COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM, BUT FOR BELIEF SYSTEMS

The tone of this Fox story is objective, but the report is meant to delight Fox's audience:

The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum, a controversial move that will impact how students are taught about Islam and Christianity....

The board approved language asserting that "radical Islam" motivated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks rather than taking a more narrow focus on the terrorist groups involved in the attack.

The material also requires students to study early Islam through Prophet Muhammad's "brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes," the "normalization of slavery" and the taking of female captives as "harem slaves."

An earlier Texas Tribune story notes:

The GOP [board] members voted against eliminating the word “brutal,” as suggested by their colleague, Will Hickman.

They did not revive a previously deleted expectation that schools teach about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy.

The Tribune story adds this:

Students testified earlier in the week that the decision to instead portray Islam as violent will cause significant harm to them and their classmates.

“I feel attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong,” Habiiba Quresh, 15, told board members. “I shouldn’t have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote.”

These changes have been in the works for years. It doesn't surprise me that the GOP-majority board (currently 11-4) approved them this year, at a moment when the state Republican Party's main message appears to be "Booga-booga! There are Muslims under your bed!" The anti-Muslim bigotry in the state is so flagrant that even The New York Times took notice last month.

I've had doomer thoughts about where this is leading, in Texas and eventually in a future GOP-led America: first to Nuremberg laws that exclude Muslims from professions and neighborhoods, and then eventually to camps and genocide, or at least ethnic cleansing. Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, certainly talks that way -- the Times story I've linked quotes a tweet in which he wrote, “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

That nightmare future is certainly possible (and certainly possible for other groups: trans people and eventually everyone in the LGBTQ community, non-whites, socialists, Jews, eventually Democrats). But there's another possibility that seems more likely.

Most Texas Republicans seem not to want to drive Muslims out of the state, exclude them from professions, or take away their right to vote. Instead, they seem to want to declare as official policy that Muslims are second-class citizens by definition. Texas doesn't seem to want to prevent Muslims from running for office -- it just wants non-Muslim children to grow up believing that Muslims should never hold office (and to believe, presumably, that no politician who embraces Muslims as full citizens should hold office either).

The difference between what the Nazis did to Jews and what Texas Republicans are doing to Muslims seems analogous to the difference between pure authoritarianism and what Professor Steven Levitsky calls "competitive authoritarianism."

In competitive authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held regularly and are hard-fought affairs. However, the “playing field” is uneven: control of the media, abuse of state resources, coercion, and/or limited fraud give incumbents an unfair advantage over the opposition. Because elections are not free and fair, these regimes are not democratic. Yet neither are they fully authoritarian.

In Texas, you still have freedom of religion, but if you're a Muslim, the government has mandated that the education system defines your religion as dangerous and "brutal." You can run for office in Texas, but Texas wants to mold citizens who will never vote for you.

This isn't exactly Frank Wilhoit's portrayal of conservatism as the belief that "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." If you're a Texan who's a Muslim (or a member of some other suspect group), the law won't force you out of a profession or off a ballot. Instead, it will work to ensure that you're always seen by the majority culture as "less than."

I think the future of Republicanism is competitive cultural authoritarianism in many areas. The New York Times reported this over the weekend:

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents....

The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families.

To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.

Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

This is pure Orbanism -- favoring married couples over non-married couples and single parents, favoring couples with stay-at-home mothers over single parents.

This is the future that Republicans want: a government thumb on the scale on their behalf and against any group they don't like. With that unlevel playing field, they'll probably allow the unfavored to live here as nominal full citizens, just as long as they can use the unfavored as political punching bags and keep them and their advocates out of power forever.