The Guardian reports:

There is a “real and very, very present” threat to the US from a shadowy collection of rightwing leaders, a new book on the movement behind Donald Trump warns, with the aim being “an end to pluralistic democracy”.

Katherine Stewart, a journalist who specializes in the religious right, spent years researching the money and influence that has aided and encouraged tens of millions of Americans in their worship at the throne of Trump.

The result is Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, which sees Stewart explore the “antidemocratic movement” – an unholy mix of Christian nationalists, billionaire oligarchs and conservative ideologues who have seized control of the Republican party, and aim to fundamentally change the US.

“Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism,” Stewart said.

In the book, Stewart details how Republicans have been held hostage by the antidemocratic movement, something that “came together long before Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president”.

Stewart – whose previous two books, The Good News Club and The Power Worshippers, focused on the impact of the Christian right and religious nationalism in the US – spent years traveling to an array of rightwing conferences, from Christian nationalist events to ”Make America great again” fests and sober thinktank talks, and found many similarities. The eclectic groups may not seem to have much in common, but their aim is the same: bringing an end to democracy in the US as we know it. Their method of achieving that is the same too.

“The overwhelming message, from speaker after speaker, was that ‘Trump needs to be allowed to enact his agenda, and you need to get behind him,’” Stewart said.

Though there is an intriguing collection of individuals and organizations in the movement, Stewart categorizes its members as Christian nationalists – who believe, wrongly, that America was founded as a Christian nation and must be governed as such – and the super-rich, who are seeking to secure their own wealth at the expense of others.

“Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below, from the anger and resentment that characterizes life among those who perceive, more or less accurately, that they are falling behind,” Stewart writes.

“The best label I can find for the phenomenon – and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label – is ‘reactionary nihilism’. It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind – a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.” [Continue reading…]