How Right-Wing Cults Have Plagued Our Politics
By Thom Hartmann for Independent Media Institute
Since Trump began his campaign of self-centered,
self-entitled whining, preening and racist “straight talk” in 2015, hate crimes and violence against women have
exploded by around 20 percent.
Meanwhile, “conservatives” have created a “watch list” of college professors suspected of teaching “liberal” climate science or the actual racial history of America.
Fossil fuel
billionaires and their buddies, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, have corrupted Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and the
entire GOP; and school boards, teachers and election
officials receive daily harassment and even death threats.
All across the internet, we’re hearing weird
theories that Trump and his followers have stolen some obscure idea from Roy
Cohn and Roger Stone or are trying to reinvent German Nazism in an American
wrapper.
But the misogyny, hate and intimidation that the
newly-Trumpy GOP have embraced since 2015 isn’t new, and certainly isn’t unique
to America; indeed, it’s played a huge role throughout the centuries of our
history.
Today’s “proud boys,” for example, are just a
modern version of the New England “churchmen” of the 1700s, the Klan riders of
the 1800s, and Joe McCarthy’s fervent followers of the 1950s. Our sold-out
“conservative” anti-Critical Race Theory politicians are just this generation’s
versions of white supremacist John C. Calhoun fronting for morbidly rich
“plantation” owners in the mid-1800s.
Historically these bullies lose, but in the
process they cause extraordinary pain and disruption to our nation. We must
revisit, and learn from, history.
The Catholic Church went after Copernicus and
then promoted repeated wars — “crusades” and pogroms — against Jews and
Muslims. Authoritarians throughout history, motivated by deep-seated fears and
ignorance, similarly hate science, egalitarian values, and those who think or
look different from them.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the most
influential of the Founders when it came to the shaping of the Constitution and
our nation, and he was horrified by the power that right-wingers (rationalizing
their largely economic and political power grabs with religion) had seized in
his birth state of Massachusetts and nearby New Hampshire.
As a teenager, he fled the state for
Philadelphia, where there were no religious tests and people weren’t required
by law (as they were in most of Massachusetts and New Hampshire) to tithe and
attend church every week.
“Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of
age,” he wrote in his first autobiography, “when, after having doubted in turn
of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books
that I read, I began to doubt of revelation itself.”
Today, churches and radio/TV/YouTube preachers
are the second largest vehicle for promoting anti-democracy behaviors and
protests, behind social media. Franklin knew that even when their style of threats
and violence were used to “enforce morality,” it’s really about power and
political control.
This knowledge led him to campaign against
authoritarianism and in favor of “free thinking” for much of his life. As his
peer Joseph Priestly wrote of him, “It is much to be lamented that a man of Dr.
Franklin’s general good character and great influence should have been an
unbeliever in Christianity and also have done so much as he did to make others
unbelievers.”
Louise and I used to live just a short drive
from Dover, New Hampshire, the fourth-largest city in the state, near the Maine
border and the Atlantic seacoast. Generations ago, rightwing politicians and
preachers were enforcing social control, and John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “How
the Women Went from Dover” tells the tale of
three young women who dared to challenge that day’s powerful men, that early
generation of what today we would called Trump followers.
Whittier’s poem begins:
The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall
Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!
The three women were Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins,
and Alice Ambrose, and their crime was adhering to and promoting
peace-promoting Quaker beliefs in a rabidly rightwing town.
This so enraged the minister of Dover’s
Congregational church, John Reyner, that he and church elder Hatevil Nutter
(yes, that was his real name) lobbied the crown magistrate, Captain Richard
Walderne, to have them punished for their challenge to Reyner’s
authority.
It was a bitter winter when Walderne complied,
ordering the three women stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse-drawn
cart by their wrists, then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes
each. As Whittier wrote:
Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.
A local man, George Bishop, wrote at the time,
“Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle
upwards, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them, whilst the
priest stood and looked and laughed at it.”
It was a start, from Reverend Reyner’s point of
view, but hardly enough to scare the residents of the entire region from which
he drew his congregation. So, he got the young women’s punishment extended to
11 nearby towns over 80 miles of snow-covered roads, all following the same
routine.
So into the forest they held their way,
By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,
Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat
Of the winter sea at their icy feet.
The next town was Hampton, where the constable
decided that just baring them above the waist wasn’t enough. As Sewall’s
History of the Quakers records, “So he stripped them, and then stood trembling
whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury
through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped
again.”
Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.
Whipping, beating, stoning, hanging, nailing,
being pilloried (publicly clamped to a post through neck and wrist holes, often
naked and sometimes for days at a time), dragging, burning, branding, and
dozens of other techniques were employed by religious and government
authorities in the early American colonies to enforce thought and
behavior.
And Trump and his “boys” who strut around with T-Shirts celebrating
General Pinochet’s practice of throwing “liberals” out of helicopters in Chile in the 1970s would bring it back if they gain
power again.
If her cry from the whipping-post and jail
Pierced sharp as the Kenite’s driven nail,
O woman, at ease in these happier days,
Forbear to judge of thy sister’s ways!
On July 17, 1658, for example, Massachusetts
Puritans seized Quakers Christopher Holder and John Copeland and chopped off
each man’s right ear. They were then imprisoned and brutally whipped “on a set
schedule” for “nine weeks straight.”
Expelled from the Massachusetts territory,
Holder and Copeland were told that if they returned, their left ears would also
be cut off and a hole would be bored through each of their tongues with a hot
poker.
In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, set in Puritan Boston, which dramatized how rule-breakers
were stigmatized in Massachusetts. In Hawthorne’s telling, Hester Prynne was
forced to wear a scarlet “A,” stigmatizing her as an adulterer.
It’s why there was debate about admitting
Massachusetts to the new United States if they wouldn’t drop their laws
supporting hard-right religion; the state finally, after massive debate and
over the objections of multiple churches, complied and agreed to ratify the
Constitution with its hated free speech and freedom from religion clauses.
So this generation of democracy-hating,
bizarre-religious-cult-Qanon-believing right-wingers are really nothing
new.
Instead of public whippings to humiliate their
enemies, they use social media, truck caravans with semiautomatic weapons and
giant flags, and pick fights in airports and public parks.
Instead of denying the Earth goes around the
sun, they deny the dangers of Covid and global warming.
Instead of closing schools they force teachers
to expose themselves to disease while harassing and threatening them if they
dare teach science or actual American history.
Instead of requiring the payment of church taxes
to vote, they require elaborate proofs of citizenship and purge “undesirable”
people from voting lists with a nod and a wink from the Supreme Court.
From Ben Franklin’s time to today, every generation
of Americans have confronted rightwing authoritarians bent on maintaining
violent white male supremacy using the twin levers of religious fanaticism and
concentrated wealth.
It’s probably beyond the power of human nature
to prevent this from ever happening again, but we must not resign ourselves to
another authoritarian movement now rising to power in America. Get
active!
Thom
Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The
Hidden History of American Healthcare and
more than 30 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent
Media Institute.