National Conservatism Conference: Two criticisms, one from the right other from the left

National Conservatism Conference was held in Washington DC from 14th to 16th July, 2019. It promoted itself as a timely reorientation, a recognition of change, and/or a return to the original American conservatism that existed before it was taken over by globalists. The conference website explains:

Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations. This has been disorienting to many, not least the American conservative movement, which has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, grown increasingly attached to a vision of a global “rules-based liberal order” that would bring peace and prosperity to the entire world while attenuating the independence of nations.  

The return of nationalism has created a much-discussed “crisis of conservatism” that may be unprecedented since modern Anglo-American conservatism was formulated by Russell Kirk, William Buckley, and their colleagues in the 1950s. At the heart of this crisis is a question: Is the new American and British nationalism a hostile usurper that has arrived on the scene to displace political conservatism? Or is nationalism an essential, if neglected, part of the Anglo-American conservative tradition at its best? 

The conference on “National Conservatism” will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.

We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Our aim is to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.

 Yoram Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation was the organizer of the conference

Source: National Conservatism (Conference)

Following are two criticisms of the overall conference proceedings, one from Vox and the other from The Federalist. Both criticize the lack of grounding and actual policies presented at the conference. Both point out that  President Trump was mentioned only a few times and his policies were not directly applauded or criticized. 

Andrew Kloster in The Federalist argued that the conference was dominated by neo-conservatives who have lost and are trying to rebrand themselves:

Both the panel (moderated by an American Enterprise Institute fellow, no less) and the keynote represented clear attempts to rehash the same foreign policy hawkishness rejected by huge majorities of Americans on both sides of the aisle, asserted as serving the “national interest.” To call oneself a “realist” or a “nationalist” when promoting regime change in Venezuela, for example, is ludicrous. Americans are not at risk in Venezuela, nor is there treasure or territory for our people to win there... 

Many good Americans, myself included, now realize that we were swindled by Conservative, Inc. during the Bush years. But promoting the same failed policies, and rehabilitating the same failed “experts,” simply because they have rebranded as “national conservatives,” will not advance the American cause. No, Hazony is not the leader we are looking for, and his repackaged neoconservatism is not the unifying principle for a New America. We want neither Athens, nor Jerusalem, but America... 

Overall the entire event fails to cohere, precisely because abstract nationalism and abstract traditionalism fail in the same way liberalism fails: they purport neutrality and ecumenism while surreptitiously importing thick conceptions of the good. Who, precisely, constitutes our nation? Who are Americans? What is America? Hazony never quite says. In this sense, “national conservatism” is ambiguous—is it national, meaning Anglo-American? Or is it national, meaning nation-wide, federal? 

Rather than lauding the particular nation of the Founding—church on Sundays; boisterous Baptism, fastidious Methodism; New Testament mercy; barn raisings; agrarianism; state sovereignty; drifters and vagrants; local fiefs; free movement (but not that free); private militias; states with usury bans, those that allow it; periodic rebellion; trial by jury (and jury nullification); free, incendiary speech—we get an abstract thing. Never concrete. It does no good to praise abstract Americanism, abstract nationalism.

 Zack Beauchamp in Vox.com also took the conference organizers and most of the speakers to the task for not denouncing Trump for his overall racism and his diatribe against the squad (that happened during the conference), and for not telling Americans "what happens to conservative nationalism when it is put into practice":

Speakers took great pains to draw distinctions between the conference’s ideals and those of the alt-right. During an opening night speech, David Brog, one of the conference organizers, pointed out the exit door and told any racists in the audience that they should head out of it. Yet the speakers also overwhelmingly agreed that a central part of “national conservatism” involved opposing allegedly divisive cultural change wrought by mass immigration. 

There’s an obvious tension in this project of building a conservatism that is simultaneously skeptical of cultural change caused by immigration and, somehow, inclusive of the largely nonwhite immigrants who are responsible for changing it. At times, it became too much to bear... 

No panelist attempted to grapple with this fundamental problem for their agenda. The notion that racism was a major force in American political life was mocked — the word “woke” was a frequent punchline — or sidelined as merely a problem of a tiny alt-right fringe rather than a huge swath of GOP voters. 

This practical reality is, more fundamentally than theory, why Brog and Hazony’s project is doomed. All their denunciations of racism in the abstract, however heartfelt, are empty without a full-throated denunciation of Trump — like a fancy of way of saying “I’m not a racist, but.” Yet they cannot denounce Trump and still claim to speak for “national conservatism,” because Trump is seen by most people (correctly) as this set of ideas made flesh. 

There is no way to square this circle. The “national conservative” conference attendees may dream of a better conservatism, but they already have what they’re trying to create. And it’s much uglier than they can admit.

White and non-white evangelicals: do their politics differ?

Evangelicals are usually spoken as a group that supports political and social conservatism. They are identified as a religious group that votes as a block and as it is close to 20-30% of the population, its views become very important during the US elections. However, while almost all evangelicals are socially conservative, research shows that, politically, evangelicals have diverse opinions and positions. Then, why it seems that evangelicals vote as a block for the Republican Party. There are three reasons:

• About two-thirds of the evangelicals are non-Hispanic white;
• White non-Hispanic Americans, including white non-Hispanic evangelicals, are more likely to vote than African-Americans or Hispanics;
• Many conservatives, who are not evangelicals according to most religious/doctrinal definitions, identify themselves as evangelicals.  

Add these three factors and it would be easier to see why more than 80% evangelicals regularly vote for the Republican Party even when the party leadership has regularly supported racist and anti-immigrant policies. President Trump's nomination, election, and continued popularity among evangelicals show that the political choices of evangelical voters (who are mostly white) are informed as much by race as they are by religion. 

A previous blog post discusses in detail the debate over how to define an evangelical and whether self-identification (which is the way most political polls identify evangelicals) is the right way to identify evangelicals, so we will not explore these issues here (for those who want to read about it: Who are evangelical Christians?). 

Here are two articles that explain the link of evangelism, race and voting behavior. 

The FiveThirtyEight article How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? contends that race and President Trump are dividing evangelicals or exacerbating their differences:

 America’s community of self-described evangelicals, about a fourth of the population, is increasingly divided between a more conservative, Trump-aligned bloc deeply worried about losing the so-called culture wars; and a bloc that is more liberal on issues like immigration, conscious of the need to appeal to nonwhite Christians and wary of the president. The split in evangelical Christianity isn’t new, but it appears to be widening under Trump. 

Two factors appear to be driving this divide. First, the number of white evangelicals is in decline in America at the same time that the evangelical population is becoming more racially diverse. According to 2016 data from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 64 percent of evangelicals are non-Hispanic white, compared to about 68 percent in 2006... 

And these nonwhite evangelicals see politics differently than white evangelicals. While the largest plurality of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, most black evangelicals are Democrats. A plurality of evangelical Latinos, in contrast, identify as political independents — and they’re less supportive of the Democratic Party than Latinos overall — but they are still more likely to consider themselves Democrats than Republicans.

Source: How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? 

The second factor driving this divide among evangelicals is Trump himself. His governing style is, in effect, forcing evangelical leaders to choose between embracing the white evangelicals who overwhelmingly support the president or distancing themselves from the president — and even politics generally — as part of an appeal to their diversifying congregations.

The Religion & Politics essay We Are All Evangelicals Now blames a "sense of “racial embattlement," the belief that one's group faces more discrimination than any other group in the US, for the voting pattern of evangelicals, who are mostly white. The author, Janelle Wong, argues that evangelicals are not outliers and their views are close to those of white Americans as white Americans also feel being discriminated against. The only difference is intensity, "Evangelicals embody U.S. racial attitudes on steroids." Wong concludes the essay by focusing on narratives of white persecution: 

The bottom line is that the racial divides and racial anxieties we see in evangelical America are not so different from the views of white Americans more generally. I speculate that these attitudes are more extreme than those of other white Americans because their fears of demographic change are even more exaggerated than other whites. A narrative of religious persecution runs deep in white evangelical theological circles. Believers expect to be attacked for their religious commitments. Hence, their defenses may be easily raised by “the War on Christmas.” Narratives of persecution have primed them to expect a broad cultural assault, despite the fact that white Christians face the least religious persecution of any religious group in the United States. These fears of religious persecution, unfounded or not, interact in an especially potent way with fears of racial embattlement to produce the political conservatism detailed above. That being said, the racial patterns we observe among evangelicals are more intense, but consistent with the racial patterns that define the country as a whole. In this respect, we all share something very deep with evangelicals.

American (Christian) Churches and Racism

The last blog post focused on whether religion is part of white nationalism. This blog post furthers the debate on how white racism was supported by the Christian churches in the US. It is very difficult to separate white racism (or for that matter white nationalism) from Christianity in the US. Protestant Christianity was part of American nationalism. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs controlled the state and were the leaders of the society. And they were not ready to accept Blacks or Jews or even Catholics or Mormons as American. The national identity was defined by the WASPs and they drew the boundaries around them.

Jemar Tisby's new book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, narrates the history of complicity of American churches in racism:

The Color of Compromise takes readers on a historical journey: from America’s early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Author Jemar Tisby reveals the obvious—and the far more subtle—ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality. 

 Tisby uncovers the roots of sustained injustice in the American church, highlighting the cultural and institutional tables that need to be turned in order to bring about real and lasting progress between black and white people. Through a story-driven survey of American Christianity’s racial past, he exposes the concrete and chilling ways people of faith have actively worked against racial justice, as well as the deafening silence of the white evangelical majority. Tisby shows that while there has been progress in fighting racism, historically the majority of the American church has failed to speak out against this evil. This ongoing complicity is a stain upon the church, and sadly, it continues today. 

Tisby does more than diagnose the problem, however. He charts a path forward with intriguing ideas that further the conversation as he challenges us to reverse these patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, and immediate action. The Color of Compromise provides an accurate diagnosis for a racially divided American church and suggests creative ways to foster a more equitable and inclusive environment among God’s people.

Religion and Politics did an interview with Mr. Tisby. Some excerpts of the interview are given below (Full interview can be read here): 

R&P: As the subtitle states, your book is a sweeping survey of the American church’s complicity in racism. To your mind, what constitutes complicity?
Jemar Tisby: The book opens with the story of four girls who died when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Shortly after that event, a white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. got up in front of an all-white business club and gave an address in which he asked who was responsible for throwing that bomb. In answer to his own question, he said, “We all did it.” 

He went on to explain that every time that the white community—especially Christians—failed to confront racism in its everyday, mundane forms, they created a context of compromise that allowed for an extreme act of racial terror like planting dynamite at a church. That’s the idea of complicity. It’s not that every Christian was a foaming-at-the-mouth racist hurling racial slurs and burning crosses on peoples’ lawns. It’s that when they had the opportunity to intervene in everyday ways, they chose complicity over confrontation, and this enabled a larger atmosphere of racial compromise.

R&P: Though some American Christians were enthusiastically racist and others were anti-racist, most just accepted racist institutions. To what extent are we free to judge that, and to what extent do we have to accept them as products of their time?
JT: I think some would argue that most of those who I am identifying as complicit in racism were merely men and women of their time. But I would respond that the abolitionists and civil rights activists and others who struggled for black freedom were also men and women of their time. So it’s not as though Christians—particularly white Christians—didn’t know there were alternatives. It’s that they must have had some investment in maintaining the status quo, or that they had some fear of what other people would say or what they would risk if they stood up for racial equality. 

R&P: Was the situation in the South markedly different from that in the North?
JT: A lot of people like to point a finger at the South and say, “Those are the real racists.” The implication is that there is no comparable problem in the Midwest or the West coast or the Northeast. But the reality is much more complicated than that. 

I purposely included a chapter in the book on Christian complicity in the North, and by North I mean anywhere outside of the South. There are examples from various geographic regions. The bottom line is that bigotry knows no boundaries. It’s not that racism stopped at the Mason-Dixon line. The thing that makes the South stand out is that this was the physical site where race-based chattel slavery occurred. It’s the place where the plantations were located. But the entire country was implicated because the agricultural production in the South fueled industrial production in the North and other parts of the United States. 

Later, when the country played host to race riots—and here I mean white race riots—these occurred in urban areas outside of the South, like Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and others in the Northeast as well. So there was no region that was free from complicity and no region that was free from racism. 

R&P: As the nation moved from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining and mass incarceration, did the church response reveal any sort of moral trajectory? Did it get noticeably better or worse over time?
JT: Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, when it came to issues of justice, the church was often the taillight rather than the headlight in society. By that, he meant that the church often followed along after changes in the racial status quo were already taking place in different arenas, from politics to entertainment to corporations, and that’s what we often see throughout U.S. history. Though many Christians were actively engaged in struggles for racial equality, they tended to be in the minority. The majority of white Christians, at least, did change, but only as the national sentiment was already moving toward more openness and more equality. The change was slow and a little reluctant. 

Consider G.T. Gillespie, for example. In 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Gillespie was president emeritus of Belhaven College, and he gave an address called “A Christian View on Segregation,” in which he justified racial segregation, he said, based on the Bible. It’s just one example of many white evangelical Christians fighting against the political changes that would promote racial integration. 

It was only after Brown v. Board that many Christians capitulated to what was already the law of the land. But there was a disappointing scarcity of Christians who were promoting racial integration or celebrating the end of Jim Crow.

Christian nationalism is a robust predictor of voting for Trump

More statistical evidence for what has been said since mid-2016. A new report presents new evidence that links the rise of trump with Christian nationalism. Those who believed in Christian nationalism were more likely to vote for Trump even if one controls for economic dissatisfaction, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and sexism, as the abstract of the report reveals:

Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States’ perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally. These findings indicate that Christian nationalist ideology—although correlated with a variety of class-based, sexist, racist, and ethnocentric views—is not synonymous with, reducible to, or strictly epiphenomenal of such views. Rather, Christian nationalism operates as a unique and independent ideology that can influence political actions by calling forth a defense of mythological narratives about America’s distinctively Christian heritage and future.

Source: Donald Trump is a ‘Christian Nationalist’

An article (see 'Make America Christian Again': How religious nationalism explains the rise of Donald Trump) by James Macintyre in ChristianToday on the report explains:

The report explains that Christian nationalism is not synonymous with 'civil religion'. It says: 'Civil religion, on the one hand, often refers to America's covenantal relationship with a divine Creator who promises blessings for the nation for fulfilling its responsibility to defend liberty and justice. While vaguely connected to Christianity, appeals to civil religion rarely refer to Jesus Christ or other explicitly Christian symbols. Christian nationalism, however, draws its roots from "Old Testament" parallels between America and Israel, who was commanded to maintain cultural and blood purity, often through war, conquest, and separatism. Unlike civil religion, historical and contemporary appeals to Christian nationalism are often quite explicitly evangelical, and consequently, imply the exclusion of other religious faiths or cultures.' 

As the website truth-out.org has pointed out, the report examines 'the extent to which Christian nationalist ideology represented a unique and independent influence leading to the Trump Presidency,' and argues that, 'Christian nationalism operates as a unique and independent ideology that can influence political actions by calling forth a defense of mythological narratives about America's distinctively Christian heritage and future'. 

One of the authors, Whitehead, told the website that Trump is likely to continue drawing on Christian nationalism in the mid-term elections this November. 

'It proved helpful to them in the 2016 elections and so there is no reason they should move away from it now,' he said. 'I think that Trump has delivered on some of the promises made to Christian nationalists, especially concerning his pick for the Supreme Court. I don't think we'll see any reduction in the importance of Christian nationalism in upcoming elections.' 

Trump continues to enjoy the almost unqualified support of evangelical leaders despite policies and personal behaviour that appears consistently to contradict the Christian approach to politics and to life... 

Make America Christian Again explains that, 'The 2016 election was repeatedly labeled as conservative Christians' "last chance" for citizens to protect America's religious heritage and win back a chance at securing a Christian future. As Trump told conservative Christian television host Pat Robertson, "If we don't win this election, you'll never see another Republican and you'll have a whole different church structure...a whole different Supreme Court structure"'. 

The authors argue: 'Christian nationalism operates as a set of beliefs and ideals that seek the national preservation of a supposedly unique Christian identity. Voting for Donald Trump was for many Americans a Christian nationalist response to perceived threats to that identity.'

The report concludes: 'Although sexism, anti-black animus, xenophobia, and economic anxieties or dissatisfaction have been proposed as possible reasons for supporting Trump, we find that net of the influence of Christian nationalism, these receive limited support, at least as measured here. Specifically, none of the alternative explanations outside of Islamophobia exhibited significant associations with voting for Trump when Christian nationalism was accounted for... Beyond the 2016 Presidential election, future research should examine Christian nationalism and its relation to various contentious topics animating politics and civil society in the United States, as well as future voting patterns at multiple levels of governance. 

'As a flexible and pervasive set of beliefs and ideals, the influence of Christian nationalism will likely prove important across a wide range of contexts. It is especially critical to examine Christian nationalism and its significance in subcultures and social arenas both inside and outside of institutional religions.'

The "othering" of Israeli-Arabs continues

Two articles detailing how Israeli-Arabs face racism in the Israeli society and how many officials of Israeli state encourages this racism. A recent statement by the Israeli Defense Minister demonstrates how Israeli-Arab are not considered part of the Israeli nation and how Isreali politicians, working at the highest level, have no moral or political compunctions in helping propagate and promote the 'othering' of around 20% of Israeli citizens (Israeli-Arabs) and brazenly working for an exclusive Jewish nationalism.

Akiva Eldar's article Israeli defense minister's comments highlight 'plague of racism' gives a general overview of racism and bigotry in the Israeli society and state's promotion of it:

In a Dec. 12 interview with my colleague Mazal Mualem, Liberman proudly held up a poll indicating that 93% of Israelis who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union in recent decades (one of his party’s main constituent groups) support his call to boycott businesses in Wadi Ara. 

If this poll is really accurate, the migrants are not alone. According to a comprehensive study conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, the cancer of racism has spread to Israelis of all stripes. The poll found that almost half the Jews in Israel, 48%, think Israel should expel its Arab citizens, who constitute some 20% of the country’s population. Eight out of ten Arab Israelis (79%) said there was widespread discrimination of Muslims by Israeli society. 

A study presented in July to Knesset members indicates that academia, one of the institutions expected to uphold democratic values, is not immune to racism, either. About half the Arab students said they encounter manifestations of racism and discrimination in colleges and universities they attend, and 40% reported expressions of racism by faculty members. One-third of the students reported that the institutions in which they were enrolled did not give them any leeway to help their integration — not even taking into consideration Muslim holidays and fasts, and 30% said they could not apply for scholarships they wanted because they had not served in the military (unlike Israeli Jews who are required to perform military service). 

In a September 2016 report, State Comptroller Josef Shapira wrote, “We have been experiencing the harsh phenomena of hatred, racism, violence, factionalism and intolerance.” The chief government watchdog went on to cite the disastrous results of historic racism against the Jewish people. “Human society, wherever and whenever it is, has no guarantee that the underbrush of racism will not turn into a dense forest,” he warned. Shapira upbraided the Education Ministry — the state arm tasked with eradicating racism, xenophobia and factionalism — for failing to turn education into a bridge between the various segments of Israeli society. The ministry only addresses these issues sporadically, on a case-by-case basis, and then only following extreme displays of racism, Shapira wrote. 

President Reuven Rivlin said in response that the report reflects the extent to which racism had become an acute and strategic issue for Israeli society. He complained that “the state is not doing enough to uproot severe phenomena of racism and hatred among youth.” Several months prior to the report, Education Minister Naftali Bennett derailed a program for the development of a “racism index” initiated by the ministry’s chief scientist, professor Ami Volansky, after the July 2014 murder by Jews of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir. The index was designed to allow schools to assess the level of racism among its students and to seek appropriate remedies. 

Bennett subsequently ordered his office to sever ties with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which runs programs for the prevention of racism, among its other activities. This week, his ministry ordered a high school in the northern town of Nesher to cancel a planned annual event with members of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, the Parents Circle Family Forum. The ministry forced the mayor, himself a bereaved father, and the school’s frightened teachers to prevent the students from meeting with six Jews and Palestinians who devote their lives to the struggle for peace and against racism. 

A Knesset committee is currently deliberating an article that would officially allow segregation, part of a proposed law that would define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. It authorizes the state to “permit a community, including the members of a single religion or the members of a single nationality, to establish separate localities.” In an editorial titled “Israel’s Attempts to Preserve a Racist Heritage," the liberal Haaretz newspaper wrote: “It would be interesting to see Israel’s response if some other country passed a constitutional amendment letting communities that exclude Jews be established.… ‘Judaism’ isn’t a synonym for racism and elitism.”

Source: Liberman: 'Joint Arab List is a fifth column'

Mazal Mualem's article Liberman intensifies campaign against Israeli Arabs focuses on Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. He is determined to become the next Prime Minister of Israel and is willing to throw Israeli-Arabs and Israel's peace and stability under the bus to fulfil his dream. 

At the request of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, his associates prepared for him several lists concerning Israeli Arab Knesset members. These lists, containing details of past comments made by those members condemning Israel and also data on terrorist attacks perpetrated by Israeli Arabs, appeared on his desk in the Knesset on Dec. 11. He used this information in a speech to the Knesset attacking the Joint Arab List, even calling them "war criminals.” 

Among the people featured in Liberman's lists was former Knesset member Azmi Bishara. Appearing beside his name was the charge against him: "Accused of high espionage: making contact with a Hezbollah agent." There was Knesset member Jamal Zahalka who "while in the 12th grade was arrested and sent to prison for two years for membership in an illegal PLO group.'' Then there was former Knesset member Basel Ghattas, "a cousin of Bishara, who smuggled 12 cell phones to prisoners." Chairman of the Joint Arab List and Knesset member Ayman Odeh was listed as having "refused to attend the funeral of President Shimon Peres, calling Peres 'the murderer from Kafr Kanna.'" There were also quotes such as "within us, we Arabs refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state," which was attributed to a speech delivered by Knesset member Zahalka in December 2007 and later quoted by the website Checkpoint. 

Liberman's assertive speech came just a day after he used interviews with Army Radio and Reshet Bet radio to call for a consumer boycott of Arab businesses in the northern Israeli-Arab Wadi Ara region. Actually, this was a new stage in his longstanding campaign against the Israeli Arab community over the past few election cycles. This time, his attack was triggered by the violent demonstrations in Wadi Ara, which broke out in response to US President Donald Trump's Jerusalem proclamation on Dec. 6. During the course of these protests, Arab youths hurled rocks at police cars, private vehicles and buses throughout the Sabbath on Dec. 9. 

"Simply impose a consumers' boycott and don't go in there. Don't enter their restaurants or their businesses. Don't get your cars fixed there. The residents of Wadi Ara must understand that they're unwanted and that they're not part of us. They’re working from within to harm the State of Israel," said Liberman, adding fuel to the flames in an already tense atmosphere. 

All at once, Liberman removed the mantle of formality that he had donned upon entering the office of the minister of defense in May 2016. He went back to being chairman of a right-wing nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu who would rather exacerbate tensions instead of restoring calm. Politicians on both the left and right expressed their reservations about his remarks, including co-leader of the Zionist Camp Tzipi Livni, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan of Likud and Education Minister Naftali Bennett. It was exactly what Liberman expected. It was what he had hoped to achieve.

Robes, hoods and burning crosses of KKK: Artifacts of white supremacy and religious nationalism

Was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) inspired by religious nationalism? A study of the KKK artifacts certainly seems to answer 'yes' to this question.

An artifact (or artefact in British English) is an artificial/manmade product as opposed to a natural product. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle first made this distinction. Since artefacts are made, they have a maker and a purpose. Researchers learn about a society by analyzing its cultural artifacts as they reveal not only the intentions of their makers but also provide information about the specific functions they used to perform in that society.

Kelly J. Baker in her amazing article The Artifacts of White Supremacy enlightens the readers about the purpose/meaning of the things associated with the extremist, white supremacist American organization KKK. Religion or more specifically Protestant religion formed a very significant part of the how the KKK understood itself and the purpose of burning crosses, robes and hoods was directly linked with their understanding of God, nation and the Protestant religion. For instance, Ms Baker informs that the revival of the KKK in 1915 started because of a vision that was thought to be divinely-inspired:

The second Ku Klux Klan (1915-1930) began with a dream. William J. Simmons, an ex-Methodist minister, fraternal organizer, and founder and eventual Imperial Wizard of the Klan’s Invisible Empire, claimed that his recreation of the Klan began with a vision on a summer night in Alabama. As he looked out a window, Simmons saw “something mysterious and strange in the sky”: horses “galloping across the horizon” with riders dressed in white robes. Then, “a rough outline of the United States appeared as the background.” Simmons watched as each “big problem” in “American life” shifted across the celestial map, and he “fell to his knees and offered a prayer to God.” He prayed to “solve the mystery of the apparitions he had seen in the sky” and vowed to build “a great patriotic fraternal order” as “a memorial to the heroes of our nation.”

These heroes were the members of the first Klan that flourished between 1865 and 1870. Simmons believed the earlier Klansmen fought for the vanquished (white, Protestant) nation, helped restore the divinely-ordained racial order and saved the nation from the iniquitous and malicious Reconstruction forced on the South by the North. 

His religious visions and adoration of those first Klansmen, as well as the theatrical release and popularity of Birth of a Nation (1915), led Simmons to create the second Klan, a fraternity dedicated not only to white supremacy and social order but also nationalism and religious faith. On November 25, 1915, Simmons and 16 men climbed atop Stone Mountain, Georgia and lit a large wooden cross on fire. At midnight on that Thanksgiving night, these men pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, American ideals, and “the tenets of the Christian religion.”.....

It’s noteworthy that Simmons’ vision included figures in robes and that the order started with a fiery cross. These are the most recognizable objects of the Klan past and present. His retelling of that vision and recreation of the order points toward an often-overlooked part of the history of the 1920s Klan: the reliance on artifacts in the order’s daily operations, meetings, naturalizations, marches, picnics, and other public events. These artifacts communicated the order’s ideals—Christianity, white supremacy, and patriotism—as well as their vision of America as a nation created and maintained solely for white Protestants.

Artifacts of the KKK

The artifacts of the KKK, like artifacts of other historical organizations, have remained the same but their meaning has changed over the years. Furthermore, the meaning of the artifacts for the KKK was  quite different than what was perceived by others:

Yet, the meaning of an object is never settled, and often the story the Klan wanted objects to tell was not the one that everyone else heard. Robes, fiery crosses, and the American flag ended up telling competing narratives about the Klan’s idealized vision of white Protestant America and their promotion of intolerance and racism. The Klan couldn’t control how other people interpreted their actions or their objects, but that didn’t stop them from trying.

In the following section, excerpts from the article are reproduced to highlight the meaning of the different KKK artifacts. It is clear that the meaning of all these different artefacts was/is religiously-inspired.

White Robes

The infamous white uniforms were, and continue to be, the most distinctive feature of the Klan. The Reconstruction Klan created the distinctive outfit: long, white robes decorated with various occult symbols and tall hoods with aprons, or masks.7 The uniforms evoked the ghosts of the Confederate dead, and Klansmen employed them to terrify African Americans and sympathetic white people. The 1920s Klan adopted the uniform from the Reconstruction Klan, but also changed it to mimic the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation.  

Imperial Wizard Simmons admitted that his initial purpose in adopting robes “was to keep in grateful remembrance the intrepid men who preserved Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the South during . . . Reconstruction.” However, the uniform’s importance grew and its meaning changed....No longer a ghoulish disguise, the robes became a sacred object....

According to an Exalted Cyclops (a Klan leader) from Texas, Klansmen wore “this white robe to signify the desire to put on that white robe which is the righteousness of Christ, in that Empire Invisible, that lies out beyond the vale of death.” Putting on their uniforms, then, commemorated the life and death of Jesus. 

But more than that, to wear the robes was to wear Christ’s example on one’s body, to embody it. Each robed Klansman wasn’t supposed to appear terrifying, frightening, or dangerous, but Christ-like. The theology of the robes tried to counter the violent legacy of the robes’ use in the Reconstruction Klan’s terrorism. Klansmen imagined themselves as Christian Knights, who supposedly were beyond the violent legacy of the artifact.

Hoods

The mask concealed the members’ faces, wiped away the last traces of the individual, and allowed each Klansman to become part of the larger Klan community. While the mask protected the identities of members, the Klan also claimed that it symbolized the Klan’s dedication to selflessness. In the minds of the order’s leadership, each individual Klansman sacrificed a sense of self to become an active and valued member of the order.

The motto of the Klan—“not for self, but others”—was realized in the indistinguishable multitude. The Klan claimed that if the uniform terrified, it was only because the robes and mask conjured images of Christianity, Americanism, and white supremacy. The enemies of nation, particularly the Klan’s vision of the nation, would have rightly felt terror upon glimpsing the hooded Klansmen because of what they stood for. The uniforms did represent exclusion, after all. Unsurprisingly, the order favored its own interpretation of the Klansman’s uniform as an artifact of Christian brotherhood and selfless service rather than outsiders’ claims about terror and intimidation.

Source: White supremacist says KKK group recruiting around Ohio

American Flag

In the Klan’s story, the flag became a powerful artifact created by a people’s love of their nation. The American flag, particularly, was an emblem of not only patriotic devotion but also the freedom and liberty of Americans granted by the founders. It was the physical symbol of the peculiar history and destiny of Americans, particularly white Americans....
For the Reverend W.C. Wright, a Klan minister, the flag was “purchased by the blood and suffering of American heroes,” which was the “price paid for American liberties.”...

The Kourier, a Klan national newspaper, demonstrated how faith was also a key component of the flag. The red stripes manifested patriotic devotion, even if this required “the shedding of blood.” The monthly noted, “We love Jesus because He shed his blood for us, and we love the Flag because it represents the blood shed for our freedom.” The stars in the field of blue came to represent “Him [God] Who is back of the stars in Heaven above.” The Kourier continued, “We may not all understand God alike, but we do believe there is a God, and we must admit that the bases of America’s Laws are the great moral laws of God. When any man turns his back on God [,] he turns his back on the Flag.”

For the Klan, belief in God was essential to citizenship. Yet, the Kourier wasn’t promoting a universal God that would be inclusive of citizens of all faiths, but rather understood Christianity as essential to Americanism. The monthly continued, “Pure Americanism can only be secured by confidence in the fact that the Cross of Jesus Christ is the wisest and strongest force in existence.” For the editorial staff of the Kourier, American nationalism couldn’t exist without Christianity. Under the Star-Spangled Banner, Americans might claim unity, but the Klan’s unity was narrowly limited to those people they thought qualified as truly American—only white Protestants.

KKK in Washington DC in 1925

Source: A Turbulent Decade The Twenties

The Cross (on flag and robes)

A deep red patch on the chest interrupts its [robes'] whiteness. Inside the patch resides a cross with a teardrop shape in its center. The cross symbolized the order’s commitment to Christianity while the teardrop symbolized the blood Jesus shed to redeem humanity... 

The cross, which also appeared on Klan uniforms, echoed the order’s Protestantism and the magnitude of Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice. Interestingly, most Protestants viewed the cross as a potent symbol of “Romanism” until the middle of the nineteenth century, and Protestant churches avoided the object as a symbol of their faith.21 Despite the cross’s ambivalent history, the Klan claimed it was “the symbol of heaven’s richest gift and earth’s greatest tragedy.”....

The wooden artifact became a memorial of Christ’s debt, clearly attached to the Klansman’s version of Jesus. An Iowa Klansman wrote a poem about the fiery cross, claiming its light revealed that God controlled the universe. Its flames guaranteed that God would “redeem and regenerate the world.” For this particular Klansman, the cross promised that a “good” Klan would triumph over any “evil”: immigration, alcohol, threats to the public school, attacks on Protestantism, Catholicism, Bolshevism, and Judaism to name several. The Klan emerged as a force of good that would triumph in an increasingly unsafe world.

The Fiery (Burning) Cross

Imperial Wizard Simmons added the fiery cross to 1920s Klan’s rituals, but it was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) that introduced the idea of the burning crosses as a part of Reconstruction Klan’s mythology. In the novel, the burning cross was a tool for Klansmen to communicate with each other, an attempt to connect the order to the Scottish clans of lore and larger history of Anglo-Saxons. The 1920s Klan adopted the artifact for ritual and as a warning....

For the Klan, the fire signified that Christ was “the light of the world” that vanquished darkness and evil. It was a beacon of truth given for Klansmen alone. An Exalted Cyclops [a Klan leader from Texas] reflected:  ‘Who can look upon this sublime symbol, or sit in its sacred, holy light without being inspired with a holy desire and determination to be better man? By this sign we conquer.’ The Klan leader believed the fiery cross helped Klansmen become better men and confirmed that they were Knights ready to conquer forces that opposed their nation.

To conquer, or re-conquer, the nation for Protestantism, white supremacy, and “100% Americanism” was a clear aim of the Klan. Perhaps Christ’s light did emanate from the burning cross, but lifting up the fiery cross as a central symbol of the Klan was also an attempt to “rally the forces of Christianity” to take back the nation. Conquering required purging the “hordes of the anti-Christ” and the “enemies” of Americanism from America.26 The cross served as beacon and warning. For Klansmen, its glow provided comfort, but for those “enemies,” the fire terrified.

Source: The Artifacts of White Supremacy 

It's not conservatism,religion or racism, only regular, common nationalism?

Mark Movsesian makes an interesting argument about events happening in 2016. He argues that local politics were important but what we saw is the rise of nationalistic anti-global movement (See The New Nationalism).

One can easily perceive nationalism’s role in the politics of 2016. Repeatedly, the side advocating a recovery of sovereignty from supranational bodies and a limit on immigration prevailed. In the Brexit campaign, the “Leave” supporters argued that Britain must take back control from EU bureaucrats and assert authority over its borders. Here, Trump famously called for withdrawal from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and for renegotiation of other free-trade agreements, including NAFTA; for a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants; and for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Conservatism, racism and religion were contributing factors but cannot explain the movement:

To be sure, traditional conservatism played a role in these developments—but only an indirect one. Although the Right, broadly defined, achieved victories in the United States and Europe, what we think of as “movement conservatism” did not. In Britain, the leaders of the Conservatives opposed Brexit; in America, many conservatives opposed Trump. In France, the Republican Party has worked hard to distance itself from the National Front, which it views as an embarrassment. In Italy, the Five Star Movement declares itself non-aligned and draws votes from both the Left and the Right. 

Nor did Christian conservatism triumph in 2016. True, the majority of British Christians wanted their country out of the European Union and the majority of American Christians voted for Trump (the members of some denominations by wide margins). But both the Brexit campaign and the American election downplayed religious themes. Trump did not make Christian values a centerpiece of his agenda. Many Christians who supported him did so from a fear of what a Hillary Clinton administration would mean for their religious freedom rather than a belief that Trump shared their values. In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen strongly supports secularism. For an express appeal to Catholic values, one must turn instead to the Republican Party’s candidate, François Fillon. 

In short, although traditional conservatism has been on the winning side in recent political contests, it has been a junior partner in a larger project: the revival of nationalism.

Movsesian argues that this rise of nationalism does not necessarily mean that liberalism has been rejected. It is the liberalism tied with globalism that is rejected by many

The resurgence of nationalism upsets the conventional wisdom, which for some time has predicted the eclipse of the nation-state and the triumph of global, free market liberalism. Even Francis Fukuyama, who originated the idea of “the End of History” in 1989, has begun to reconsider. (Access to his article in the Financial Times is best from this link.) Why was the conventional wisdom wrong? Many observers argue that the financial rewards of global liberalism have been poorly distributed, with benefits going to a small number of elites within each country. Global liberalism may look great to cosmopolitans in New York and Los Angeles, who enjoy cheaper goods and services and higher returns on their investments, but to many in Middle America, who have lost well-paying factory jobs, and whose communities have been decimated by unemployment and other social ills, the advantages are harder to discern.

The lagging fortunes of what used to be called the working class are only part of the story, though, and not the most important part. As Fukuyama acknowledges, many well-educated Americans with reasonable professional prospects, who could expect to benefit from global liberalism, also supported Trump. For these Americans, too, the new world order of multiculturalism and ever-freer trade seemed lacking.

Does that mean these Americans reject liberalism itself? Maybe. Political scientist Yashca Mounk points to some worrying trends. But not necessarily—they may just want a liberalism tied to a coherent national community. Liberalism is not simply an abstract set of propositions; it is a tradition embedded in a particular political culture. Ultimately, it depends on a shared identity beyond markets and human rights, on a cultural and social unity that transcends cheaper prices and due process of law. A global liberalism divorced from local communities is a pale substitute for the deeper sources of belonging to which people naturally turn when they face a crisis. That, more than anything else, is the key political lesson of 2016.

The question I would like to ask Movsesian is about the basis of this new nationalism. Okay, it is anti-global and anti-immigrant but why? Is it economic nationalism or racial nationalism or religious nationalism or a combination of all of them. Secondly, nationalism is inherently divisive so a 'national' liberalism may not be benign in the end.