Tracking a major threat to American democracy
Review of "Money, Lies, and God" by Katherine Stewart.
How did we get to a place where citizens of the world’s leading democracy elected an anti-democratic government? That question is answered in colourful detail by Katherine Stewart in this new book. While the answer is not encouraging for those who care about good governance, it offers a deeper understanding of reality and some glimpses into how a turnaround might find a toehold.
Katherine Stewart, an accomplished journalist, has been attending events and tracking elements of the movement to Make America Great Again (MAGA) for 15 years. This book fills in the details of a big canvas with who the actors are, what drives their actions, and how they come together to pose a major threat to democracy itself. She relies on primary sources such as interviews, quotes from presentations, and original documents, which gives her account a high level of credibility, even though she is clearly critical of what she is describing. She has documented in great detail what she opposes. This book is full of data and has extensive footnotes and yet it still reads like a storybook.
The first takeaway from this portrait is that the MAGA movement is not a fluke or short-term phenomena that will disappear when Trump leaves office. It started long before Trump and won’t end in four years. It has developed through very intentional, deliberate strategies employed by people committed to long-term goals. It has staying power. While one root is the growing disparity of wealth in the U.S., often cited as a primary cause, this book explains that it is much more than that and would not disappear if the wealth gap is reduced. It is also true that reducing the wealth gap is unlikely to happen while this movement holds power, in spite of claims to care about working people.
The second takeaway is that the movement to upend democracy in the U.S. is a convergence of various streams, driven by a coalition of groups that do not have the same goals. In fact, some of the goals are contradictory, such as protecting workers and the interests of large corporations.
Stewart identifies five main streams that come together. The Funders are wealthy billionaires who bankroll various interests with a primary goal of advancing their own financial interests. “They have chosen,” says Stewart, “to invest their fortunes in the subversion of democracy,” and they bring a lot of cultural power in a society that glorifies the ultra-rich. The Thinkers are well-educated people who are critical of other “elites.” Characterized as “anti-intellectual intellectuals,” they gather at conferences and populate many think-tanks to produce documents that lend legitimacy to their plans, such as the “Project 2025” report that became a headline during the 2024 election. The Sargeants are the ambassadors who carry the messages from the Thinkers to the local level. This group includes many pastors who use pulpits and church networks to persuade and mobilize captive audiences. The final group, the Infantry, are the millions of volunteers who do the ground work to mobilize support and votes. They are a diverse group of warriors, motivated by different causes for which they care passionately. They are fired up to wage war against what they perceive as evils that threaten their way of life and local communities. When all of these work together, it is a formidable force that operates largely under the radar of the media, who focus more on the personality of President Trump.
Common themes across these groups are a sense of grievance and being persecuted; fear of impending catastrophe for what they most value; finding their identity in MAGA; and trust in an authoritarian leader to make things right.
Tension within
One of the intriguing insights in this book is that the contrary goals of some of the groups, held together now by the desire for power, might divide in time and contribute to its downfall. There is tension, for example, between those driven by free speech and those who want to ban books and censor language. Some of the internal conflicts seem more significant to me than others; whether the potential cleavages offer as much hope for pro-democracy forces as Stewart suggests will be revealed in time. Another insight is Stewart’s observation that the hard right invested heavily in institutions and organizations with long-term goals, such as replacing the judiciary one judge at a time, while the progressive movements in the U.S. focused energy and resources on specific causes, such as equality for women or anti-racism. That difference helps to explain why MAGA has staying power, and its opponents often seem out-organized for the next battle.
For readers of Christian Courier, the chapter that describes the attack on public education misses important reasons why parents choose non-public schools. Without clarity, it merges the issues of for-profit schools, quality of education, values in public education, parental rights, and diverse perspectives on education. It is simplistic to describe advocates of pluralism in education as Proselytizers and Privatizers. Stewart claims that the school wars in the U.S. are the work of well-funded groups that have motives other than the best education for children. One takeaway is the need for advocates of pluralism in education to also show support for strong public education systems, based on the equal right of every child to learn what they need to know to participate in society and flourish.
In the conclusion, Stewart offers hope for democracy by naming six findings that could be used for a turnaround. Some of them will be difficult to do while MAGA holds power, such as reducing inequality or clarifying the separation of church and state. The most hopeful may be her reminder that knowledge is power; this book contains helpful knowledge, also for Canadians who want to understand the forces behind MAGA at a deeper level.
