Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, October 11, 2025
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24 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Enshitification proceeds offline as well.
When a blog called One Mile at a Time, which is largely, but not solely, dedicated to the accumulation and uses of miles and points for travel, posts a piece called Why Should People Care About Airline Loyalty Programs? No, Seriously…, it’s perfectly clear without even reading the post.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I follow this blog mainly for reviews and some industry tidbits. But from glancing at the post titles, and some occasional reading, it’s clear airlines have been devaluing their loyalty programs for years.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s Turning Point Event Derailed by Racism (TNR)
Oh Ramalamadingdong! Turning Point must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel, to trot out this DOGE reject.
A follow to https://outsidethebeltway.com/fridays-forum-255/#comment-3016113
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPox7CfDCTO/?igsh=MTg3N3MxbnZqdDlk
@DK:
I would love to see those two male students in conversation. One uses Christian as a generic ID; the other narrows it to Protestant.
Pew has the Christian ID at 64%. But only 42% ID as Protestant.
Another Pew breakdown.
I wonder how much either fella knows about their fellow Christians.
I also wonder whether they would apply their concern for representation to other identity groups. Well, really my question would be how quickly they would violate their own standards wrt to representation when it concerns anyone else.
Under the topic Trump Fires Workers Amidst Shutdown, I posted an HHS spokesperson’s quote that included, “the Democrat-led government shutdown,” in keeping with the administration’s use of official communications to make partisan political statements.
During trump 1, Kellyanne Conway was criticized for repeatedly making statements that violated the Hatch Act, but avoided punishment because that would have required presidential action. During trump 2, it is the stated policy of the administration to include partisan political attacks in agencies’ official written statements, in clear violation of the Hatch Act.
Christianity has become less and less about Christ because actually behaving like a Christian is hard. And no one really believes in the Protestant personal God, or in the afterlife nonsense because it’s 2025. But people continue to need a group identity, I don’t know why, but people do. Might as well make ‘Christian’ your identity, after all, you already have the church and the picnics and some hypocrite to tell you how to vote and who to hate.
Also church is a really good place to hook up and get laid. And it prepares you for a life of being fleeced by grifters, which helps to make you into a good consumer and allows you to discover the true meaning of life: buying useless shit to enrich your billionaire overlords.
There are people who really believe in a sort of vaguely-defined divine spiritual presence. It is possible to believe that because that version of god isn’t keeping track of how often you masturbate. That god stays out of the way and just wants you to be nice, which is easy enough.
@DK: What part of White Christian Nationalism did Mr. Ramaswamy fail to understand? He may not be as smart as he thinks he is.
@DK:
@Kurtz:
So what are the Father and the Holy Ghost? Chopped liver?
@Gustopher:
I’m sure as soon as he gets from under the leopard that’s eating his face, he’ll explain why the leopard that’s eating his face won’t eat his face.
Did Jesus even have a religion?
First comment:
There’s this old Jewish joke: A Jew was stranded on a desert island. When they found him a few years later, they found that he has built three huts. “What are they” they asked. “This one is my house; this one is the synagogue I go to; and that one is a synagogue that I don’t go to”.
“Christian” is just the politically correct way to say “white” with those folks. Values? Trump doesn’t abide any of the ten commandments and they don’t give a rip.
@Michael Reynolds:
“Christianity” is not a monolith. I’ve known a lot of very sincere, kind, thoughtful Episcopalians on a spiritual journey. I have two Catholic friends who are saintly people. I have some evangelical friends from way back to high school who are just as serious about living Christ-like lives. And yes, I’ve known people who cloak their bigotry, resentment, anger, and smugness behind their professed faith.
I really wish, when you burble things about religion, you had more to say than just sweeping generalities.
Diane Keaton 79
RIP
https://people.com/diane-keaton-dead-oscar-winning-actress-dies-at-79-exclusive-8603118
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Tragic. An icon.
@Kingdaddy: Indeed. My late brother, the Lutheran Reverend, and his immediate family and circle of friends have been lovely people, and mostly good Democrats. Not everyone is an evangelical head case. I don’t mix with them, but I’m given to understand there are even a number of reasonable evangelicals.
Well, there’s a whole massive theological can of worms.
lol
“Paging Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople .
Nestorius, please pick up on the white courtesy phone”
@Kingdaddy: Sure, there are people who call themselves “Christians,” but it is a mixed bag. I don’t know what the percentages are, but plentyof racists, sexist, and otherwise bad people call themselves “Christians.” The people who treated Jimmy Carter with contempt are examples. No, we shouldn’t assume that Christians are bad people, but we should be aware that plenty of deceivers call themselves Christians. Neighbors who do that are probably ok; politicians who label themselves Christians are 90% deceivers in my experience.
@Kingdaddy:
@gVOR10:
I think I’ve mentioned before: a lot of Anglicans and Catholics are inclined to view the American “evangelical” identification with American “right-Republican” politics with distaste.
See the current trend among some US MAGA”Christianists” for proclaiming that the Pope is woke.
lol
@Michael Reynolds:
I know some avowed Christians who are, imho, rather decent people, and whose theological grounds do not lead to group-based exclusionary politics.
Christianity is not just the rather daft American evangelical fundamentalism, or the “more Catholic than the Pope” reactionary neo-Catholicism.
American socio-political religiosity is rather odd.
As an ordained Anglican of my aquaintance has said of such:
“Both heretics and lunatics”
(He was in an unusually bad mood at the time)
@Kurtz:
The day after “Christian Nationalism” hypothetically achieved power, look for the ultras among both evangelicals and Catholics going for each other’s throats.
Their theological assumptions are really quite incompatible.
See the European Wars of Religion, etc.
@JohnSF:
Yeah, several of us have expressed that outcome is likely—if only for purely political reasons.
It was not that long ago that many conservative Christians in the US did not consider Catholicism to be a Christian faith.
As I’ve pointed out before, the development of Christianity was a highly political process from the beginning. Today, Evangelicals claim their political views are from the Bible, but it’s the other way around.
@Slugger:
If you look at congress, you would find that there is a small smattering of Jewish folk, a Muslim or two, and then the rest would label themselves Christian. Including the better Democrats.
I think Christianity is bunk, but basically every politician good or bad is going to label themselves that. It’s just not a useful label.
If there were a Christian God, and He looked down and saw the incredibly wide and mutually exclusive things done is His name, citing His book, He would shake his great Godly head, sigh, and then send down another son or an angel or something to clarify things. If the Bible is the Word of God, then He has done a piss poor job of communicating.
Maybe start a call-in show called “Praise, Smite, or Don’t Care” where He performs a few miracles to show his bona fides, and then takes viewers/listeners questions and scenarios and renders a judgement. Just clarify the burning questions.
And maybe He would say: “what part of ‘eating shellfish is an abomination onto the Lord’ was unclear? No shellfish. None. Don’t eat them, don’t touch them. Do you know how many people are suffering for eternity because of this?” And then we would know.
(He may really be the Shrimp God, and humanity is kind of a side project that got out of control.)
@Kurtz:
Indeed.
It’s quite remarkable, but historically unsurprising, how doctrine adjusts to conform to interest or to prejudice.
Christianity was in some ways non-political for its first 300 years.
An experience that still marks it, compared to some religious doctrines that were political from the outset, in various ways.
It is part of why mediaval Christianity tended to defer to the secular powers.
The US “evangelical” political project is something of an aberration.
Some Reformation Protestants aimed at a “Godly commonwealth”, as did some Papal supremacists.
But most were obliged to accept, once again, the supremacy of the temporal power.
The problem of the dominionist evangelicals is that, due to history, there IS no coherent or uncontested Christian political/legal system.
Either it falls back on some dubious partial version of Old Testament law, or as with most Protestant and Catholic political projects in Europe, it eventually relies upon customary law.
Unlike Islam, or some variants of Judaism, or Confucian orthodoxy, Christianity is, for historical reasons, not really suited to temporal governance.
See eg the reliance of the Orthodox East Romans on imperial law, and the Papal States legal basis being primarily secular, and the failures and limitations of Calvinist republics both in Europe and in New England.
Ironically, arguably the closest that western “Christian” (for an arbitrary value of such) got to a coherent political system was the Mormons.
And that because Smith and Young mostly made it up as they went along.
A moment of levity while the world burns: Who’s on first?
@Gustopher:
Or perhaps:
“I was trying to say, don’t be selfish. Moses was getting a bit deaf in his old age.”
It’s really quite shrimple.
We are all just prawns in the game.
😉