Summertime in presidential campaign season tends to resemble midyear network TV schedules of yesteryear: unpopular, full of re-runs and marred by the occasional high-concept experiment gone horribly wrong.
Such is the Democrats’ latest attempt to jump-start their stubbornly nonplussed electorate with a jolt of old-timey hate.
Presented with endless potential lines of attack against the GOP’s court-convicted-nominee and his bottomless well of sycophants, lefties are instead sounding the ooga-booga alarm against a menace that does not meaningfully exist: Christian nationalism.
“Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration,” warned a Politico headline, over an article about . . . a single such ally, who heads up a three-year-old think tank no one’s ever heard of, and speaks with the former president “at least once a month” (according to an anonymous source, natch).
Scary!
Remember the Revolutionary War-era pine-tree flag breathlessly reported to have flown outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito?
That has now magically been transformed, according to The Conversation (motto: “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”), into a “call for Christian nationalism.”
Good to know.
After self-described “relentless truth pirate” Lauren Windsor relentlessly infiltrated a Supreme Court Historical Society gala to lie about her personal beliefs in a James O’Keefe-style attempt to embarrass Alito on secretly recorded audio, a wide swath of the leftosphere depicted the justice’s unremarkable responses to Windsor’s leading questions about political polarization by suggesting (via misused headline punctuation) that Alito had finally been caught in the act of doing a Christian nationalism.
“Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement,” mis-asserted The New York Times (Alito did not say the word “godliness”).
“Caught on Tape, Alito Exposed as ‘Crusader for Christian Nationalism,’” went the widely shared headline on Common Dreams (that quote was from an Alito critic).
Salon, which impressively if surprisingly still exists, announced that “Experts alarmed at Alito’s secretly recorded Christian nationalist ‘confession,’” which would ring more true if he had confessed anything of the sort.
At this point, it’s worth pausing to reflect on what it is — particularly with the allegedly Christianist Alito — that we are supposed to be scared of.
Per Salon, it’s that the justice is “predictable,” as evidenced by the fact that “one analysis of Supreme Court rulings,cited by Vox, ‘found that Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time, and against liberal litigants in every single case.’”
Sounds a little less than scientifically rigorous, but let’s test the hypothesis: How did Alito rule, as recently as Thursday, on a case brought by the conservative Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine versus the Food and Drug Administration over its approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone?
With the unanimous majority against, turns out.
Abortion policy, for those of us against blanket prohibitions, is the most plausible theory of the case against Christian influence, anyway.
But even there, a cursory glance at the post-Dobbs political scoreboard suggests that Americans just aren’t that into severe restrictions, and will vote in contested races against those who are.
There’s a reason why Donald Trump, the Freddy Krueger of anti-Christian-nationalist nightmares, is essentiallypunting the abortion issue back to the states.
Trump is both the reason for, and one-man argument against, the Christian nationalist scare in the first place.
Personalized Bible sales notwithstanding, it’s doubtful anyone not being paid to say otherwise could argue with a straight face that the 45th president was a particularly religious figure.
Joe Biden has probably gone to church more this year than Trump has in his lifetime.
But Trump is a nationalist, and the Christian right is solidly behind him, so one can see the attraction of the synthesis, redolent as it is with some of the darker 20th century collabs between (usually Catholic) church and authoritarian state.
Yet, if Democrats truly believed we were teetering on the brink of Franco-style revanchism, they would have spent some — any! — of the past 41 months pruning back the power available to our next wannabe dictator.
Instead of that, Biden is aping Trump’s nationalist trade policies, squandering taxpayer money with jingoistic “buy American” provisions and even invoking the same anti-asylum powers that judges (including Republican-appointed Christians!) denied to Trump.
If Democrats want to convince us, despite all visible evidence, that they can effectively manage government, they could start by criticizing their opponent as he really is — rather than conjuring some numerically implausible bogeyman out of the ranks of a decreasingly religious electorate.
Matt Welch, Reason editor at large, co-hosts The Fifth Column podcast.
