George Will On How Trumpism Became Republican Dogma
In the attached video, Brian Williams conducts a superb interview of archetypal conservative, George F. Will, a man so rooted in History that he knows the categorical difference between thoughtful conservative "originalism" and the volcanic visceralness of gullible populism.
What Will leaves out of his analysis is how "Christian" "conservatives" (who are neither) have persuaded themselves that "miracles" and all-encompassing "providence" exempt them from any need to study, think research and plan.
The misguided Christians don't even see the need for prudence.
Rather, they conceive God as a kind of omnipotent magician, a Supreme Being, alternately providential and punitive, who, at bottom, seeks the adulation and applause of those who profess to worship him.
In the "conservative" "Christian" mind, there is no sense that "virtue is its own reward" and that "salvation" coupled with "providence" co-emerge as simultaneous consequences of kindness -- culminating in that rarified state of agape in which lovers of God (who are necessarily lovers of their fellows) manage to love their enemies.,
These shrunken, formulary Christians -- "rattling on like the pagans" -- are bound by the letter of the (most horrible) laws, and worship a punitive tribal God -- most especially a God who promises eternal torment for most human beings -- a God whose biggest "payoff" is a frame-of-mind that is unrelentingly bitter, and whose torment is only mitigated by their ability to re-make themselves in the image of their "Thunder Sky God."
And so, their consolation prize is the celebration of cruelty toward "infidels," a foretaste of what "the damned" have in store n the life to come, torture without end.
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I often say to my "Christian" "conservative" friends that "there will be a riotous surfeit of surprise at The Pearly Gates."
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