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Andrew C. Spiropoulos

Conservatives believe that the new U.S. Supreme Court can serve as an effective buffer in the culture wars. An excellent example of a case that may serve as an appropriate vehicle for vindicating the right to religious liberty is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a case argued before the court earlier this month.

Catholic Social Services, a foster-care organization associated with the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, has for many years served the city of Philadelphia by certifying potential foster parents. CSS, because of its Catholic faith, cannot consider certifying either unmarried couples or same-sex married couples. In 2018, the city council ordered its foster care agency to cease making referrals to CSS, despite CSS 100 years of foster care ministry. The city cannot abide any connection with what it believes is rank bigotry.

Under current precedent, the case appears easy. In 1990, the court, in Employment Division v. Smith, held that a government law that does not discriminate against religious people and treats all covered by the law equally must generally be upheld even if the law substantially burdens the free exercise of religion equality before the law requires that religious people be given no special judicial exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws. The city requires that its contractors do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. If the city wanted to exempt CSS, it could, but since it does not, case closed.

But not so fast. One of the reasons the court took this case is that it wants to consider using it as a vehicle to overrule Smith. What would that mean? Even if the citys law is neutral and generally applicable, if it substantially burdens religious liberty such as ending a century-old foster care ministry that is central to the mission of the Catholic Church the court will not give the citys law any deference. Instead the city will have to meet strict scrutiny, which requires the city to prove it has a compelling interest for its law and that the law is absolutely necessary. While the city doubtless will argue that ending discrimination based on sexual orientation meets the highest possible standard, CSS, pointing to the availability of over two dozen other foster care agencies who are happy to work with same-sex couples, will argue that ending its ministry is not necessary to ensuring same-sex couples access to the foster care system.

The overruling of Smith would have enormous legal and institutional significance. It would signal that the court is ready to explicitly embrace an active role in umpiring the most heated cultural conflicts. These cases, like Fulton itself, are notoriously difficult and close, and the results will go both ways. But, should the court choose to take on this burden, it may encourage our warring parties to catch the spirit of compromise.

Its hard to not root for Smiths overruling when you see whats going on here in Oklahoma. The State Department of Education has crafted rules that will exclude certain religious schools from participating in the Lindsay Nicole Henry Scholarship program because they refuse to sacrifice certain aspects of their religious character. While it appears obvious that SDE has flouted the clear terms of the programs statute, one can imagine a future in which the law does not protect religious liberty. A revitalized First Amendment doctrine might come in handy.

Andrew Spiropoulos is the Robert S. Kerr, Sr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Oklahoma City University and the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and should not be attributed to either institution.

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Right Thinking: Is Supreme Court ready to umpire heated culture conflicts? - Journal Record

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. A glass case in the history museum on the main street through this city celebrates its curious place in American lore: There's a photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. on the courthouse steps, and Richard Nixon at Terre Haute's little airport. A newsreel playing on a loop describes it as "magic town."

Vigo County, with about 107,000 people on the western edge of Indiana, long had some mysterious mix of quirky politics, demographics, geography, religion, labor and luck so that it had become America's most reliable presidential bellwether.

Since 1888, this exhibit boasts, the county voted in line with the nation in every presidential election but two. It missed in 1908 and 1952, then remained a perfect predictor of the U.S. mood, a rare place to toggle between Republicans and Democrats in harmony with America.

"That's wrong now. We're going to have to change that poster," said Susan Tingley, the executive director of the museum, which is in an old overalls factory that closed long ago, like most of the local factories.

Vigo County's most recent winning streak ended this year, as it did for nearly all the country's reliable bellwethers, most of them blue-collar, overwhelmingly white communities in the Rust Belt. Of the 19 counties that had a perfect record between 1980 and 2016, all but one voted to reelect President Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden in both the national popular vote and in nearly every battleground state.

The country's tribalized politics seem to have finally reached these places that used to routinely swing from one party to the other. The only county that maintained its place as a bellwether is Clallam County, in Washington state.

The ones in the middle all crumbled, leaving many here wondering whether this was merely a Trump-fueled fluke or whether the country has cleaved itself so firmly into two opposing camps that these old political standard-bearers are obsolete. Is Vigo County just one more reliably red square in the red middle of America?

"It speaks to an evolution in American politics," said David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati who analyzed the state of Ohio's fall from bellwether status this year.

Niven notes these bellwethers were born when political battle lines tended to be drawn more cleanly along economic lines. These middle-class communities were in the center and up for grabs. But as national politics become less about economics and more about culture wars and identity, Democrats have lost their grip in places such as Vigo County that are overwhelmingly white, he said.

Now the places emerging as possible new bellwethers have more racially diverse populations. Delaware's Kent County last missed in 1992. Its population is 60% white and 27% Black. Blaine County in Montana, which last missed in 1988, is more than 50% Native American.

Vigo County doesn't look much like America, and its place as its foremost presidential predictor relied on a certain degree of luck, said Matt Bergbower, a political scientist at Indiana State University. It is not as diverse as the nation, with a population that is 85% white. It is not as wealthy or highly educated, either.

But for generations its conservative tilt on social issues was balanced by left-leaning idiosyncrasies. There are four colleges in Terre Haute, a remarkable number for a city its size. It is the birthplace of Eugene V. Debs, a champion for workers' rights who ran for president as a socialist five times in the early 20th century. The county's blue-collar workforce was heavily organized and union halls dotted the city.

Terre Haute was once so defined by its factories it even smelled of them. Big industrial plants lined the banks of the Wabash River, and the odor of fermentation and chemicals was in the air. People are happy that the smell is gone now. But it drifted away as the plants closed down, and with it went countless good-paying jobs.

The Democratic-leaning ingredients in town diminished, too. Many young people now leave, seeking better jobs in bigger cities. As industry crumbled, union membership declined.

Trump won in Terre Haute by 15 percentage points, holding his margin of victory in 2016. But local political observers on both sides of the aisle marveled at the dramatic spike in straight-ticket Republican ballots: 11,744, more than one-quarter of all the presidential votes cast. The county government, for the first time anyone can remember, will now be controlled almost entirely by Republicans.

"If you would have told me 10 years ago we would have more straight-ticket Republicans in this county than Democrats, I'd have said you're a liar," said Frank Rush, a Republican radio talk show host who voted for Trump.

Rush said Vigo County might be saying goodbye to its bellwether history, but it remains a barometer for the worries and values of the geographic middle of America. People in growing big cities just can't understand life in a place like this, where it feels like the country is moving on without them.

"And Trump, love him or hate him, approve or disapprove, he at least gave the impression that he really cared about these folks that thought they were left behind and ignored," Rush said. "That's why they rallied to his side."

Todd Thacker, business manager of the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said he's willing to take part of the blame for the way this election turned out. He tried mightily to persuade his members to "vote your paycheck" and elect Democrats who support organized labor. But he watched as many instead aligned themselves based on polarizing wedge issues "God, guns and gays," he derides it.

Thacker is an avid hunter, he has a concealed carry permit and owns many guns. But the polarized political landscape today has, he said, "brainwashed people to think that if you're a Democrat, you can't be a patriotic gun-owning flag-waving American."

Trump managed to stoke that fear and people listened, fueled by misinformation on social media and pundits bellowing all day about how the other side will destroy democracy.

"He's not a politician, he's a scam artist," said Thacker, who tried to remind people that President Barack Obama didn't come take people's guns, President Bill Clinton didn't, either.

His union supported a program called "Unity in the Community," that as a response to the national reckoning on racism tried to bring together the police and the Black community. One of his members accused him of supporting a "Marxist" movement.

Thacker says typically about 35% of his members vote Republican. This year, he thinks it increased.

The Trump supporters in the union include Craig Rudisel, who spent 23 years in the military before joining the electricians' local and has a Trump sign as big as a bathtub on his front lawn.

"I've had conversation with people I work with and they say 'you need to support your brotherhood, you need to support your paycheck,''' said Rudisel, 50. "And I say 'I have to support my conscience.'"

Rudisel is drawn to Trump's position on guns, abortion and taxes. He wears a Make America Great Again cap every day, and was unfazed to receive an anonymous typewritten letter in the mail from someone who described in vulgar terms how much they disapprove of his Trump sign. He likes that Trump upsets people, and he doesn't mind doing it, either.

"He wants to make America great again, and that's what we want," he said. "We are tired of liberal progressive ideals. That's not what our country was founded on and that's not how this county should be going in the future. I want the country that I grew up in for my grandson and granddaughter."

Rudisel is proud of Vigo County's bellwether history. Like many here, he can off the top of his head rattle off the details of the few elections it missed and that is part of why he has clung to the hope that Trump hasn't lost. Trump has claimed there was widespread voter fraud, despite offering no evidence to support that charge.

Rudisel thinks what happened here is proof. Vigo County and the rest of the bellwethers always get it right and opted for Trump, so he must be the rightful winner, Rudisel thinks.

Other Trump supporters also pointed to Vigo's past performance as a sign that the election fight might not be over.

Ken Warner, a stockbroker, said he will accept a Biden presidency but he wonders how so many bellwethers could get it wrong, all at once.

Warner, 64, has toggled between Republicans and Democrats, and wasn't terribly excited about Trump in the 2016 primary. Warner remains uneasy about the president's personality. He cringed when Trump antagonized governors during the pandemic and hurled childish insults at people such as the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

But he grew more enthusiastic about Trump throughout his presidency. He cheered for Trump's economic policies. He supported the tax cuts, the tariffs and his tough stance on China.

The Trump era hasn't been a boon for Indiana's factory towns. The sector was recovering from the Great Recession when Trump took office, but that began to stall in 2019. Then the coronavirus caused a plunge in factory jobs in the state, which are now down by almost 40,000 from a year ago.

Warner believes if Trump had gotten a second term, things might have improved. He worries the economy will stagnate under a Democratic administration.

"I think his tweets were part of his downfall," Warner said. "But the people that voted for Trump didn't vote for him for his personality. They voted for results."

Joe Etling was certain that the people of Vigo County would punish Trump for his temperament. Every four years, Etling, who has run the county's Democratic Party for 24 years, is asked by pundits and politicians to guess who will win the presidential election. This year he said Biden.

"People in this county are good, decent people. They treat people with respect, they're polite and if you're out and about, people on the streets are going to welcome you. Well, when you hear some of the things that the president says publicly, they're not real friendly, they're not real polite, they're not real courteous," he said. "My sense is if you had Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a room with people in Vigo County, they would have substantially more in common with Joe Biden than they ever would have Donald Trump. And yet."

Etling refuses to accept that his county is fully Republican now.

In 2008, he saw how excited this community was about Obama. When Obama came to town, people packed a school gymnasium and screamed like he was a rock star. The county had from 1960 to 2004 voted within 3 percentage points of the national vote, but it broke that streak to vote overwhelmingly for Obama, who won this county by 16 percentage points. That margin narrowed considerably in 2012, when Obama won Vigo County by just a few hundred votes.

Then it swung wildly rightward, awarding Trump huge margins of victory, twice.

"And you would have to agree that those two gentlemen are about as diametrically opposed as anybody that you could think about. And yet people still did that," Etling said, and so he thinks they can turn it around again.

There was a bright spot for him in 2020. One of the few Democrats elected was Dr. Janie Myers, the new coroner and the first Black woman in history to win countywide office here.

So Etling is already starting to recruit Democratic candidates to run in local races in 2022, and he thinks it can reclaim its bellwether status.

But Tingley, at the county history museum, isn't sure this place or any place can be a bellwether these days.

"It is all politics of fear and passion. It's not about voting for who's right for you. It's about avoiding the candidate that scares you the most," she said. "If it gets back to what's best for the country, what's best for individuals, what's best for communities, I think that's when the bellwether counties all across the country can hit it again."

In the meantime, the city is trying rebrand itself.

The signs leading into town welcome visitors to the birthplace of the Coca-Cola bottle. A glass company here invented Coke's iconic contoured container in 1915.

There's a mural of the bottle painted on the side of the history museum, and around the town are 39 6-foot-tall brightly-painted bottle sculptures. The goal is to promote Terre Haute as a cultural destination, steeped in Americana history.

Tingley would be happy if the city became known for that. It probably would be more reliable than predicting the president every four years.

___

Associated Press writer Josh Boak and Associated Press data journalist Angeliki Kastanis contributed to this report.

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America's bellwethers crumbled in aligning with Trump in '20 - Minneapolis Star Tribune

After Republicans won big on election night in the state of Iowa, in Americas heartland, Governor Kim Reynolds claimed vindication for her light-handed approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

It was a validation of our balanced response to Covid-19, Reynolds said of the vote. One that is mindful of both public health and economic health.

That was two weeks ago. Since then, the trajectory of the pandemic in Iowa, as elsewhere in the American midwest, has taken a sharp and tragic turn.

Daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations are up 100% in Iowa since election night, and daily deaths are up more than 50%, hitting 41 on Tuesday. Nationwide, the United States has passed 250,000 confirmed deaths about twice as many as any other country.

Like other Republicans torn between fighting the pandemic and fighting the culture wars, Reynolds spent months dismissing the need for a mask mandate in her state, calling it a feelgood measure. But new warnings from local hospitals of a dangerous overload finally drove Reynolds to reverse course this week.

The pandemic in Iowa is the worst it has ever been, she said. No one wants to do this. I dont want to do this.

The reluctance to do this is not exclusive to Reynolds but it is exclusive to one of Americas two major political parties.

Since the start of the pandemic, Republican officials across the country, cowed by Donald Trump, conspiracy-swayed constituents and lesser political calculations, have resisted asking voters to take personal action to stop the spread of Covid-19. Until recently, many of those states had escaped the worst consequences of the official dereliction, enjoying some luck in the mysterious dynamics of the viruss spread.

But with the arrival of cooler temperatures, an increase in indoor activity and widespread pandemic fatigue, that story has changed terribly this fall, as public health experts predicted it would. With each passing week, the unwillingness of elected Republicans to act against the virus is taking an increasing toll, health experts say.

And the mistrust in basic public health guidelines that Republicans have sown has a further, potentially destructive cost yet to be paid: the climate of mistrust seems likely to hamper the countrys imminent effort to escape the viruss clutches through universal vaccination.

Its not just that the anti-mask, anti-distancing, anti-testing Republicans are wrong as a matter of public policy, tweeted Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative anti-Trump Bulwark. Its not even that they lack empathy for those who suffer. They relish their lack of empathy. They glory in their callousness. They are proud of their inhumanity.

Daily coronavirus-related deaths since the election are up by more than 50% in western states with Republican leadership including North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska, according to the Covid Tracking Project and like Iowa, those states have been flooded with new infections.

Some Republican governors, such as Reynolds and the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, have been driven by desperation to reverse themselves on masks. But others, such as Nebraskas governor, Pete Ricketts, a major Trump backer, have resisted a general mask mandate.

In lieu of such a mandate, hundreds of Nebraska healthcare workers signed an open letter published on Wednesday by the Omaha World-Herald, pleading with the public to mask up.

Your frontline health care workers are exhausted, they wrote. We are scared that the hospitals wont have the space and people to meet the ever-growing demand. We are seeing many deaths and will continue to see many more.

There is no clear map of the United States overlaying holes in political leadership with spikes in coronavirus cases, because the virus does not respect political boundaries, said Lawrence O Gostin, founding ONeill Chair in global health law at Georgetown University and a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University.

Its really hard to make a direct and causal connection between governors in conservative states that refuse to order masks, distancing, or send out mixed messages and cases, Gostin told the Guardian.

But make no mistake about it, those are causing enormous flare-ups in the United States, because we cant think of the state as some self-contained unit. They affect other states and they affect the entire country.

Republican resistance to masks, social distancing and other coronavirus mitigation measures began early on in the pandemic. The purely political prism through which Trump saw the pandemic set the tone.

In private, Trump said the virus was deadly stuff that goes through the air while in public he said the virus was a hoax that would disappear. Any Republican governor who dared split with the party line, such as Ohios Mike DeWine and Marylands Larry Hogan, drew wrathful Twitter fire from the White House.

Republicans also took up coronavirus rejectionism as an ideological battle, equating basic health precautions with existential threats to personal freedom.

The conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito said last week that safety measures had exacted previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty. The attorney general, William Barr, called prospective stay-at-home orders the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history apart from slavery.

The partisan chasm produced a striking scene on the Senate floor this week, when the Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown asked the presiding senator, the Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan, to wear a mask to protect the health of staff members required to be present in the chamber including one staffer seated directly underneath Sullivan.

I dont need your instruction, Sullivan barked in refusal.

Ted Cruz, another Republican senator, piled on. Sherrod Brown is being a complete ass, he tweeted.

The senators had been called to the chamber to confirm a final few Trump judges. But that fact only underscored the Republican failure, in the eyes of critics, to meet Democrats halfway on a new and direly needed coronavirus relief bill, which appears a dead letter.

For millions of American lives touched by the coronavirus, it was too late to correct the failure to stand up protocols for masking and social distancing, testing and contact-tracing. But negative consequences of the culture war around the pandemic could still lie ahead, damaging the national vaccination effort.

The primary responsibility for prioritizing vaccines and distributing them [lies with] state and local health departments, said Gostin. Even though youre going to probably have leadership that values science, youre nonetheless going to have state and local government that are resistant, and are not effectively distributing the vaccine and not encouraging their citizenry to get the vaccine.

And so the splintered, fragmented approach in the United States will only look worse when it comes to a vaccine distribution.

Gostin said he hoped that Biden would convene a Covid-19 summit at the White House including all the governors and public health commissioners.

Its going to be hard, said Gostin, but I think thats our only hope to meet what we face: the most daunting logistical challenge for a vaccine campaign in our lifetime.

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Republican officials finally forced into action on Covid-19 as reality bites - The Guardian

DETROIT The head of the Catholic Church in Detroit has been chosen to lead a new national group that seeks to guide how Catholics should respond to President-elect Joe Biden and the contentious issue of abortion.

Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who leads the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, was named this week the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), on the last day of their annual fall meeting.

Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, who named Vigneron, struck a conservative tone in his remarks in emphasizing abortion and by saying Biden supports policies that "attack some fundamental values we hold dear." Biden spoke last week with Pope Francis in a call seen as a show of unity that was praised by liberal and moderate Catholics.

Now, the Detroit archbishop, who is also vice president of the USCCB, could play a leading role in how the Catholic Church interacts with the Biden administration on abortion and other policy issues.

Experts say the creation of the group signifies that Catholic leaders in the U.S. may be adopting a more hard-line stance toward Biden, a pro-abortion rights Democrat who would be the second Catholic president of the U.S. and has talked often about his faith. Liberal Catholics worry it would put the Church at odds with Biden, the first Catholic elected president since John F. Kennedy.

Biden has "given us reason to believe that he will support policies that attack some fundamental values we hold dear as Catholics," Gomez said on Tuesday during a general assembly meeting, according to a copy of his remarks provided to the Detroit Free Press by USCCB. "These policies include the repeal of the Hyde amendment and the preservation of Roe v. Wade. Both of these policies undermine our 'preeminent priority' of the elimination of abortion. These policies also include restoration of the HHS (Health and Human Services) mandate, the passage of the Equality Act, and the unequal treatment of Catholic schools."

Archbishop Gomez praised Biden on some issues, saying the "President-elect has given us reason to believe that his faith commitments will move him to support some good policies. This includes policies in favor of immigration reform, refugees, and the poor; and against racism, the death penalty, and climate change."

But he added that Biden's support for abortion rights may create "confusion" for Catholics.

"These policies pose a serious threat to the common good whenever any politician supports them," Gomez said. "We have long opposed these policies strongly, and we will continue to do so. But when politicians who profess the Catholic faith support them, there are additional problems. Among other things, it creates confusion with the faithful about what the Church actually teaches on these questions."

"This is a difficult and complex situation," Gomez said. "In order to help us navigate it, I have decided to appoint a Working Group, Chaired by Archbishop Vigneron, and consisting of the Chairmen of the Committees responsible for the policy areas at stake, as well as Doctrine and Communications."

He didn't offer additional details, saying he will later provide more information.

Some observers of the Catholic Church expressed concern about the message this group may be sending at a time when Pope Francis has been trying to promote unity.

David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, said that "the ad hoc committee sends a bad message and will only undermine efforts to promote Catholic social policies and to cast the Catholic Church as a driver of the common good. Instead, the Catholic leadership will be seen as another polarizing wedge like so many prominent churches."

"I think the creation of this working group on Biden is a muscle memory reflex by the USCCB leadership after so many years of taking a conservative culture war approach to politics," Gibson said. "Pope Francis has appointed many bishops and cardinals who are more in his own mold of engagement and dialogue the pope called to congratulate Biden while the American bishops gird for battle with Biden, which is telling. And at least half of Catholic voters back the second Catholic to be elected president. But the bishops' conference has not caught up with these shifts. That's unfortunate, especially in this time of division."

It's unclear what direction Vigneron will steer the group in.

Since he became head of the Archdiocese 11 years ago, Vigneron has struck a conservative tone at times, warning that people who support same-sex marriage should not receive Communion and the Archdiocese has been cracking down on LGBT Catholic groups. In September, Vigneron drew criticism from liberal Catholics for attending a pro-life fundraiser with former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders where some endorsed Trump.

But while "Vigneron is certainly no liberal ... he is actually closer to the center than to the right wing" among Catholic bishops, Gibson said. "He also doesn't strike me as someone who tosses verbal bombs the way some of his colleagues do. So Vigneron could actually be a moderating influence for this ad hoc committee."

The Archdiocese of Detroit referred questions about Vigneron's appointment to the USCCB, which sent the Free Press a copy of Gomez's remarks.

"I am dismayed by the USCCB's decision to adopt a contentious posture toward the President-Elect," said Natalia Imperatori-Lee, an associate professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in New York. "If the working group turns out to be, as I suspect, another salvo in the culture wars that uses an oversimplified notion of abortion to turn Catholics against one another, then the bishops will continue to lose moral credibility in the eyes of the faithful."

Imperatori-Lee said she is "particularly dismayed, in this statement, by the way Archbishop Gomez uses the notion of 'confusing the faithful'" when he talks about how Biden's views on abortion may confuse Catholics.

"The faithful all know what the church teaches on abortion," she said. "The 'confusion' seems to be about whether the bishops are willing to work toward the common good with someone, anyone, who considers the legality of abortion in this pluralistic country a matter of settled law. Many Catholics, if not most, want to see a decrease in the number of abortions."

Imperatori-Lee said it was "dismaying" for the Catholic bishops to create a group focusing on abortion instead of issues such as immigration, racism and economic struggles of Americans.

"When thousands of Americans are dying in a global pandemic that disproportionately affects people of color, when Central America has been decimated by consecutive hurricanes that are intensifying due to climate change, and when we see images of miles-long lines of people waiting for access to food pantries, I cannot imagine how this working group is the priority for the hierarchy of the US Church," Imperatori-Lee said. "Where is their closeness to Pope Francis's priorities of care for the poor and for the earth? Of global solidarity?"

Speaking Oct. 1 at the annual Al Smith dinner with Catholic leaders, President-elect Joe Biden said: "My Catholic faith has helped me through the darkness" during difficult moments in his life losing loved ones.

It has also shaped his social and political views, Biden said.

"Throughout my life in public service, I've been guided by the tenets of Catholic social doctrine," Biden said. "What you do to the least among us, you do to me. We have an obligation to one another. We cannot serve ourselves at the expense of others. We have a responsibility to future generations."

But his abortion rights views disturb conservative Catholics, with some calling upon bishops to refuse him Communion.

It's unclear how much of an effect the group will have on individual bishops.

"Individual bishops will deal with the Biden administration as they wish, and with Biden himself as they see fit," Gibson of Fordham University said. "The question of whether Biden can receive communion, for example is up to his bishop in his home diocese in Delaware. ... I'm sure both Biden and the bishops will try to avoid any confrontations over communion."

(c)2020 Detroit Free Press

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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Detroit archbishop to lead national Catholic group on Joe Biden and abortion - The Bakersfield Californian

For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans. Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.

Biden, committed to re-establishing normalcy, will probably rejoice at the prospect of returning to the good old days of chummy bipartisanship. Dianne Feinstein already gave a preview, when she thanked Lindsey Graham for his leadership in the plainly illegitimate Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process and literally embraced one of Trumps worst lackeys. In the coming two to four years, political moderation might be a particularly alluring siren call to a weak Democratic president who may not control the Senate or have a strong majority in the House of Representatives.

Heres the problem, however: working across the aisle is not an ideal in itself. If we expect politics to look like an impartial pursuit of the common good or think that there will be consensus if we all follow the rules, as the neoconservative writer Anne Applebaum has suggested, then we are bound to be disappointed over and over. Rather, we must learn to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic forms of political conflict and properly sanction those engaged in the latter.

Polarization is not a given. Culture does not automatically determine politics; we are not fated to debate all issues in terms of cliched contrasts between flyover country and liberal coasts. Some social scientists like to reduce politics to psychology; they claim that humans are hardwired for tribalism or, put less politely, for groups hating each other. That isnt true. In fact, such accounts are curiously apolitical, as well as ahistorical. They cannot explain why, if tribalism is our universal fate, some democracies miraculously appear to escape it, and why some get by without endless culture wars, even if their internal differences are no smaller than in the US.

Polarization isnt an objectively given reality; its a rightwing political project and, not least, its big business just look at the talk radio millionaires. Rightwing populists deepen divisions and reduce all policy questions to questions of cultural belonging. What makes them distinctive is not their criticism of elites, but the invidious suggestion that not every citizen is part of what such politicians often call the real people. Trump told four congresswomen to go home to their shitholish countries; his sycophant Jim Jordan tweeted that Americans love America. They dont want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco.

This strategy has worked well enough for a Republican party whose economic policies are utterly out of line with what large majorities of Americans actually want. For a counter-majoritarian party of plutocratic populism, riling people up with apocalyptic visions of real America being destroyed by black and brown people is not an add-on, but the core mechanism of an electoral outrage-and-grievances machine oiled with resources from the 0.01%. The noise of that machine effectively keeps people distracted from the plutocratic policies most Americans find unappealing.

Fierce partisanship is not in itself a symptom of politics gone wrong. On the contrary: we would not need democracy if we did not have deep disagreements and divisions which are inevitable, as long as we live in a free society. The problem arises when disagreement translates into disrespect. Disrespect doesnt mean just being impolite; it means denying the standing of particular citizens and, as a logical next step, actively trying to disenfranchise people. Republicans have been working towards a situation in which a combination of voter suppression and what the philosopher Kate Manne has called trickle-down aggression acts of private political intimidation tacitly endorsed by Trump shrinks the political power and relevance of many Americans in a way favorable to the interests of the Republican party.

None of this is to say that culture is off-limits for democratic conflict. Of course, its not always clear how abortion, for instance, is really about culture. But even deep moral disagreements can be accommodated in a democracy provided that both winners and losers have another chance to fight the fight. Contrary to Mitch McConnells gloating, losers dont just go home, but get to hold winners accountable and develop systematic policy alternatives. Democracy always allows for second thoughts; its only when the stakes become absolutely existential, or religious, that society gets locked in a scorched-earth, zero-sum battle.

What if rough play in politics not pretty, but not illegitimate becomes truly unfair play? Some theorists think the losing side should sacrifice for the sake of keeping the greater democratic whole together. But democracy cannot mean dividing politics between suckers and scoundrels, as the political scientist Andreas Schedler puts it. Game theorists tell us that we can re-establish proper rule-following by answering every tat with a tit. But responding to unfairness with unfairness might lead to a downward spiral of norms violations; fighting fire with fire could burn down the house as a whole.

It is crucial to realize that not all norm violations in political conflict are the same. Not every invention of an insulting nickname on Twitter must be answered with the same childishness (of which even Trumpists must be tired by now). The best answer to suppression of our voters is not somehow keeping out partisans of the other side. Mechanical tit-for-tat retaliation even if sometimes emotionally satisfying should be resisted in favor of could be called democracy-preserving or even democracy-enhancing reciprocity: measures the other side wont like, but which can be justified with genuine democratic principles: such as giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, or abolishing the electoral college.

Of course, McConnell sees these proposals as merely a power grab; yet a party that tries to construct new majorities, as opposed to just capturing counter-majoritarian institutions like the supreme court and relying on the votes of what Lindsey Graham once called angry white guys, would welcome the contest for new voters. Fair partisan fights can restore democracy, not kitschy appeals to unity and bipartisanship.

Read more from the original source:
End the odes to political 'civility'. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate? | Jan-Werner Mueller - The Guardian