Autocracy Now!
As I write these words, an American election is going on, in the way that American elections go on, and on, and on—years and months of un-fun pageantry as grim-faced candidates and odds-obsessed journalists take stock of a contest for power. It’s surreal, in a way, to go on with life—the making and eating of meals, the earning of small money, the doing of everyday deeds—knowing that by this time next year, the character of this country will be on the precipice of a permanent and dark alteration.
Americans have a tendency to believe that authoritarianism will arise here in a swirl of drama, obvious malefactors emerging from the ether to work their evil; even more so, we have a sense that our democracy, the most powerful in the world, is immune to becoming a dictatorship, and this form of American exceptionalism has a tendency to blind us to what is directly in our path.
At present, there are still other candidates, but they will inevitably make their obeisances when it’s time for Trump to ascend. The one group that has never wavered in their faith, not for the past seven years, is the Christian right—a massive carapace of institutions, lobbying groups and tens of millions of congregants that have stayed steadfast in loyalty to their chosen messenger since his initial ascendance in 2016.
The fact of the matter is that the Republican Party, in step with, and guided by, a small and powerful theocratic minority, and with a profoundly vengeful and militant demagogue at its head, is poised to win an election that will render moot the need for any subsequent elections. It is the logical offspring of half a century of the Christian right’s building power, and in the shadow of this contest, the mundanities of life become impossibly small, in the way people live ordinary lives until the tsunami hits, and then all that’s left is the bones of the drowned and their shattered houses.
Watching the dull pageantry unfold on cable news in the fall of 2023, waiting for Donald Trump to seal his candidacy again despite or perhaps because of the indictments that dog him, has rendered that cognitive dissonance acute to the point of pain. This election cycle has been profoundly odd because it’s haunted by unacknowledged ghosts, ones that aren’t in the room, aren’t on the debate stage, don’t rate a mention in the horse-race coverage about odds and public perceptions.
One of them is vengeance.
The presumptive Republican nominee is a man who declared the last presidential contest, which he lost, illegitimate, a claim that has launched a thousand grifts and millions into the belief that all electoral contests are fraudulent, rigged. This obvious candidate’s first promise, in office, is to exact vengeance on his enemies, whom he calls “vermin.” Revenge is his chief refrain, in posts on his custom-built social-media site, Truth Social, where he regularly inveighs against the Marxists and the godless who kept him from his second term, and who will suffer his righteous anger should he attain, once again, control of a world power.
The prophets and their flocks that heralded him once haven’t left his side; evangelicals are, once again, primed to form a central bloc in the Republican voting base. And it makes a profound kind of sense that promises of vengeance, that talk of enemies everywhere, reverberates with them. After all, their worldview is girded by the doctrine of spiritual warfare, the idea that demons and angels do battle to influence human deeds. They were already armed for battle, and their standard-carrier’s words match the fever pitch they have long carried. If they thrum to the hymn of vengeance, it’s only to be expected: it is the signature mindset of a group that believes themselves to be suffering martyrs of a heathen world, who must attain worldly power in order to avenge their grievances and prevent them from ever happening again.
The other silent specter in this electoral contest is promise that, if this candidate is elected, it may signal the end of elections: a move with historical precedent—democracy undoing itself by rendering power to someone for whom surrendering it is unthinkable.
This, too, is consonant with spiritual warfare, with the seven-mountain mandate of attaining worldly power. The Christian right has long desired such earthly control as a means to secure souls for God, and keep their own flocks obedient. At the heart of evangelical faith is ecstatic worship of a King, and adherence to the word of His earthly representatives. Obeisance and obedience are built into this structure; the scattershot and febrile mess that is free will has no place in it. Authoritarianism harmonizes here like a choir carol; responsiveness to edicts from above is drilled into this segment of the population from childhood, with attendant violence that makes it impossible to ignore. Childhoods wracked with violence have enforced this obedience. Have trained authoritarians from before the moment of their first word, superseding Genesis in their eagerness to create soldiers for the faith.
It would be easier to ignore this unsettling drumbeat—the music of authoritarianism on the march—if its most loyal servants hadn’t accrued, over the last half-century, so very much power, far disproportionate to their percentage of the population.
A great deal of this power—and the reason that in the case of a Trump win, any illegalities will be swept smoothly aside—has been accrued in the judicial branch of the government. The central figure behind this slow-motion coup is an ultraconservative Roman Catholic lawyer named Leonard Leo, director of an organization called the Federalist Society, whose branches, in every law school in the country and with member judges in every circuit, comprise some 90,000 members. Founded in 1982, the group has aimed to destroy the “liberal orthodoxy” of the legal profession. “Backed by a who’s who of right-wing money, the fledgling group quickly grew from a handful of grassroots chapters on college campuses into a million-dollar organization with headquarters in Washington, D.C., and at least 75 campus affiliates,” the Intercept noted in a history of the society. It was co-founded by Paul Weyrich, the so-called “Robespierre of the Right,” who journalist David Grann noted was “the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway.”
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Over the past fifty years, the Federalist Society has established a coterie of committed hard-right judges and lawyers, often in prominent positions. It was a Federalist Society member, serving as chief counsel for the Christian-right organization Alliance Defending Freedom, that argued the Dobbs case that felled Roe v. Wade—before a Supreme Court of which six of the nine justices were current or former members of the Federalist Society. Roe never stood a chance; it was the culmination of a half-century project of incursion into and capture of the nation’s legal institutions that had scaled the ladder of ambition to the very top of the American judiciary. The Trump Administration in its first term accordingly appointed judges, many youthful, extreme members of the Christian right, to lifetime judicial appointments at record speed—234 judges in total, three of them members of the Supreme Court.
Such a judiciary, linked at its core to a religious authoritarian movement, cannot be trusted to preserve such worldly values as a secular democracy. A democracy that has allowed abortion and gay marriage and interracial marriage, integrated schooling and public education and social-safety-net programs. All of these are on the cutting block, and there is such a hunger, everywhere, for righteous destruction of it all.
The Heritage Foundation—Paul Weyrich’s brainchild, and a subsequent hyperactive lobbying juggernaut, has laid out a comprehensive vision for a conservative future in its “Project 2025.” Among the materials it has assembled includes a 30-chapter book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. It mentions religion and religious freedom no fewer than fourteen times, and presents 30 different conservative “solutions” for government institutions that are, in essence, an instruction manual for destroying federal institutions from within. Its partners and contributors include numerous bold-faced Christian-right organizations, from the Family Research Council to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America to Hillsdale College, and the government it imagines is one whose sole purpose is war and law enforcement, the armature of surveillance and violence. All other functions of the state should be left to private religious institutions, which should be free to discriminate as they wish. In the first Trump Administration, many of the members of his Cabinet were heroes of the religious right—and overt, joyous saboteurs of the institutions they were meant to safeguard; one example was Betsy DeVos, the billionaire heiress to the Prince fortune and someone who, up to the very moment of her appointment as Secretary of Education, had spent her adult life devoted to undermining public education and promoting private religious education in its stead. During her brief tenure, she continued this subversion apace, in obedience to a devout Christian faith that found public education ungodly.
The recent past is the future laid out in blueprint, and Project 2025 lays out further details for the immediate, burning path forward. The first Trump Administration eagerly co-opted Heritage Foundation suggestions, and all indicia point towards a second crowning of the florid Cyrus of the right’s imagination becoming an orgy of wish-fulfillment for the Christian right.
When Donald Trump came to power, many evangelicals—including members of his own Cabinet—saw in him an echo of a figure foretold in Biblical prophecy, the reincarnation of a monarch who had lived more than two millennia ago. As foretold in the prophesies of Isaiah, this figure was Cyrus the Great, the Emperor of Persia, who in the year 538 BC granted the return of exiled Jews to their homeland of Israel, and enabled the building of the Second Temple. Cyrus was, in the words of the Christian Courier, “a pagan in sentiment and practice, yet an unconscious tool in the hands of the Lord.”
Seeing in Donald Trump a return of Cyrus—the heathen who would become God’s instrument—was a popular view among evangelicals leading up to and after Donald Trump’s 2016 election. In the leadup to the 2016 elections, when a tape was released revealing a series of lewd comments Trump made during the filming of the TV show “Access Hollywood,” including his now-infamous assertion that he could “grab [women] by the pussy,” evangelical leaders doubled down on this comparison. In 2017, prophet Lance Wallnau told the Christian Broadcasting Network that God had visited him and explicitly made the analogy, citing Isaiah 45:1—which references “Cyrus, the Lord’s anointed.”
“I heard the Lord say, ‘Donald Trump is a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness,’” Wallnau told the TV station. “After I met him I heard the Lord say, 'Isaiah 45 will be the 45th president. I go check it out; Isaiah 45 is Cyrus.” Cyrus was an agent of the restoration of God’s kingdom; so, too, would Trump be, and evangelicals voted for him twice in great numbers.
The view that Trump had been chosen by God as an imperfect instrument, a vessel of prophetic fulfillment, continued throughout his first term and beyond it. In November 2019, Rick Perry, former Governor of Texas and then-Secretary of Energy in charge of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, explained on the morning show “Fox and Friends” that he believed Donald Trump to be chosen by God. “I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago and I shared it with him,” Perry said. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one and I said, ‘You were.’ If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.” Pete Hegseth, a host, concurred, adding: “Followers of the president hear the attacks in the media about who he is and his background and they dismiss it, and say, God has used imperfect people forever, because we’re all imperfect, but what he has withstood is really unlike what any other mortal could withstand.”
Should Cyrus go uncrowned in next year’s election, a congregation primed on waiting for a messiah’s return in blood will not be daunted. An organization that has trained up its children to be dutiful and obedient, patient and sweet until the sword must be taken up, will bide its time. It will cultivate its power further, keeping its mobs at a distance from its more respectable iterations, until the time should come again when the reins of power are within its grasp. This is a group that rebounds from unfulfilled prophecies by making further ones; a group that sees the devil’s hand in its failures, and the work of angels in its successes. Against a backdrop of supernal warfare they do their work; they will continue to do it until they have succeeded in their aim. The Greek chorus of ex-evangelicals, people witness to the rapacity, cruelty and ambition of the movement, has for years expressed dire warnings as to the imminence of such a takeover of the government. It is time and past time that the rest of us listened.
The desire for America to be a Christian hegemon, a kingdom that crushes infidels within and without, will not wane or abate until the public at large decides that this movement represents a legitimate threat, and works to countermand it. This is difficult and painful work, and demands a counter-zeal that is not easy to muster in the dull and painful and costly and challenging world. Nonetheless, it is required of us, in this time, and for our children and of our children, to ensure that the momentum of half a century is stopped by a collective heaving against that mass of kinetic energy. A nation bound by Christian authoritarianism, whose mandate is cruelty in private and austerity in public—which claims to love you as it burns you alive—is not to be countenanced. Not in our schools, our courts, our cops, our corners. It must be routed out from the public square and left to rot in ignominy, robbed of its power to hurt and to shame.
What do you hear in the darkness around you? Is it the whirl of devils and angels in battle, or silence, or rain, or the mundane miracle of dawn, or the sleep of the one you love beside you? Somewhere in that aural landscape are the war-drums marching, the horns of Jericho in full, florid trumpet, ready to shake down the cracked remaining guardrails against autocracy in this country. In response, we must take up a countermarch, thrill to its own cacophonic strains, and rise to spurn a faith that has overrun its banks, spilled out into wild and untrammeled hate.
