Hillary's America needs law and order

But Trump is the one presenting himself as "the law and order candidate."

Disorder helps Trump.

There is a debate going on about police violence toward blacks.   Guest Post writer Thad Guyer yesterday cited evidence saying that, in actual verifiable fact, police don't kill blacks more than whites except insofar as blacks and other minorities are disproportionally bigger share of the poverty cohort.

Click here for the full article

Police target poverty and social disfunction, not race, Guyer wrote, and he had his own fifteen years of anecdotal experience as a litigator on behalf of abused inmates to help inform the statistical evidence.

His Guest Post got pushback and he responded, saying that if progressives ignored data they built their argument on a bad foundation which would ultimately undermine their credibility.   The New York Times yesterday published an article on the subject--showing police are rougher on blacks but do not actually kill them more often.

But first: What this controversy means for the 2016 election.   Disorder helps Trump.    Protests and counter protests help Trump.  Arguments--even "constructive debate" over the facts and nature of police behaviors help Trump.

Here is why:  Hillary has staked out a political base that got her through the primary: Democratic voters who consider themselves part of a racial or gendered group that faces prejudice, plus left-center progressives who have a "practical" orientation and consider Sanders un-electable.    She has failed, so far, to attract her share of blue collar whites, particularly men; she does not offer them big solutions to their problems and she blames them for the oppression of the women and ethnic minorities in her core constituency.   

This voting block is tempted by Trump and they have a particular concern for law and order.

Prosperous people can insulate themselves from disorder by moving to nice neighborhoods.  Blue collar people cannot.  They live in--or near--poor neighborhoods.   They do not just read about poverty and social disfunction.  They see it up close.   Too close for comfort sometimes. 

American neighborhoods and schools are as segregated now as they were pre-civil rights era and they have sorted themselves by money and social class which is inexactly coincidental with ethnicity.   People with the money to do so move to "nice neighborhoods."

Hillary needs Americans to feel safe enough about themselves and the state or race relations that she can preach and encourage multi-cultural integration.  Openness.  Toleration.  Politically correct and morally correct and constitutionally correct equality.    

Hillary needs order for people to consent to this.  It is easier to perceive as enriching or charming customs that are "other" when they seem safe.   Not so when they seem menacing.  

Trump profits from disorder.   If the neighborhood a half mile from your house has youth at night throwing rocks at policemen or blocking streets one wishes one lived further away.  Or out in a nice, safe suburb.  If men are on street corners selling drugs--maybe, possibly, probably--you want police to look into it and stop them if they are up to no good.  One does not need proof to be suspicious.  

If four young people are hanging out in a publicly visible place, just apparently waiting, looking up and down the street casually, maybe smoking cigarettes, what do you wonder?  Or suspect?  Are they discussing their college class material?  Maybe.  But maybe not. Do you feel comfortable thinking that your kids need to pass in front of them?  Or your wife?  Or you?   What it it is at dusk, or at night?   If you see a police car with policemen giving them a close eye, is one's thought: racist profiling?   Or is it, good, those guys look suspicious, I feel safer? 

If your wife goes to a Safeway store, but feels nervous about the neighborhood because of the people she sees standing around in the parking lot, she maybe goes to another Safeway, further out.  Or at least she welcomes the police presence.   Those guys hanging out might be white or black or Hispanic, but they are probably poor, or at least one suspects they aren't working regularly, because why else would they be just hanging out?   Maybe they work a night shift, and there are perfectly innocent reasons for them to be there.  But still.  They are frightening in a way that young men the same age, wearing the green apron smock of a box boy out rounding up shopping carts is not frightening.  

Trump:  No civilization without law and order

The police target poverty and social disfunction and that is exactly what vulnerable people want, and the people who feel most vulnerable are people who live close to this.  As Guyer learned at first hand: white citizens trust the police more than then trust "criminal types."     

Trump is openly calling himself the law and order candidate and he has credibility doing so. Hillary has no credibility as the law-and-order candidate because her base constituency is built around grievance and a presumption--or at least the potential--that the police are handling things improperly.

Hillary is locked in as the candidate unhappy about unfair and targeted policing.   Trump is on the other side.

Trump has the political wind at his back.   Notice to progressives:  Trump can win this election.

Here below is Thad Guyer's long comment:

Who Cares if the Statistics Don’t Show Cops Kill Blacks Disproportionately?

After my recent post showing cops kills blacks proportionately with whites, a reader asked me “who cares, and how is that a contribution to the dialog America needs to have about police racism?” My answer is that a constructive debate about racial justice is diminished by spurious accusations of racism against a key group that is indispensable in reform efforts—the police”. In the end, whether in Congress or state legislatures, once the false narrative is statistically debunked, policy initiatives based on the false statistics will fail in a cloud of cynicism.

A case in point was the Diane Rehm show yesterday, “The Latest On The Shootings In Dallas, Louisiana and Minnesota” (July 11, 2016, http://npr.org/5376c005409da). Ms. Rehm aggressively asserted against a caller, a policeman, that a new Washington Post study proves that cops kill blacks at 2.5 times the rate of whites. Two of her activist panelists chimed in their support, as Ms. Rehm claimed it was time for police chiefs to say they are “apologize” for this systemic and deadly “racism”. The WP “study” she referenced, was reported in “Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no” (July 11, 2016, https://goo.gl/3eN0oo). It is not a credible statistical study, at least not as reported, and suffered the usual fallacy of using the total national population of blacks and whites, ignoring the required validating “cohort” of those who come into contact with police. Most disappointing to me beyond Ms. Rehm, hurting her own journalistic credibility, was her ignoring the New York Times article on the same morning reporting a Harvard study debunking claims of racial disparity in police killings. See, “Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings”, (NYT, July 11, 2016, http://goo.gl/4Gml9E). “It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.  

Professor Fryer, who is the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard, explained that he had undertaken the study fully expecting to find support for racially motivated police killings. Not only did he find no support for the claim of higher rates of blacks being killed by cops, he was surprised to find just the opposite:

"In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force."

Indeed, professor Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston, for example, "were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black". He found that "blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites".

Unsustainable statistical accusations of police racism will only cause more political polarization and cultural insensitivity. Activist groups, politicians and well-intended citizens are not going to advance the cause of racial justice in law enforcement by using false statistics that will ultimately doom policy initiatives which relied on those statistics. Worse, these activists will undermine their reputations at a time when credible voices are most needed to address the real issue—excessive police killings of poor Americans, regardless of race.  

Police War on Poverty

People Misunderstand What is Happening with Police.  They aren't picking on blacks.  They are picking on poor people.

Peter Sage Introduction of a Guest Post

Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer sent a long, detailed post, challenging readers to soldier through it.   I will introduce it with a few bullet points.

1.  Guyer spent some fifteen years practicing law in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oregon representing inmates in police brutality cases as the most visible part of his practice.  He represented plaintiffs--people who got excessively roughed up.  He earned high praise for his skill. Sheriff deputies who later got into trouble of any kind themselves turned around and hired Guyer to represent them.   But Guyer lost every single excessive force case.  Police always had some sort of excuse for the force they meted out.  Jurors could always find something wrong with the guy who got beaten by the police or the woman who "voluntarily" had sex with her jailers.  

2.  Guyer appears frustrated with the progressive team's analysis of the problem, not because he fails to recognize racism, but because focusing on police-on-black misses the wider problem.   Police are brutal against poor people.  Poor people are disproportionately black and Hispanic, but Guyer knows from experience that "white trash" populations are subject to the same kinds of profiling, suspicion, close policing, and quick readiness to use extreme force lest they be caught off guard.

3.  Guyer appears frustrated because insofar as the problem is defined as race it falls into the racial-team paradigm pushed by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: a race war.  This encourages and enhances racial resentment politics which further fractures the country and points to electoral defeat for Hillary.   It expands the "Reagan Democrat" blue collar base for Republicans because white voters want to believe in their police.  Worse, it proves to swing voters that liberal "Can't we all get along" policies don't work, and if Obama-Clinton cannot govern they will try some new candidate.

4.  If the problem is poverty and the nature of policing of poor people and often blighted neighborhoods then it is not a race war and solutions are possible.  American cannot "cure race" but we can address poverty and the disfunction of addiction, bad housing, bad schools, truancy, and crime.  The problems are intractable, but they are not impossible.  There is opportunity for progressive hope and change.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer

America’s Self-Delusional “Race War

Thad Guyer

America’s frenzied social media churns a culture wars narrative that cops kill blacks disproportionately. Black Lives Matter is the new boogeyman of the conservative right, and the face of a new racial injustice narrative by the left. The most deceptive statistic now being writ large is that blacks make up 30 percent of the people dying from police violence, but are just 13 percent of the population. See, US Census, “Quick Facts” (https://goo.gl/oDl7jT). This single-axis racial demographic is meaningless. Instead the comprehensive data support a single conclusion—cops disproportionately kill the poor, and the poor disproportionately kill the cops. Poor blacks are 26.2% of the poverty population, and 30% of all people killed by police. 
 
Of police who are murdered, 40% are murdered by poor blacks, and 50% are murdered by whites, Hispanics and Asians, who together constitute 45.7% of America’s total poverty population. See, C-Span, Washington Journal Heather MacDonald Ferguson (June 27, 2016 http://goo.gl/lYyJfW); see also crime statistics reported in Daily Wire, “5 Statistics You Need To Know About Cops Killing Blacks” (http://goo.gl/1Rschi). In my years as a criminal defense lawyer, the strongest association we saw was between poor people (regardless of race), and police stops of old cars with broken tail lights, expired tags, drivers without seat belts, and drug dealing.

The US Census found in 2014 that 14.8% of the general population lived in poverty.  Some10.1% of whites are in poverty, 12.0% of Asians, 23.6% of Hispanics , and 26.2% of blacks. (Wikipedia, https://goo.gl/Ki2WdT). As a review of crime statistics unsurprisingly shows, “poor urban blacks had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites.  So, generally speaking, rates of violence for people in poverty are largely the same across racial lines”. See, Daily Kos, “The problem isn't ‘black on black’ crime, it's poor on poor victimization” (Oct 2015, http://goo.gl/B22zBn).

The statisticians at the popular left website FiveThirtyEight.com have been evaluating the case for blacks being disproportionately killed by police. They cannot make that case, but instead show that arrests are the key statistic, concluding that “the reality is that the proportion of arrests that are of African-Americans is close to the proportion of killings by police that are of African-Americans.” (April 2015, http://goo.gl/y7GhrD). These in turn are close to the percentage of blacks in poverty. 

More recently, FiveThirtyEight has considered whether non-combative or unarmed blacks are killed by police more often than non-combative or unarmed whites. This it turns out is tiny subset, because almost everyone killed by police is armed or resisting arrest. (including all three black men shot is Ferguson, Baton Rouge and Minnesota). See, Heather Ferguson’s new book, “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe” (Amazon, https://goo.gl/7G1z0x), 

FiveThirtyEight concluded that FBI and DOJ “counts don’t all track whether people killed [by police] are unarmed, and that can be disputed or hard to categorize.” (“Police Are Killing People As Often As They Were Before Ferguson”, July 7, 2016, http://goo.gl/vk1GjD). As "community policing" deploys more non-white police, blacks are increasingly being shot by non-white officers. 

In my view, the lack of credible data that police kill poor blacks disproportionately to poor whites, Hispanics and Asians will continue to keep America’s delusional “race wars” narrative exactly where it has been stuck for the past eight years— nowhere. Hillary will urge greater enlightenment for “white people”, Trump will warn us about Mexicans, but like Obama, neither will do anything other than “listen” and argue about guns. 

Our polarized culture does not care about the facts. We will continue to ignore “inconvenient truths” about cops, hope our tweets and videos go viral, and denounce the “other side” as we, the viewers, judge the validity of police shootings from our arm chairs. 

"Good Guy with a Gun"

A new wrinkle in the gun debate.   What if the good guy with the gun is black?

We do not know what actually happened in Minnesota in the incident where police officer Geronimo Yarez shot and killed Philando Castile. 

Let me repeat that:  the world will never really know exactly what Castile did and what Yarez saw.  So we can describe what is being said but not what really happened.  

 Possibly we will learn more verifiable facts.    Some contradictory and uncertain version of "the truth" will emerge, as the physical facts of bullets, videotape, and a dead body are studied, and as we evaluate the comments by Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, and now the policeman, through his attorney:  it was the presence of a gun that changed things from routine to tragic.

In my extended circle of Republican Rotarian Chamber of Commerce civic minded friends I am noticing a new fad emerging, something akin to getting a Harley.   That is getting a handgun and a concealed carry permit.  It is a little bit of bad boy empowerment combined with the notion of "being prepared."

The NRA and Republican politicians celebrate gun ownership and carry as a right and opportunity to protect oneself and serve the community: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is by a good guy with a gun."    Men like myself, well past middle age, far too old for any police or military role, now being addressed by store clerks as "sir", and having young women at the grocery checkout ask if we need help carrying purchases to the car, we get to be strong again by carrying a loaded pistol.  We are once again able "to protect and to serve" in the event of trouble.  As Trump said, if people were armed the bullets could have gone both ways.   What could go wrong?


But it turned out that in Minnesota the gun didn't resolve trouble.   It brought trouble.


As Diamond Renolds told the story on video while Castile lay bleeding to death, and as she repeated it on camera the next day, the policeman interpreted Castile's reaching for his driver's license as instructed as if he were reaching for a gun.  She speaks in an animated tone, but is very decisive about the event.   Castile was doing exactly as instructed and doing nothing wrong.  Click Here. She describes the police stop.    T

The attorney for Yarez has presented as the opening explanation in the officer's defense that his client was reacting to "the presence of that gun and the display of that gun.  This had nothing to do with race. This had everything to do with the presence of a gun."  

This incident confounds the NRA's politics.   The NRA supports police, except when police are thought to be complicit in gun confiscation, at which point the NRA referred to them as "jackbooted thugs", a term that caused George HW Bush to terminate his lifetime membership in the NRA.  The NRA supports the right to carry firearms, openly or concealed.   The NRA message is the current Trump message: a white man with a gun might protect himself from a "thug" or rioting black men in a race war, making him a hero rather than a victim.   

NRA press release

But a black man carrying a concealed weapon changes the politics completely.   Concealed guns are to protect someone against the black man with a gun.

The NRA has been silent, and called out on their silence.   Finally, they issued a press release:  no comment now.

The incident in Dallas had a similar problem for the NRA.   A large black man was openly carrying a rifle at a protest march.   Some might think this is both foolhardy and provocative.  I do. 

Still, this is a behavior the state of Texas adamantly defends.  
After all, a rifle might be useful if there were a shooting incident and someone needed to defend himself and others.  And it actually happened in Dallas, a shooting incident.   But in a real life situation the presence of that gun became dangerous trouble.  The "good guy with a gun"--a black man--was assumed to be a "bad guy with a gun".  He immediately surrendered his gun, he was detained, and some 5 million people received tweeted photos of him as a suspected killer.  

Black Panthers

Ronald Reagan endorsed and signed gun control legislation.  Why?   Black Panthers were openly carrying military type weapons, exercising that constitutional right.  It scared Californians.  The wrong sorts of people were exercising 2nd Amendment rights.

People in America will disagree over whether policing is reasonable, fair, and unbiased.   The GOP/Trump/NRA narrative is that police are doing a hard job trying to keep control of very disorderly people.  As Rudy Giuliani observed, these people getting killed by police "aren't alter boys."   As I wrote yesterday, my experience with police is different from the experience of some other people.  I assume I will be treated fairly because that is my limited experience.   I have been stopped 3 times in 50 years.

What really happened at that traffic stop in Minnesota?  What presumptions and profiles might have informed each participant's behavior?   Can an armed black man in civilian clothes be assumed to be the "good guy?"

Acording to the Associated Press:   


"Court records show the traffic stop was at least the 52nd time that Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor, had been pulled over in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area since 2002. He had been given citations for minor offenses including speeding, driving without a muffler and not wearing a seat belt."

Say, what?   He was stopped almost 4 times a year over a 14 year period?   In what world of community and traffic policing--utterly unfamiliar to me--is a person detained by police in recorded instances that often, and yet apparently was not actually cited so that he still maintained a driver's license?  

Election Context 

From the point of view of Hillary's team, the Minnesota case confirms a grave problem of systemic racism.  Plus, the NRA is made to look hypocritical.   That's good for Hillary, right?  Not necessarily.   Hillary's team is already sold on racial prejudice and grievance.  Hillary's problem is that she is running as the continuity candidate.   We have had a black president for 8 years and she is running as his successor.  Therefore, the incident tells a story that is uncomfortable for white voters.   It shows that liberal politicians and policies don't work.   Racial strife is as bad as ever, and what more could we do than elect a black president?   

Worse, the incident suggests something ugly and intractable:  white people are in fact guilty of racism, and few white people want to integrate that notion into ones conscience?  This is Minnesota in 2016, not George Wallace's 1950's Alabama.  The problem is us.   Apparently--maybe--even people we need to entrust with our safety--policemen--are actually carrying out racist profiling and policing.  

Hillary's message is an uncomfortable one:  maybe we are, indeed, more racist than we thought and we need to change ourselves.   It sounds like a scold.

Trump has an easier message:   Policemen are good, all except a very few "bad apples."  Bad guys are bad and good guys are good and generally they are color-coded for easy distinction.  People like you are good.   Bad guys look different.   All this multicultural stuff is PC and watering down what we really know deep down, that other people--unassimilated Mexicans and other immigrants, crafty foreigners, Muslims generally, and disorderly protesters of all colors, and the liberal friends of those people--are making America dangerous and are pulling us down. Trump says he isn't racist--the Mexicans and the blacks love him--it is just that he is saying the the simple truth, that there are a lot of illegals and thugs and terrorists out there and Trump will name them and protect real Americans from them.   There is a war out there and he is on our side against them.   There is nothing wrong with you, Trump says, except that you have elected weak leaders.

Race War Helps Trump

Chaos is good politics.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . . "

Hillary Clinton was not forced to take and maintain the "continuity, incremental, not real change" position, but she has done so.  Trump and Sanders were naturals for the outsider position, the position that Barrack "Hope and Change" Obama held 8 years ago when he won big.  

Hillary represents continuity; Trump represents change.  Or reform.  Or something better than this.


Another warning to progressives:   Trump could win this and if the frame stays "continuity" versus "something better maybe" Trump will win in a landslide.

The videotape images of the police encounters with of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota fit a pattern we have seen before: police quick to size up a situation involving a black person and to use lethal force.   The result has been that the two tribes I described yesterday each raced to define these incidents as emblematic of what is happening in America.

Representatives of Hillary's team, street protesters, the most visible being black, described this as yet another iteration of the discrimination faced by people of color, a widespread condition at long last made visible by cell phone videotape.   

The media voice of Trump's team, Fox News, largely ignored the two incidents themselves--until the sniper assassination in Dallas of the 5 killed police officers, at which point they began non-stop coverage of a unruly blacks vs. orderly whites race war, a war that was simultaneously lawless thug blacks and their liberal politician apologists vs. courageous policemen.

The frame seems accurate to each side and it serves the purposes of each side.  Black protesters experience policing as unfair profiling.    What is undeniable is that a great many dark skinned people--Afro-American and Hispanic--perceive it and believe it to be true and obvious.  Their goal is the legitimization of their grievance.  They perceive discrimination and prejudicial profiling, and the videotape gives them evidence to confront skeptical whites.   And many whites are in fact skeptical, since they have a very different experience with policemen. 

I am a white male who drives newish vehicles and my encounters with police have been few but very pleasant and respectful.  Quick-draw police?   Others must be imagining it.  Lawyer friends tell me that the white juries in my community in Medford, Oregon overwhelmingly trust policemen to be reliable truthful witnesses when they testify.    

Click here: "Tensions are high!"

Meanwhile, the Fox News meme of angry and murderous blacks at war with America serves Fox's ratings as well as their political purpose.   Sean Hannity reveals his frustration with peaceful black protesters in Baton Rouge when they are interviewed and express peaceful intent.   Hannity kept seeking someone to voice anti-police comments "There are people out there protesting with black lives matter 'pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon' and I want you to ask if they support comments like that."  [ 6:21]   Alas, for Hannity the protesters explained that their tee shirts came from their churches.  Hannity persisted, "what about black lives matter 'pigs in a blanket?'" [7:30).  Again, the protester frustrated him, responding that people didn't want to cause problems, that they were protesting profiling, that blue lives mattered, etc.    

Racial strife fits the Fox News frame of the world, which is simultaneously the Donald Trump frame:  disorderly blacks are at war with white America, i.e. normal America, regular America, the America that used to be great. 

Meanwhile, events give them evidence to demonstrate that frame, even if the protesters in Baton Rouge failed them.  Yesterday there were incidents in Missouri of an ambush shooting of a policemen, apparently by a solitary black man, and an incident in Tennessee of an Army veteran, also angry about the incidents in Baton Rouge and Minnesota, who began random shooting of motorists on a Tennessee highway.   Horrible events, very subject to nonstop breaking news and commentary, which Fox is giving them.

All this helps Donald Trump enormously.

Donald Trump is the face of change.   The soft spoken, deliberate comments by Obama from Poland (where he is on NATO business) attempted to acknowledge past and present wrongs and to urge peaceful progress toward order and justice.  The immediate aftermath is black men shooting cops and motorists.   The implication: Obama is ineffective.   Racial divides continue and Obama cannot do anything useful.

Race war is good for readership, good for ratings and good for Trump

Trump and conservatives have another approach:  Strength. Defend the police.  Call the war for what it is:  war.  Joe Walsh, now a talk show host and formerly the congressman of "You Lie!" fame tweeted:   "This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.").   The New York Post (the conservative, pro-Trump NY tabloid) called it Civil War.  

The agents of the status quo (Obama and Hillary-the-continuity-candidate) are demonstrated to be unable to create order so the stage is set for someone new and different.  Trump is new and different.

Inside, progressive politics.  Outside, not progressive enough.

Meanwhile, the Sanders supporters seem eager to show that they, too, are angry with the status quo.  On Thursday I attended a fundraising event for the Oregon governor, a leftist environmentalist bisexual woman who supported Hillary Clinton in the primary and now faces a conservative Republican opponent.   She has well funded opposition from the right but the protesters were from the environmental left.   The protesters were led by people holding Sanders signs, and they marched in front of the gate to the event chanting: "Hillary cheated, Sanders won.  Hillary cheated, Sanders won."

Inside the event Oregon's Governor Brown talked about Oregon's progress on a higher minimum wage, on achieving the greatest voter access in America, on cleaner energy, on the most progressive rules in the country on reproductive freedom and the challenges she faces from Republicans.   Outside, Sanders voters condemned her.

It could hardly be worse for Hillary.  The most loyal part of her base, black Americans, are shooting policemen out of political ideology, and the most fragile part of her base are rejecting electable left-center politicians saying they are sell-outs.   

If the falcon does not listen to the falconer voters will find a different falconer with a different whistle.

Who would Jesus vote for?

Allah Akbar vs. God is Great.   Live Churches vs. Dead Churches.   Baptists vs. Episcopalians.

This election is a struggle about identity.   The sign on the campaign wall could read, "It's the identity, stupid."

I had written last month that a student of this election didn't need to have studied economics.  Study anthropology instead.  Bernie Sanders talks about how wealth is earned and distributed and election commentators keep trying to understand the "working man's" resentment and grievance.   But Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders are each motivating voters by appealing to something other than money.  They are identifying and firing up their tribes.

And religion is part of that tribal identity.  This is why the issue of whether Obama says the talismanic words "Islamic terror" actually matters.  It is important to white, Christian conservatives that mere crime (gang killings, workplace killings, and incidents like the black-white racially motivated killing in the Charleston church) be differentiated from "real" terror, i.e. Muslims killing Muslims and non-Muslims motivated by Muslim triumphantalism.  Allah Akbar.    Their Allah inspires murdering savages--not great.  Our God is the great one, the bringer of peace and salvation from sin.

There is a struggle for triumphant leadership within the Christian churches of America.  The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was led by politically active liberal ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr. being the most prominent, but others led the anti-Vietnam war movements.

Connie Ihm

One reader, in Medford, Oregon, Connie Ihm, responded to an earlier guest post which posited that Christian faith caused people to be better and more moral--and more governable within a constitutional democracy--because such a document would only survive if it governed a moral people.  She wrote,  "Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive."  

She went on, "I am a registered Democrat not only because I was raised with parents who voted Democrat but because after I started to follow Jesus, I believed the Democrat party more closely matched what I believe Jesus purposed;  Forgiveness and caring for others; our family, our neighbor and the stranger as we try our humble best to imitate Jesus’ love for others as created in God’s image.  Jesus said to render what is Caesar’s to Caesar and to God what is God’s.  He wouldn’t let himself get drawn into political agendas."

Click to see "Victories" ad: Christianity triumphant.

Ted Cruz was the purest example of the Christian Church triumphant.   His TV ad--'Victories" presented him as the man who led the fight to place a cross at the top of a public park and a Ten Commandments monument at a state capital.  "We" win.  The godless and believers in false gods lose.   Members of Christian-triumph churches note with pride that this version of Christianity is winning adherents and old style "establishment" churches are losing members and are "dead" in spiritual life.  Episcopalians and Methodists down; independent evangelical churches up  Here's the scorecard:  Evangelicals over Mainline Protestants

Connie Ihm writes that her faith changes people personally and internally.  Its power is to change souls, not to dominate a polity and shape laws, nor to judge behavior of others.

Responding to a description of modern secular and non-triumphalist-Christian society as morally degraded mutantcy, she wrote: 

"Am I a moral mutant because I vote Democrat?  . . .  We need laws of course.  Every society needs laws.  

As society changes so do the laws.  As people we are constantly coming up with ways to break the laws so we need new ones to cover the results of our fertile imaginations of ways to get around them.  As concerns believers and his followers; Jesus got it down to 2 laws or rather commandments for his followers; ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.   And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

God blesses a Godly community but destroys one with sin within it.

Ihm says it is not about rules and judging.  It is an emotion of submission and love, not law enforcement.   She is a Christian non-combatant in the political wars.   For her, it's personal.  Just personal.  Not focused on political action, this strain of Christianity loses out politically to the other version of Christianity because the other version understands God as a rule-writer and judger, who wants believers to create a Godly community and many of its members organize for political action.  From America's founding it was understood that a Godly community requires the faithful to create laws for the community on the role of men and women, on religious doctrine, on proper dress and eating, on civil laws, on homosexuality, on the nature of marriage.   John Winthrop said the very survival of Boston required that they keep the faith and create a community fully knitted together.  That requires a government, conscious of its Christian heritage, obedient to Christian rules, and unapologetic in the triumph of Christian values.   True when John Winthrop said it and still true. The tribe is Godly and God is Great.    

(ISIS, the Islamic State, has the same understanding of the need for political Islam and control of territory: the faithful must create a polity of the faithful.   To create a Godly community it is not enough to have faithful people in private service to Allah.  Not all people are properly faithful and unGodly behavior offends Allah and defiles the community.  Allah, like God, demands an obedient community, and people should have great pride in  the effort to establish it.  The caliphate is Godly and Allah Akbar.)

Marco Rubio said it most succinctly but Trump said it most effectively:  we are in a war of civilizations.  Them versus us.  Trump knows what to do in a fight:  WIN.

That politically active strain, the one identified and nurtured by Ted Cruz (emphasizing religion) and Donald Trump (emphasizing white ethnicity) has has largely unified the Republican Party for this election, a unity impaired somewhat due to Trump's behavior and style.  But the Trump is appealing to a lot of Americans, and when Trump stays on that message he is broadly persuasive to a great many voters.  America first. America pride.  We are Christian and proud.  "Merry Christmas!" No apologizing.  We are not one of many, we are central.  It is our country, people like us, people who were born here, who speak English.   Our values created this country and we don't need or want to dilute them or pollute them with other values purporting to be equal and requiring us to share space or resources.  We can "take America back."  We can make America great again.

Hillary represents the opposite brand: global, multi-ethnic, respectful of international norms and institutions.  

Hillary was brought up in the Methodist church.  Trump says he is Presbyterian.  Both are mainline churches.  The difference is that Hillary presents her faith rather more as Connie Ihm presents it: a personal enrichment that leads toward a Matthew 25 version of Jesus: feed the hungry, clothe the naked.  Churches of all kinds serve the poor, naked, hungry, sick.  Service to the poor is not the differentiator.   The difference is the spirit of triumph and winning: Christian identity.   Hillary does not lead a Christian tribe, at war with the secular and the infidel.

Trump does.  The fact that Trump is obviously un-churched ("Two Corinthians) actually makes my point.  His being un-schooled in his faith demonstrates that his appeal is not about faith but about tribe.  He represents traditional possessors of power, the reassertion of the legitimacy and power of "normal" Americans--white, Christian identity in a war of tribal identity against Islam, multiculturalism, globalism, and foreigners.   

Trump's tribe is the traditional American tribe.   Hillary's tribe is the group the traditional American tribe defines itself in contrast to.  Trump's tribe is still bigger on election day, especially if his tribe is motivated to vote.