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well first off this "christian nation" business is a big part of neo-fascist or "extreme right" politics across the board. you can see it alot in western european far-right political organizations. you see how this nonsense can acquire some traction in the recent swiss vote concerning minaret construction. so the only difference really between neo-fascist politics in western europe and this stuff in the united states is (1) its closer to mainstream conservatism because (2) there's been no particular effort to name this sort of politics for what it is. so in a way what happened in switzerland has been happening for quite a while in the states. go america.
it's obviously an identity politics which does what that sort of politics always does, which is to redefine the distinction inside/outside.
it's not surprising in a way either because lots of folk are feeling social and economic pressure and recourse to some notion of identity that seems stable by being rooted in something that's outside history (god, you know)----& reacting to that pressure by trying to assert a sense of nation-ness that transfers the outcomes of economic reorganization (for example) that's been happening right in front of people with near-universal assent from the dominant opinion co-ordination systems onto some community of essence or belief is not a new move.
it is potentially dangerous.
but there are many possibilities in real-time...history doesn't repeat exactly. the united states has just passed through 7 years in the course of which national-level political discourse was dominated by versions of this nonsense--what do you imagine the discourse of the "terrorist" does? and you had idiocy like the huntington thesis--the whole "clash of civilizations" thing--that seemed for a while almost respectable and which were basically restatements of this same dynamic with footnotes.
the underlying problem is the idea of nation, which i regard as a kind of collective mental disorder. but that's another matter.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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