Hong Kong, Voter Suppression, and Republican Hypocrisy

The Republican Party is taking a firm stance against China’s anti-democratic policies designed to thwart free elections and autonomy in Hong Kong. The Beijing government is foisting new election laws on the former British colony intended to end the “one country, two systems” policies that allowed Hong Kong to exist as a democratic enclave in an otherwise totalitarian state.

Last year, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised Hong Kong’s pro-democracy, “demonstrations against the repressive grip of the Chinese communist party.” And he hailed the fact that “Hong Kong voters with American flags in hand dealt crushing defeats to Beijing’s preferred puppet candidates in elections last fall.”

McConnell continued his support for Hong Kong democracy this year by criticizing new Chinese laws restricting voters’ rights in the enclave. “The Chinese Communist Party is trying yet again to tighten their grip,” he said. “New laws supposedly related to national security aim to stifle dissent and curtail Hong Kongers’ civil liberties.”

Sen. Ted “Cancun” Cruz, R-Texas, also supported Hong Kong’s civil rights movement, saying last

January, “I’ll continue to support and stand alongside those of you speaking out against tyranny and fighting for freedom.”

China’s authoritarian government and its attempts to destroy democracy in Hong Kong deserve the strongest condemnation. Yet the GOP’s response to the Chinese restrictions would be more admirable if it weren’t so hypocritical.

At the same time McConnell criticized China’s new laws curtailing the civil liberties of Hong Kong’s citizens, the Republican Party was launching a multitude of state-level voter suppression laws to prevent American citizens of color from casting votes in future elections. And, as in Hong Kong, the reason for passing these anti-democracy laws was that the GOP suffered crushing election defeats in November 2020.

In February, the Brenner Center for Justice reported that “33 states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year.” In the first two months of 2021, Republican state legislatures introduce four times the number of voter suppression bills than introduce in the whole of 2020. The Center described this anti-democracy legislation as “a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.”

Salon reported that number to be much higher, claiming the “tidal wave of (Republican) voter suppression” included 253 bills in 43 states.

These bills aim to limit mail-in voting, which became popular in 2020 during the COVID crisis; impose stricter voter ID requirements, which makes voting difficult for the elderly and minority voters who don’t drive; slash voter registration opportunities, also aimed at the elderly and people of color; and enable more aggressive voter roll purges, all aimed at removing people of color from the voting rolls.

Georgia—where a massive voter turnout helped give Joe Biden the presidency and sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate—is one of the states scrambling to make it harder for its citizens to vote. On March 26, the state's governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law a bill that bans automatic voter registration, limits Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and restricts absentee voting. It also prohibits volunteers from passing out free food and drinks to people forced to stand in lines for hours because of the state's failure to provide adequate polling places in minority neighborhoods.

Georgia’s Republican legislators introduced the bills in response to Donald Trump’s baseless claim of widespread voter fraud in the state.

The Georgia restrictions are so heinous and so obviously aimed at Black voters they are being compared to the Jim Crow laws which existed in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War until 1968. “We know their targets are Black voters,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter. "These (legislation) notes are dripping in the blood of Jim Crow.”

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that marginalized African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or marry outside their race. Violating Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death.

Lest there be any doubt as to the oppressive nature of the Jim Crow laws, they were so admired by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler he used them as a model for the German racial purity laws that restricted the rights of Jews, Blacks, Slavs, and Roma.

The Republican Party did not suffered setbacks in November 2020 because of voter fraud. Repeated investigations by federal and state agencies declared the election one of the cleanest in U.S. history. Fifty lawsuits filed by Trump supporters alleging voting fraud were found without merit by state and federal courts. The Republicans lost because their presidential candidate was widely unpopular because of his hateful rhetoric, unprecedented corruption, and dictatorial ambitions.

Both the Chinese government and the Grand Old Party need to realize governments only suppress the vote because their policies are unpopular. If you want to win over voters and win elections, don’t restrict people’s right to vote, change your policies.

A Novel More Prescient Than Fiction

In 1935, American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis published a novel he meant to be a cautionary tale about the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States. But when read in today's political climate, the book seems less a work of fiction than a prescient foreboding of what was to come.

The basic plot of  It Can't Happen Here involves a pompous, blustering, populist politician who gets elected president running on a platform that is anti-woman, anti-Jew, and anti-black, by making promises he can never deliver on, by accusing the news media of spreading lies, and by proclaiming only he can cure the country's ills and "make it great again." Once he takes office, he begins issuing orders that by-pass the law-making powers of Congress and the legal review of the judiciary, and strips the rights of millions of people.

What sounds like a plot torn from today's headlines was actually written 80 years before the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Sinclair's bitingly witty story holds so many parallels to the results of the 2016 election and its aftermath as to be unnerving. Written at a time when fascist governments were popping up throughout Europe, the book was inspired by the naïve belief of Americans at the time that what was happening across the Atlantic "can't happen here."

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a populist U.S. senator loosely based on the bombastic southern Senator Huey Long, whose quest for the presidency was ended by an assassin's bullet in 1935. Windrip curries the favor of Americans disgruntled over the economic blight of the Great Depression by claiming he would end unemployment, much as Trump promised to "bring jobs back" to America.

Men of Little Intellectual Curiosity

A man of little intellectual curiosity, Windrip claims his autobiography is the world's greatest book next to the Bible, the same claim made by an equally incurious Trump about his ghostwritten autobiography The Art of the Deal. Windrips' political base is a rag-tag group of agitators called The Minute Men, or MMs for short. Think of the MMs as a combination of the Tea Party radicals and Alt-Right white supremacists who helped put Trump into office.

Windrip runs for office, much as Trump did, with promises of taking power in Washington away from industrialists and bankers and giving it back to the little man. Once in power, however, Windrip begins appointing incompetent cronies to key government leadership roles.

Sound familiar? Trump, who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington, filled his Cabinet with controversial D.C. insiders, family members, wealthy financiers, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists—most of whom were appointed to their offices without approval from Congress.

Almost immediately, Windrip by-passes Congress and begins issuing executive orders ending President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal social programs, stripping women of the right to vote, and Jews and blacks of their civil rights. He replaces key military leaders with buffoons from the Minutemen, and abolishes all regulations on businesses.

In the first few days of his administration, Trump used executive orders to strip regulations on banks, industry, and polluters; demanded the repeal of President Obama's Affordable Care Act; ordered the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (at least those who are non-Anglo); began caging Hispanic immigrant children, and removed the nation's top military and national security leaders from the National Security Council, replacing them with his Alt-Right strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon, a self-professed white nationalist, didn't last long, of course, and as of this writing he is facing federal criminal charges for fraud.

To consolidate power, Windrip sends handpicked "commissioners" to assume the leadership of local governments. The move is very similar to the Nazis use of gauleiters to take control of areas of Germany. Trump hasn't done that—yet—but several Republican governors have dispatched "emergency managers" to take over local government bodies in their states. (Two such emergency managers were charged with felonies for their roles in the Flint, Michigan drinking water fiasco.)

Windrip fails to make good on any of his campaign promises save one; he ends unemployment by sending the unemployed to labor camps. Workers from labor camps are provided to companies for a small fee. This, of course, means those companies lay off regular workers who, now unemployed, are sent to labor camps.

As one of his first acts, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order to withdraw federal prisoners from privately operated prisons, which have been criticized for bolstering their profits by outsourcing inmates as prison laborers.

Building Walls to Keep Us In

Windrip fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises when he strengthens border security to prevent illegal immigration out of the United States into Canada and Mexico. Walls, after all, keep people in as well as out. Trump has not succeeded in building his promised border wall, but his incompetence during the Covid-19 crisis forced the bulk of Europe to ban U.S. travelers from visiting their countries—essentially building a wall to keep us in. The only wall Trump succeeded in building so far is an "unscalable" wall around the White House grounds.

Eventually, as Windrip consolidates his power, he does away with all political parties except the new Corporatist Party, whose members are called Corpos. The country is now ruled by and for corporations and wealthy oligarchs, the very definition of fascism as defined by the father of fascism, Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Trump stuffed his Cabinet with wealthy and mostly incompetent corporate donors. His economic policies have benefited major corporations at the expense of American workers. His trade war with China did nothing to hurt that country while devastating a large part of the American agricultural sector. Even before the pandemic, Trump's job numbers were plunging despite burgeoning corporate profits.

Lewis narrates his story through the disbelieving eyes of Doremus Jessup, a middle-aged newspaperman who cannot believe his fellow citizens don't see the slow creep of growing totalitarianism in the country. When MMs begin to terrorize the citizenry, people assume they are just a small minority of rabble-rousers. Even when Windrip establishes concentration camps to house his enemies, many in the country simply cannot believe the United States is falling victim to corporate fascism. They continue to believe "it can't happen here." By the time they realize it has happened here, it is too late.

Trump has praised white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He ordered federal police and troops to attack peaceful demonstrators so he could be photographed holding a Bible outside a Washington church. His followers have attacked synagogues and mosques, and gunned down cops. Federal agents clad in unmarked military uniforms kidnapped peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., threw them into unmarked vehicles, and held them without just cause. Alt-Right armed militia are being allowed to patrol American streets. One of those "minutemen," a 17-year-old teenager with an illegal weapons, is now accused of murdering two people.

And still too many Americans refuse to see this country's slide into authoritarianism. They still believe "it can't happen here."

Lewis's inspiration for this book was simply the time in which it was written. In the 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. Ninety percent of the country's wealth was owned by only three percent of the population. (Today, after 30 years of Reaganomics, only one percent of Americans own the bulk of the nation's wealth).

Dissatisfaction over the slow economic recovery spawned several populist movements, many of them pro-fascist. In 1932, a group of wealthy conservatives attempted a coup to overthrow the government and establish a fascist government. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History on this blog.)

Lewis doesn't spare any political movement in this book. He views any strongly held belief system, political or religious, as potentially authoritarian. All it takes is a populace too wrapped up in their own lives to not recognize what's happening about them, or not caring what's happening as long as it doesn't happen to them.

There is no happy ending to this book. There is no great uprising of patriots; many of those who most loudly proclaimed their patriotism in the beginning of the book end up in the MMs or working for Windrip, just as the Republican Party—which initially opposed Trump's candidacy—is now his greatest enabler.

 Far more than Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale  all Americans should be reading—and heeding—today.

GOP the "Party of Lincoln?" Not So Fast There...

During his poorly attended, virus-ridden June campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump once again pulled out the GOP’s favorite meme, that the Republican Party was the “party of Lincoln.” Republicans love this claim because it fits so nicely into the grade school lessons most people remember—that is Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the GOP ticket and reelected again in 1864 on behalf of the Grand Old Party.

Republican Lincoln ran for
reelection with Democrat Johnson 
as his running mate.

The problem is Lincoln did not actually run for reelection on the Republican Party ticket. And if you remember back to your high history lessons, you'll remember Lincoln's running mate in 1864—Andrew Johnson—was a Democrat. A Democrat running on a Republican Party ticket? How could that be?

When confronted with that fact today, the GOP simply claims they temporary changed the party’s name for that one election. It wasn’t that simple. The National Union Party was comprised of both Republicans and Democrats.

Party Schisms

This bizarre fact of history came about because by 1864 a political schism slashed through the Republican Party. First, Lincoln was a dark horse candidate that no one in the party ever expected to rise to be their presidential nominee. Even after his election, Lincoln never really received the full support of his party.

One reason for that was a faction of the party called the Radical Republicans who were strong proponents of abolition, the enfranchisement of blacks, and—after secession—ensuring the South paid dearly for its treason. They disliked Lincoln and his call for a gentle reintegration of the South after the war. And in a political case of you can't win for losing, many Republicans were outraged by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, especially since four Union states— Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky—were still slave states. Those who opposed Lincoln's policies demanded he step down after his first term.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Party was experiencing its own policy split. Before the war, the Democrats were the party of the South and of slavery. After the Southern secession, those Democrats who remained loyal to the Union were split into two categories—the War Democrats who supported Lincoln’s war to force the South’s return into the Union, and the Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, who opposed the war and demanded a peace settlement with the South.

For the 1864 presidential election, both parties experienced so much division it was impossible for the traditional two-party balloting to take place. The Radical Republicans formed a separate party, the Radical Democracy Party, and nominated John C. Frémont, famed explorer and the Republican presidential nominee in the 1856 election. War Democrat John Cochrane, a former Union Army general, was his running mate.

 Other War Democrats joined Republicans in forming the National Union Party, which nominated Lincoln for president with War Democrat Johnson as his running mate.

The Democratic Party, now largely a Copperhead party, nominated former Major General George McClelland, whom Lincoln had fired as head of the Union Army, as its presidential nominee.

National Union
campaign poster

Couldn't Win as a Republican

As much as today’s GOP likes to describe itself as “the party of Lincoln,” the truth is Lincoln faced losing reelection if he ran solely on a Republican Party platform. Many of the National Unionists would not vote for a Republican candidate. Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, chairman of the National Union Party’s convention, declared to Lincoln, “As a Union party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. But as an Abolition party, as a Republican party, as a Whig party, as a Democratic party, as an American [Know-Nothing] party, I will not follow you one foot.”

The Radical Republican’s attempt to win the presidency did not last long. Realizing that his third-party candidacy might hand the White House over to McClelland and the Democrats, Frémont withdrew from the race. McClelland himself did not agree with the Copperheads’ platform demanding a peace settlement with the Confederacy, but the National Unionists used that platform to discredit the one-time hero of the Union.

Lincoln won reelection by a landslide. The Republicans and the Democrats of the National Union Party returned to their former entities, as did the Radical Republicans and the Copperheads. By the end of April 1865, Lincoln would be dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. But, for the few remaining months of his presidency, Lincoln was not a Republican president or a Democratic president, but a National Union president supported openly by members from both traditional national parties.

So, when today’s GOP claims to be “the party of Lincoln,” they are simply wrong. Lincoln transcended any one party. Unlike Trump, Lincoln was a president for the nation.

Ayn Rand's Corrosive Influence on American Politics

The three and a half years he’s been in the White House, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a greedy, self-involved, narcissistic, sociopath. At the same time, Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate to be of like mind with Trump. It’s not difficult to understand why; their brand of political conservatism is, at its heart, sociopathic.

But the true inspiration behind their hard-edged conservatism is neither Pinochet nor Friedman, but a mediocre, early 20th century novelist and self-proclaimed philosopher named Ayn Rand. Rand’s brand of social Objectivism has been the center of extreme right philosophy. GOP Senator Rand Paul, along with his former Republican congressman father, Ron Paul, are hard-core adherents to Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Her belief system was also behind the Tea Party movement.

Her novel, The Fountainhead, is one of the few books Trump said he enjoyed reading. When he became president, Trump proclaimed he would appoint Rand acolytes to cabinet posts. One of those, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Post, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me.” Pompeo is said to be currently facing multiple internal corruption probes.

The problem is, Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing are sociopathic.

The Russian-born Rand has been poisoning the minds of self-absorbed adolescents for decades with her philosophy of the individual as the center of the universe. That philosophy holds well with high schoolers who truly believe the universe revolves around them. Most people say adieu to Rand and her rants as they mature. Those that don’t become sociopaths— as Rand was herself.

The terrorist-hero of The
Fountain was based on a
real-life psychopathic killer.

Had she ever laid herself on a psychiatrist’s couch, Rand no doubt would have been diagnosed as sociopathic. Throughout her life, Rand—like the heroes in her best-known books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—believed whatever was good for her was right. She once wrote the basis of her philosophy stemmed from her childhood in post-Revolution Russia when her parents refused to buy her a dress she wanted or give her a cup of tea like the grown-ups were drinking. She believed if she wanted something, she should have it. It is said she once took money that her family needed for food to buy tickets to the theater.

Rand was so enamored with the idea of the unfettered self, she developed an infatuation with the notorious psychopathic serial killer, William Edward Hickman. In 1928, Hickman kidnapped his last victim, a 12-year-old girl, and held her for ransom. When the girl’s father paid the ransom, Hickman dumped the girl’s eviscerated and dismembered body in the street. At the time, it was considered one of the greatest crimes of the century.

Psychopathic 'Superman'

Ayn Rand felt otherwise.

In her notebooks, Rand wrote admiringly of Hickman. “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote. She added, using words eerily prescient of what the Nazis would be saying a few years hence, that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

Hickman, who was executed in 1928, became the model for Rand’s Fountainhead hero, Howard Roark, a self-absorbed architect who wins a woman’s devotion by raping her, and ends up committing an act of terrorism—blowing up the Fountainhead building—because he didn’t get his way.

Howard Roark, like his real-life model, was one sick puppy.

Rand’s self-proclaimed Objectivism philosophy basically says man makes his own reality. Whatever he determines to be, is. Evidence of how wide-spread this narcissistic philosophy is among the extreme right of the Republican Party was seen when Karl Rove, then chief advisor to President George Bush, told journalist Ron Susskind, “we create our own reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

Former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan, also an Ayn Rand fan, carried that same philosophy to the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention when, as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he delivered a diatribe on the Obama administration that was so separated from reality that even Fox News criticized its lies.

Kindred Spirits

Ryan, in fact, has a lot in common with Rand. Like her, Ryan likes to bite the hand that fed him. Ryan, youngest son of an upper middle-class family, received Social Security survivors’ benefits after his attorney father died of a heart attack. Since his family didn’t need those benefits to survive on, Ryan stuffed them away and used them to pay for his college education. Later he advocated doing away with Social Security for those who do need it.

Ryan's home in Wisconsin was declared a national historic site, meaning the Ryan family receives a taxpayer subsidy to maintain it. Since graduating from college, Ryan drew a government paycheck, first as a congressional aid, then as a congressman. Now retired from Congress, Ryan continues to collect a government pension and tax-payer subsidized health care.

Ayn Rand, too, took advantage of a government-sponsored education in the Soviet Union, and then turned against the system as soon as it no longer benefited her. She was the beneficiary of many government programs in the United States, as well. When her first play abruptly closed in 1938, the Works Progress Administration took it on a nationwide tour and paid Rand a weekly salary. In her old age, Rand regularly criticized those living on Social Security, even though she was receiving Social Security benefits under a married name.

Like Trump, Ayn Rand was an amoral, narcissistic, sociopath, and her poisoned pen continues taint American political thought and corrupt American political morals.

_____________________

UPDATE (July 8, 2020): Like the woman whose juvenile rhetoric they advocate, the Ayn Rand Institute admitted on July 7 that it had received up to $1 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program approved by Congress to help businesses during the Covid-19 crisis. The institute, which continues Rand's criticism of government welfare of any kind, used twisted logic to rationalized why it took the bailout. Apparently it isn't enough for the institute to keep Rand's childish philosophy of greed and selfishness alive, they also follow her hypocrisy, too.

 

For further reading:

Trump Administration Embraces Ayn Rand's Disdain for the Masses

US Republican leaders love Ayn Rand

The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

‘We Took PPP Funds and Would Do It Again’

In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan

Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching on to Theocracy

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” 

 Sinclair Lewis, American Writer (1885-1951)

Many years ago, when I was young police reporter, a cop friend of mine told me: “Never trust a man who wears his patriotism or his religion on his sleeve,” he said. “They’re hiding something.”

I took that advice to heart, and found it never to be wrong. The self-righteous hypocrisy of today’s flag-waving, Bible-thumping right-wing only reinforces my belief in my friend’s advice. All that preaching and pontificating is hiding something, something dark and terrible, something they don’t want you to know.

We’ve seen it before. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the first religious broadcasters, used his cloak of religion to preach an anti-Semitic and pro-fascist theology. Coughlin closely associated himself with the Christian Front, one of many “cross and flag” organizations that wrapped their theology of anti-communism, anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism in the American flag and the Bible. We’d all be seig-heiling today if this country knelt before Coughlin’s alter.

Rick Santorum, running for the Republican presidential nomination, is doing his best to fit into Coughlin’s cassock. His recent rant that President Barrack Obama follows a “phony theology,” not only echoes Father Coughlin’s dogma but also that of the “birthers” bigotry. Moreover, his recently uncovered 2008 speech in which he claimed Satan was attacking the United States shrieks the same rhetoric espoused by Al Qaida and the Taliban.  

Disgraced House Speaker and outed philanderer Newt Gingrich has been marching down that same path of self-righteousness, using his born-again Catholic conversion to claim President Obama is waging a war on religion. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, wears his Mormon religion like his sacred underwear. He doesn’t show it, but you know it’s there.

When attacking the president’s religion or what they perceive as his anti-religion policies is not enough, the candidates and their cohorts attack each other’s religion. In his 2008 speech, Santorum, a Catholic, said Protestantism is “gone from the world of Christianity.” On the other hand, right-wing Protestant evangelicals call Catholicism a cult. Neither side has much nice to say about Mormons ... or Jews. 

 Is this where we’re going in this country? Are the Catholics and Protestants and Mormons and whoever else going to line up against each other like the Sunnis and Shiites of the Muslim religion? Is that what we want in this country—sectarian warfare? 

These Taliban Christians who blot the airways with their venal pontification are obsessed with sin, both doing it and being forgiven for it. Their idea of Christianity is simply accepting Jesus Christ as your savior and your sins will be absolved. They don’t see the fault of that philosophy; that if all you need for salvation is to “accept” Christ, you can do anything you want—steal, murder, pillage, it will all be forgiven.

Because Santorum has accepted Christ into his heart, is he to be forgiven for being a corporate shill when he was senator and afterward? God may have forgiven Gingrich for his past indiscretions as a wife-cheater and corrupt politician, but what about his more recent sins as a lobbyist for corrupt corporations and as a race-baiter in the primaries?

Should Romney be forgiven for his vulture capitalism, wantonly destroying American companies and the lives of their laid-off workers, all in search of profit? Are the Virginia state legislators who voted to punish women seeking an abortion by forcibly raping them with sonogram probes to be forgiven? 

Christ’s gospel was all about a loving and forgiving God. He preached love, forgiveness, tolerance and charity. He trod a path others were suppose the follow—helping the poor, the sick, the downtrodden—things the right-wing seems to consider un-American. Preaching a self-righteous gospel of hate, greed and intolerance doesn’t make you a Christian. If anything, it makes you an Anti-Christ. 

Our Founding Fathers were very bright. Far from a group of “white Christian men” who founded this country for “white Christian men,” as the right-wing contends, our Founding Fathers were a diverse collection of nationalities, races and religions—Protestants, Catholics and, yes, Jews. Most, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were deists, believing in a Supreme Being, admiring Jesus Christ as a philosopher, but wary of the church’s influence. 

Our Founding Fathers were wary because the age of theocratic monarchies was not ancient history to them as it is to us. They lived it as subjects of King George III. When they declared independence for England, they were declaring independence from a theocracy in which the king derived his right to rule from God and the church. 

It was with this in mind that they wrote the First Amendment. It not only promised Americans the right to believe as they wished, it was also a promise to keep religion out of government, to keep religion from being a requisite for patriotism. They knew a government ruled by any one religion would lead to intolerance, and intolerance would lead to suppression, and suppression would lead to some form of authoritarian government. They were right.

My cop friend understood that. So did Sinclair Lewis. I sincerely hope American voters do as well.