MONEY, LIES, AND GOD: Contained in the Motion to Destroy American Democracy, by Katherine Stewart
On condition that “Cash, Lies, and God” was largely written earlier than the November 2024 election, the guide reads as an eerily prescient information to the phantasmagoria of our political second. Nevertheless it’s a measure of the upheavals of the previous couple of weeks that even the guide’s writer, the journalist Katherine Stewart, didn’t anticipate among the early surprises of the second Trump time period.
Stewart makes passing point out of Darren Beattie, a White Home speechwriter who left his publish in 2018 after information reviews revealed that he spoke at a convention attended by white nationalists. “Beattie was too far out even for the Trump administration,” she writes — a believable remark that was nonetheless dedicated to print too quickly. A few weeks in the past, Trump tapped Beattie for a prime job on the State Division, placing him in command of the nation’s public diplomacy a mere 4 months after Beattie declared, on X, “Competent white males have to be in cost if you need issues to work.”
Stewart’s earlier guide, “The Energy Worshippers” (2020) traced the rise of Christian nationalism; “Cash, Lies, and God” expands the story to embody the right-wing “motion to destroy American democracy.” Beattie is only one determine in a bulging forged of characters that Stewart handily divides into 5 fundamental classes: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry and Energy Gamers. These teams don’t at all times have each other’s finest pursuits at coronary heart, nor do they at all times get alongside.
However as Stewart exhibits, this fractious motion has lined up below the banner of MAGA and Donald Trump. They communicate the language of democracy whereas practising the authoritarian politics of coercion and exclusion. What all of them share, Stewart says, is an angle of “reactionary nihilism.” They denounce tolerance and pluralism as a catastrophic change to their most well-liked political order. Reactionary nihilists presume a world that’s “devoid of worth, impervious to purpose and governable solely via brutal acts of will.”
Stewart ought to know — she has spent loads of time with reactionary nihilists, whether or not in individual or on the web page. Her guide provides us a tour via a raucous Christian nationalist occasion in Las Vegas and a flowery Mothers for Liberty fund-raiser in Philadelphia. She provides a brisk mental historical past that features the high-toned, intolerant musings of the Harvard authorized scholar Adrian Vermeule and the gutter misogyny of the web character Bronze Age Pervert — a Yale philosophy Ph.D. An adolescent boy’s preoccupation with “manliness” seems to be a standard denominator among the many thinkers on the proper. Rational deliberation will get derided as a device of liberal democracy, which they in some way depict as each tyrannical and toothless. All of the methods they provide boil right down to domination.
“Cash, Lies, and God” covers a number of terrain, however it’s Stewart’s exploration of right-wing concepts that makes her guide stand out. A chapter referred to as “Smashing the Administrative State” explains the novel proper’s longstanding plans to interchange the general public administration of presidency providers with a “privately managed, corporate-managed” regime. One other chapter on the Claremont Institute, the right-wing California assume tank, examines the affect of the political thinker Leo Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
But Stewart can also be cautious to not overstate this motion’s mental depth. So lots of the concepts espoused by the cutting-edge figures on the far proper are reflexively contrarian and basically empty. Its main intellectuals are Ivy League graduates who persist in being obsessive about the campus squabbles of the Ivy League. Stewart argues that their elaborate theories are constructed from emotions of elite entitlement and petty resentment: “After they speak about sticking it to the executive state or fantasize about having their dictator buddy manhandle the libs, they appear to be dreaming about revenge on the folks down the corridor.”
This can be a guide with a decidedly robust viewpoint, even when Stewart maintains that she gathered her info with an open thoughts. “As a reporter, I wish to look first and theorize later,” she writes in her introduction. “I’m fascinated about info, not polemics.” After spending a number of time with the info, Stewart has developed her principle of the case.
The Funders and Thinkers, she says, have labored out their very own symbiotic ecosystem, with the Funders supplying the cash that helps the Thinkers churn out the concepts that justify the Funders’ energy to make ever more cash. Simply don’t inform that to the Infantry — these thousands and thousands of lower- and middle-income People who turned out for Trump. Stewart explains that the one actual function for the Infantry is to produce the votes. They could assume they’re voting for cheaper eggs, when what they’re extra more likely to get are fewer meat inspectors and an expansionist warfare: “Satisfying the financial and emotional wants of this group is at all times the ostensible supply of legitimacy of the antidemocratic motion, however it’s by no means the precise aim.”
As an antidote to a lot cynicism, Stewart ends her guide with some suggestions, calling for constructing coalitions and pursuing a “progressive system of taxation.” It’s the sort of noble, hopeful conclusion that nonetheless highlights the discrepancy between the incessant churn of the Trumpian information cycle and the extra languid tempo of what is likely to be referred to as “guide time.”
However Stewart maintains a dedication to deliberation — not simply as an exercise however as a necessary precept. The far proper, she factors out, seeks to “demolish the very risk of affordable dialogue” by treating politics as an extension of warfare by different means. Books like hers operate not as weapons however as maps, navigating a manner across the edges of the abyss.
MONEY, LIES, AND GOD: Contained in the Motion to Destroy American Democracy | By Katherine Stewart | Bloomsbury | 338 pp. | $29.99