On Becoming the Monster

Nietzsche is watching

I believe that Donald Trump's politics are best described as American fascism. Also—because apparently this has to be said these days—it is very bad thing to be a fascist because fascism is a very bad thing, has been a very bad thing for as long as it has been a thing, and will always be a very bad thing. For that reason it has been encouraging to watch the Democrats oppose Trump on grounds which are often (not always) both strong* and moral**.

That is not to say that the Democrats are, as a whole or as individuals, especially wonderful or especially moral. What it does say is that the President's behavior and speech has been so bad that his political opponents, opportunistic or ideologically pure, have been able to assume the moral and logical high ground for quite some time; with the concomitant result that they have enjoyed the alliance of moral and reasonable people from outside their own political party. They have, of course, also enjoyed the alliance of political opportunists from outside their own party, but that would have happened no matter who the president was.

As a result of all this, we find ourselves in a position where we don't really know the degree to which Democrats as a whole, and individually, really are proponents of reason and morality (and I want to state for the record that both of these categories can operate independently of a person's general politics). They may all be shining beacons of integrity an reason, or they may all be crummy opportunists who are only too eager to exploit the country. In all likelihood of course, the truth lies somewhere between those poles. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tax that vice pays to virtue which is why virtue often characterizes the preferred rhetoric and methodology of those politicians to whom it is available as a sufficiently powerful attack on their opponents.

All of this is well and good and is something I have kept in mind over the course of the Trump presidency. Recently, however, I have started to notice a few Democratic and anti-Trump figures arguing that "winning" in 2020 is going to require Democrats to "play dirty". I want to highlight that sentiment and place a giant warning circle around it. 

Ezra Klein over at Vox wrote what I think is the most insightful and accurate account of the Trumpification of white American Evangelicalsim and it is all about power. In the second paragraph of the piece (the entirety of which is well worth reading) Klein lays out the thesis:

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense.

This... happened

The choice which white Evangelicalism made in 2016, which has scandalized so many other US Christians and has played a significant role in alienating a portion of Gen X and Millennial Americans who grew up within US Evangelicalism is the choice to abandon "their sense of righteousness, grace, gentility"—in other words, to abandon strong moral arguments—in favor of what they euphemistically call "street fighter" tactics. There is a whole lot that could be said about this and Klein has already said much of it, but I want to focus here on the warning that this needs to be for those of us who are committed to actually working to build a better world, to standing against injustice, to being on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. The great temptation is to descend.

It is vital that we not forget, that we not fail to notice, that white American Evangelicals have justified their embrace of a philandering, racist, misogynist, dirtbag by first concluding that evil (here I am referring specifically to the many actions and words of Trump which cause white American Evangelicals to squirm and say things like "we didn't elect a Sunday School teacher") is finally more powerful than good. Machiavelli's view that "the ends justify the means"—while a very great evil—remains relatively harmless against those who believe that good is more powerful than evil. It is only once we begin to believe that lies are more powerful than the truth, that subterfuge and misrepresentation is more powerful than integrity that Machiavelli's poison can begin to really infect our thinking.

I do not have a whole lot of use for Nietzsche but he was 100% on the ball when he warned "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become a monster." If we become that which we seek to defeat, only with a different hue, then in that same moment we have already lost the capacity to win. I am afraid that there is no help for it. Evil cannot be resisted on its own grounds of lies, deceit, bullying, and violence, evil gives way only to good and good will not prevail without faith. It is in the nature of good that it nearly always appears the weaker power at first. Good will prevail—it must prevail—but in the short term the Truth, Integrity, Nuance, Complexity, and Honesty, will always seem weaker and more fragile than the smarmy and swaggering oversimplified and obfuscating lies of evil.

Good ends will never be achieved through evil means, or put more directly, evil means will never succeed in achieving good ends—the means always entail then ends—and if we forget that, we are doomed to create our own Trump.

Footnotes:

*Strong grounds would be grounds which are, and should be, convincing to a rational, reasonable person.

**Moral grounds would be grounds which do, and should, carry moral weight and do not involve advocating immoral motives or actions.

Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross — An Introduction to Evangelicalism and Fascism Part 1: Tradition and the Mythic Past

Sinclair Lewis probably never said "When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But he should have because he would have been right.

Introduction: White American Evangelical Christianity and Fascism 

This post will begin a series on the rise of fascism in the US today and the ways in which it intersects with, co-opts, and is suborned by white American Evangelicalism. My goal is to work through what is happening in our current political moment and how it has happened. Umberto Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism from his essay Ur-Fascism together with Jason Stanley's 10 pillars of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them are my key texts for the nature of fascism. Much (but not all) of my analysis of white American Evangelicalism comes from Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America together with my own experience as someone who experienced Christian homeschooling in my elementary and middle school years, matriculated at a conservative Bible College, and who identified as an Evangelical for at least the first 30 years of my life. I will also bring in additional readings and sources as appropriate and necessary. While this series of essays will take the form of a series of positive arguments informing one another and building towards a final conclusion, I hope that it will be read as an invitation to discussion. To that end I would invite reflection, reaction, push back and suggestions in the comments section of each post.

Recommended reading for this blog series

One important caveat I want to make at the outset is that I am not claiming that all white American Evangelicals are fascists or crypto-fascists. I do not at all believe that to be the case. I do, however, believe that some white American Evangelicals and particularly American Fundamentalists, are functional fascists (by which I mean that they do not recognize or realize the fascist nature of their own politics) and that there are significant historical and thematic strains within white American Evangelicalism which render its adherents particularly vulnerable to fascist ideology and leadership. It is, for instance, importantly true that 19% of the Evangelicals who voted in the 2016 election rejected Trump, but it is equally important that 81% of voting Evangelicals voted for him. Specifically this means that Trump received a higher percentage of the self-identified white Evangelical vote than any previous Republican candidate on record. The most fascist GOP president to date was more attractive to white Evangelicals than any previous GOP presidential candidate. Even that does not mean that the 81% of voting white Evangelicals who voted for a fascist president are themselves fascist, but it does at least suggest they were drawn (reluctantly or enthusiastically) by some degree of fascism. In this series I hope to explore that.

Features of Fascism

In Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco identified 14 common features of "Eternal Fascism or Ur-Fascism" that is, Fascism as a political practice and ideology abstracted from its specific instantiation in early 20th century Europe. Eco suggests that each of these may be present in other forms of totalitarianism "But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." The features are:

• The cult of tradition
• The rejection of modernism (but not technology)
• The cult of action for action's sake
• Disagreement is treason
• Fear of Difference
• Appeal to social frustration
• The obsession with a plot
• The enemy is both strong and weak
• Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
• Contempt for the weak
• Everybody is educated to become a hero
• Machismo and weaponry
• Selective Populism
• Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak

Jason Stanley provides an overlapping "list of pillars" of abstracted Fascism in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

• A Mythic Past
• Propaganda
• Anti-Intellectualism
• Unreality: the rejection of truth
• Hierarchy
• Victimhood
• Law and Order
• Sexual Anxiety
• Sodom and Gomorrah: heartland values vs. decadent cities
• Arbeit Macht Frei: portrayal of the out-group as "lazy"

My plan is to combine the two lists where I can but also bring them into conversation with one another and with what I have seen and read about what is happening in US politics and with white American Evangelicalism.

The Cult of Tradition/Mythic Past

Both Eco and Stanley (and pretty much everyone else who has studied fascism) point out that fascism establishes, or reinforces a mythologized past in which the "us" flourished. Now, there can be some value in a national myth, so long as it is recognized as myth and not mistaken for an actual period in real history. A national myth which is known to be a-historical can be aspirational—a dream of what the nation hopes to become—and insofar as the aspirations are good, the myth will serve a good purpose. However when myth is mistaken for real history even good myth is going to corrupt; bad (racist, bigoted, xenophobic, imperialist etc...) myth will not be any better but it might be easier to spot. Contemporary US fascists use bad myth to feed their base supporters while using good-myth-mistaken-for-history as propaganda. Specifically, the myth they feed their base is the myth of northern Europeans "heroically" dominating the continent and "properly" subjugating indigenous peoples (they don't like to think of them as Americans) and African people in the service of a white nation. This myth minimizes all contributions and achievements of non-white (and usually non-Protestant Christian) people as often as possible. The myth that US fascists feed the moderates as propaganda on the other hand essentially erases the genocide and slavery which the first myth celebrates; it focuses on the good that the US has done (always incidentally crediting Euro-Christian folks for those achievements) and minimizes the harms and atrocities the country has committed, blaming them on "liberals", "humanists", "outsiders", and  "socialists" when they can't get away with ignoring them. Of course the two myths are contradictory but that is entirely irrelevant to Fascists. The myths suit their purposes. They are each attractive to their target audience and they each occlude the actual history of the nation in favor of one which will elicit anger and defensiveness on the part of the adherent when it is challenged by factual histories. In the latter effort Fascists have made particular inroads with Evangelicals and Fundamentalist Christians. 

Conservative and Evangelical home school and private school curriculum has long included a false American History narrative claiming that the american founders were Evangelical-equivalent Christians who founded the US as a Christian nation to the extent that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are really Christian documents thinly disguised as secular or pluralist documents. As it turns out, the connection between conservative Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism and U.S. Fascism goes back quite a ways. In the words of Frances Fitzgerald's magisterial history of Evangelicalism in US Politics The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

In the early 1930's a number of other leaders, among them Arno Gaebelein, James M. Gray, William B. Riley [whom Fitzgerald credits as the architect of northern fundamentalism] and Gerald Winrod, embraced the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and integrated it into their end times scenarios—uncomfortably, as it sat with their prophetic Zionism....Like the notorious Father Charles Coughlin and his Protestant associate, Gerald L. Smith, some of these fundamentalist leaders became Nazi sympathizers. Hitler, Riley wrote, has snatched his country "from the very jaws of atheist Communism" with "help from on high."(p.144-145)

They also tend to propagate Lost Cause revisions of civil war history, downplaying slavery and emphasizing states rights narratives. Certainly this is something I encountered in the the Christian homeschooling curriculum I grew up with (Bob Jones, and Abecka mostly). In general, the homeschool narrative (one which traditionalist conservatives, dominionist and Christian Reconstructionist thinkers have had a large hand in shaping) teaches a remarkably strident version of the myth of white Christian/Protestant American exceptionalism. Again from The Evangelicals:

A voracious reader and a prolific writer, Rushdoony [a prominent proponent of the Christian homeschooling movement and whom Fitzgerald credits as one of the two "thinkers of the Christian Right" in the second half of the 20th century]  in the mid 1960's wrote two books on American history... he argued that the intellectual roots of the American Revolution were purely Calvinist and owed nothing to the Enlightenment... The Constitution, he maintained, was a secular document in appearance only... The early American Republic, he maintained, was an orthodox Christian nation with an economic and social Protestant feudal system. By 1860, however, only the South had a Christian system, and in the Civil War the Union troops destroyed it. ... The South, he wrote, had a right to defend slavery because the radical reordering of its society by atheists was a far worse alternative.

R.J. Rushdoony a Christian Fascist

...

Rushdoony discovered the works of Palmer and two other leading Presbyterian defenders of the Confederacy and used them to argue that the Civil War was essentially a "theological war"—and the civil rights movement anti-Christian. Rushdoony found both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments unconstitutional and nothing but an effort to impose the power of the federal government on the states. By his account, it was downhill from there on, with increasing federal power and increasing racial and religious diversity. "Minority groups," he wrote in 1965 "hold the balance of power in many states—Negroes, Catholics, Zionist Jews, pensioners, and the like... Only by restoring localism, by amending the Constitution to require the coincidence of the electoral college and its vote with the structure of Congress, can minority rule, with its attendant evils, hatred and injustice, be checked." Rushdoony's America was white and Calvinist, and at the heart of his politics was not just racism but an all-purpose, full-service bigotry"(p.339-340)

If those don't sound to you like the talking points of "alt-right" today then may I suggest that you have not been paying attention. I think it is important to recognized the myth that conservative Evangelicals and the Christian Right have been promulgating as it does so much to explain the current co-incidence of Evangelicalism of far-right Trumpist Fascism. The Evangelical "myth of America" is a myth of a white and Protestant America which was founded on reformation (rather than enlightenment—I will be addressing the "rejection of modernism" in a future post) ideals, which was most fully instantiated in the Confederacy, and which has been under attack from "liberals" both theological and political (the conflation is a popular and much-exploited one) since the nation's inception. This provides them all the fodder that Fascists need from their Nationalist myths. In the words of Jason Stanley "Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed."  The Fundamentalist/Evangelical "pure mythic past" which was lost because of the work of "the enemy" (political and theological liberals) but which good members of the "us" group (white, conservative, patriarchalist Evangelicals) can work to reclaim by (re)gaining political power integrates rather seamlessly with that of more readily identifiable alt-right and neo-fascist groups specifically because they both locate the mythic past in a fundamentally white and "Christian" America and both see "liberalism" (though they put different spins on the meaning of the term) as the villainous force responsible for the decline they are trying to reverse.

Further, of course, is the fact that Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism understand themselves largely in opposition to theological liberalism—particularly 19th century German liberalism—and as fighting to reclaim a Christian theological past which only they have preserved. Certainly my own experience with church history classes specifically structure the history of "true Christianity" as one which faded after the fall of Rome (one Church history course from the Reformed Theological Seminary ignores the Eastern Orthodox church altogether, not even mentioning the Great Schism) and was practically resurrected at the reformation. Again, this is not to say that all white American Evangelicals are fascists, but to point to themes within white American Evangelicalism which render its adherents more open to fascist propaganda and red pilling.

From this perspective, it is entirely consistent that the Charlottesville Protests, centered around the "Unite the Right" rally served as the first significant conflict between American fascists and an alliance of Liberal Mainline and Progressive clergy with Antifa counter-protesters. Nor should it be surprising that Evangelicals, in defending Trump for his "both sides" speech, have centered the question of "honoring the Confederate past" rather than the obviously racist intent of the initial rally.

Clearly this is about more than just statues for them

By now the heavy blending of the religious right with the Republican party—particularly the tea-party, freedom caucus, Trumpist arm of the GOP—has resulted in a state level pressure campaign to promulgate the myth of white and Christian American exceptionalism in public schools. Essentially, Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and allied groups (the National Legal Foundation, and Wall Builders in particular) are pushing legislation which would make the Fundamentalist white, Christian revisionist US history of my home schooling days in the late 80's and early 90's the standard curriculum in public education after painting it with a thin veneer of secular pluralism. According to their Project Blitz playbook (they even name it after a Nazi battle tactic) the first focus category in their project is to enact "legislation regarding our Country's religious heritage". 

All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the current president's campaign slogan was Make America Great Again a statement which both references and participates in the creation of nationalist mythology.

PART 2 ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND THE REJECTION OF MODERNISM

How I Analyze Political Candidates

In the wake of 2016 and with the presidential campaigns for 2020 already ramping up, I want to spend some time proposing a model for analyzing political candidates. One big reflection I had on the sort of discourse and debate I found myself engaged in in 2015 and 2016 is that it suffered from a lack of clarity around concepts of integrity, ideological purity, and pragmatism. I suspect that you have encountered plenty of this sort of frustrating ambiguity and that it gave rise to quite a few frustrating discussions in your own experience as well. Now I am, admittedly, a big believer in clarifying terms, premises, and assumptions in almost any discussion—I labor under the belief that most arguments would be far simpler and less vitriolic if people were clearer about what precisely they mean and what premises they are working from—but I hope that you will either find this compelling or will do me the very great favor of showing me (in comments) where you think it fails.

The Defacto Model

I propose that this is the model people use when we do not want to reflect or engage much with the election process. Campaigning and debates sort of happen around us for a while and then, on voting day, we vote for the candidate we happen like most. In this model there isn't a lot of conversation to be had because like is pretty subjective, and because we tend to feel attacked when someone criticizes what we like. People who use this model could hardly be described as critical voters; they might or might not be informed but they are not really engaged in critical and careful decision making in a meaningful way. Ultimately, propaganda and in-group identification will probably have the greatest impact on how they vote.

The Nuanced Defacto Model

This represents something of an improvement and sometimes an increased degree of cynicism over the defacto model. Voters who use this model are able to recognize that no candidate is perfect (a claim you will likely hear them make incessantly) and are often willing to vote for candidates in the "meh" range so long as that candidate's opponent is in their "no" range. These voters vote against a candidate at least as often as they vote for one. When they vote they often do so out of a sense of civic duty or out of group identification (the candidate may be "meh" but either they support the party or all of their friends vote) but they can occasionally become energized voters when the encounter a candidate in their "yes" range.

The Moral Integrity Model

This step brings us closer the model which I am proposing (though I still want to add some more complexity). Here the question you would ask about a candidate is not "do I like them" but "am I morally comfortable with this candidate?" In this model a person's response to that question can range from "no" through "I can vote for the candidate but I  have reservations about them" up through an enthusiastic "yes". I have built a range into each of these three categories to allow for the uniqueness of persons. I can heartily affirm two different candidates and still find one to be better than the other.

The really important addition to this model is what I have labeled the line of integrity which divides the reservations range from the no range. That line is critical to the way I think about candidates and its placement is always at the top of the no range. In this model, to ask someone to vote for a candidate who exists below the line of integrity is to ask that person to violate their actual conscience (note that a person's actual conscience may be different from their stated or public conscience and that sometimes they might not be aware of the difference). A lot of the cross-talk argument in the center and on the left had to do with misunderstanding the line of integrity and/or misdiagnosing its location. For now I will restrict myself to saying that everyone who is not a psychopath or sociopath has a line of integrity somewhere insofar as they would not vote for a candidate who advocates unabashed genocide no matter how much they agree with that candidate on other dimensions or how much they dislike with the candidate's major opponent. 

Voters who use some version of this model are more likely to develop some degree of resistance to the most common form of propaganda and will sometimes break from their peer-groups when voting. Because there are candidates whom these voters consciously cannot support, they are somewhat more likely to have voted for 3rd party candidates, or to have been conscientious non-voters in some elections (it will depend on who is on the ballot). Most notably these are the voters who are most likely to vote against their typical party or ideological affiliations in situations where a candidate is the subject of scandal just because scandals are the sort of thing that can plunge a candidate below the voter's line of integrity. Of course that line will be in different places for different people; its placement is subjective to each individual voter since individual voters will have differing levels of tolerance for (for instance) graft, bribery, theft, or sex scandals. A politician who has cheated on their spouse will likely thereby fall below some voters' line of line of integrity but certainly not all. Further an individual voter's line of integrity will vary both in terms of sensitivity, but also by the dimension involved—remember that we are not talking about the candidate's morality, we are talking about the moral comfort of the voter with the various aspects or dimensions of a given candidate.

With this model we can identify the snarls which lead to some tangled political arguments. If a candidate falls just below Wanda's line of integrity but just above Bob's line, then Wanda and Bob will agree that the candidate is "problematic" and will likely agree about the candidates failings but if they do not recognize the existence and roll of the line (or the fact that they have analyzed the candidate differently in relationship to the line) they will not see eye to eye on whether or not it is possible to still vote for the candidate.

And now that I have mentioned that there are multiple dimensions to any given candidate, let's move on the the "final form' of this model.

The Dimensions of Moral Integrity Model

Just to keep things simple I have only included four dimensions in this illustration but there are actually as many as the individual voter happens to notice or care about. Notably absent from this illustration yet relevant to recent US elections for instance would be Immigration and The Environment but there really isn't any functional limit on the number of dimensions available. The final—and vital—addition to the model here is the recognition that a candidate may well be excellent in one dimension but fall below the line of integrity in another dimension. This complicates both our analysis of candidates, and a voter's capacity to reason clearly about a given candidate. Specifically, I think this this helps to untangle a lot of messy political arguments. When two people argue about whether a candidate is imperfect-but-still-viable or "too problematic" (the most common term I have encountered on the left to imply that the candidate has dropped below the line of integrity) the snarl in their communication may reside in the fact that they locate the candidate on different sides of the line, or that they are judging the candidate on different dimensions. This is further complicated by the fact that each dimension is weighted differently for each person. My "NO" threshold on economics (and economic justice) may be lower than yours while your "NO" threshold is lower than mine on foreign policy. 

Let me emphasize that the line of integrity is likely significantly lower than we are generally happy to admit. That is to say that we are generally willing to tolerate more that we would like to say and that this becomes most clear when a candidate who we really like turns out to be significantly "problematic" in one realm. The Democratic ambivalence around Gillibrand's calls for Al Franken to resign would be an example of this. For some voters Franken's behavior fell below their real line of integrity in the issue of sexual assault and harassment; for others it fell above their real line but below their public line. This, of course, resulted in their feeling very ambivalent about the call for him to resign. They do not want to be seen as people for whom his behavior is above the line, but they are also not really convinced that his behavior merited his resignation. 

The space between the red and the grey line is ripe for political miscommunication and misunderstanding, often because we ourselves are often not quite sure about that area. We often convince ourselves that our public line is our real line and only discover the difference when someone action, position, or behavior falls between them. Even then we only make that discovery when we are brutally honest with ourselves—self justification is one hell of a drug.

Of course the big problem with all of this is that the moral impetus we feel regarding issues below the line is entirely different from the impetus we feel about those above the line. Below-the-line-of-integrity discussions are different in kind from above-the-line-of-integrity discussions.

The essential difference between the two kinds of discussion boils down to the role of pragmatism in our political decision making. Above the line, pragmatism is an important and even moral factor. We all recognized that we will rarely, if ever, get a candidate with whom we agree perfectly on every issue and who has a sterling record—there are no perfect candidates—and so pragmatism or questions of "electability" are worthwhile so long as the candidate stays above the line. This is true both within a given political party and in the general election. I suspect that a great many of the people who yearn publicly for "a return to the days when Republicans and Democrats could disagree and still respect one another's politics" do so, at least in part, because in their estimation both Republican and Democratic candidates exist exclusively above the line whereas people who are utterly flummoxed by that notion see candidates from the opposition party as falling below the line in one or more places. Conversations across the line of integrity will always fail just because support which is deemed possible by one party is actually impossible for the other.

That is not to say that it is impossible to have meaningful conversations about political candidates with someone who differs with you about where those candidates stand in relation to the line. It only means that you need to have a different kind of conversation in those situations. At that point, to be meaningful, the conversation needs to be about the facts—"does the candidate really think/say/do that?"—or about the placement of the line itself—"should/shouldn't X really be disqualifying?".

Maybe some examples will help to clarify all of this.

Some Examples

Please note that for all of these examples I will be assuming that the locations on the chart represent your assessment of a hypothetical candidate.

SAMPLE A The Acceptable Candidate

I take this to be the chart for a fairly standard "no candidate is perfect" type of candidate. The candidate here is great on civil rights and you really respect their character. Their economics aren't perfect (you have some significant disagreements with them) and they are frankly far more hawkish/dovish than you are. You likely would not have supported this candidate in the primaries but you will probably be a strong supporter in the general election. As a side note, this is also what nostalgic moderate Democrat baby boomers like to imagine "the opposition candidate" charted in "the good old days when we were less divided".


SAMPLE B The Baffling No-Go

This candidate is precisely the sort of candidate that is likely to get you into fights with your own friends on social media. Here is a candidate whose foreign policy views you simply cannot countenance. Likely your whole social circle will not be thrilled with the candidate but, if they (and you) agree that the major opposition candidate is even worse then unless they understand your line of integrity, they won't understand why you just can't vote for this "lesser of two evils". This problem will be particularly compounded if you are able to honestly recognize that the candidate is a person of good character who honestly holds to the foreign policy beliefs which you find so unconscionable. This, chart, I suspect represents the way McCain supporters felt about Obama (or at least, it represents the way McCain himself spoke about Obama).


SAMPLE C(1) The Dictator Comparisons

This sample should be fairly straightforward but it has one feature which I think is relevant to our political moment. This is my best mock-up of the way I think most moderate Democrats would have charted Trump. In itself I doubt that there is much surprise here but with a few tweaks I think it can shed some light on one particular frustration.

SAMPLE C(2) The Reluctant Trump Voter

 This, I think, represents the situation of the Reluctant Trump Voter®. This person seems to have almost identical views with the moderate Democrat (your milage may vary) and their public line of integrity is in about the same place as the moderate Democrat. Yes they don't see Trump in quite as negative a light as the moderate Democrat but he clearly falls below their public line of integrity. However, because he remains above their real line of integrity they were still able to justify voting for him since he opposed Clinton*. We saw this most clearly in the evolving reactions to the Access Hollywood tape. The contents of the revelation thrust Trump below most Republicans' public line of integrity which left them publicly denouncing him and looking desperately for an alternative or option. However, because his behavior was still above their real line, they effected an about face at the flimsiest of excuses (the "locker room talk" contextualization, his tepid apology, accounts of his later salvation experience) the strength of the pretext didn't matter much so long as it allowed them to retain the appearance of their public line. This is also why I think it is important to note the Republicans who never went back to Trump after Access Hollywood. Their failure to return is an indication that, for them, the tape represented a real line.


Finally I want to end with a quick look at two hypothetical left leaning Americans in 2016, one of which would have almost certainly voted for Clinton, the other of which would not.

The Reluctant Clinton Voter®

This person is clearly a Bernie supporter, who would have voted for him in the primaries and was likely rather upset when he lost. They may even have blamed Clinton for bankrolling the DNC and ensuring that Sanders never really got a fair shake. Nevertheless, they would have seen Clinton as a tragically necessary compromise of their ideals and would have voted for her "as a way to stop Trump" and possibly consoled themselves with the virtue of supporting the first woman candidate in a major political party (though they were probably wishing she had been Warren).

The #NeverClinton #NeverTrump Voter

Notice that this is another Sanders supporter. The difference with the Reluctant Clinton Voter® is only that for this person, Clinton fell below the line of integrity when it came to foreign policy (maybe all the Benghazi talk worked on them, maybe they are a strong dove and see her as part of "the Blob"). This is a likely Johnson or Stein voter or a principled non-voter. This is also the person whom the Reluctant Clinton Voter likely railed at in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Unless they clarified their differences viz. the line of integrity on foreign policy, both of these voters probably left the conversation without making any headway and incredibly frustrated with one another. This voter likely saw the Reluctant Clinton Voter as lacking in integrity (after all, they admitted that her foreign policy positions are problematic) and the Reluctant Clinton Voter likely saw this person as too precious and concerned to care about the real harm that Trump is going to do to oppressed minority people and the the country's norms and institutions. This, despite the fact that the two of them agree perfectly on everything about Trump. If we were to lower their real lines of integrity and add public lines of integrity, the confusion might become even more clear.

Conclusion

I hope that you find this to be useful tool in modeling the way people make minimum-viable political and electoral decisions. Please don't hesitate to hit me up in comments if you have suggestions, critiques, or questions about how I could improve or modify this.

*I have explicitly chosen to ignore the roll that party and ideological association and attendant in-group/out-group effects have on our estimation of a candidate by simply presenting the estimations as final and not exploring the reasons we have for locating a given candidate at a given spot on the chart. Those reasons are real and the proper subject of healthy and passionate political, sociological, and religious debates. For the purposes of this analytic model, however, they may be simply taken as givens.

Let America Be...

If I had to recommend a mascot for the USA...

In the wake of President Trump's "shithole" comment, I have noticed one well intentioned but not quite accurate theme in the responses. It essentially boils down to "this is not who we really are". This is usually offered by good people who are trying to tell others (other nations, other people) that the President's racism does not have the support of the whole country—that there is real opposition to him. And I think that is a good thing to want to communicate, as far as it goes, but I don't think that framing—this is not who we are—is the right one because... well... this is exactly who we are. The United States is the nation which made Trump possible. Yes our #resistance is real, but our bigotry, our racism, our xenophobia — that is real too. Trump wasn't an accident. Trump was encouraged, and tolerated by enough of us that he became our executive, our leader.

Trump does not represent my values, my interests, or my desires, but the plain fact is that he does represent the nation of which I am a part. He does represent me; to me that is one more reason to resist him.

I worry a little, that the desire to say "this isn't us" comes from a desire to pretend that a mythology has more historicity than it does. There is a real United States and then there is also a dream of the United States. The real, historical United States is a country born in the blood of genocide and built on the back of chattel slavery. The real historical United States has, truly, built and accomplished great things; but far too often it has accomplished those great deeds over the corpses of others. The real, historical United States really is a purveyor of beauty, grandeur, holocaust, theft, and oppression. The real, historical, United States has nailed the body of Jesus to the front of our Roman Imperial temple. That, horrific and grand nation is the real and historical United States.

But there is also a mythology. And as mythologies go, the myth of the Unites States is a good one. It is a myth of all persons, free and equal in dignity. The myth is a myth of liberty and liberation. Of siblings, children, and parents; of hard work and good play; of education and simplicity. As an aspiration it is able to move us closer to the good—as many of the great myths are able to. The danger is in confusing our history with our myth. The history is who we are, the myth is who we want to be. I have never found this more perfectly represented than by Langston Hughes:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be.

"The land that never has been yet—and yet must be." We are, still, the land of Donald Trump. We will, now, forever be the land that once elected Donald Trump. That is who we are; it is not who must be.

White Evangelical Politics are Less Christian than American Politics

Last night Alabama elected a Democrat to a statewide office for the first time since the 90’s. That is sort of cool in its own right I suppose, but what particularly struck me about it is the demographic breakdown behind Doug  Jones’ victory, specifically the religious breakdown, and most specifically the behavior of self-identified Evangelical Christians. 

Whatever else comes out of the analysis (Here is the original Washington Post Analysis). There are two trends which really strike me today. If we take Moore’s loss as representative of a decline in the strength of Trump-ism over the last year (Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight make that pretty clear) then it seems to me that Trump-ism is on the decline (huzzah) and that despite its overall decline, it is hanging on most stubbornly among white self-identified Evangelicals. Again:

1. 1. Trump-ism is deteriorating.
2. 2. Trump-ism is deteriorating more slowly among white self-identified Evangelicals than it is in the general population.

This leads me to conclude that white Evangelicalism as an institution and an ideology is a healthy environment for Trump-sim.

From the Washington Post

Now I have already made the argument that Trump is pretty thoroughly anti-Jesus, so the implication here is that white Evangelicalism is a healthy environment to a determinedly anti-Christian element in the world. But I don’t think it is prudent to let this fact sit in isolation; I also want to point out that white Evangelicalism claims to reflect, and encourage growth in, the Way of Jesus.

So now we have a movement/ideology which specifically claims to follow Jesus and is simultaneously acting as an incubator for anti-christian activity and behavior.

At this point I think the relevant question is not so much “Is Evangelicalism corrupt?” that it is seems obvious. The question is more “How long should good Evangelicals keep fighting for Evangelicalism?” I honestly don’t know what the answer ought to be. I know my answer was to take what was good, the “Egyptian gold”, and leave.

Some final caveats

1. I don’t think this means that individual white Evangelicals are themselves anti-christian; they have accepted a doctrine or ideology which, if left unchallenged and uncorrected, is going to incline them in that direction but there are many influences in any person’s life — their own will and character not the least — so many can and do resist it.
2. I am aware that there are many sub-strands of white Evangelicalism and that many white Evangelicals are fighting valiantly to change at least some of the many broken and damaging elements in this ideology. I wish them the very best and if I had not broken with some basic tenets of Evangelicalism a while back I hope that I would be right there with them. Unfortunately I believe that this last year is evidence that they are currently losing that fight.

Trump is Herod Antipater

Obviously they are not identical, since no two people are the same, but the similarities are striking. Consider the following:

He serves his own power and isn’t really loyal to “Rome.” #TrumpisHerod

Herod Antipater was exiled near the end of his life after playing a political game during a Roman succession struggle. Trump has systematically used an appearance of near jingoistic patriotism as a tool to increase his own power. He did this before, during, and after his campaign for president.

He panders to power hungry religious conservatives. #TrumpisHerod

Herod used the Sadducees (a group of theologically conservative power brokers) to establish and bolster his power base among the people he governed despite the fact that he did not follow the moral or religious dictates of their theology. Religious conservatives make up a central part of Trump’s base and he panders to them by offering them power and a cultural prestige they have not recently enjoyed.

He is creepily obsessed with the sexuality of his own female relatives. #TrumpisHerod

Herod married his brother’s wife, who was also his own niece. Trump has made quite a few really disturbing comments about his daughter and her sexuality.

He is terrified that people will think he is weak; also he is weak. #TrumpisHerod

Herod imprisoned John the Baptist for speaking out against his marriage but actually found the prophet rather compelling in general. He was manipulated into beheading John the Baptist when he made a promise to his step-daughter which he then felt compelled to keep for fear that the people around him would think he was weak if he didn’t carry through on her request for the head of John. Trump seems to be almost viscerally motivated by the need to appear strong, but his inability to shrug off criticism and insult belie the fundamental weakness of his character.

His father was a builder, he built some things too. He thinks that makes him special. #TrumpisHerod

Herod’s father (also Herod) initially gained favor with the local conservative religious power brokers by restoring the Temple in Jerusalem. Having seen the public prestige that had granted his father, Herod Antipater also undertook several building projects in order to secure prestige and respect (though he ended up having to scramble and “patch” some of these attempts which his ignorance of the public’s actual religious positions undermined some of his projects). Trump’s basic boast is that he builds big things.

Herod built a wall (at Beth Haran); Trump thinks building a wall will make him great. #TrumpisHerod

One of Herod’s signature building projects was a new defensive wall at Beth Haran. Trump rose to power promising to build a wall across the US’ southern border.

Trump has a problematic relationship with marriage but is given a pass by the religious conservatives of his day (because he gives them power). #TrumpisHerod

Herod’s marriage to his second wife (his niece who had been his brother’s wife) should have been a total scandal to the conservative religious establishment as it was a flagrant violation of their religious law. However thanks to the cozy relationship he had with them they turned a blind eye to it. In the end it was John the Baptist (a religious outsider who made the conservative establishment extremely uncomfortable) who called Herod out.

He has a really problematic relationship with Syria. #TrumpisHerod

Herod’s relationship with the governor of Syria (Vitellius) was complicated and he ended up having to try and force Vitellius to support him by going over his head. Even then Vitellius backed out of the aid as soon as he could manage it.

He is a misogynistic predator who boasts about the sexuality of underage girls. #TrumpisHerod

Herod infamously showed off his step daughter (apocryphally named Salome) by having her perform an erotic dance for the guests he was trying to impress. He was himself so impressed that he ended up promising her anything she asked for, which led to the John the Baptist debacle. Trump has spoken and acted in incredibly misogynistic and predatory ways throughout his career but particularly with regard to Miss Teen USA contestants.

Most of these facts about Herod Antipater are based on either the Biblical record or may be found in the relevant entry in the New World Encyclopedia (which drew largely on Josephus and Philo of Alexandria)

Two Tales of one Tactic: Trump's SoB rant and the Nashville Statement

Unity in Diversity

As an Anabaptist, I don't spend a lot of time making favorable comparisons between the church and the United States government. That said, there is one particular value, which they share, which I like, and which I have been ruminating about recently; let's call it unity-in-diversity. In US parlance this takes the form of the national motto e pluribus unum (out of many, one). In Christianity it appears in Jesus' upper room discourse in John 17:20-21 where he prayed "that they may be one" and in 1 Corinthians 12 (among other places) where Paul uses the image of a single body with diverse members.

Both within the church and within the US, this has been a historically hard value to live in to. Unity-in-Diversity seems to be more often a tension we live in that a truth we live out of. In both cases the natural human desire for community is in tension with the also natural human desire for safety and the fear of "the other". The ordinary result of this tension when applied to States is nationalism, or when applied to smaller groups of people we would probably call it tribalism. In any case it is the attempt to establish a community which feels safe because it contains people who are like us and excludes people who are not like us (the gold-standard read on this subject is probably Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities). This tendency towards tribalism is one which may well be fairly natural to humans but it is something that both the New Testament and founding values of the US resist fairly adamantly.

In the new testament, Jesus' final "high priestly" prayer for those who follow him is that we would be "one" and not just that we would be "one" but that our unity would be a reflection of the unity between the first and second persons of the trinity (all being united in the 3rd person)(1). Paul goes to great lengths to establish, enforce, and reinforce the principle that all who follow Jesus are members of a single "body"—the Body of Christ—and that, far from implying some form of homogeneity, our unity also requires our diversity. We are specifically called to be different from one another and also unified as members of one Body. Our diversity is understood to be unified around the central person of Jesus Christ; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 is worth quoting at length:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

Similarly, the Unites States has historically understood itself to especially value unity in it's diversity. The theory might be put something like "You are free to be any sort of American you like, so long as you are American" Rather than insisting on perfect homogeneity, the founding documents carve out protections for the exercise of particular individuality. While the country has always struggled (and often failed tragically) to live up to this value, the fact of the value itself remains. Again the diversity of America is imagined to be unified around a central political philosophy. After his visit to the US G.K Chesterton described the phenomenon this way:

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

In both cases the idea seems to be that diversity is to be celebrated in the context of a broader and more powerful definitional unity. We may all be different sorts of Christians, but we are all in Christ; we may all be different sorts of Americans but we are all Americans. Now it is obvious to me that those to claims must be in some degree of tension with one another—there cannot be more than one center in your centered set—but that tension only exists because both entities (the US and Christ) claim to be the unifying center around which our diversities orbit; thus the value of unity-in-diversity is a shared one(2).

Further, both groups (the Church and the US) have a long history of inter conflict over this issue. Much of the book of Acts is the story of the early church learning, fighting over, and adjusting to the fact that more and more types of people (Samaritans, Eunuchs, Women, Gentiles) were all offered full participation in the body of Christ without being asked to renegotiate their particular identities in favor of the "original" Jewish identity(3). Similarly, while it is accurate to say that unity-in-diversity is a founding value in the philosophy of the Unites States, the actual application of that value is one that has been only slowly playing out over the centuries. At our outset, the "diversity" was limited to a handful of non-Catholic Christian denominations and a limited but real scope of economic diversity. Our founding documents exclude the full participation of black, native American, and female human persons from the unity-in-diversity(4). In the evolution of our legal documents it is clear just how excruciatingly slow and difficult the unfolding application of the ideal has been as the acceptable domain of "American" has been expanded.

Two parallel stories

So it struck me recently that Evangelical Christianity and the Unites States have recently experienced the deployment a particular tactic. In Evangelical news, a few weeks ago the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood released the Nashville Statement, an extremely anti LBGTQ+ statement with signatories from all around the conservative Evangelosphere denying the Christianity of people who believe that God is cool with LGBTQ+ folks, condemning all same-sex sexuality as sinful, and even condemning people who identify as anything but straight and cisgender (you can find my thoughts on those subjects by clicking HERE for LGB theology and HERE for transgender identities). In America news, President Trump referred to Colin Kaepernick and the other athletes who protested police brutality and violence against black men by taking a knee during the national anthem as a "son of a bitch", suggesting that they ought to be fired, and then proceeded to characterized his statements as a defense of the US flag and, by extension, America itself. Two systems which claim to value unity-in-diversity, two lines drawn in the sand.

See the issue here, is that there are really way more than two "sides" in both of these situations. In the America story, there is Kaepernick and the racial justice advocates who agree with him and have celebrated his cause from the start(5). Then there is the president and his supporters who want to homogenize American diversity and believe that police brutality is a good thing. And then there is the group of Americans who aren't really on board with #blacklivesmatter yet, who don't really like thinking about racial injustice in this country and who mostly wanted to have a Sunday afternoon free from pesky thoughts about systemic oppression; they generally didn't like Kaepernick's protest and would likely be characterized as politically "moderate" or "centrist" they have been coming around to the Kaepernick point of view recently but they have been moving slowly. 

Again within Evangelicalism there are those who believe that God is has no problem with, and in fact loves and delights in the LGBTQ+ community, that LGB sexuality and trans* identities are not sinful and that the Church has a need to repent for millennia of homophobic and transphobic hatred and violence, they want full inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church(6). Then there are the conservative culture-war Evangelical types who believe that there is a dark "homosexual agenda" out to corrupt children, destroy families and generally enmesh American Christianity in dark sexual sin, they want anyone who persistently identifies as LGBTQ+ to be excluded from the life of the church (7). And then there are the many (often younger and more academically oriented) Evangelicals who still think that LGB sexuality is sinful but are genuinely disturbed by the homophobia and transphobia of the Nashville crew, and are very much upset by the clear damage the church has done to actual LGBTQ+ folk. They want very much to find a way to be practically and genuinely loving to LGBTQ+ people but do not (or can not) change their convictions on LGB sexuality or trans* identities(8). They want LGBTQ+ folks to be more included in the life of the church but they are not sure about full inclusion.

Now Kaepernick and a few allies had been engaging in their protest for a year prior to Trump's comments; also the argument over the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church has been going on for quite some time. Arguments and fights would pop up from time to time, discussions would take place, individuals would find that their thoughts, opinions, and positions were shifting. 

And then the Nashville Statement.

And then "that Son of a Bitch".

Leading figures on one side, were suddenly "forcing" the decision. In the America story, Trump's tactic was to send out a clarion call that people who kneel during the national anthem are not "us". He attempted to cut them out of the unity-in-diversity system of America but re-categorizing them as people who don't respect the country (go back to the Chesterton quote if you doubt that this amounts to a denial of their American identity). And so, willing or not, Americans have been drawn into a new conversation. Of course many of the original participants are carrying on with the original debate, but now the entire third group—the group that wanted to be left alone—is now arguing over whether or not Kaepernick's form of protest actually disqualifies someone from being a "real American". And, while Kaepernick's original protest was not particularly popular, it is beginning to look like most of that same group are really upset at the idea that anyone would force him not to engage in it. They didn't like his methods but they are even more opposed to government limitations on free political speech. And that is what led David Graham over at the Atlantic to conclude that Trump has turned Kaepernick's protest into a success.

And over in Evangelical land the same tactic was deployed, this time by the culture-war Evangelicals. The Nashville statement attempted to redefine the terms of the discussion as it existed in the American church. This time the re-categorization attempt was more blatant. Article 10 specifically claimed that to approve of same-sex sexuality or the gender identities of trans folks "constitutes and essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness", and on the off chance that this was insufficiently clear, one of the statement's authors clarified later that it really is saying that they aren't Christian(10). Article 7 declared sinful the celibate-because-of-their-theology LGB Christians like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet whom many of the signatories had regularly cited and even lauded in the past on the grounds that these folks identify as "homosexual". Further, the statement as a whole lumps transgender identities in with its condemnation of same-sex sexuality, a move which may seem "intuitive" to many who don't participate much in these discussions but which has been really troubling to the academic evangelical crowd who tend to be far less settled in their positions on transgender identities than on their thoughts about gay sex. So, like Trump, they have forced a new conversation onto the existing discourse and, like Trump, they have made it far less comfortable for that third category of people in the more-but-not-necessarily-full camp. People whose position ws more "off to the side" who disagree with the full inclusion folks but who saw the exclusionists as overly harsh and extreme were forced into a conversation wherein they have to take a side(9). And, again, this doesn't seem to be working out as well for the authors of the Nashville statement as they might have hoped.

In an attempt to shrink the Overton window to exclude those they oppose, both Trump and the Nashville statement writers seem to have inadvertently excluded their own visions of their respective communities instead. As it turns out, "American" can very much include those who protest injustice by choosing to #takeaknee during a nationalist liturgy and LGBTQ+ Christians are very much fellow members of the Body of Christ (11).

Some tentative conclusions

The outcome of this polarizing exclusion tactic on the part of (respectively) Trump and the Nashville crowd has been somewhat mixed in the eyes of the original protesters. Racial justice advocates have been understandably worried that this sudden expansion of the conversation will and/or already has erased the issue for which Kaepernick started protesting. It is not at all difficult to find reminders that "this is about black lives and police brutality, not about freedom of speech or opposition to Trump per se" all over the internet. And these concerns are very much justifiable. The original activists need to continue in their work of keeping the central focus central, their reminders and concern should not be dismissed as "hand wringing". So long as they do that work though, this tactical move by Trump is likely to benefit the cause of racial justice. On a fundamental level, American's of the third group are being forced to choose whether Kaepernick's vision of America or Trumps is the more legitimate. And if most of the country sides with them on that question (the one that might occlude the issue of racial justice without their hard work) then it will not be Kaepernick and racial justice advocates, but Trump and the MAGA crowd who will be thought to not understand America.

I would argue that the same dynamic is currently playing out within American evangelicalism though in this case the full inclusion crowd is less worried about having their message occluded. The fact that the exclusion camp chose to deploy a similar line-in-the-sand exclusion tactic has forced those Christians who encounter it to confront the question of whether the exclusionists or full inclusionists have the better understanding unity-in-diversity within the Body of Christ. And the outcome of that question will, I submit, restructure the entire conversation in a way that is likely to prove largely positive for the full inclusion position.

After all, one of the most well remembered (I hope) parts of Martin Luther King Jr's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is it's excoriation of the "white moderate" where he says:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.

The choice to deploy the tactic of redefinition has served fundamentally to make the "white moderate" and "full exclusion of LGBTQ+ people" positions far less popularly tenable. Now I am firmly on the side of the racial justice advocates and for the full inclusion of gender and sexual minorities within the life of the Church; I also firmly believe that complexity and nuance are vitally important and that often (but not always) there are important truths to be found in the deliberations and considerations of those who are not at the poles of an issue—it is critically important to be able to have the conversation(12). I also believe that the ultimate success of any popular struggle for justice is dependent on its being accepted as a legitimate (even if not yet accepted) position in society. There have been times and places where exclusion-by-redefinition has worked(13); fortunately, in both of these stories, it seems to be backfiring.

Footnotes

(1) I am not an expert in theology of the Trinity so please let me know if I have misunderstood this one.

(2) I should mention here that, in both the US and the Church the overall "conversation" about unity-in-diversity has often included significant arguments over the degree of "homogenization" which should/will be required for inclusion in the unity. In the US this has historically meant conformity to the mores and expressions of the dominant "white" culture whereas in Christianity it generally revolves around particular liturgical and "orthopraxic" questions. Thus I would consider the question of homogenization distinct from, but always entwined with the value of unity-in-diversity.

(3) I recommend Megan DeFranzas Sex Difference in Christian Theology and/or Wes Howard Brooks' Empire Baptized for a good overview of this one.

(4) For good reading on this I recommend most of the work of Mark Charles but particularly his work on the Doctrine of  Discovery and its subsequent impact on the founding structures of the US; as well as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the Unites States.

(5) I recommend the work of DeRay Mckesson for a good primer on the recent conversation here but the overall view may be best encapsulated by Rembert Browne's recent piece Colin Kaepernick Has a Job.
(6) My recommended books on this would be James Brownson's Bible, Gender, Sexuality, Justin Lee's Torn, Matthew Vines' God and the Gay Christian,  Ken Wilson's A Letter to my Congregation, and Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People.
(7) Al Mohler's We Can Not Be Silent is the most representative book I have found for this view, also Mohler was one of the chief signers of the Nashville Statement; the most celebrated scholar for this position is probably Robert Gagnon.
(8) Folks in this position take a number of different positions so I would recommend looking at Scot McKnight's A Fellowship of Differents, Preston Sprinkle's People to be Loved, Wesley Hill's Washed and Waiting, and Melinda Selmys Sexual Authenticity for a representative overview.
(9) Again, these folks are not at "the poles" for a wide variety of reasons, some because they hold to rigorously worked out conclusions which just aren't quite compatible with either pole, others just because neither side "feels quite right" to them.
(10) Denny Burk, the current president of the CBMW has clarified this HERE

(11) Harry Enten over at FiveThirtyEight.com has a good summary of how this process has worked viz. the civil rights and gay liberation movements.
(12) I think this point holds more strongly in the Christianity Story than in the America story. The non-polar Christians have evidenced a far more "thought out" set of responses than the non-polar Americans in my experience. I haven't found much of value in the public thinking and writing of "white moderate" Americans on this subject (though a few folks have presented their reactions to Kaepernick in more nuanced ways) whereas I have found a lot of value in the writing of non-polar Christians. I would particularly recommend the work of Gabriel Blanchard over at Mudblood Catholic, and would commend the Nashville responses of Preston Sprinkle and Scot McKnight as representative of the non-polar Christian reaction, for a far more "conservative" reaction you might want to read Rod Dreher's piece.
(13) For a resonant account of how this tactic was successfully used by Al Mohler as part of a larger strategy to shift the Southern Baptist Convention to the extremely conservative positions it holds today, check out Dave Gushee's book Still Christian