The Power And The Glory, Threatened By The Young And The Restless

One of the things about writing a blog, as is the case with any regularly scheduled program of writing:  some days you can't wait to sit down and start typing, and other days, you sit in front of your screen and think, "OK, now what?"  And then, there are the weeks, like the past few, where a political writer has all sorts of options.  Fox News. The Georgia grand jury.  Jimmy Carter, speaking about Georgia.  East Palestine.  Ukraine.  The SOTU address, speaking about Biden.  MTG's plan for red and blue states to divorce, speaking of Congress.

I'd like to write about all of that.  I will, in fact, write about at lease some of it next month.  But I've been moved by two events to return to a subject I've written about a number of times, and yet it never gets old for me.  Even though I may not have much in the way of new information to share about it.

I'm talking about evangelical Christianity, with which I had a long, difficult, and ultimately traumatic relationship in my young adulthood.  For me, part of the trauma was the feeling that being "born again" had been actually a kind of "failure to launch" into an adulthood, one that I carried within my family as a kind of source of shame, even though there was a profound benefit to that failure:  my marriage, my new family, and career choices that I could only have dreamed about when I was younger.  It's why I don't regret at all the trajectory of my life.  On the other hand, having had my development "sidetracked" the way it was made me feel like I was unique, and not in a particularly good way.

And then, I read this.

I have always been an admirer of Kirsten Powers' work.  I believe that, among political commentators, that she is truly and consistently fair and balanced.  I think that she comes as close as it is possible to being a "centrist" in a world where centrism has been hard to find and therefore harder than ever to define.  Which is why I appreciated her humility and candor in sharing by way of Substack her experience with born-again Christianity, and her difficult separation from it.

For me, it was especially bracing to read her description of her struggle to regain her sense of personal agency after she left the evangelical world.  As I told her in my comment on her post, this was the breaking point for me with that world, twelve years into it.  I finally realized, during what was for me one very bleak December, when I was in danger of becoming unemployed, with no immediate career prospects, very little in the bank, and two very frustrated parents who were wondering when I was going to put life together, what the problem was.

And that was the point when I figured out what the problem was.

Evangelical Christianity, boiled down to its functional essence, has something in common with the political world to which, in the U.S., it is now joined at the hip.  Unlike the Gospel it supposedly preaches, it is not a world in which the greatest virtue is humility and the worst sin is pride.  Indeed, on a brass-tacks basis, it is 180 degrees away from that Gospel.  Evangelical Christianity is about power.  Not in any democratic sense.  Not even in the sense of power for all evangelicals.  It is about power for a few wealthy, well-connected members of the clergy, over their congregants, their congregations, and the Constitution they pretend to defend.

And to get there, they play mind-control games with their followers, by teaching them to doubt their simplest impulses and inclinations, and to see any form of failure in their personal lives as a reflection of some sort of secret "sin" that must be flushed out.  And, of course, that flushing out must be done under the supervision of some supposedly more mature, more "enlightened" person or program, in return for your providing a hefty portion of your disposable income to the "enlightened."

Ultimately, this leads the poor suckers who fall under the spell of the "enlightened" to question all of life's decisions.  Even the most basic ones, like taking a specific job, moving to a certain city, dating a certain person.  And I was absolutely there, with a sense of self-esteem so low I would have to reach a thousand miles down to touch the top of it.

I had, in short, completely lost my sense of self-agency.  And that December, I finally realized it.  What G-d has really given each of us, in the form of a soul, and a body with various abilities, is a kind of ship.  We are, in some sense, limited by the ship's limitations.  But it's otherwise up to us to be the captain of it.

That's what Kirsten Powers had to re-learn, and that is also what I had to re-learn as well.

But here's the larger point:  I stated a moment ago that evangelical Christianity and politics are joined at the hip.  I should have been more specific.  Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, with which it shares an obsession with control, are joined at the hip.  That has been true for decades.  But it has never been more dangerous than now, when political conservatism has shifted from being a philosophy to being a fifth column.

At the same time, conservatives of both the secular and spiritual variety are recognizing that, having won victories with the Greatest Generation and Boomers, they are losing the battle with the generations that follow.  Take, for example, the "He Gets Us" Super Bowl ads that provided the jumping-off point for Ms. Powers' post.  As you can read about here, these ads, which are framed to make Jesus sound like some sort of latter-day hippie (gee, haven't we tried this before, too?), are in fact bought and paid for by some of the most powerful conservatives infecting our politics.

I say "infected," because these people, far from doing G-d's will, work actively to subvert that will in a variety of ways, whether it involved crippling the IRS to ensure it won't look too closely into the finances of megachurches, or preventing those who have suffered from abuse by priests (which probably included at least one member of my family) from coming forward to seek justice.  As the latter point indicates, the problem is by no means limited to Christianity of the evangelical variety.

But the "He Gets Us" campaign exists for a reason:  it is addressing the uprising by young people against the authoritarian theocracy that all of us have allowed to spring up in our midst.  You need look no further than this to see what I'm talking about.*

If we all heed the words of Jinger Duggar, and many others like her, we may all yet find ourselves freed from the power and the glory of evangelical conservatism by the young and the restless who have learned to see through its false promises and its greater lust for a secular kingdom rather than a spiritual one.  Democracy can only survive if each citizen reclaims the helm of his, her, or their personal ship.  Ms. Powers and I have reclaimed ours.  I hope and pray that you reclaim yours.

*Full disclosure:  the Times article to which I have linked here references both Bill Gothard and Brian McLaren.  I went to one of Mr. Gothard's seminars, an experience that contributed mightily to my loss of self-agency.  As for Mr. McLaren, I had the good fortune to meet him later on, an experience that helped me to regain it.

Good Riddance To Larry Hogan

I've waited eight years to write that headline.  Sometimes, it felt like I would never get a chance to do it, even though I knew it would happen.  In an election season where it seemed like that the political tide would flow toward the GQP, I was able to console myself, as a native and nearly lifelong resident of Maryland, with one powerful and incontrovertible fact.

Come January of 2023, Larry Hogan would be out of the Governor's Mansion, and out of Maryland politics.  He would be free to pursue the fantasy shared by him and an incredibly supple corporate press:  using his reputation as a "moderate" Republican to tame the Trump-transformed national party, sweep through the 2024 primary season toward nomination for the presidency, and Make America Safe Again from both the Orange Iguana and the leftist hordes of the "Democrat" Party.

Well, you be the judge of how likely this fantasy is to come true.  I know that polls are increasingly unreliable as the thermometers of political reality, but I read their results at any rate, and I have yet to see a single one concerning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination showing Hogan with anything other than single-digit support.  To be precise, low single-digit support.  To put an even finer point on it, think of the numeral 1.  But not as in "number one choice."

Consider this fact as well:  Hogan's would-be Republican successor in Annapolis, Dan Cox, made absolutely no effort to appear "moderate" next to anyone, except possibly Attila the Hun.  He ran an unabashedly Trumpian campaign, and the voters handed him his political head as a result, preferring the moderate-in-tone, progressive-in-substance Wes Moore.  But why?  Why, if Hogan's brand of so-called moderation was so impressive, was no Republican able to capitalize on it?  Why, by electing Moore, did Maryland effectively return (thankfully) to its prior default position as a state that preferred a slow but steady policy course to the left?

Because, politically speaking, Larry Hogan is a complete fake.  And, when it comes to Larry Hogan, that's the good news.  Because Larry Hogan, deep down inside, is little more than a kinder, gentler version of Trump.

I take no pleasure in making this assessment.  Like an all-too-growing cohort in conservative politics, Hogan is a legacy politician.  His father, with whom he shares his first and last name, was a true moderate back in the days when such creatures actually existed in office.  Of special importance is the fact that he served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate period, and broke with his party's official line at the time to support the impeachment of Richard Nixon.  The subsequent release of Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings revealed how farsighted, as well as courageous, that break was for our democracy.

Hogan rode his father's reputation into office in 2015, running against an inept Democratic candidate (good luck to him as our new attorney general, by the way) as well as voter frustration with Martin O'Malley's pursuit of national office at the expense of his local obligations.  Then, early in his first term, when he and we learned that he was facing a battle against cancer, he was able to rally Marylanders across party lines to route for his recovery, including me.  However, when Hogan noticed that this had the effect of softening and even reducing political criticism of him generally, he did not do what most public figures do when they disclose a health-care battle:  treat it as a personal matter, and ask for privacy.  Instead, he used it as the center of a full-court-press reshaping of his image, wiping out most if not all discussion of his more controversial moves and transforming his image from that of a politician to that of a heroic survivor.

Hogan's use of his cancer diagnosis to soften his media image, and the media willingness to accept the soft-news bait he was offering them by doing so, has been incredibly useful in disguising the fact that, as "moderate Republicans" go, Hogan is more Republican than moderate.  He managed to stretch the cancer-related good will through two terms, making the prediction in this article a bit off.  But, in a sense, the article also anticipated the outcome of Hogan's re-election as governor, by noting the role that positioning himself as a cancer survivor played in obscuring the substance of his governing.

And this media slight-of-hand was by no means limited to local coverage.  He even managed to parlay his diagnosis into a national reputation, of which this New York Times interview is a sad, pathetic example.  I have a very high regard for Frank Bruni, but this piece just absolutely reeks of what has been described (I think fairly) as "helicopter journalism":  well-known national reporter drops in on a local official for a day and, solely on the strength of that visit, performs a complete public diagnosis of politics in that state.  It's not an exaggeration to say that Hogan's national reputation is almost entirely built on puff pieces like Bruni's.

The worst things about those pieces are not only their contribution to the well-deserved poor reputation of journalism today, but the role they have played in obscuring the hard political facts of Hogan's governance--or, more precisely, his failure to govern and even subvert good governance.  On that subject, the facts speak for themselves, in articles that have not received the same level of attention as the cancer-related coverage.

Let's start with the giant anchor around both the GQP and the nation, the 800-pound gorilla that refuses to go away, even though he can't win a majority of the popular vote:  Donald Trump.  Since then, a significant number of Republicans have walked away from their party, clearly stating that there is no chance of their return until Trump and the lunatic brand of politics he represents goes away.  But Hogan has gone in the opposite direction, refusing, in fact, to refrain from declaring that he would not support Trump if he were once again the GQP nominee.

And why should he?  What really is the substance of Larry Hogan's politics?  The fact is that he's gone out his way to dodge taking positions on a number of issues, and many pieces of popular legislation addressing these issues, even going so far as to allow many of them to become law without his signature.  Frequently, this is what corporate media means when they describe him as a "moderate."  Apparently, if you're a public official in contemporary America, all you have to appear to be a "moderate" is to do is nothing at all.

Unfortunately, that's a trick that not even Hogan has been able to pull off.  He has done things.  Bad things, unfortunately.

When he had the opportunity to bring refugees into the state that would have helped boost its economy, especially in Baltimore, where block after block is filled with empty houses, Hogan said no.

When, early last year, it was first apparent that the Supreme Court would reverse Roe v. Wade, and the Comptroller requested that state funds be released to train abortion providers, Hogan said no.

While hate crimes and opioid deaths rose here and around the country, Hogan failed to keep a promise to treat the latter as an emergency, and ignored the pain created by the former by associating with supporters of the likes of Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh.

And, in a state that prides itself on having world-class public education, not only did Hogan make war on the General Assembly's implementation of a plan to make Maryland education second to none, he used funds from dark-money sources to do it.

Of course, it's not like he made it easy for you to find out about any of this, as he found and implemented a way to subvert state record-keeping laws.

Perhaps his greatest act of both hypocrisy is his handling of state transportation needs.  Despite a reputation as "Governor Asphalt," ready to pave Maryland with roads, roads, and still more roads, the fact is that Hogan grossly underfunded state transportation projects, then proposed a monstrous "public-private partnership" that would use park land to create more traffic-clogged lanes in the DC area, and stick taxpayers for the bill if the "partnership" fails to make money off of it.  

This, and many other penny-wise pound-foolish decisions in other areas of state spending, is the cost of his war on taxes and user fees.  If you're going to fight that war, and deliberately starve the needs of the public, you owe it to that public to advertise the price tag.  But that was not Hogan's style.  Never has been, and never will be, for any Republican; far easier, as well as far more deceitfully to pretend that every meal can consist of three courses of dessert.

But then, there was one transportation decision that summed up Hogan's deceit, as well as the subtextual racism of his party and his administration:  his cancellation of what he characterized as a "wasteful boondoggle," the Red Line potentially connecting eastern and western Baltimore County (in which I live) with the existing Metro and light-rail lines in Baltimore City.  Had this been allowed to become a reality, it could have led to the beginning of a true metropolitan rail system in the Baltimore area, and one that might have been able to connect with the Washington Metro system and create a regional system on the scale of New York and Chicago.  And, were that to happen, the economic benefits for the state would have truly been explosive.  You need look no further than the D.C. metropolitan area to see the dynamic effect that the Metro has had there.

A small personal digression is in order.

I worked for the State of Maryland for twelve years, the last eight of which were spent working in procurement.  During that time, I saw a transition in state government from a Democratic governor, Parris Glendening, to a Republican successor, Robert Ehrlich.  I expected, as did many of my colleagues, that fiscal belt-tightening would be the order of the day.  But one exception to that made by Governor Ehrlich had to do with federal money.  He believed the state had an obligation to capture every federal dollar that might be available to it.  This was especially important with regard to child welfare, the area in which I worked.  Despite the fact that the Governor and I were members of different parties, I appreciated the fact that he took the impact of federal spending on the state seriously.

Would that Hogan had followed his example, not only regarding the Red Line but other public priorities as well.  But Hogan's fiscal strategy was not entirely designed to address fiscal purposes.  In truth, it was part of a larger strategy was part of a larger strategy to keep Baltimore segregated, and poor.  In other words, to fulfill the goals of his political base in Western Maryland, the people who believe that public money should only be spent according to the wishes of the people who provide it.  In practice, that means more for white people, and less for people of color.  And you may be sure that, for Western Marylanders and Hogan, their political patron, that was the real point.

This is why Hogan not only cancelled the Red Line, but spent eight years making war on Baltimore's economic development and education funding.  He did his best to hide this, and the cancer diagnosis helped him do that.  But, every so often, something would seep out into public attention.  Here is one example:  some of Hogan's Anne Arundel County supporters wanted to close light-rail stops in their county, for specious reasons.

But then, all you really have to do is take the word of the man himself.

I will give him this much credit.  Larry Hogan did a brilliant job for two terms as the Governor of Western Maryland.  But he did it at the expense of the short-term and long-term needs of the rest of the state.  And he has left behind a residue of racial animus that reminds those of us with a long memory for Maryland politics, and not in a good way, of this man.

Do you get it now?

This is the man who wants to now run off to Iowa, and other presidential primary states, along with his corporate media press clippings, and sell himself as some kind of middle-of-the-road alternative to Donald Trump, as well as Ron DeSantis.

Larry Hogan is not an alternative to them.  He may be slightly softer in style, but in substance he is a carbon copy of Trump.

And I think that voters on the ground know it.  Which goes a long way toward explaining the 1%.  Why buy a steak with no sizzle, when you can buy one that ignites itself to become as well-done as the customers want?

That's Trump.  And that's what DeSantis wants to be, although, when it comes to presence, he's still quite a ways behind Trump, no matter how many times he says "woke."

But that's the national battle, to be fought nationally over the next two years.  For now, I am grateful that the local political scene has reverted back to sanity, to inclusion, to public service over self-service.  With our first governor and lieutenant governor of color, and a state legislature solidly in Democratic hands, the future of the Free State looks bright.  Maryland can be Maryland again.  Maybe, just maybe, with a little bit of luck and hard work, America can be America again.  Meanwhile, Marylanders can look forward to projects like this, which one day could become a major hub of a truly regional rail system.

Good riddance to Larry Hogan.  G-d grant that, soon, we may say good riddance to Trump, and to MAGA politics.