It cheers to reflect that Donald Trump will soon be a political aberrant padding around Mar-A-Lago, accosting passersby with lies about his greatness, but his malice-eaten base will remain.
Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.
The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness.
[ … ]
What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.
I’m happy to see something like this appear in the New York Times; it’s something I’ve said repeatedly through the years. The Evangelical Right, no matter its pious mewlings about love of country, is intensely hostile to America’s founding ideals.