Remember that guy whom we called the “American Taliban”? We thought he was a strange anomaly.
He was not.
We have a large number of states in which a radical right religious faction has taken over as the legislative, moral, literary, and thought police. They are today’s American Taliban. the extreme religious zealots who set themselves up as arbiters of societal behavior, perfectly willing to impose their warped view of society on the rest of us.
They police womens’ bodies. They police libraries, They police sexuality. They spin up horror stories and ideas of conspiracy to spread fear among their own ranks. They prey on terrors inculcated in people by religious leaders whose readings of foundational texts are rife with hate of the “other,” often in direct contradiction of intentionally unmentioned lessons in the same texts. They willingly spout falsehoods in the service of power and they do it in very intentional ways. They ban the teaching of accurate history.
They give license to bigotry, to the inchoate fury of the deeply troubled in our society, to the worst instincts of the mob and use the results to their political power advantage.They cloak their lies and imprecations with references to false “freedoms” that they claim are being stolen while, by design, they steal and muffle guaranteed and hard-won freedoms they do not agree with. They cloak their lies in their loudly bruited concern for non-existent humans while demonstrating contempt for existing humans they decline to care for.
This American Taliban is a blot on our body politic. It has arisen in states some of which have unscrupulous actors who use the background radiation of other-hate not only to champion draconian, punitive laws, but to play willingly with lives in the service of playground posturing. These “leaders” get a lot of press from their outrages, and that’s precisely the point. It’s about them, not about principles. But what they do merely increases the overwhelming stench of Talibanism in their states.
Florida is, and has been, a Taliban state. Texas is an extreme Taliban state. Indiana is a Taliban state. Missouri is a Taliban state.
Michigan has significant pockets of Talibanism, as do Arizona, Kentucky, and Iowa. Wisconsin’s legislature and courts are in the hands of that state’s Taliban. Many other Southern states emulate Kentucky in their Talibanness, particularly among those who pine for Civil War days and the “rising” of the South again, presumably as slave states (or at least one would think so, given the rhetoric of the zealots in those states).
We readily condemn what the Taliban in Afghanistan does to its people, especially to its women. The attitudes about and treatment of women in our Taliban states is qualitatively the same, particularly in their draconian intrusion into the lives of women. Their attitude is one of possession, of holding women as objects which, if they happen to become pregnant, are merely containers for the fetus and without personal ownership of themselves.
The states of the former Confederacy, which if you recall, was a treasonous excrescence in our history, wish not only to “rise again,” but also to expunge any truths that expose their actual history. They claim not to be responsible for the sins of their forebears, but even while acknowledging that there were such sins, they legislate away any evidence of the transgressions. In this and in their contempt for the lives of women, it’s as if they have invented their own version of Shariah law. But it’s actually worse than Shariah law by reason of its being perpetrated in a land ostensibly of freedom.
The main difference between American Talibanism and that in Afghanistan is that the Afghanistan Taliban can claim a certain doctrinaire consistency in their terrible suppression of their citizens. Not so here. The major Talibanish perps in our country do what they do mainly to appeal to the worst instincts of their followers and to make political points against their opponents. So the Greg Abbotts, the Ron DeSantises, the Trumpists throughout the south and southwest and plains states, are stunningly dishonest in their motives and actions, and do not hesitate to be patently disingenuous when they are not outright lying. Many of them are masters of political manipulation, of playing to the audience, and of pure fabrication when it suits the occasion.
Decry and scorn the Taliban in Afghanistan as we will, it’s only consistent to recognize our own large areas of Talibanism. And keep in mind that our Taliban cloak their political machinations in religion too, a particularly corrosive version of American christianity that is hell-bent on imposing itself on our secular society. The zealots of that broad sect care not for your liberty or beliefs. They are fine with Taliban-style measures when they can get them. But they’re much more aiming for a theocratic state in the mode of Iran. Our job is to oppose them at every turn, to shout them down (they shout a lot), to expose their schemes and their full-throated lies. We need not waste our time trying to convince or “convert” them. We have to convince those they speak to incessantly. They are a major danger to our democracy and need bright lights shone on them to expose the tripe they spout.
Don’t think that terming these actors an American Taliban is merely an analogy. It’s a reality in our body politic. We cannot expunge the Afghanistan Taliban. We can and must expose our own Taliban and wipe it out of existence. It’s an imperative for the Republic.
Edmund McDevitt
© October 2022