Prophetic Populism and the Violent Rejection of Joe Biden’s Election: Mapping the Theology of the Capitol Insurrection

For President Donald Trump’s most committed Christian devotees—those with ears to hear—his rise to power was prophesied, and the 2016 victory was miraculous. Prophets again foretold re-election in 2020. These charismatic Trump supporters tended to come from outside the main denominations, and when the electoral college swung towards Joe Biden, the results were not accepted. In rejecting the election, they became fellow travellers with more overtly militant and conspiratorial groups—sometimes sharing a stage with them. This article describes the discourse of prophetic populism from 2011 to 2021—focusing in particular on the three months from the 2020 election to the storming of Capitol Hill to the inauguration of Joe Biden. Although Trump repeatedly says, ‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’, these prophetic promises did not materialise—leading some to try to force God’s hand. This article explores the reaction to three consecutive disappointments that took their toll on prophetic populism: the declaration of Joe Biden as president-elect in November 2020, the certification of his victory in early January 2021 and the inauguration later that month. It demonstrates the power of a relatively new force in conservative politics, the flexibility of beliefs in divine involvement and the resilience of these beliefs in light of weighty disconfirming evidence.

Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft

What role does the Islamophobic theory of “love jihad” play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft—the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology—in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of “love jihad” relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grounded in a foundational opposition between true Indians and their anti-national enemies within. The article begins by exploring how “love jihad” has transformed from an idea that was used to legitimize extra-legal violence by Hindu nationalist vigilantes to the status of law, with a particular focus on the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh. We then situate the “love jihad” laws in relation to a regime of gender governance that constitutes women as subjects of protection - and specifically protection by state and nation—and discuss how this resonates with a pervasive patriarchal common sense in Indian society. Finally, we show how “love jihad” laws and the wider conservative politics of gender and intimacy within which it is embedded feeds into the authoritarian politics of the Modi regime, in which Muslims are consistently portrayed as enemies of the Indian nation, and reflect on what this entails for the country’s secular political order.

Arctic Pedagogy

This paper is about the place of Indigenous people in an early instance of a culture war in the United States: the conflict in the 1970s over an innovative middle-grades social studies curriculum called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS). Funded by the National Science Foundation, MACOS sought to revamp social studies education by addressing big questions about humans as a species and as social animals. It quickly came under fire from conservatives and helped to solidify the concept of “secular humanism” as a social threat. A broad conservative organizing effort, whose effects can still be felt today, eventually ended not only MACOS, but the very viability of school curriculum reform projects on the national level. Though this story is familiar to historians of American education, this paper argues for its centrality to the development of contemporary conservative politics and the early history of the culture wars. It also takes up the largely unaddressed issue of how Indigenous people figured in the MACOS curriculum and in the ensuing controversy. Focusing on the ethnographic film series featuring Netsilik Inuit that was at the heart of the MACOS curriculum, this paper addresses the largely unacknowledged legacy of Indigenous pedagogy, to argue that the culture war that led to the demise of the MACOS project also represented a lost opportunity for Indigenous knowledge and teaching to be incorporated into the formal schooling of American children.

When Think Tanks Refuse Thinking: Why American Pro-Market Conservatives Oppose Market Integration

American pro-market conservatives often oppose use of federal authority to rein in anti-competitive behavior by market actors. Competitive barriers, whether created by local jurisdictions or the absence of national competitive rules, go unaddressed. In international comparison, especially considering the European Union's use of central authority for market openness, this is quite puzzling. Based on interviews and archival research, I trace inattention to market barriers to contradictions within Hayek's neoliberalism and an enthusiastic reception within the American academy of one possible interpretation of those writings. This conception of markets—competitive federalism—diffused into the conservative law and economics movements, think tanks, and eventually mainstream conservative politics. It permitted conservatism to align a strong pro-market rhetoric with demands for states’ rights and federal retrenchment, albeit side-stepping many significant issues in economic theory and policy. Thus, conservatives pursue spending and tax cuts, deregulation and decentralization, often to the detriment of market openness.

The Electoral Framework and the Politics of Representation

The framework that governs electoral competition in Ireland has a profound impact on the democratic cast and character of the country’s political life. The institutionalization and organization of both constitutional referendums and national general elections constrain and shape its capacity for responsible decision-making. The former has become an increasingly significant focus of electoral decision, the latter have fostered a conservative politics in which representative impulses overwhelm the party system’s ability to provide for disciplined choice. Despite a party-focused proportional representation electoral regime, the use of the single transferable vote has generated a politician–party–voter dynamic privileging a constituency-centred politics that has persisted in the face of the social and economic changes that have transformed much of Irish life.

The Concept of “the Establishment” and the Transformation of Political Argument in Britain since 1945

This article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course and significance of recent political and social change was contested, and that ultimately transformed social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. The article situates the formation of the concept of the Establishment within a prolonged contestation of social and political authority in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century and traces the recoining of the term in conservative political commentary prior to Henry Fairlie's frequently cited 1955 Spectator article. From the late 1950s, it is argued, the concept acquired more distinctively contemporary meanings that enabled its adoption by Harold Wilson during the mid-1960s and its subsequent reappropriation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1970s. These usages registered and helped to accomplish fundamental political realignments, the understanding of which depends upon a close analysis of political and social concepts.

Religious Non-Affiliation

For the past century, the bulk of white evangelicalism has been tightly linked to very conservative politics. But in response to social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative white evangelicalism organized itself into the Christian Right, in the process attaching itself to and making itself indispensable to the Republican Party. While the Christian Right has enjoyed significant political success, its fusion of evangelicalism/Christianity with right-wing politics—which includes white nationalism, hostility to immigrants, unfettered capitalism, and intense homophobia—has driven many Americans (particularly, young Americans) to disaffiliate from religion altogether. In fact, the quantitative and qualitative evidence make it clear that the Christian Right has been a (perhaps the) primary reason for the remarkable rise of the religious “nones” in the past three decades. More than this, the Christian Right is, in itself, a sign of secularization.