paranoias that walk into these people’s heads, it’s the new far-right hoax supposing that “critical race theory” is now an omnipresent force working to oppress The White Folk that hits home the hardest, eh? How very intriguing.

There does seem to be quite the overlap between Americans who believe democracy needs to be overthrown so that conservatives can properly lead and Americans who believe that books by Black authors need to be removed from public schools and libraries, but the Times does not dwell on that. As is usual with these stories from middle America, someone being interviewed invariably pipes up with a clue that it is white nationalism that animates them, not the nuances of zoning laws or a genuine belief in election fraud by space laser, and as proper zoologists studying this ecosystem, we’re just going to write that down in the margins somewhere. Just a little tidbit, apropos of nothing else.

And yet it seems to come up every damn time.