A covert alliance of wealth, faith, and fear is quietly dismantling American democracy — one lie, one spectacle, and one grievance at a time.
When we imagine democracy collapsing, we picture tanks in the streets, ballots burning, or shadowy hackers pulling invisible strings. Yet the gravest threat to America’s democratic experiment isn’t loud or sudden — it’s a quiet, methodical corrosion of truth, fueled by grievance, money, and a dangerous sense of divine entitlement.
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.
Building upon the story she began in The Power Worshippers, Stewart continues her deep investigation into the powerful coalition of Christian nationalists, billionaire funders, cunning intellectuals, and an increasingly radicalized electorate determined to reshape America’s political landscape.
Based on 15 years of meticulous research, Stewart reveals how the intellectual architects behind this movement have abandoned democratic ideals, with some openly advocating for monarchical or authoritarian governance.
She describes alarming spectacles such as the “Reawaken America” tours, which immerse thousands in a parallel universe of conspiracy theories designed to systematically erode critical thinking, spread fear, and mobilize voters.
Stewart lays bare how this coalition gains power — not through coherent policies or genuine religious faith, but through the strategic weaponization of grievance politics and identity — creating a formidable political machine operating with chilling efficiency.
However, beneath its unified front, Stewart identifies clear vulnerabilities: tensions between the cynical opportunists leading the movement — and the genuinely aggrieved followers they manipulate.
Stewart gives us more than just another warning about democracy’s fragility. She offers both a precise diagnosis of what ails our society and a clear prescription of how to restore it to health. In the end, she reminds us, the greatest threat to democracy isn’t spectacle or chaos, but the silent corrosion of trust and truth that occurs while we are distracted elsewhere.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. When we think of existential threats to American democracy, our minds often turn to dramatic scenarios like military coups, foreign interference, or chaotic insurrections. Yet history teaches us that democracies typically fall not with a bang, but with a whimper. Through the slow erosion of norms, the careful dismantling of institutions, and the deliberate blurring of truth and fiction. In Money, Lies, and God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, my guest, Katherine Stewart, pulls back the curtain on what may be the most comprehensive threat to our democratic experiment since its founding. Through painstaking reporting during 15 years, Stewart reveals how an unlikely coalition of Christian nationalists, wealthy funders, intellectual elites, and disaffected voters has coalesced into a powerful political force determined to reshape America’s future. What makes her work particularly valuable is her refusal to engage in lazy caricatures. Stewart spent countless hours in the company of the movement she chronicles, attending their conferences, visiting their churches, and listening closely to their strategies. She categorizes this coalition into distinct groups, funders, thinkers, sergeants, infantry, and power players, each with their own motivations and roles. The picture that emerges is both more complex and more troubling than the standard political narrative. This isn’t simply about electoral politics or policy disputes. It’s about whether America will remain committed to the foundational ideas that power flows from the consent of all the governed, or whether it will revert to an older, darker vision where some are born to rule and others to obey, what Stewart calls reactionary nihilism and its growing influence in American life. Katherine Stewart is the author of three previous books, including The Power Worshippers, which examine the rise of Christian nationalism. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Guardian, and numerous other publications. And it is my pleasure to welcome Katherine Stewart back to this program to talk about money, lies, and God inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Katherine, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Great to be here. Thank you so much for doing this. We appreciate it. Some of the groups that are part of what you write about seem, in so many respects, so divergent. The Christian nationalists, the wealthy funders, the intellectual elites, and all the angry voters across the country are a list which is growing, as we saw in the last election. What is it that holds all of these groups together and pushes them forward in seemingly the same direction?
[00:03:05] Katherine Stewart: Well, Christian nationalism is arguably the most important piece of the anti-democratic reaction. It’s an ideology and a political machine that motivates a lot of the voters, local activists, people I refer to as the foot soldiers. So some of them don’t identify themselves as Christian nationalists, but with their actions, they’re lending support to a Christian nationalist and anti-democratic agenda. And I show that this rank and file really has to be distinguished from the small cadre of leaders or political pastors and national activists, cohorts that I call sergeants and power players. They’re the ones who are driving the agenda. So the movement is very diverse in terms of its folks. Some of them are working at cross purposes, in fact. I think about the agenda of the funders and the agenda of the foot soldiers. The funders, at the end of the day, want a better deal for themselves. They want to entrench wealth inequality. They want justification for the enormous concentrations of wealth that they have. And the foot soldiers, when you kind of strip away the religious nationalism, they want a better deal for themselves and for the workforce. But they’ve been brought along by the sergeants and the power players, and they’re really collaborating, wittingly or unwittingly, on an anti-democratic agenda.
[00:04:32] Jeff Schechtman: When you talk about this rational nihilism as an overarching idea that brings a lot of these groups together, explain what that’s about.
[00:04:41] Katherine Stewart: Nihilism. I describe the term as a form of reactionary nihilism because I think it’s better defined by what it wants to destroy than what it wants to create. And that’s really a big part of what we’re seeing. So one of the main consequences of this government, the present government, being better defined by what it wants to destroy than create, is government by spectacle. What I mean by that is what they actually do matters very little compared with how they can represent it to their target audience. Doge is a great case in point. I mean, it seems very unlikely that it’s going to save any serious amount of money. Instead, it’s causing terrific disruption across multiple sectors of government that will ultimately prove very costly in terms of both lives and money. If you destroy key government functions, if you destroy, for instance, the health services, people become less healthy. If you destroy the social safety net, there are more homeless people, more people who fall into poverty, and that’s going to have social costs. It makes everything less safe, etc. But with the nihilistic movement, none of that matters. And by the way, the folks who are doing the destroying are enriching themselves at government expense. But with a nihilistic government, a nihilistic movement, that doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that they can render it as a politics of destruction. So they bring out the chain saw, they make their base think that they’re hacking away at the bad people who they say are sucking money out of government. But what they’re really doing is enriching themselves at people’s expense. And we’re seeing this now. We’ve got this performative government instead of one that’s committed to serving the people. And the consequence of that is extreme incompetence, efficiency, and corruption. That’s the end state of a nihilistic government. The elevation of incompetent loyalists, which we’ve seen throughout the Trump administration, inefficiency, which we’ve also seen, and corruption, which we’re seeing to an enormous degree. And I think it’s worth pointing out at this point, the GOP now has to be treated like a dead animal in a way. If people think that this group of people are going to put a check on the authoritarian ambitions of this movement, they really need to take a shower because that’s not going to happen. And it’s really a tragedy because that is the one group right now that could stop it. It’s ironic because in the 1970s, the GOP is a group that stopped Nixon when he attempted to take just a few inches in this
[00:07:23] Jeff Schechtman: direction. But that was then and this is now. And how does this line up against and what is the nexus with what we had come to know as traditional conservatism, which was part of that old Republican Party, which seems to have vanished at this point? Well, for many years, the Republican
[00:07:44] Katherine Stewart: Party made use of this movement. They thought, where are they going to go? Who else are they going to vote for? They tried to placate the religious right and the leaders of the religious right with nice words, while not really doing exactly everything that they wanted and what happened over time. They didn’t notice that this movement was growing and strengthening as a consequence of deep investment in organizational infrastructure. I remember in 2011, George W. Bush’s speechwriter said this is a movement that could fit into a phone booth. He just was not either paying attention or willfully, blindly looking away. And what happened is this is a movement that simply took over the Republican Party and the wheels have fallen off. The party, conservative party of yesteryear no longer exists. Even though the various groups that you
[00:08:38] Jeff Schechtman: talk about may have divergent interests, one of the things that keeps them going is this desire for power, what you call the right to rule. Talk about that. Right to rule. The movement has changed
[00:08:51] Katherine Stewart: in so many ways over the past, oh gosh, decades. I mean, it’s broadened its base of donors. It’s substantially increased its power. It’s made inroads among new populations. It’s more overt in calling for an end to pluralistic democracy. Movement leaders used to feel they had to hide their belief that only Christians of a certain reactionary type should dominate the key features of government and society and that our laws should be based on their preferred interpretations of the Bible. And now they’re really open about it. I mean, the movement is also advanced in many other fronts, on many other fronts, which I describe in Money, Lies, and God. And maybe we can get to some of those later in this conversation. But I think the most pernicious way in which the movement has shifted is the mainstreaming of lies and bad truth arguments. Many representatives of the movement have convinced themselves that any means justifies the end when it comes to achieving supposedly godly rule. And this is the reason they’re funding and working with massive disinformation and propaganda operations, which I also detail in Money, Lies, and God. So, for example, I have a chapter that focuses on Reawaken America. For any of your listeners who don’t know what that is, it’s a traveling MAGA conspiracy fest. It’s been taking place every few weeks in MAGA churches around the country. Each one draws thousands. It’s organized by some of Trump’s most trusted allies. One of his sons usually shows up to speak. So you can’t, it’s like a kind of, when I say it’s a MAGA fest, I’m not exaggerating. I mean, you see a lot of art in these spaces, you know, Trump looking like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger with the eagle over one shoulder and Jesus over the other. And the kind of messaging you see in those spaces, it’s like every imaginable conspiracy. You get QAnon, you get Great Replacement. Of course, we’re hearing that, you know, the vaccine for COVID was invented to destroy Americans and not help them. And that people are going to be microchipped and they, the deep state, are controlling every penny you earn. And they’re really existing to inculcate fear and confusion in the people who attend. And it’s not just the people who attend are being disinformed and misinformed. There are a lot of YouTubers there. There are a lot of people with very hyper MAGA podcasts. And so the programming that you see in these spaces is filtering out throughout the entire right wing or sort of far right information sphere. And so it exists to confuse people, but also to make, fill them with fear so that they suspend their critical thinking capacities. And that clears the way for them to, you know, throw their support behind such a transparently amoral,
[00:11:51] Jeff Schechtman: corrupt, anti-democratic leader. Although it is hollow at its core, there is a purported intellectual underpinning to all of this. Talk about that. We see a sector of the movement.
[00:12:06] Katherine Stewart: I describe a particular sector of the movement as thinkers. These are folks who are kind of represented a new would-be intellectual elite. They play an enormous role in, I think, some of them as funder whispers. They tell the funders where to spend their money, where to invest their money in the anti-democratic movement. And they also play a role in kind of coming up with messaging that is going to appeal to the rank and file and persuade them to vote a certain way. I think some of them hail from a movement called the new right, which I would say on balance, it’s a bit diverse, but on balance, it’s less overtly religious nationalist and more overtly anti-democratic. It’s influenced by a lot of these sort of think tanks, anti-democratic think tanks like the Claremont Institute, which, you know, in its earlier era was always conservative, but saw its mission as bolstering the principles of democracy. And now thinkers associated with the Claremont Institute are arguing for an end to democracy. Some of them are talking about how democracy doesn’t work anymore. It’s not going to give us what we want. So we need a more monarchical form of government. It draws on, some of its members draw on thinkers associated with Nazi Germany. I kid you not. This idea of the state of emergency or permanent emergency, meaning our society, is facing, you know, we’re standing on the edge of an apocalypse thanks to woke and diversity and equality. And the principles, really the principles of liberal democracy, the fact that women have equal rights, the fact that, you know, Black people might want to have equal rights too is just sort of represents to them a terrible emergency. And so they say the rules don’t apply anymore. And we need to smash up democracy and replace it with something new, an autocracy. They also draw on this idea that hails from, I would say, the mid-century political thinker Leo Strauss, which is the idea that there’s one kind of communication that, you know, these thinkers can sort of really be honest with one another when they’re speaking in their spaces. But then there’s another form of messaging that they engage in when it filters down to the rank and file. And it’s very nihilistic. It basically says that the truth doesn’t matter anymore. They see no value in the world as it exists. And, you know, it’s why I call it reactionary nihilism in a way, because they are saying that what matters more than the truth is, rather than advancing toward and progressing toward a better state, they want to emphasize a return to some sort of imaginary virgin of an allegedly better past, a past that includes elements of regressive social order, gender hierarchy, the suppression of certain forms of speech, attacks on the religious freedom of those who fail to conform, among other features. Now, of course, not everybody who wants to go back to the good old days is a nihilist, right? But the ones who believe that a democratic political system and its ideals and institutions are so bad that they need to be destroyed. And at the same time, they’re exalting a completely fictitious and unrealistic fantasy about the golden age of yore. I think these people count as nihilists. Their version is not based on reality. It’s retreating into a fantasy that’s
[00:15:44] Jeff Schechtman: projected onto a past. One of the things that has happened, and you’ve witnessed it and written about it, is the way that this movement has drawn in particularly young men with intellectual underpinnings from people like Bronze Age pervert Jordan Peterson and the Tates that have this
[00:16:02] Katherine Stewart: magical appeal to these angry young men. I know, it’s really sad. It was like part of the hardest, some of the hardest stuff to write about when I was writing about this sort of real like deep contempt for women and for ideas about equality. But here’s the thing, in a society where there are these vast stratifications of wealth, right? And it’s hard for everybody to succeed, particularly young people to succeed. There are a lot of legitimate resentments out there. And what this movement is very good at doing is drawing on those resentments and finding a scapegoat for them. And I think for a lot of folks, women are a scapegoat. This idea that if only the genders would stay in their lanes, then things would revert to an easier version of the past when so much has changed about the past. I mean, think about, they’re always talking about the late 1950s and early 1960s and how things were so much better then. Well, let’s think about what was happening in the late 1950s, early 1960s. The average CEO of an American company made 20-something times the salary of the average worker. Today, the average CEO makes hundreds of times of a Fortune 500 company, many hundreds of times the average salary of their worker. So we’ve had this vast upward concentration of wealth at the very tippy top of the economic ladder, and that’s made a lot of folks legitimately resentful. And this movement, again, is very good at harnessing those resentments and finding easy answers. And by the way, back then, the tax code was much more progressive. People who made more had to pay more in terms of their taxes. And now they don’t. Now there’s a lot of corporations paying no tax or all these different ways to sort of hide your money so you don’t have to pay taxes on it. And we just don’t have a tax code that reflects the way it was back in the late 1950s, early 1960s. But rather than sort of tackling some of the real reasons for people’s resentments and the fact that life is so much harder for them, they say, well, if only the genders would just stay in their lane, then everything will go back to what it was. And again, it’s very, it’s kind of reactionary nihilism. It’s this fantasy of a past that never really existed the way that they think that it did. I mean, that’s a kind of short version of it, you know, but that’s one of the reasons for the harnessing of resentments of these young men, these unhappy young men.
[00:18:49] Jeff Schechtman: And how was the movement overall so successful in the weaponization of emotionality, of vibes? How the movement shifted from political discourse, from discussion of policy of any kind, or even religion for that matter, to really one that was, as you said at the outset, about performance?
[00:19:11] Katherine Stewart: Yeah, you know, this is a movement that claims the left, anyone who’s remotely not on board, by the way, with their agenda as, you know, they say we’re, you know, all radical Marxists, which isn’t true. And in this group, they include political centrists, proper conservatives and people who, what they call Republicans in name only. You know, when I go to these gatherings, you see a lot of t-shirts that say things like, I’m going rhino hunting, meaning Republican in name only, and then guns. So what they’re really good at doing is conveying this idea that everyone who’s not on board with their agenda as a radical leftist, you know, woke communist or whatever. But the funny thing is, they’re always talking about how the left, when I say left, I also mean big tent, moderate, liberal, progressive left, plays identity politics. But they play it harder, because the short answer to your question is identity politics. And that’s what a lot of this sort of harnessing of grievance is doing. It’s a form of identity politics. It’s you’re with us, or you’re against us. You’re one of the pure versus one of the impure. You’re an insider versus an outsider. And I have to say that it’s almost more defined by politics than it is by religion. Religious nationalism, you know, broadly speaking, is a form of exclusionary nationalism. It’s the idea of who gets to properly belong in the country, and who doesn’t. And it’s not just defined by religion. Look, I think many if not most American Christians reject the politics of conquest and division that this movement represents. Try being a member of the religious left and doing what people on the religious right do. So for instance, Sean Foyt, I’ll give you an example, very concrete Sean Foyt, who’s a kind of a far right, I would call him like, you know, very hyper political pastor. He’s boasted about walking into the Capitol Rotunda on multiple occasions to have these spontaneous worship ceremonies. He walks in there with his guitar, and I remember one time Lauren Boebert joined him. And there’s sort of this display of sort of quasi-religious political sanctimony that they’re just sort of doing freely in the Capitol Rotunda. Well, Reverend Barber tried to do the same kind of thing in the last week or two, and he got arrested. So it really is a privileging for one certain form of religion, right, or say, politics-infused religion, and just privileging of anyone who feels to conform
[00:21:51] Jeff Schechtman: to that agenda. And to what extent, in your research and studying this for so many years, to what extent is Trump either the cause or a symptom of all of this? Well, the movement long
[00:22:05] Katherine Stewart: preceded Trump, and unfortunately it will long outlast him. But he really gave him rocket fuel. I would say the movement started to gather strength in its current form in the late 1970s, when a group of leaders calling themselves the New Right felt the Republican Party had become too liberal, too soft on communism. They were very upset with the Brown versus Board of Education decision that desegregated public schools. They were very upset about the nascent women’s movement, about a nascent gay rights movement. They felt that the Republic, they were very upset about the rise of, I would say, more moderate theologians in American Protestant faith, like Tillich and Niebuhr. And they wanted to drag the Republican Party to the right. This group included people like Paul Weyrich, who was later called the evil genius of the movement, Phyllis Schlafly, Howard Phillips, and others. And they really needed an issue to unite their movement. At the time, most Protestant Republicans supported a liberalization of abortion laws, but they identified abortion as an issue that touched on sexual anxieties and ideas about family and progress. And they figured out that if they could purge the pro-choice voices from the Republican Party, they could unite their movement around a single issue. And they also knew very well, if you can get people to vote on a single issue, you can control their vote. So they did that over time. It took a while. They also started a number of organizations that still exist today, think tanks, networking organizations, policy groups, and the like. And they allied with, I would say, plutocratic funders, who also were worried about their privileges being threatened, their tax privileges, etc., and didn’t really like the idea of greater economic equality, and who invested in some of these think tanks. And that’s how they grew their movement, quietly. For a long time, this is a movement that claimed to just want to see the noisy form at the table, you know, in the noisy form of American democracy. And they’ve really given up that narrative. They really want power. Now it’s power by any means necessary. But again, Trump gave the movement rocket fuel. The thing about Trump is he is, the movement has always been very anti-democratic at its core, although they used to pretend that they respected the institutions of a democracy in our Constitution. But he shifts the goalposts, and he shifts them again, and he shifts them again, until they are no longer even on the playing field. I mean, he’s a perfect representative, a perfect leader for an authoritarian movement, because he behaves like a king. He doesn’t obey the rule of law. He has no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. And so he’s a perfect representative of a leader that has never really believed in democracy to begin with.
[00:25:20] Jeff Schechtman: You talk about the abortion issue being a defining issue. Talk about race as a defining issue as well.
[00:25:26] Katherine Stewart: Well, interestingly, that group of new right thinkers, the thing that really upset them, you know, they partnered with people like Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell. They partnered with some of the, I would say, hyper-political pastors of that time. They called them the electronic ministers. And those folks, a lot of those folks were really upset that the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, was starting to look at these, what they’re called segregation academies, these religious, racially segregated schools that were run by some of these hyper-political pastors. People like Bob Jones had called segregation, affirmed the idea that segregation was God’s established order, that segregation was, in fact, scriptural. And they published, you know, sermons addressing this issue in particular. But this issue that the IRS might take away their tax privileges really got them up in the morning. And they, you know, but they realized stop the tax on segregation wasn’t really going to be an effective rallying cry for their movement. So they needed something else. And that’s why they sort of went down a list of issues that might be able to unite their movement. School prayer was one, but that tended to alienate the hyper-conservative Catholic leaders that they were drawing in as allies. The ERA was going down in flames, so that wasn’t really going to work. But when they came to abortions, like a light bulb went off, and they thought, oh, that could really work. And, you know, the historian Randall Balmer has written a really wonderful book about this issue. He was in on some of those early conversations. In the contemporary period, I mean, look at this sort of focus on first it was CRT and now it’s DEI. It’s the same old Jim Crow mentality, just dressed up in, you know, in new clothes.
[00:27:26] Jeff Schechtman: Is the movement too diverse or Trump too erratic as a leader for it to sustain over a protracted period of time? Are the seeds of its own destruction built into what they have created?
[00:27:40] Katherine Stewart: You know, the movement is very divided, and money lies in God. I talk very explicitly about those divisions. They can be exploited, and they should be.
[00:27:51] Jeff Schechtman: And what can the other side learn from the way this movement was built?
[00:27:57] Katherine Stewart: Well, again, at the end of Money Lies in God, I talk about some of the things that we can learn. One of the key lessons that I’d like people to take away is that organization really matters. I’ve written over 16 years, three books on the anti-democratic movement, and I’ve written each of them to show people how it was done. It just didn’t happen overnight. It’s not simply about like some little messaging trick, you know. This is a movement that very carefully and strategically built up the infrastructure of a movement that has legs. They partnered with deep-pocketed funders. You know, there’s plenty of money on the, say, moderate liberal left side too, but the left and the right spend their money differently. The right spends their money on organizations and individuals. They find individuals with the right ideological approach, and they sort of cultivate them, and let them know that they can secure their economic futures within the movement by working within it. And they invest in organizational infrastructure so that, you know, the organizational infrastructure, much of it functions as a giant voter turnout machine. What the left does is that they invest, you know, I’m being a bit broad brush here, but they’ve tended to invest in things like campaigns, political campaigns. They’ll donate money to specific politicians and technocratic solutions, which often operate or like groups that often operate in silos, right, rather than collaborating within a larger network. And it’s pretty clear at this point what kind of investment is more effective. So on the right, if somebody, if you invest the infrastructure, they can throw their support behind a candidate who actually conforms to what they want. And if that candidate happens to lose their election, well, the investment is still there. The infrastructure is still there. And on the right, on the left, if you like, you know, spending a lot of money on the war chest of a particular politician, well, number one, they might not need that money. Their war chest might be big enough. I also remember that in advance of the 2024 election, I don’t remember if it was September or October, the Democratic Party spent, what was it, $2 billion on political ads. If they had taken a small portion of that and invested in infrastructure building, you know, over time, we frankly might be in a different place. You know, Jeff, I travel around the country. I speak to a lot of different groups, and I’m speaking to a lot of these small, genuinely grassroots groups, like that want to offer, you know, their moms typically, or moms and dads who see this kind of, you know, stuff happening in their local public school, these Moms for Liberty showing up and, you know, spreading all kinds of lies and basically not trying to improve the schools, which, you know, schools can always be improved, but rather trying to tear them down. And they’re, hey, you know, the schools are really important for us, and we’re trying to, you know, dispel the lies and mobilize people and help them understand the threat in our midst. And they’re working with, like, you know, on nothing but their own steam. And if they were doing what they’re doing, the right would have already found them and drawn them into networks, offered them funding, you know, paid for buses so they can go to the state capitol to demonstrate, they would have, you know, there just would be much more support. And instead, you’ve got these different groups. Now, there’s starting to be some collaboration and some, you know, I would say, better organization among groups like the School Board Integrity Project, or I think of another one called the Public School Defenders Hub. But, you know, I am starting to see a lot more infrastructure building and cross-organization collaboration on the, you know, pro-democracy side. But it’s really taken a bit of time for them to, you know, for this to start happening.
[00:32:20] Jeff Schechtman: And for it to continue happening, does it need more grassroots support or more charismatic leadership? Obviously, it needs money. But in terms of leadership, does it need more top-down or bottom-up?
[00:32:33] Katherine Stewart: I think that, you know, a lot of it is about, I hate to say it, there’s funding that has to happen. I mean, that would be really helpful. You know, a lot of these small groups of moms that I meet, wow, if you gave them, like, 10 grand, they’d be off to the races. And they wouldn’t have to, you know, scrounge childcare and, like, you know, gas money when they drive by themselves up to the state capitol to, you know, provide some kind of opposition for when, you know, Moms for Liberty has a bus that, you know, is driving, you know, dozens of them up there to sort of spread their lies in state capitals. So there’s that. And, I mean, I think all of the above, you know. But I think things are starting to coalesce in a more positive direction. But again, like, you know, there are no guarantees. You know, we’re really facing a time of unprecedented peril, I would have to say.
[00:33:28] Jeff Schechtman: And for these movements on the right, what constitutes or what do they say constitutes victory for them? What is their measure of success?
[00:33:38] Katherine Stewart: This movement is defined more by what it wants to destroy rather than what it wants to create. And, you know, we’ve spoken about that. I do want to say that I think that they want power. They want access to not just private money, sources of private money, but also public money. Look at the war on public education. It’s really about, you know, they’ve got this case right now before the Supreme Court saying they did oral arguments already. It’s called Saint Isadora versus Drummond. It’s a fully taxpayer-funded, this idea to start a fully taxpayer-funded religious school. And if they can win on this case, they know the money will flow without end. Right? So it’s about, you know, public money, private money, a sort of licensing of, frankly, cronyism and corruption at the very top. And it’s also about policies that privilege certain religious and political viewpoints and disprivilege others. I mean, what we’re seeing in a way in their language about this stuff is incredibly Orwellian. They have this idea that, they have this idea that, you know, when they talk about, they were talking for decades about cancel culture. They pretended it was about free speech. But now when they have the power, they have zero interest in free speech when it involves someone with whom they disagree. You know, they’re out there banning books and canceling words in federal government like socioeconomic and status and climate science and diverse. They’re covering up displays of female soldiers and Black soldiers and getting rid of Jackie Robinson from some government displays. They’re eliminating entire fields of science from the federal government. You know, another kind of speech that they use that would make Orwell proud is their use of the term religious liberty. In their mouths, it really means privilege for anyone who shares their view alone. I mean, they’re really trying to dismantle democracy at its foundations. So here’s the thing, Jeff, the Constitution is really clear about the power of Congress to check the president. It’s really clear that the president can be held liable for crimes, that he shouldn’t be corrupt and so on. But they’re willing to completely overlook their constitutional responsibilities. We’ve got a current president who is rewriting and remaking laws that by law only Congress can do. And Republicans seem totally okay with that. So, as do the courts, as do the courts. As do the courts. So the idea that they’re adhering to any sort of constitutional principle or speaking the language of democracy is really preposterous.
[00:36:24] Jeff Schechtman: Do you get a sense, finally, and I don’t mean this as a crystal ball question, but really it more as a business question, because we see it with companies, we see it with politics, we see it all across the board, that sometimes groups or organizations or businesses can have too much success and it creates more division. And sometimes organizations, even the most successful corporations, can collapse under the weight of their own success. Is that something that you see at all within the makeup of these people in these organizations?
[00:36:59] Katherine Stewart: Well, I think I’m going to take from this question the fact that for a long time, this movement cultivated an ethos of grievance. They claimed to be discriminated against, even as they were some of the most privileged, frankly, groups of people in society. The idea of grievance is really critical to their movement. I think we can think of many groups of people in society that are subject to some form of discrimination, but movement leaders can think of only one group, which is people exactly like themselves, which is conservative and either explicitly or implicitly white conservative Christians. And this idea of grievance has been so underscored within the movement that once they actually have power, they simply can’t give it up. I mean, this movement depends on this idea of the constantly aggrieved folks who then, because they’re saying they’re being discriminated against, they’re very easily poised to identify scapegoats that are responsible for all of their ills. And this is something they do all the time. I mean, dictatorial movements always need a scapegoat to blame their grievances on. I think that there are folks within the movement, I would say, certainly the rank and file. Many of the members don’t describe themselves as Christian nationalists, although they may agree with certain Christian nationalist ideas. And when they’re casting their vote, say, for a candidate who promises to defend the American family or end abortion, they’re really not making a major argument about destroying democracy. They’re really making a statement about their own identity and themselves. But when you look at the leaders of the movement, it’s really a different story. They’ve always been anti-democratic. They’ve always expressed contempt for the principles of equality and pluralism that represent the best of the American promise. And now that they are in the seat of power, they are getting everything that we want. But here’s the funny thing about these kinds of movements. They don’t really produce pure theocracies. I think that the societies they produce are much more accurately described as cronyistic, kleptocratic, authoritarian societies with theocratic features. So think about a leader like Putin in Russia or Orban in Hungary, or think about leaders in Iran, or think about Erdogan in Turkey. When these leaders are binding themselves tightly to ultra-conservative religious figures in their own countries to consolidate authoritarian forms of political power, I mean, there’s so many examples of more theocratic countries, how they do this. The countries certainly could be described, depending on the region they’re in, more or less as theocratic, but they’re also better described as cronyistic, kleptocratic autocracies where you have absolute suppression of free speech, no tolerance of political opposition, and suppression of dissent and total suppression
[00:40:35] Jeff Schechtman: of the rights of various subgroups. Katherine Stewart, her book is Money, Lies, and God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Katherine, as always, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
[00:40:49] Katherine Stewart: Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you. And thank you for
[00:40:52] Jeff Schechtman: listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
