As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville.
“Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.”
Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”
Carville zeroed in on the US variant: white Christian nationalism, particularly as embodied by Mike Johnson, his fellow Louisianan and the US House speaker.
“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” the so-called Ragin’ Cajun declaimed on Saturday, hours before he watched the Louisiana State Univeristy quarterback Jayden Daniels win the coveted Heisman award.
Third Way Democrats helped create this mess. Spend decades triangulating and compromising with a group, and you think they’re not gonna notice that them moving to the right gets you to move to the right?
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”
“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” the so-called Ragin’ Cajun declaimed on Saturday, hours before he watched the Louisiana State Univeristy quarterback Jayden Daniels win the coveted Heisman award.
Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate.
He won election to the House in 2016, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message newspaper: “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”
Burke, a former archbishop of St Louis, is known for his lavish, regal attire and attacks on the pope’s agenda of “radical mercy” – reaching out to migrants and people on the margins, seeking to make the church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ believers, divorced Catholics and women.
Like most liberal Catholics, Carville finds a bulwark in faith in the form of the big tent, the messy, sprawling people of God packed into sacred spaces that unite them on Sunday to hear the gospel, take the host and go back to their different lives.
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