Debate night!

Last updated on: October 19, 2016 at 8:05 pm by Fred Clark

Debate night! 2016-10-19T20:05:50-04:00 Fred Clark

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• So the good news for me is that I spend Wednesday nights on a ladder at the Big Box and will therefore be unable to subject myself to watching tonight’s third and final presidential debate. I’ll be doing what I did with the first one — trying not to think about it before frantically checking Twitter at my 11 o’clock break. (This is also how I follow the baseball playoffs.)

• This report today from Sarah Pulliam Bailey manages to be both depressing and unsurprising, “The Trump effect? A stunning number of evangelicals will now accept politicians’ ‘immoral’ acts”:

In just five years, white evangelicals have become much more likely to say a person who commits an “immoral” act can behave ethically in a public role. In 2011, just 30 percent of these evangelicals said this, but that number has more than doubled to 72 percent in a recent survey.

I think Bailey is right, that this is partly a “Trump effect” — white evangelicals now supporting Donald freaking Trump can’t very well continue to pretend they value a candidate’s personal morality. But it’s also an Obama effect — the result of spending eight years desperately searching for, and failing to find, any pretext for an attack on Barack Obama’s “personal morality.” Obsessive concern with candidates’ personal morality always diminishes when the candidate you’re determined to oppose proves to be immune to such attacks (see, for example, the white evangelical opposition to Jimmy Carter in 1980).

WaPoBailey

There’s a sense in which the 2012 election — pitting Barack Obama against pious Mormon Mitt Romney — was bound to diminish the political significance of personal morality. Two candidates devoid of any hint of hanky-panky had to be frustrating for voters trying to elevate concerns about candidates’ sex-lives. And that had to be even more frustrating for evangelicals, given that both of those faithful husbands learned their personal morality from religious traditions — the black church and Mormonism — that white evangelicals don’t view as legitimate.

I would argue that the business model of Bain Capital doesn’t really square with anything I would praise as “personal morality” — Old Man Potter never cheated on Old Mrs. Potter either. But I appreciate that I’d have a hard time convincing most white evangelicals to expand their understanding of “morality” in that way.

• That graphic from Bailey’s Washington Post piece also illustrates something my older daughter repeatedly said during her big research project on former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. She argued that most of Rizzo’s biographers “let him off the hook” by saying that he merely tapped into and exploited racial resentments that existed independent of his efforts to turn them into political capital. While it’s true that those attitudes existed before Rizzo, and that he didn’t create them, she argued that he channeled, energized and magnified them. He didn’t start the fire, but he fueled it, making it burn higher and hotter.

The same, I think, is true of Donald Trump’s campaign. No, the wave of ugly hate he’s been surfing won’t go away once he’s defeated. The alt-right will still be a problem on November 9, and afterward. But all of that is worse right now than it will be without Donald Trump fueling the fire. This, again, is why the magnitude of his defeat matters. The more crushing that defeat, the harder it will be for others to keep fanning those flames.

A report released Wednesday (Oct. 19) by the Anti-Defamation League does not directly indict Trump for this upswing in anti-Semitism. But it explicitly connects some of his supporters to the hate speech.

… The ADL found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets — with an estimated reach of 10 billion impressions on Twitter — were posted on the popular social media platform between August 2015 and July 2016.

Within this group of tweets, the task force focused on 19,253 — though the ADL says the actual number could be much higher — directed at 800 journalists. Two-thirds of these tweets came from 1,600 Twitter accounts.

If there’s anything slightly encouraging to be gleaned from that, it’s the news that the vast majority of this hateful venom is coming from a relatively small number of bigots. Granted, 1,600 isn’t that small a number — but given that some of these are probably bots, it may be fewer than 1,000 actual humans posting this garbage. And while these 1,000 or so anti-Semites have been working furiously to create a hate movement on social media, they haven’t generated a huge following of like-minded supporters. Their hateful speech and threats are harmful and damaging, but they’re not succeeding in getting a huge number of others to join them in their evil campaign.

The larger effect these folks are having, though, isn’t so much getting others to join them in the kind of vile Nazi crap that anti-Semitic trolls have been promoting all over the Internet (including in the comments here), but in normalizing and spreading the more vague anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that provide the foundation for those views. This is the stuff Trump and his surrogates — including Jerry Falwell Jr., Eric Metaxas, and other white evangelical “leaders” — have been promoting and amplifying, talk of “international bankers” conspiring to rule the world from the shadows. Like Tim LaHaye in the world’s worst books, they imagine that they can promote such things because they’re “pro-Israel” (whatever that means to them), and therefore insulated from any criticism for their anti-Semitic propaganda.

• Speaking of Jerry Jr., here are Adelle M. Banks and John Fea on the Liberty University president’s recent censorship of the school’s student newspaper when it attempted to publish an opinion piece criticizing Donald Trump for boasting about sexual assault.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that an evangelical college has prevented its student newspaper from printing something critical of a Republican politician. That’s pretty much how it works at most such schools. This case simply illustrates the extremity of that status quo since, as with all things Trump, it shows the full extent of this white evangelical partisanship. Trump is like the creature you’d have come up with if you’d sat down in a lab to create a perfect test case to measure whether there were any limits to that sectarian partisanship. The results of that experiment, so far, are not encouraging.

• It’s still weird trying to write about Donald Trump and sexual assault. As a former newspaper copy editor, I’m trained to describe those acts as “alleged” — these are allegations against Trump that have not (yet) been tried in a court of law. Thus when it comes to the story told by former People writer Natasha Stoynoff, and now backed up by six witnesses on the record, I’m obliged to refer to Trump’s alleged sexual assault. But when describing Trump’s own words in that Billy Bush tape, it’s harder to know how or where to insert such a qualification. This is Donald Trump himself alleging that he has done those things. I certainly wouldn’t want to say that we should ever take Trump at his word — he is epically untrustworthy — but it seems weird to refer to what he describes as his alleged crimes, because he’s the one doing the alleging.

Can’t help but wonder how Trump and his defenders would be responding to that tape if it had come out after the accusations from Stoynoff and a dozen other women.

• Here’s Aimee Mann. I love Aimee Mann. As I said on Twitter, repeated listens to the Magnolia soundtrack were the only thing that helped me to survive a really tough period of emotional trauma brought on by repeated listens to the Magnolia soundtrack.

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