Saturday, November 19, 2016

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, November 19

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch


PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS EDITION

ANALYZING THE VOTE: PEW Research by race and gender. Trump’s margin among whites without a college degree is the largest among any candidate in exit polls since 1980. Two-thirds (67%) of non-college whites backed Trump, compared with just 28% who supported Clinton, resulting in a 39-point advantage for Trump among this group. In 2012 and 2008, non-college whites also preferred the Republican over the Democratic candidate but by less one-sided margins (61%-36% and 58%-40%, respectively). Because Trump did not do as well with college educated white women  as Romney, his margin of the overall white vote was similar to Romney. However by turning working class whites in the Rust Belt he took new states. His loss of college white women in the Democrat’s big states ran up victory margins for Clinton but won her no new electoral votes. AOA Maps of what happened by A. Joseph Lynch. 16 lessons from 16 election by Larry Sabato.

THE NEXT PRESIDENT - WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN:         Paleocons and the Election.
 Mr Trump’s God Whisperer - interesting profile of a lady Pentecostal who crosses color lines for Christ.  Donald Trump's post-secular win - the return of Christian America. This short, very perceptive, article by Stephen Turley at Imaginative Conservative seems right-on to us. It starts with this racist sexist homophobic xenophobic quote from Mr Trump: “Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God, saluting one American flag. Cain Pence in Washington Examiner on Election and Shakespeare.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Robert Reich on their leaving the working class. From Debbie Wasserman to Keith Ellison - is this the DNC chairman who will win back the working class? Powerline’s Scott Johnson knows Ellison well, as he remembers the Democrats who opposed him in his initial rise as a Minneapolis congressman. They knew Ellison, and told reporter Johnson the Ellison story as Democrat insiders. They have gone silent as the left seeks to take the Democratic Party from the Clinton syndicate, but Mr. Johnson remembers.

The YWCA, like most WASP institutions, is neither young nor Christian anymore but is reliably feminist. Here is some of their trenchant analysis of the presidential election in which "the glass ceiling remained as the floor fell in." This is part of a series on institutional freakouts at the Trump election from the excellent political blog Powerline. Stay at the site to explore how the corporate world is responding to their fellow citizens' exercise of their franchise. Freakout at the YWCA.

FDR was am upper-class guy who was "a traitor to his class" as he put the working class to work and to war as fellow Americans. The Clintons were lower middle-class who became upwardly mobile themselves, at the expense of manual laborers. They too were traitors to their class, but as grifters not nationalists.

The 'Feminist Implant' is America's Blue Angel Syndrome - a deadly infatuation leading to humiliation, emasculation,  and sinning against God the Father.

An Englishman on the left gives the best tirade yet to fellow leftists on why the left can no longer make arguments. Johnny Pie on Why Trump beat Clinton (LANGUAGE ALERT).

SAYING GOODBYE TO HILLARY: Tim Kaine picked Langston Hughes to hold fast. This celebration of a hardline Communist poet is significant because the atheist project of overthrowing the rule of the Father is now being carried by feminism. All sorts of middle-class women  are telling us they can't wait to overthrow the patriarchy, and insert a female in our military command. They may agree that Hillary was the wrong woman, but a woman president is still a great idea. This national psychosis that we should break up all male hierarchical groups in the name of justice for women  has not yet been cured.  Defeating Hillary Clinton was a huge miraculous step in extracting the feminist implant and reasserting sacral and sexual order. But our work is just beginning. 

THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND THE TRANSFORMATIVE NATURE OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY: UNDERSTAND FLYNN AND BANNON:
General Flynn - a profile. Another profile during campaign.
Steve Bannon according to Cosmo magazine. They are harsh critics but still informative.
Here is a better article about Bannon who is the big idea and historical/cultural thinker who so resonates with Trump. He sees a working man’s party that cuts across color lines. "I am an economic nationalist, not a white nationalist." He thinks of himself as a Kennedy Democrat who saw the Clintons and other social movements steal the Democratic Party from the working man. A transcript from a speech he gave by telephone to a conference on poverty at the Vatican in 2014. A Vanity Fair profile during the campaign.

THE SEA CHANGE IN RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA IS REAL.
 Trump during WSJ interview Nov 11, 2016:
"I've had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria. My attitude was you're fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. “Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria. Now we're backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”
The most important foreign policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was the different anti-terror strategy that Trump showed in the Republican primaries. Mrs Clinton was much more allied with the Republican neocon hawks that he so soundly defeated. This was under-reported during the campaign and in the early transition, but it will become a great foreign policy debate. Certain Republican hawks will be the major opponents of the president (look for Senators McCain and Graham as early critics). Some Democratic senators will emerge as his advocates. Our first analysis.
Our short explanation of Trump change in American policy in Syria and with Russia. President-elect Trump’s national security pick (General Flynn) and his top strategic advisor (Stephen Bannon) are fully on board with his initiative to normalize relations with Russia.

ISRAEL AND U.S. IN TRUMP ERA: A good summary of Israel’s Priorities. Could Trump adopt the one-state solution? A nationalist who allies with Israel will first protect the territorial integrity of the Jewish state. Our prediction is that the two-state paradigm (an independent Palestine cut out of Israel’s West Bank of Judea and Samaria) will be abandoned as a failed historical fantasy. The most dramatic evidence of this will be the restoration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  

A FEW NON-ELECTION THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION:
Thinking about the Mystical Body of Christ with Evangelicals -- hard to do. A Totalizing Discourse: Classical Education and Christian Culture -- Turley at Imaginative Conservative.

The Genius of St Albert the Great, teacher of St Thomas Aquinas, patron of scientists. His feast day celebrated Nov 15.
 From a 2010 talk by Pope Benedict XVI:
"His encyclopedic interests led him not only to concern himself with philosophy and theology, like other contemporaries of his, but also with every other discipline then known, from physics to chemistry, from astronomy to minerology, from botany to zoology. For this reason POPE PIUS XII Pope named him Patron of enthusiasts of the natural sciences and also called him "Doctor universalis" precisely because of the vastness of his interests and knowledge.

... His method consisted simply in the observation, description and classification of the phenomena he had studied, ...A man of faith and prayer, as was St Albert the Great, can serenely foster the study of the natural sciences and progress in knowledge of the micro- and macrocosm, discovering the laws proper to the subject, since all this contributes to fostering thirst for and love of God. The Bible speaks to us of creation as of the first language through which God who is supreme intelligence, who is the Logos reveals to us something of himself. This is one of the great merits of St Albert: with scientific rigour he studied Aristotle's works, convinced that all that is truly rational is compatible with the faith revealed in the Sacred Scriptures. In other words, St Albert the Great thus contributed to the formation of an autonomous philosophy, distinct from theology and united with it only by the unity of the truth. So it was that in the 13th century a clear distinction came into being between these two branches of knowledge, philosophy and theology, which, in conversing with each other, cooperate harmoniously in the discovery of the authentic vocation of man, thirsting for truth and happiness: and it is above all theology, that St Albert defined as "emotional knowledge", which points out to human beings their vocation to eternal joy, a joy that flows from full adherence to the truth."

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