What Josh Hawley, Vladimir Putin and Life Surge have in common
Selling the culture wars. Delivering something else entirely.
Even when it’s not about the culture wars, it’s about the culture wars.
That’s what I take away from Josh Hawley’s Thursday appearance on Fox News, anyway. He went on Tucker Carlson’s show and suggested that President Biden’s energy policy is not rooted in concerns about, well, energy or climate — but on a hatred of real Americans like yourself.
You know, you would think, Tucker but you would also think that it wouldn't make a lot of sense to shut down this nation's principle source or one of its principal sources of wealth, of jobs. And I think what's really going on here with the Biden administration is this is a religion to them. The climate agenda is a religion to them. And the religion is that America is fundamentally bad and that the American way of life, particularly American workers and middle class families, that the way that they live is bad and that it needs to change. They don't like people driving around in cars. They don't like the suburbs. They don't like all the energy we use. Why? Because they don't like how we live. They want to change how we live. So the real targets of their war are the American people and the American middle class and working class.1
I agree that President Biden’s energy policy, to the extent that it’s not as capacious with fossil fuel use as Hawley would hope, is indeed driven by concerns about climate fears.
But no, it’s not driven by a hatred of the American people.
From hurricanes to flash floods, to increasingly destructive wildfires, climate-driven natural disasters are forcing more Americans out of their homes and triggering waves of relocations as some regions of the country become too burdensome or dangerous for many people to continue living in them.
Scientists say California agriculture will face much bigger and more severe impacts due to climate change in the coming decades. In a new study, University of California researchers said those effects range from lower crop yields to warming that will render parts of the state unsuitable for the crops that are grown there today.
Two-thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts are produced in California, along with more than a third of the country’s vegetables. The team of researchers said the warming climate is projected to hit many of those crops hard and will require localized efforts to help growers adapt and prepare for risks.
Real Americans like to be secure in their homes and in their ability to eat, I presume. That’s tangible. Let me suggest that Josh Hawley lacks a sufficient argument against addressing climate on those grounds, and so resorts instead to talk of “values.” When the the going gets tough, the tough flee through the Capitol hallways resort to vague culture warfare.
But it’s not just the senator
Vladimir Putin, currently conducting an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, sought to explain himself this week.
President Vladimir V. Putin, in a speech seemingly aimed more at winning over political conservatives abroad than his own citizens, declared on Thursday that Russia’s battle was with “Western elites,” not with the West itself.
“There are at least two Wests,” Mr. Putin said.
One, he said, is a West of “traditional, mainly Christian values” with which Russians feel kinship. But, he said, “there’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite,” and trying to impose its “pretty strange” values on the rest of the world.
The conservatives — or at least some prominent ones — were indeed won over. If you thought to yourself, “Rod Dreher probably loved this speech,” you’re right.
Look, I don't have any problem recognizing the hypocrisy here in Putin, who jails antiwar critics, but the man is not wrong about Western decadence and arrogance. The corruption of the messenger does not negate the truth of the message.
Maybe not, but it does suggest that maybe taking the message at something more than face value. Putin’s selling his war against Ukraine as a war against wokeness. But is that really what he’s delivering? Is it really worth dropping bombs on Ukrainians because there’s a drag show going on somewhere in the West?
It’s a money maker
There’s a connection here to Josiah Hesse’s new story about his visit to a Life Surge “Christian finance conference” in Denver.
Life Surge follows a long tradition of evangelists offering financial advice through the lens of morality and the supernatural. The Iowa farming community I grew up in during the 80s and 90s was steeped in these institutions, which vampirically drained my family and community’s economic momentum. Many of our church’s leaders attended Oral Roberts University, named for the televangelist most associated with the “prosperity gospel”, which explained that your financial success or failure was directly tied to your Christian morality.
This was the overarching theme of the day: Christianity is under attack in America, cancel culture is silencing us, so God commands you to earn a lot of money (which we’ll teach you to do, via the stock market and real estate) in order to fight the culture war and recruit new believers.
Only…
Multilevel marketing companies (often pejoratively referred to as “pyramid schemes”) like AmWay are often founded by evangelicals, and use churches as recruitment centers, offering the opportunity to “be your own boss” and have more family time. (This was a common refrain at Life Surge as well.)
Believers are often encouraged to go deep into debt for these schemes, told to employ a “fake it till you make it” approach, growing their businesses and living a flashy lifestyle long before any profit comes in.
“The evangelical community has been one of the more susceptible groups that have been so infected by this and still is today,” says Robert FitzPatrick, author of Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing. “It spreads through churches, and is presented with this moral authority, you are told not to argue with anybody who criticizes it, they are non-believers … And in the end, only a fraction of one per cent of people who get into multi-level marketing ever turn a profit.”
This is why the culture wars are good for everything.
They’re good for whatever Josh Hawley is selling, which I’m guessing is his own quest for political power. They’re good for what Vladimir Putin is selling, which is a war of death and conquest meant to enhance his own glory instead of his people’s well-being. And it’s good for Life Surge, which is selling financial products and a promise of riches unlikely to be realized.
Sometimes, cultural battles are important and necessary. But sometimes, they’re just a distraction, meant to steer you away from paying attention to what’s important — a sales job that always delivers something else.
Boldface in quotes is always emphasis added by me.