In this installment, we are going to explore one of Donald’s many glaring contradictions while highlighting a few of the malicious ways he used information to obscure reality and abuse his audience. The following examples don’t go too deep on any one topic, but rather explore a telling contradiction within his worldview.
The idea that liberals wanted to ban public prayer is wrong.
However, it is true that during the century preceding 1970 most of the politically radical European working classes — extremely hostile to the interests of established churches, chiefly the Roman Catholic Church, but also the Orthodox and Lutheran — did want to see public prayer banned entirely. Religion was for Europe’s working classes a bourgeois tool to oppress the workers and restrict their political and economic rights. Marx saw religion as an opiate that prevented the masses fighting the parasites who ruled over them.
Banning public prayer is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to do when they established the Soviet government.
Bans upon the public and — de facto — even private practice of non-Muslim religions is the established policy of the Saudi monarchy even today. It seems logical to me that both Lenin and the European working classes (would have) reacted with envy upon learning the public practice of Christianity was banned in the Emirate of Nejd and Hasa and succeeding Sultanate of Nejd [the two names Saudi Arabia was known by between 1917 and 1924].
Academics in the United States, who envied the social and political gains European workers had achieved over the preceding century, wished to see the secular ideals of Europe’s working classes implemented across the Atlantic. The problem for them was that, as Ron Rogowski and Jeffrey G. Williamson have discussed if rather weakly, free trade was much more favourable to US ruling classes than those of Europe. Therefore, US working classes could never campaign for democratisation or secularisation at all. Actually, the ruling classes were able to prevent the growth of socialist parties by general disenfranchisement of the working classes — and not merely in the former Confederacy — during the very era working classes achieved their greatest gains in Europe. Churches, in fact, served as the organising centres for US working classes, and severely discouraged militant political activity.
Even when deglobalisation following World War I provided more favourable conditions for working class political activism in the US, sharp racial divides meant that there was never adequate unity to seriously challenge ruling class political control. US workers also remained deeply tied to the churches that had become their key social networks. This had the paradoxical effect that — in stark contrast to the moral liberalism of European workers — US workers, even when they campaigned for greater labour and political rights, also campaigned for more rigid moral constraints upon industries like entertainment. The result was that US workers became opposed to the social liberalism evolving among academics who possessed substantial understanding of overseas political developments largely absent within the “white cloisters” that comprise(d) the great bulk of suburban and rural America.
All this combines to explain why there was so much working class opposition in the US to the social liberalism of the 1960s, and why the very rich who knew what they had to fear therefrom had such a large support base.
I love your commentary on citing. A government full of lawyers who lack the basic comprehension of source citation, a mandatory part of your underclassmen years for a bachelors in history. But memes speak to the “Fox News breath” masses so much easier than facts do. Sad
The idea that liberals wanted to ban public prayer is wrong.
However, it is true that during the century preceding 1970 most of the politically radical European working classes — extremely hostile to the interests of established churches, chiefly the Roman Catholic Church, but also the Orthodox and Lutheran — did want to see public prayer banned entirely. Religion was for Europe’s working classes a bourgeois tool to oppress the workers and restrict their political and economic rights. Marx saw religion as an opiate that prevented the masses fighting the parasites who ruled over them.
Banning public prayer is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to do when they established the Soviet government.
Bans upon the public and — de facto — even private practice of non-Muslim religions is the established policy of the Saudi monarchy even today. It seems logical to me that both Lenin and the European working classes (would have) reacted with envy upon learning the public practice of Christianity was banned in the Emirate of Nejd and Hasa and succeeding Sultanate of Nejd [the two names Saudi Arabia was known by between 1917 and 1924].
Academics in the United States, who envied the social and political gains European workers had achieved over the preceding century, wished to see the secular ideals of Europe’s working classes implemented across the Atlantic. The problem for them was that, as Ron Rogowski and Jeffrey G. Williamson have discussed if rather weakly, free trade was much more favourable to US ruling classes than those of Europe. Therefore, US working classes could never campaign for democratisation or secularisation at all. Actually, the ruling classes were able to prevent the growth of socialist parties by general disenfranchisement of the working classes — and not merely in the former Confederacy — during the very era working classes achieved their greatest gains in Europe. Churches, in fact, served as the organising centres for US working classes, and severely discouraged militant political activity.
Even when deglobalisation following World War I provided more favourable conditions for working class political activism in the US, sharp racial divides meant that there was never adequate unity to seriously challenge ruling class political control. US workers also remained deeply tied to the churches that had become their key social networks. This had the paradoxical effect that — in stark contrast to the moral liberalism of European workers — US workers, even when they campaigned for greater labour and political rights, also campaigned for more rigid moral constraints upon industries like entertainment. The result was that US workers became opposed to the social liberalism evolving among academics who possessed substantial understanding of overseas political developments largely absent within the “white cloisters” that comprise(d) the great bulk of suburban and rural America.
All this combines to explain why there was so much working class opposition in the US to the social liberalism of the 1960s, and why the very rich who knew what they had to fear therefrom had such a large support base.
I really appreciate these additional insights!
I love your commentary on citing. A government full of lawyers who lack the basic comprehension of source citation, a mandatory part of your underclassmen years for a bachelors in history. But memes speak to the “Fox News breath” masses so much easier than facts do. Sad
Thank you!