The end of democracy? To many Americans, the future looks dark if the other side wins. washingtonpost.com/politics/end-o… This article is a prime reason why academicians, primarily historians, are a poor guide to understanding what is happening. The fault is their methodology. There are
2/ mysterious forces that move Americans. They are "seeking to fill a void." Not even Michael Barkun, who wrote 2 books on right-wing conspiracy theories rooted in Christian Identity, sees a deliberate strategy of polarization. And that is the key. If you don't look for a
3/ strategy, then you don't see a strategy; you see mysterious forces. @NormOrnstein in their book It Is Worse Than It Looks saw a deliberate strategy of destruction. John Dean and Thomas Frank see deliberate destruction. Hofstadter & Lipset saw the destructive orientation of
4/ fundamentalist Protestantism. Gingrich, trained by Paul Weyrich, the major institutional proponent of Fourth Generation Warfare, set out to destroy America using the Christian Right, which specializes in promoting menace/fear, uncertainty, & mistrust. Polarization & the End
5/ Times go together. When Adam Serwer wrote that "cruelty was the point" of Trump/GOP policies, we forget that for decades the ideological theology of the Christian Right was cruelty and they linked that cruelty to a religious basis for a libertarian no-state ideology in which
6/ the poor are sinful, the rich are divine, and God rules through the Market. There is a reason other scholars understood that Religious Fundamentalism, Political Fundamentalism, and Economic Fundamentalism were strongly correlated, institutionally, as social movements, and as
7/ individual beliefs in surveys. That does not happen through mysterious forces or a sudden rise of magical thinking or an immediate need to fill a void. Historians are so blinded by their methodology that they entirely miss the political warfare strategy destroying the country.
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