Harold Meyerson talks about the spirit of Christmas -- and who really is at war with it -- in an excellent, must- read for this or any other season. We're taking the liberty of excerpting a major portion of it here. Meyerson first briefly recounts the Biblical story of Joseph fleeing from King Herod's Judea with Mary and Jesus, "a story that echoed the Old Testament's concern for strangers, foreigners and refugees." He then poses a question:
Who’s really waging a war against Christmas in 2015? Secular multiculturalists who, stealthily and nefariously, have somehow rendered Starbucks’s coffee cups a tad less festive? Or the self-proclaimed culture warriors on behalf of traditional values, who demand we leave refugees — even small children, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has made pitilessly clear — at the mercy of the latter-day Herods? Who condemn entire religions? Who fear and loathe strangers?
It’s been a banner year for fear and loathing, xenophobia and racism. What has made the year genuinely ominous is the emergence of fictions presented (often, but hardly exclusively, by Donald Trump) as facts that legitimize a sense of both grievance and hatred: New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11; the quarter-million Syrians that the Obama administration is planning to bring in; a wave of black-on-white homicide. Concoctions all, but credible enough to the sizable share of Republicans who also believe the president is a Kenyan Muslim. Fed by talk radio, Fox News and paranoid websites, millions of our compatriots dwell in a parallel universe of alternative realities. My colleague Dana Milbank has noted that the fashion among conservatives is to dismiss hard facts that clash with their alternative realities as “politically correct.” That’s Republicanese for “empirically correct” — verifiable by research, but at odds with the stories they’ve created to justify their rage.
Such right-wing fictions have always hovered on the fringes of the body politic, but what has enabled them to go more mainstream is the sense of displacement — from their previous position as a majority race, a thriving class, a dominant religion — that is now widespread among the white working class Trumpites and the evangelical Christians flocking to Ted Cruz’s banner. The mission of right-wing media and pols has been to exaggerate some of that displacement (the threat to white America), play down other parts of it (the evisceration of blue-collar living standards by corporate America) and lay the blame for it all on minorities, foreigners, liberals, feminists, gays — you know the list. [snip]
Enmities, and most certainly not love, have become the core of the right’s appeal and message this year, not just in the United States but also across Europe. They may well sweep Trump or Cruz to the Republican nomination; they have already infused the entire party with bigoted perspectives that will be hard to disclaim.
They are most surely at odds with the spirit of Christmas. Walls on the border, religious tests for admission, despising the poor — good thing Joseph and Mary didn’t have to encounter our modern-day defenders of the right as they scrambled from one country to another, desperate to save their son’s life.It's too much to expect that this connection would ever be made by the supporters of Donald "Rump" Trump, Sen. "Tailgunner Ted" Cruz or any of the other demagogues, cranks and small- bore xenophobes and bigots running for the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid/ Shooter's Party nomination. Their supporters are hunkered down in a right- wing "parallel universe of alternative realities" that's been created for them over decades by a cynical, pandering political structure (aided and abetted by a puerile, cowardly "mainstream media"). They're angry (at the wrong people), aggrieved (for the wrong reasons) and fearful (of the wrong things), and the sad fact is they're not coming out of their parallel universe into the one the rest of us know.
