Thread by @DouthatNYT

Very powerful rhetoric here from @AdamSerwer, to which I will offer a few mild responses:
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Working backward. First, it is not the case that the possibility of having the state turned against "has not even occurred" to anxious religious conservatives; if anything they have become too paranoid (a paranoia that in other contexts liberals mock) about exactly that.

Nor is the case that religious conservatives have no experience w/state coercion in their US history; Catholics + Mormons as well as evangelicals comprise the coalition, and it's not a coincidence that Catholics are often the most concerned about liberalism's anti-clerical edge.

I understand that liberals do not share pro-life premises but on its own terms the religious-conservative coalition has its own recent example of persisting with liberal democracy despite injustice; the patient 45-yr fight against abortion law made by our least democratic branch.

This patience occasionally inspires accusations from liberals that pro-lifers don't believe their own premises because if they did they would take up arms, etc. (And the pro-life movement has long worked to marginalize anti-abortionists who agree with this critique.)

OTOH some religious believers did question or give up on constitutional proceduralism in a different context -- the years before the Civil War. You can make a case, via "the Civil War as necessity" school, that they were broadly right to do so. Proceduralism does sometimes fail.

More broadly, the tendency to suddenly turn on or question some *element* of the liberal constitutional order because it isn't delivering the outcomes that you want is hardly unique to white religious conservatives circa 2019.

For instance for most of my adult life deference to the Supreme Court's anti-democratic character and rulings was understood by the center-left as an essential element of serious small-l liberal politics from which only right-wing rabble-rousers dissented.

But now that the Supreme Court suddenly seems decisively in conservative hands there has been a left-liberal rediscovery of arguments about constitutional interpretation and democracy that I grew up hearing from ... the religious conservatives Serwer is critiquing.

The point being that it was understandable that cultural liberals were more favorable to less-than-democratic institutions back when they had less democratic support, and now that the religious right feels itself a minority it's understandable that certain scripts have flipped.

Finally, I agree w/Serwer that white religious conservatives' particular bargain with Trump has high moral costs that are too quickly waved away bc they aren't borne by white religious conservatives themselves. Now I'll leave off and go write a column about something else.