Weekly Roundup: Reviving the Lost Cause - the Real Meaning of Trump's Refusal to Concede + Biden's Religious Voters + SCOTUS and Obama Care
Dan begins by explaining why Biden didn't underperform and why emotionally this should feel like a big win
He and Brad also discuss the White religious voters who fled Trump for Biden and why it is/and is not a big deal
They touch on SCOTUS and the Affordable Care Act, including the surprising comments from Justice Kavanaugh
The bulk of the episode is then spent on discussing the real meaning behind Trump's refusal to concede. Dan explains why a hard coup is not imminent; Brad sets what he calls Trump's "Lost Pause" in the context of the "Lost Cause," the myth and civil religion that emerged from the Confederacy and eventually shaped Southern politics and culture for a century.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am here with my co-host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be here with you, Brad.
It's been another long and eventful week.
It really has, and it felt like Saturday was this moment of jubilee, people in the streets, people dancing, people celebrating, and then we just sort of moved into the week here, and Trump has refused to concede, and there's been this full-on assault by leading top Republicans
Senators Mitch McConnell, Rubio, Cruz, the normal suspects, along with a kind of media blitz and a very poorly constructed legal blitz in the courts on the part of Trump to sort of talk about, you know, things like a stolen election and fraud and all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, it's one of those things where a lot of folks on Twitter, Dan, have talked about how even when you are able to excise a malignant narcissist from your life or an abuser from your life, They're always trying to haunt you, you know, and they're always trying to sort of come back into your sphere in any way possible and that sense of relief is always sort of provisional.
So I think that's where we are now.
Does that make sense to you?
It does make sense to me.
And I think an overarching thing for me, and we'll touch on this in various ways as we go along, is just the way that the media, you know, the right always complains about the media, and I have different complaints, but the media, I think, Has exacerbated a lot of these kinds of things, like even while they report on it and ostensibly are concerned about a lot of things that arise from this, I think they've actually sort of made things worse.
So that's been just a real sort of sticking point for me in the last week is the way the media has presented so much of what's going on right now.
Well, let's set that up.
So I think today, friends, we want to get into a bunch of stories.
Unfortunately, a lot of them are still about Trump.
So we're going to unpack some of that.
But we're going to talk about the loss of religious support.
For Trump and the ways that that really helped Biden.
I think, Dan, you really want to get into the idea that Biden didn't underperform and we need to stop thinking about it that way as we move forward.
We want to touch on the ACA and SCOTUS and some of the things that happened this week with the Affordable Care Act.
And then I think we just want to finish, Dan, with what are the ramifications of Trump's refusal to concede?
I mean, Do we have a constitutional crisis?
Are we in danger of Trump somehow remaining in power?
I think we want to get into that.
And both of us have different takes on that, especially takes that kind of bring in our study of religion, scholar of religion expertise.
So we'll get there in the end.
But let's start with this, Dan.
Trump did lose some support with religious voters, and it did seem to make a difference.
So I'm looking at a Politico article that came out this week.
And it's by Gabby Orr, came out just two days ago.
And I'll quote a little bit of this and then throw it to you.
Between 47% and 50% of Catholic voters supported Trump, a small decline from 2016, but enough to cost him the Rust Belt states that mattered most.
Nationally, the president carried white Catholics by 15 point margin, but that was a decline from his 33 point margin of victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago.
Trump's slippage with white evangelicals was less pronounced.
It seems as if he's got 76 to 78 percent, which is what we talked about last week, but that was a decline from the 81 percent that voted for him four years ago.
So, Dan, just like last week, a small deal in the sense of the percentages here are somewhat minor, but a big deal in terms of electoral victories because the decline in these two groups, white Catholics and white evangelicals, did seem to have an effect in places that were important to the president.
So what do you think here?
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