War is a tragic litany of collateral human damage and unresolvable sadness

A History News Network echo essay by Walter G. Moss:

Private Sorrows of Ukraine

The best quote I’ve discovered about war is from Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs (1993). 

“Cartoons against Putin's regime could lead to jail”

In the novel, the main character reacts to World War II in Europe:

"He was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust. . . . For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories."

With all the media available today we do sometimes become aware of war’s “private sorrows,” but not often enough. 

When we consider how important our own sorrows (like the death of a loved one) are to each of us, we should pause longer to reflect on all the deaths, maiming, and other tragedies that wars inflict.

Like the general public, historians (including myself) often fail in this regard. We are better at providing mind-numbing statistics regarding all the deaths and injured than we are at conveying much feeling for the millions of individual tragedies caused by wars. Sporadically, however, I have tried to correct this defect. On the first page of my book An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (2008), I quote McEwan and then add,

Some feeling for all these tragedies is also sometimes conveyed by first-hand accounts. A few early ones are provided here, and readers can only attempt to imagine some of the other millions of tragedies which lie behind the gruesome statistics of the remainder of the century.

I then provided excerpts from the writings of a few U. S. soldiers that killed Filipinos at the very beginning of the twentieth century--in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.” Here is just one sample:


Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.

Almost all wars have produced such “private sorrows.” But I have only occasionally touched upon them--see, for example, “A Memorial Day Lament for Capt. Wilfred Owen, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, and the Needless Dead of Foolish Wars."

Now, however, having just observed the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems appropriate to describe just a small percentage of the individual suffering wrought by this tragic war.

One of those tragedies occurred last year on the first day of summer, June 21. It happened in a pine forest near the Ukrainian Donbas city of Sievierodonetsk, and it killed a professional Ukrainian-Jewish couple in their early thirties, Taras and Olha Melster.

They had grown up in Kropyvnytskyi, a central Ukrainian city of 230,000, surrounded by wheat fields and relatively unscathed by the physical damage inflicted on so many other Ukrainian cities. The couple knew each other from age eight on, engaged in environmental protests together, went to college--he studying electrical work, she art--and married when they were 25. Six years later, they were living in a small apartment, owning a big dog, not yet having children, but hoping to soon. He was constructing websites, she had created an online decoration business. Like so many other Ukrainians of various ages and professions they both volunteered for military service, in their case on the very first day of the Russian invasion back in February 2022.

Evil Putinism

Even though the couple had little military training and she was the only woman in their unit, they found themselves on the front lines because of her persistence and major losses to more experienced soldiers. Their job? Hold their trench despite heavy Russian shelling and bombing; prevent the Russians from advancing. But after particularly intense Russian bombardment, another soldier discovered the couple’s bodies “next to each other, ripped apart.”

Another Ukrainian tragedy occurred the following month. But since I’ve already described it, I’ll just summarize it here. 

In July 2022 in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, about 160 miles southwest of Kyiv, Iryna Dmytriev, a thirty-four-year-old single mother, is pushing a pink and black stroller. In it is her only child, four-year-old Liza, who is afflicted with Down syndrome and was also born with a defective heart. When she was seven months old she required five-hour heart surgery.

As Iryna and Liza are walking Iryna suddenly hears a frightening noise above. She looks, sees a “massive” missile, and spontaneously huddles over the carriage trying to protect her daughter. But it did no good. The Russian missile killed Liza and severely injured mother Iryna, who was hospitalized for a month, with her left leg shattered and missile fragments requiring removal from her stomach and left arm. About the killing of her daughter Iryna said, Liza “was my life. . . . What Russia took from me cannot be forgiven. All my plans are destroyed.”

Another example of the “private sorrows” of wars that McEwan wrote about occurred in Dnipro, the Ukraine’s fourth largest city with a population of about one million. It’s on the Dnieper River, about 243 miles southeast of Kyiv. On January 14, 2023 a Russian cruise missile hit the apartment building where Anastasia Shvets, age 24, lived on the sixth floor with her parents and a cat. She was the only survivor in her apartment. According to Ukrainian authorities at least 44 other people in the building were killed and 80 were injured.

Anastasia’s mom had worked in a bank, and her dad had been a mechanic until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when he lost his job and later volunteered to build roadblocks to secure the city. Anastasia and her mom also took in stray cats, fed them, and looked for people to adopt them.

On the day the missile struck, the daughter and her parents had just finished lunch, but the latter remained in the kitchen, where they made candles for Ukrainian soldiers hunkered down in trenches. Working a night job at a bakery, Anastasia left the kitchen to sleep for a while. But just minutes later she heard a “massive roar,” and the kitchen and most of the apartment was blown apart. Her parents’ dead bodies were pulled from the rubble the next day.

As with many Ukrainians, this death was not the first to bring her grief. The previous September her boyfriend, Vladyslav, died in battle during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine. All this tragedy has left her living with an aunt and grandmother, taking sedatives, being on sick leave, and being frightened of air-raid warnings and loud noises.

A final example of the war-inflicted suffering is that of Andrii Mishchenko, his wife Olha Taranova, and their 11-year-old daughter, Sasha. From living together in Kyiv, they parted like many couples early in the one-year-old war. In their case at the Ukrainian-Slovakian border. He eventually ended up on the front lines in eastern Ukraine doing dangerous reconnaissance work. She and Sasha are now in Trossingen, a small town in southwest Germany, which has also welcomed other refugee Ukrainian mothers and children. Fortunately, because she can work remotely, she is able to continue earning income from the IT (Information Technology) job she had in Kyiv.

Andrii and Olha communicate mainly by cell phone. Every morning he tries to send her a heart emoji; she responds with an electronic kiss, but also tries to send him videos of her and Sasha. In one exchange he wrote, “Kissing and hugging you tightly”; she replied, “I am yearning for you.” He responded, “Miss me but do not be sad.”

Once he ordered flowers to be sent to her German address. She used the flower box to send him German chocolates, a box he now keeps beside him when he sleeps.

One can only imagine the anxieties of this man and wife, separated by more than a thousand miles and warfare, when they cannot communicate. That was the case for three straight weeks in September during Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Since they parted in early 2022, the family has only been able to get together twice. The first time was in Kyiv in August, but only for about four hours because Andrii’s unit needed him back quickly for a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. The second time, in December in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, they were able to spend five days together. They talked about Olha and Sasha moving back to Kyiv, but because Andrii would worry too much about a Russian missile killing them there, Olha agreed for her and Sasha to return to the safety of Trossingen.

The four sketches outlined above are just a small sample of the innumerable hardships and tragedies suffered by the Ukrainian people. We can read statistics like 13 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes (8 million of them now refugees in Europe), but they don’t mean much unless we think of millions of individual cases, most of them worse, like those of Olha and Sasha. Ditto for linking the at least 100,000 Ukrainian troops killed or injured with the Kropyvnytskyi couple Taras and Olha Meltser, found dead, “ripped apart,” in a trench together. And ditto for connecting the at least 8,000 Ukrainian non-combatants who have been confiramed killed and nearly 13,300 injured with the four-year-old child Liza (killed in Vinnytsia) ); her mother Iryna (injured); and the parents of 24-year-old Anastasia Shvets (killed), all non-combatant victims of Russian missiles.

The four cases mentioned above are just a minuscule sample of what McEwan called “a near-infinity of private sorrows.” And none of the four deal with cities or villages like Mariupol, Kherson, or Bucha where some of the worst atrocities occurred. (See, for example, “Putin’s Mariupol Massacre is one of the 21st century’s worst war crimes,” a late-February 2023 “60 Minutes” treatment of Kherson, and an AP News account of Russian tortures and executions in Bucha.)

Corpses In The Street: Mariupol Is Being Devastated By Relentless Russian Attacks- Radio Free Europe.

Nor do any of our four cases mention Russian missile or other attacks (a total of 707) on Ukrainian medical facilities that occurred in 2022. Nor do any of the four deal with the effects of the war on children’s education. (A recent UNICEF report stated, “Recent attacks against electricity and other energy infrastructure have caused widespread blackouts and left almost every child in Ukraine without sustained access to electricity, meaning that even attending virtual classes is an ongoing challenge.”)

Nor have our tragic examples mentioned rape, sending some Ukrainian children to Russia, or the imposition of Russian propaganda in Ukrainian areas seized by Russia--all of which have occurred. Nor have I written about all the Russian deaths--reportedly more than Ukrainian ones--nor Putin’s increased domestic curtailments.

And for what purpose have all these evils occurred? Primarily because in Vladimir Putin’s head all kinds of evil Ukrainian and Western threats whirl around. Some, like NATO’s expansion, may be genuine dangers; but others like the Western desire to dismember Russia, or Ukraine being dominated by neo-Nazis, are more like paranoid delusions.

The present essay has not addressed the need for a diplomatic solution to end the war. Nor has it minimized the risk of it leading to an escalation and perhaps even a resort to nuclear weapons. Moreover, the sources cited may not all be 100 percent objective. But, as one critic of the escalating level of Western military support for Ukraine has written, “There is no valid excuse for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its horrific ongoing war on that country.”

Putin and the War on Food

 Putin's Ukraine War and Ecocide by Walter G. Moss
Published in the History News Network HHN:

(Maine Writer- In my humble opinion, I cannot understand how the Russian military continues to wage the Putin War on Food.  Evidence indicates that Russian military are hungry, stealing food wherever they can find it.)

Right now the two greatest evils threatening our planet are Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the continuing despoiling of our environment. 

Regarding the latter, climate change consequences come immediately to mind, but the ecocide (“destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action”) presently being perpetrated by the Russian military in Ukraine is also important. Videos coming out of Ukraine clearly indicate that the amount of destruction--not only of people, but also of lands and structures--wrought by Russian planes, missiles, and artillery has been overwhelming. 

A Rolling Stone article of May 10, declared, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is poisoning the country’s land, air, water, and climate in a way that will have longstanding repercussions.”

Kenneth Boulding once wrote “Peace is ploughing and sowing and reaping and making things.” And the farmer, writer, environmentalist, and pacifist Wendell Berry stated, “To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”

Much earlier the Dutch humanist Erasmus (d. 1536) had written:

Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man; war, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. 

Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful.

But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandman butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war.

In his study of British writers and World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has a chapter, “Arcadian Resources” which contrasts that war with the peaceful pre-war rural British environment and pursuits.

This monument is to memorialize the Holodomor endured by the Ukrainian people in 1932-33. The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR and adjacent Cossack territories between 1932 and 1933. During the famine millions of Ukrainians and Cossacks died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.

Ecocide perpetrated by Russia is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Chekhov bemoaned the “diminishing animals, drying up rivers, and deforestation” he saw his country furthering. 

In 1992, Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., in their Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Human Nature Under Siege, updated our knowledge of the saga of Russian ecocide.


By the time Putin came to power, at the very end of the twentieth century, he displayed little concern about environmental questions. In late 2021, The New York Times noted that “Mr. Putin long dismissed the scientific consensus that human activity was to blame for the warming of the planet. Rather, he said in 2018, climate change could be caused by “cosmic changes, shifts of some kind in the galaxy that are invisible to us.” But then the continued devastating effects of climate change, especially in Russia, finally convinced Putin to at least acknowledge it might be important to Russia’s future. Not important enough, however, to prevent him from ordering (in late February 2022) the invasion of Ukraine, which is bringing in its wake devastating environmental damage.

As early as 4 March, more than two months ago, “over 1,000 organizations and individuals from more than 75 countries released an open letter . . . voicing concern over the war’s environmental and human toll.” A month later a piece on the Global Citizen website indicated three major ways the Russian invasion was harming the environment: 1) It was worsening global warming; 2) It was polluting water, soil, and air; and 3) It was harming wildlife and biodiversity.

Let’s examine each of these points in more detail. First, as the U.S. agency NASA indicates, “Human activities (primarily the burning of fossil fuels) have fundamentally increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet.” The Ukrainian Donbas area, presently the region where most of the fighting is occurring, accounts for almost half of Ukraine’s greenhouse gas emissions. And as the Global Citizen article indicates, “Militaries consume enormous amounts of fossil fuels, which contributes directly to global warming.” Russian jets, which have bombed numerous Ukrainian cities, “can burn through 4.28 gallons of gasoline per mile, with each detonation releasing additional greenhouse gas emissions, and destroying natural carbon sinks like soil, vegetation, and trees.”

In addition, various other Russian wartime activities--including all the movement of vehicles, including tanks, and artillery--were increasing global warming. In early April, to cite just one other type of increase, Russian forces blew up at least a few nitric acid container tanks in Ukraine’s Luhansk Province. Not only did the explosions create air-pollution warnings, but such acid is used in manufacturing fertilizer and some explosives, and reproducing the lost acid would involve a process that releases nitrous oxide into the air. This oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that has contributed to global warming.

In regard to our second category, pollution, one of the nitric acid explosions mentioned above led a government official to urge the local population to stay inside, close their doors and windows, and wear masks because of the polluted air. Even before the 2022, Russian invasion, the World Health Organization had ranked “Ukraine as the country with the highest health impact from air pollution in Europe.” This was mainly because of Ukraine’s high dependence on fossil fuels (like coal) for producing energy.

As a result of the Russian invasion, toxic-material emissions into water, soil, and the air from fires, destroyed buildings and damaged pipelines, sanitation systems, and industrial facilities like chemical and fuel storage sites have increased. For a while Russian forces occupied the Chernobyl nuclear site and caused a fire at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest. So far, the invasion has caused no major nuclear tragedy, but fighting around nuclear sites certainly increases the dangers of a future one.

In addition, all the movement of tanks and heavy vehicles increases air pollution; discarded ammunition sometimes leaks ammonia into waters; and as wars disrupt normal government environmental oversights, it becomes more likely that air and water pollution will increase because of such activities as trash burning and dumping human waste into bodies of water. According to an early May report, Ukraine’s deputy minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources stated, “From the first day of the war, we stopped everything that we were doing.” Instead the ministry began concentrating on collecting the war’s environmental-damage data.

Finally, in regard to the harming wildlife and biodiversity, it is illustrative to consider Polesia, sometimes referred to as “Europe’s Amazon.” Although the area also encompasses parts of Belarus, Poland,and Russia, the Ukrainian portion of the area is larger than that of the other three countries combined. Overall, its total landmass is about the size of half of Germany, and its contains pristine forests, large wetlands, and rivers, most significantly the Pripyat. It is also inhabited by large populations of such animals as bison, lynx, wolves, and 1.5 million migratory birds. A factsheet about the area states it is

home to some of the most biodiverse and culturally rich parts of Europe. The survival of many endangered mammals and millions of birds depends on this untouched landscape. The area not only has tremendous natural intrinsic importance, but also provides immeasurable benefits to people through ecosystem services such as water retention, flood mitigation, clean air, and carbon storage. Polesia also has a strong cultural heritage. Due to their relative isolation the indigenous population of Polesia, Poleshuks, have historically had little contact with people from other regions. Deep in the heart of Polesia, the traditional way of life like the use of local herbal medicine and traditional singing has been very well preserved.

In late March, shortly before it became clear that the Russian military was regrouping in order to focus more on eastern and southern Ukraine, an article on the NewScientist website declared that “Polesia is a war zone, pummelled and churned by Russian tanks. . . . the assault on Kyiv, launched from Belarus, ploughed straight through its eastern flank. So did the attack on the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant. . . . Russian advances have also begun to edge towards strictly protected areas in central Polesia.”

In April and heretofore in May, as Russian attack priorities shifted, Polesia has been less directly threatened, but the author of the NewScientist essay was right when he wrote that “Putin cares no more about the destruction” of this biodiverse area “than he does about bombing hospitals and killing civilian populations that stand in his way.”

Lest one think that declining biodiversity just means the loss of some animals we humans don’t need anyway, the British natural historian David Attenborough sets us straight. In his Netflix’s A Life on Our Planet (2020), after ticking off the likely increase in global warming, he tells us how to slow it down: “To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity—the very thing that we’ve removed.” For more detail on the exact connection between restoring biodiversity and slowing down climate change, readers should watch Attenborough’s program, where he makes such statements as “The ocean is a critical ally in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The more diverse it is, the better it does that job.”

One final harmful effect of Putin’s war should be added to the Global Citizen’s list of three--increasing world hunger. Ukraine has traditionally been a major exporter of wheat, sometimes referred to as the “breadbasket of Europe.” As Erasmus indicated five centuries ago, war ravages farm life.

Other effects of the war cannot yet be seen clearly, partly because the war is ongoing and we do not yet know how it will end--it is still possible for Putin to extend it beyond Ukraine or resort to heretofore unused weapons that could do even more environmental damage.

Although in order to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, it is also possible that the war may hasten some counties transition to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. It is also conceivable that for the same reason, countries might increase their own fossil fuels production while placing less stress on climate-change containment. One point, however, is without doubt. And that is that the Ukrainian war and the terrible destruction it is causing is diverting great amounts of money and world attention away from fighting climate change as a number one priority.

Thus, all of the certainties and uncertainties of Putin’s Ukrainian war make it easy to understand why a lover of the environment like Wendell Berry can hate war so much. Consider the last stanza of one of his early twenty-first century poems, “Look Out.”

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

Tumpanistas afflicted with acute anxiety syndrome

Echo opinion by Walter G. Moss, published in the History News Network

William A. Galston’s recent essay “The Bitter Heartland” begins, “We are living in an age of resentment . . . [that] shapes today’s politics.” The more I read of it (and more about it later), the more the great resentments of Hitler’s followers came to mind. 

"

Trumpanistas suffer "acute usurpation anxiety syndrome", also known as AUAS- (pronounced "You Ass")

Hitler's cult resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919, had imposed the “unfair” postwar Versailles Treaty upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the “decadent” godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film Cabaret.

The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and, also, their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche notes that “between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped.”

Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler’s early cultist tactics like boycotts that “relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews,” and he writes that “the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action.” 

Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, “pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world.”

Almost a century after Hitler came to power in 1933, some of #FormerGuy Trump’s followers remind us of Hitler’s cult crowds. 

On at least one occasion, after Hitler ranted about the “November criminals” (German politicians who negotiated the war-ending armistice of 1918), the audience cried out, “Hang them up! Bust their ass!” In both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump crowds (in response to their hero’s words about Hillary Clinton) shouted “lock her up.”

Even in 2016, during the campaign, writer George Saunders observed (The New Yorker: Who are All These Trumpzi supporters?) described some of the Trumpist's resentments. Many believed “they’d been let down by their government . . . and [were] sensitive to “any infringement whatsoever on their freedom.” Many suffered from what Saunders labeled “(acute) usurpation anxiety syndrome" or AUAS- pronounced "YouAss",” which he defined as “the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions.”

In Galston’s 2021, essay “The Bitter Heartland” he cites a 2016, poll that indicated that 65 percent of whites without college degrees “believed that America’s culture and way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s.” But more than that poll, his essay dissects the continuing Trumpites’ resentments much more thoroughly.

Like some before him, he indicates or hints at where the Trump resentful are mostly found: in small towns and rural areas, and among older people, non-college graduates, groups once dependent on manufacturing and mining jobs, and “social conservatives and white Christians.” The resentful are more provincial and traditional and many of them “lack access to high-speed broadband.”

“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.” They believe that the big-city elites, the professionals, and the government—before Trump came along—all failed to help them achieve their share of the American Dream. They resent professionals and liberals telling them how to live, calling them racists, or limiting their freedoms—e.g. to buy multiple guns or go about maskless during our present pandemic. “President Trump was at his best, they say, when he ignored the experts and went his own way.”

Like Saunders earlier, Galston thinks that many of the resentful feel they are “being treated unjustly, unfairly, or disrespectfully.” 

Achtung! The appearance of Trump and discovery of like-minded people—via the Internet and the person-to-person contacts of smaller towns—help overcome feelings of powerlessness. Feeling more powerful, some “people merely want a remedy for the injustice they have experienced. But others—typically those who experience disrespect—want more than redress; they want revenge.”

Galston closes his essay with some suggestions for dealing with Trumpanista resentments, but they are less compelling than his analysis of them. Partly this is because, while some are legitimate, others—like the reluctance of many white Christians to grant equal rights to all ethnic and religious minorities—are not. As we learned from examining the supporters of Hitler, understanding the difficulties of people and even sympathizing with their plight (e.g., being jobless) does not mean condoning resentments that lead to dangerously hateful behavior like victimizing Jews.

The preceding comparison between two phenomena of group resentment, separated by almost a century, in two different countries and political cultures, omits many contrasts and nuances. In addition, we know how Hitler and German Nazism ended. The ending of the Trumpite culture of resentment is still unknown. Will it gradually decline? Will the Biden administration successfully address many of the Trumpite grievances? Will Republicans continue to stoke them? Will Trump run again in 2024? But thanks to the writings of Galston and others--he mentions Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild--we better understand the resentments, and that’s a start.

Trumpian unsustainable deficits

By Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University a Contributing Editor of the History News Network

On July 5, 2019 the White House put out a (lie!) statement declaring “The Trump Economy Smashes Expectations Once Again.” (Middle class workers need up to three jobs to pay bills!)

It added that the “June’s jobs report smashed expectations, proving once again that Donald J. Trump’s pro-growth policies are delivering for American workers.” Two days later, The Washington Post noted that a recent poll by it and ABC News gave Trump “the best approval rating of his presidency,” and the main reason appeared to be our “strong economy.”

And yes in April unemployment fell to the lowest rate in the last half-century, and in July the stock market reached all-time highs.

Although heretofore in August the stock market has fluctuated widely, and talks of a possible recession prior to the 2020 elections have increased, Trump knows that his reelection chances could be greatly affected by the state of the U. S. economy. Thus, he is likely to use all powers at his disposable, including additional tax cuts, to make the economy look as good as possible in 2020.

But as a historian and grandfather of six grandchildren, 16 and under, I think that Trump’s claims of a “strong economy” are misleading. A recent comparison of the “Trump vs. Obama economy” puts the matter in better perspective. 

Those who in 2020, vote for Trump primarily because “he has improved the economy”—if superficially this still seems to be the case—will be as foolish as those Germans who supported Hitler between 1939 and 1942 because he had expanded German control over much of Europe. Or as unwise as those who agreed with financier Bernard Baruch and believed in 1929, right before the onset of the Great Depression, that “the economic condition of the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement.”

Historians are not seers who can know the future, but as futurist Tom Lombardo has written, “Memory of the past . . . is the knowledge foundation for both present and future consciousness, as well as wisdom.” And we know enough of the past to realize that good judgments often require a time-based perspective.

Trump and the justifiers of his economic policies represent, to use the words of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a case of “Irrational Exuberance.” Such exuberance is misplaced for many reasons, but two outcomes will be especially harmful to our children and grandchildren. The first is the tremendous environmental damage that the Trump economy is unleashing, and the second is the ever-growing national debt. 

Regarding the environment, let’s put aside the social, political, moral, and cultural effects and zero in on the economic cost, for the economy is our focus here. Since we are considering future economic costs, there is no certainty as to their amount, just as there has been no certainty in the past about how much major wars would cost. But consider the dire projection made by the 13 federal agencies in the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)’s 2018 report to the U. S. Congress and President Trump: “The continued warming that is projected to occur without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century, especially in the absence of increased adaptation efforts. With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century.” 

An article in Market Watch cited this same report and mentioned other findings and projections on the economic threat of climate change: “Climate change has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $350 billion over the past decade [think, for example, of payments for hurricane, flooding, drought, and fire damage, all heightened by climate change]. . . . By 2050, that figure will be $35 billion per year. . . .Climate change will send food, energy, and water costs soaring. . . . Incomes are expected to shrink by 36% by 2100 due to climate change, and millennials will bear the brunt of the economic effects.” In addition, rising temperatures and erratic weather events will increase food costs. “A 21-year-old college student graduating in 2015 is expected to lose $126,000 in lifetime income due to climate change and the generation as a whole is expected to lose $8.8 trillion in lifetime income.” While climate-change effects are likely to decrease income, they are expected to increase health care costs, including for mental health. “The American Psychological Association predicts that climate disruption will cause a steady increase in mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, and addiction.”

Although the above predictions are not certainties, they help make the point that in judging the success of the Trump economy, we cannot dismiss the future effects of his climate policies. Also threatening their future is the growing national debt, a subject that has received increasing attention during the last week following the release of a new study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Although George W. Bush left Barack Obama a $1.4 trillion national deficit, by Obama’s last full year in office (2016), it was only $587 billion for the fiscal year (ending September 30). Under Trump in 2017, it was $666 billion; and in 2018, $779 billion. For fiscal 2020, the CBO estimates the deficit will be $1 trillion. When Trump became president the accumulated national debt was $19 trillion. By July 2019, it was over $22 trillion. Thus, although during his 2016 campaign he claimed he could eliminate the debt if allowed to serve two terms, so far under him it has increased by $3 trillion.

True, the debt is not entirely Trump’s doing—the economic record of any presidency is affected by many factors. For example, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019, signed by Trump at the beginning of August, was supported by more Congressional Democrats than Republicans, and it raised budget caps and the nation’s debt limit for two years. But Trump enthusiastically supported it, tweeting that the plan was “phenomenal for our Great Military, our Vets, and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! Two year deal gets us past the Election.” AWashington Post article on the deal stated “Mitch McConnell told President Trump privately last month that no politician has ever lost an election for spending more money. That mind-set—caring more about the next election than future generations—helps explain Trump’s motivation.

Moreover, Trump also claims that the economy is his—see this essay’s first sentence—and voters in 2020 will consider him the politician most responsible for it. Though if there is an economic downturn, he will no doubt blame it on the Federal Reserve and other non-Trumpian causes. Also the December 2017 tax cut was mainly his doing, and the CBO estimated that it would add more than $1.5 trillion to the budget deficit over a decade.

By decreasing revenues, as well as increasing income inequality, it meant government borrowing had to increase. Even with the low interest rates now existing, the federal government this year must pay more than $350 billion to service that debt. (If Trump pushes additional tax cuts to increase his election chances, that would likely increase the debt even more.) On a recent PBS Newshour conservative David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields agreed that our children and grandchildren “are going to have to deal with . . . the [debt] burden.”

Similarly, it is future generations who will be most impacted by climate change. Commenting on the activism of the million and a half kids worldwide who in March 2019 went on a climate strike and refused to go to school, environmentalist Bill McKibben said, “I think the reason that young people are so involved is because . . . you and I are going to be dead before climate change hits its absolute worst pitch. But if you’re in high school right now, that absolute worst pitch comes right in the prime of your life.

And if we’re not able to take hold of this, then those lives will be completely disrupted, and they’ve figured that out.”

Thus, during the present campaign season if individuals tell you they’re voting for Trump in 2020 because of the “good economy,” mention the environment, deficits, and the debt to them. 

And since Republicans often like to talk about “family values,” ask them what kind of world they think the “Trumpian economy” is going to bequeath to their kids and grandkids.

Historic tribalism was overcome by visionary leaders. "Who now?"

Does this history remind you of many Donald Trump voters in 2016? And the divisiveness has continued to the present. An "essay echo", published in the History News Network, written by Walter G. Moss, a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University and Contributing Editor of HNN.

Who will lead America out of the current political tribalism?  Senator John McCain's funeral was one step forward but who will take up a visionary standard to lead us?

In July 2017, Senator John McCain told his Senate colleagues that their deliberations had become “more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember.” Conservative columnist David Brooks started off 2018 with a column entitled “The Retreat to Tribalism.” During the last year The Atlantic featured two essays, “The Tragedy of President Trump's Tribalism”and “Can America Survive Tribalism?”

But, consider this historic quote: “A steadily degenerating confidence in the future which had reached the height of general alarm. . . . We are in a pitiful position.” The American Dream “appears to lie shattered.”  Those words are not from the present Trumpian times, when political rancor and divisiveness are rampant, and the president continues to attack his predecessor’s legacy and despoils our environment? Nope. The quotes are from Herbert Hoover, a popular historian before FDR took office in March 1933—as found in Robert Dallek’s biography of Franklin Roosevelt.

In addition, Dallek tells us there “was the deep cultural divide between urban and rural Americans, or modernists and fundamentalists, as they were described.”

Moreover, in 1932, “rural folks who aggressively supported ideas and traditions largely in harmony with their established way of life” felt threatened by the growing dominance of the big cities. 

Many of these same folks especially distrusted all the southern and eastern European immigrants who had come to the cities before the 1924 National Origins Act discriminated against them and Asians.

“The belief that these groups could never be turned into citizens who fully accepted Anglo-Saxon economic and political traditions” was widespread.

Beginning with 1920, the USA had elected three successive Republican presidents. In the 1928 presidential election, the Democratic candidate, the Catholic Governor of New York Al Smith, was crushed by the Republican Herbert Hoover. Dallek believes that the election signaled “the extent to which the country remained split between cities and towns, Catholics and Protestants, southern and Eastern Europeans and assimilated voters.” And he quotes a Southern newspaper editor who wrote that the election indicated that the nation’s “Anglo-Saxon stock” would not be “overturned and humiliated,” that the “small communities and rural regions” had “risen up in wrath” against the country’s “great cities.”

Remind you of many Trump voters in 2016? And the divisiveness has continued to the present.

In July 2017, Senator John McCain told his Senate colleagues that their deliberations had become “more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember.” Conservative columnist David Brooks started off 2018 with a column entitled “The Retreat to Tribalism.”During the last year The Atlantic featured two essays, “The Tragedy of President Trump's Tribalism”and “Can America Survive Tribalism?”

The first Atlantic essay accuses DonaldTrump of operating “in a uniquely tribal fashion that has ominously, and even deliberately, widened” our political divisions. Instead of, the essay advocates, “policies that resist tribal separatism and balances the interests of all Americans.”

The second Atlantic essay reviews Amy Chua’s Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations(2018). Chua’s book explains how the changing demography of the USA has aroused fears among many white Americans that they are losing the dominance they once had—indeed, by 2045 demographers predictthey will be less than 50 percent of the U.S. population.

But now, as in 1932, Americans are unhappy with a Republican president’s performance. By late 1932, Dallek tells us that Hoover “became the butt of vaudeville comedians,” and that he “deepened the gulf between him and his critics by accusing them of ‘unpatriotic’ ” behavior. The same could be said for Trump if we substitute “late-night” for vaudeville. By late 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed. In the November election Roosevelt swept the Electoral College vote, 472 to 59.

In late 2018 unemployment is low, but there are many other reasons for voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump. According to an early September 2018 ABC News/Washington Post Poll, 63 percent of those polled thought that both Trump and the Republican Party were out of touch with the concerns of most people. Trump’s approval rating stood at 36 percent. This was the 10 points or more lower than presidents Obama, Clinton, and Reagan at a comparable time heading into their first midterm election.

As in 1932, so today, the American Dream seems shattered to many. In Chau’s book mentioned above, she insists that what we need is a new American vision that can unite our torn nation. She criticizes both the Right and Left for stoking the flames of tribalism. At the beginning of this year, I agreed with two conservative columnist David Brooks and Ross Douthat—both very critical of Trump—who also stated that we need such a new vision. But, unlike them, I suggested that two prominent Americans assassinated a half century ago, Martin Luther King, Jr.(MLK) and Robert Kennedy (RFK), offered us models for reconstructing our dream—in King’s words so that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

Although acknowledging King’s importance, Chua ends her book by quoting from another source that can provide inspiration for any imaginative reconstruction of our dream, Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again.” 

Hughes wanted America “to be the dream the dreamers dreamed,” to be a “great strong land of love.” But it had to be more inclusive than in the past. It had to go beyond “dog eat dog,” it had to extend justice to poor whites, blacks, Native Americans, and immigrants. Hughes’s final stanza reads,

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

How appropriate that last stanza seems today! The first two lines speaking to the rot and lies of the present administration and the remaining ones to the need to undo all the environmental harm the Trump government has inflicted upon us. “And make America again” reminds us of the Trump mantra “Make America Great Again.”

But Hughes did not urge us to restore an age of white dominance (as Trump does), but beckoned us forward, as MLK and RFK did, toward creating a more inclusive American vision. One that could inspire us all, whether we be white, black, or brown; male or female; young or old; rich or poor.

Our finest Americans have long pointed us in this direction. In his First Inaugural Address, occurring about a month before the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln told his “dissatisfied fellow-countrymen”: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Instead he appealed to “the better angels of our nature.”

In his Second Inaugural Address, occurring about a month before the end of the Civil War,Lincoln said, “but let us judge not, that we be not judged. . . . With malice toward none, with charity for all . . . let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

A century after Lincoln, MLK expressed a similar spirit in his “I Have a Dream Speech”in which he held out a vision of a “day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

In 1968, before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy demonstrated (as aNewsweek article noted after his victory in an Indiana primary) that “in a painful era of racial polarization” one could still “bridge the chasm separating the gut elements of the traditional Democratic coalition. He swept the Negro vote while at the same time piling up big leads among backlashy white workingmen—the same group that whistled Dixie for Alabama's George Wallace in the primary four years ago.”

In recent decades there have been glimmers of hope that we can move more toward national unity and embrace a reimagined American Dream. In his2004 Keynote Address to the Democratic Convention,Barack Obama spoke against “those who are preparing to divide us” and urged us to remember that “we are all connected as one people.” Once he became president, he occasionally reminded us of the need for more civil political discourse. In 2010, for example, in a University of Michigan commencement address he toldthe graduates, “We can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it. You can question somebody’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism.”

Although the Trump candidacy and presidency has heighted political incivility, occasional hopeful rays continue to appear. The final words of Sen. John McCain and the funeral he planned for himself combined for one such powerful ray. In his last advice to the American people he stated, “We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But, we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we’ll get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before.” To deliver eulogies at his funeral, he asked one former Republican president (George W. Bush) and one former Democrat president (Barack Obama). In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser wrote,“John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Meeting [to Trumpism] Yet.”

Such words as those of Obama or McCain may seem fine, but 2018 is not, as 1932 was, a presidential election year. Unlike Hoover in late 1932, it is unlikely that Trump will soon vacate the presidency. But what does seem similar is our increasing disgust with our president and our yearning for new leadership that can help restore our fractured political body.

In a 1932 interview, FDR stated that what our country needed was “some one whose interests are not special but general, some one who can understand and treat the country as a whole. For . . . no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all.” As Dallek writes, “If Roosevelt was to find the means to overcome the nation’s crisis, it would have to rest on shared support from every region and every ethnic, religious, and racial group.”

In his First Inaugural Address, he criticized “false leadership,” “self-seekers” who had “no vision.” But what vision did he have, and how did it differ from previous ones? He thought of himself as a liberal and progressive, but in a non-ideological, pragmatic, and imaginative sense, one open to compromise and experiment. In pursuit of the common good, which should be what a government pursues, he was prepared to defy the failed Republican bias against substantial government aid. 

Dallek tells us that in 1932 President Hoover thought that “Federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed”; and “Roosevelt's New Deal reforms were giant steps in humanizing the American industrial system.”

It’s true that FDR did not please everyone. Many wealthy businessmen, conservative politicians, and the Hearst press, for example, thought him too leftist. But, overall, Roosevelt had a unifying vision – as indicated by his popularity with the American people. They elected him president four times, and generally approved of his policies; in the spring of 1941, for example, he had a 76 percent approval rating.

2018 is not 1932. But again most Americans are disgusted with a president’s behavior and ready to consider a revised and recharged American vision. Will it be forthcoming? Will it be inclusive enough? Who will provide it?

Scott Pruitt is challenged by Pope Francis about environmental science

Pope Francis and the environment ~ the antithesis of wrong minded Scott Pruitt: by Walter G. Moss*

Scott Pruitt is in conflict with God's creation ~ these deliberate degradation are sins

Maine Writer comment: Let's remember, before Pope Francis was a chemistry teacher before he became a priest.  In other words, Pope Francis is a scientist.  On the other hand, Scott Pruitt is a political operative and, as such, he has no idea about how the environment is harmed by his propriety driven policies.

Published in the History News Network HNN.com

Scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests to the existence of human-caused global warming. The problem, however, is many people ignore or dispute such evidence. Such it has been with evolution, and so it now is with global warming. A recent example has been the man President Trump appointed to the job of protecting our environment—the Environmental Protection Agency’s head, Scott Pruitt—and other Protestant evangelicals who share his hostility to a science-based climate policy. (Evangelicals are primarily Protestants of various denominations who share an emphasis on the importance of experiencing a “born-again” transformation, on the Bible and Jesus as ultimate authorities, and on encouraging others to accept Jesus as their Savior. Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of U.S. voters.)

An article in the century-old pro-business magazine Forbes recently stated that Pruitt “has systematically removed science from environmental decisions and regulations in the United States.” Two other recent articles zero in on Pruitt’s evangelical connections. The first, in Slate, is entitled “God’s EPA Administrator,” and it asks, “Did the politics and history of evangelical Christianity create Scott Pruitt?” The second, a New Yorker essay, asks, “Are Evangelical Leaders Saving Scott Pruitt's Job?”

Late last year I wrote that President Trump’s worst sin was the damage he was doing to our environment and that Pruitt was one of his chief henchmen. 

“Sin” is a strong word and a religious one. But in using it I was following the example of Pope Francis, in his 2015 climate encyclical. There he quoted favorably the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, who stated:“For human beings … to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.”

All of these religious references, lead us to several important questions: 1) Do different religions (e.g., Francis' s Catholicism and Pruitt's evangelical Protestantism) say different things about our obligations regarding climate change? 2) What role do religious beliefs regarding climate change play in the minds of politicians? 3) How do these beliefs affect the behavior of voters?

In answer to the first question about the differences in religions, the answer is, “Yes.” But the answer involves more complexity than one might imagine. Some idea of this complexity can be gained by looking over such books such as the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2018), which contains essays on different religions’ and regions’ approach to ecology, plus other ones dealing with subjects such as religions and climate change (see here for an online version of the latter essay). Even within one religion, for example Judaism with its Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches, there are often different approaches to climate change.

Our chief concern here, however, is between the different perspectives of the Catholic Pope Francis and Trumpian Protestant evangelicals like Scott Pruitt. In addition to quoting the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew about how harming our climate is sinful, Francis begins his climate encyclical by citing the environmental concerns of his papal predecessors since 1971, and then he jumps back to the thirteenth-century’s St. Francis of Assisi, whose name our current pope took as a “guide and inspiration” when he was selected to head the Catholic Church. The pope recommends the saint’s loving attitude toward nature as a safeguard against regarding ourselves as “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on . . . immediate needs.”

Early on, however, Pope Francis transitions from a concern with his Catholic forerunners’ thinking to stating that he will review “several aspects of the present ecological crisis, with the aim of drawing on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” 

Pope Francis then goes on to write that “a very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. . . . A number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity. As these gases build up in the atmosphere, they hamper the escape of heat produced by sunlight at the earth’s surface. The problem is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system. Another determining factor has been an increase in changed uses of the soil, principally deforestation for agricultural purposes.”

Thus, from the beginning of his encyclical, Francis displays the utmost respect for scientific findings. Popes, however, have not always been so open-minded. Mention of the Catholic papacy’s negative reaction to the contentions of Copernicus and Galileo that the earth revolved around the sun (and not vice versa) is enough to dispel any overly-rosy generalizations about past papal respect for science.

Yet, the Catholic Church has never taken an official position on Darwinian evolution, and unofficially it has never been as hostile to it as Protestant evangelicalism. Most notable among evangelical opponents to Darwin, as the famous Scopes Trial of 1925, reminds us, were the fundamentalists. (A Pew Research survey indicates that only 27 percent of white evangelical Protestants, as compared to 68 percent of white Catholics, are willing to accept that “humans have evolved over time.”)

Although fundamentalists are only a subset of evangelicalism, by 1930 a decades-long transformation was occurring among evangelicals in general. As conservative columnist Michael Gerson points out, before the Civil War many evangelicals were abolitionists who believed in social justice and progress, but by 1930 “all progressive social concern . . . became suspect” among most evangelicals. Decades later white evangelicals “shamefully” sat out or opposed the civil rights movement.

In general, as a 2014 survey revealed, white evangelical Protestants are less likely than other major U. S. religious groups to concern themselves with scientific developments or to believe that climate change is an important environmental matter. Although U. S. Catholics were more than twice as likely as white evangelical Protestants to say that climate change is the “most pressing environmental issue,” they still did not prioritize it as much as they have done since Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, which has swayed, some, but by no means all, Catholic believers.

Although climate change may or may not be of much interest to religious believers, it can no longer be ignored by national politicians. This brings us to our second and third questions: What role do religious beliefs regarding climate change play in the minds of politicians and voters? In light of the overwhelming percentage (81 percent) of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and the prominence of evangelicals like Vice-President Pence and EPA head Pruitt in the Trump Administration this question has special importance.

When one considers that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson are also evangelical Christians, the serious impact of Trumpian evangelicals is considerable. In addition, other Republican evangelical Trump supporters like Senator James Inhofe (Okla.), patron of fellow Oklahoman Pruitt and author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, also increase evangelicals’ influence, as do the fossil-fuel-tycoon Koch brothers, who have supported various conservative evangelicals like Pence and Pruitt, as well other individuals and groups opposing efforts to reduce global warming.

Trump’s own religious views are less clear. But the evangelical leader James Dobson claimed that during the 2016 campaign Paula White, a Florida televangelist and spiritual advisor to Trump, converted him to evangelicalism. What is certain, however, is that Trump considers himself a Christian and has supported many goals of conservative evangelicals.

Evangelicals are influenced by their faith’s distrust of science and belief in God’s omnipotence. One example is furnished by Pastor Ralph Drollinger, author of “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint” and conductor of a weekly Bible-study meeting attended by many of the Trumpian evangelical cabinet supporters—about Drollinger and his Bible-study group Pruitt has stated, “to be encouraged, to pray . . . to spend time with a friend, a colleague, a person who has a faith focus on how we do our job, whether it’s through prayer or through God’s Word, and to encourage one another in that regard is so, so important, and we have that in our Cabinet and it’s such a wonderful thing.”

Drollinger has written: “To think that Man can alter the earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man. . . . In our lifetime there has been a radical shift in aggregate, national religious belief. In essence and unfortunately, America has been in the process of changing horses: from the religion of Christianity to one of Radical Environmentalism. We are in the process of exchanging the worship of the Creator for the worship of His creation. This is a huge and dire error, with extreme consequences, and it presages disaster.”

But not all evangelicals share this view. In deciphering the role of religious faith in the politics of evangelicals, the insights of Gerson (see above) seem most pertinent. He believes his own evangelical faith has shaped his life, but that “Christian theology is emphatically not the primary motivating factor” in the minds of evangelical politicians and voters(my bolding). He writes that “Fox News and talk radio are vastly greater influences on evangelicals’ political identity.”

Also influencing their political choices are other factors like geographic location and race. The states with the largest evangelical populations (all with more than 40 percent of the total population) were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—more liberal California and New York had much smaller percentages of evangelicals, only 20 percent and 10 percent respectively. In last year’s Alabama Senate race, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Republican candidate, while 95 percent of black evangelicals supported his Democratic opponent.

Gerson faults white evangelical voters for being too defensive, reactive, and narrow, for voting for Trump with his “distinctly non-Christian” values. Unlike the Catholic Church, which developed a well-thought-out social philosophy, evangelicals failed to do this, and Gerson thinks this has left them too susceptible to politicians like Trump who promised to look out for their interests. 

Michael Gerson supports Pope Francis opinion about the environment~ Evangelicals are influenced by extremist FoxNews

In contrast to the narrowness that Gerson eschews, Pope Francis has urged Catholics to be open-minded, pragmatic, and work for the common good. Anyone reading his long climate encyclical from beginning to end, while perhaps not agreeing with all aspects of it, should conclude that it reflects this spirit and is motivated primarily by his deep Christian faith. 

*Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University