Western Chauvanism and Democracy: Take your pick?!?

110 years in Rosthern, Built of Rosthern Brick, no less.

I’ve been reading websites dedicated to the conservative/anti-liberal cause, trying to understand the motivation behind their adamant stands. 

        A 2014 article by Randall Balmer in Politico traces the history of American evangelical churches’ current affinity with a right wing world view. Balmer shows how this Christian adherence to a rigid conservatism doesn’t have its roots in abortion or queer-equality issues, but in the reaction to civil rights. While America was desegregating on paper and on the ground in the second half of the 1900s, separate Christian whites-only schools were being set up, assuming that their income from tuition and their connection with the church would save them from government scrutiny. However, following an action brought by the Treasury Department charging that segregation in separate schools disqualified them from their tax-free status, the Supreme Court ruled in the Treasury Department’s favour. This signaled, of course, that large blocks of adherents to both church and to the separation of races had lost one freedom of choice. 

        Balmer writes that anti-abortion and LGBTQ+ issues were added by the anti-integration movement as incentives to rally the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians into their cause opposing liberalism. Now, stridently Conservative websites tend to paint even Christian humanists like Jimmy Carter as dangerous “socialists.” The Proud Boys website declares that they are “Western Chauvinists” and a browse through the site reveals the depth of radical-right motivation behind the group. Their guiding image of themselves appears to be an armed and ready force to beat back any threat against their version of America. Guns against “communism,” sort of. Time to buy an assault rifle and “man up!”             

        The slippery-slope argument—which weighed heavily in the run-off elections of two Georgia senators—sought to paint the Democratic candidates as party to a planned decline into communism in the USA. Under the umbrella of moral majority, free speech and freedom memes, the fundamentalist, evangelical and charismatic streams of the Christian church in the USA found themselves to be in league with an assortment of “Western Chauvanists:” the gun lobby, anti-globalists and anti-socialist pockets growing more strident inside the Republican Party during Trump’s tenure. 

         If their version of the slide had them thinking China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, that slope would have to be mightily greased. Even the most ardent socialists I know find the prospect of a command economy, a “big brother is watching” scenario as abhorrent as can be imagined. What we do via taxation and government, and what we leave to citizens to do for themselves makes for a useful dialogue before every election in a democracy. To shout out the polar opposites unceasingly doesn’t bring us closer to peace and unity. 

        But the gun-toting, manned-up men aren’t great dialogue partners. 

         Every successful democracy has its own version of a mixed economy; government can do the telephone system and private enterprise the trains if it works … and it does. Every country strikes its unique compromises between personal freedom and public welfare … there’s very little outcry over speed limits on highways, for instance. Meanwhile, the requirement for exit visas (before travelling abroad in the German Democratic Republic before 1998) was an unacceptable encroachment on personal freedom that finally made the downfall of its communist regime a certainty. 

         How much personal freedom citizens are willing to give up in exchange for public services and security is at the crux of democratic politics. We need a balance of liberal and conservative thought so that the extremes never become our lot. It’s a general “my way or the highway” mentality that represents the most frightening danger to our democracies, in my opinion.