Louisiana bill will be key when Joe Biden debates Donald Trump

FiveThirtyEight, a leading US-based polling operation, simulated the election 1000 times and found Biden won 50% of the time, with Trump a razor-thin 49%, and margins making up the remainder. FiveThirtyEight’s senior researcher Mary Radcliffe called it “an election of vibes”.

The debate this week will test that theory; we’ll see whether policy moves votes, or whether base animosity reigns. Viewers in Scotland should expect to wake up Friday morning to social media feeds filled to the brim with content from the debate. Expect the normal rancour and vitriol that comes packed into political exchanges, and the dopamine hit that comes with engaging it. But this normalcy is an illusion.

Though Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, the Republican Party are preparing for a convention without him, exploring the increasing possibility that he may be under house arrest or even incarcerated after his sentencing hearing for 34 felony convictions.

If there was ever a time to expect the unexpected from American democracy, it might be now. And that means something. Go and read up on our election of 1877. I’ve found, after returning to the States after three years in Scotland, that vibes do matter. And one specific vibe – apathy. It pervades everyday American life. DC circles are the exception. As are the partisan extremes, the loudest in our media echo chambers.

READ MORE: Labour's Ian Murray told to clarify stance on nuclear weapons

In the midst of everyday American life, you find almost a willed ignorance, an apathetic resignation, a mixture of denial and dread that we have to endure another election with seemingly existential stakes. I’m not disputing those stakes. I’m merely describing the sense of exhaustion that presses down any political conversation.

I wonder if (and how) American minds can be changed in this apathetic climate; I wonder if compromise can be celebrated, if the common good of representative democracy still has a hearing, or if we are merely experiencing the vestiges of democracy in a functional oligarchy. Even now, I refuse to believe in the inevitability of fate, that great weapon of autocrats.

It’s true that the apathetic resignation to fate is both palpable and potent. From more than a few interactions and conversations, many fellow Americans I meet seem more than content to opt out of it all so long as the streaming services and the Amazon Prime deliveries keep running.

I find there’s a profound agreed sense – even a “vibe” – that democracy no longer works, no longer represents the people – it entertains us, or at worst divides us. There’s a danger here.

As we approach the fall when votes are cast, onlookers can expect a broad intensification of American politics, this time with a very real threat of escalating violence. Because not everyone is apathetic. Activism abounds, too. Because there are many who are working hard in view of a second Trump term. New conservative and progressive coalitions of all kinds are organising ahead of the election.

Some of these ventures take the longer view. Like progressive activist David Hogg, who told me his new venture Leaders We Deserve aims to follow the path blazed by conservatives a half-century ago to capture state legislatures, but this time for young progressives. They elected the first LGBTQ+ candidate to the Texas House by a margin of less than 80 votes. It will be at least one more election cycle before Hogg’s movement exerts any sign of life in or even real influence on the American electorate.

Conservatives, in contrast, appear more focused on ensuring that the next Trump administration is a more total capture of civil machinery for conservative ideology. Enter Project 2025, a vision of the Heritage Foundation, a point-by-point plan for a complete conservative overhaul of the federal government.

Project 2025 can be described as a plan for conservative Christian ascendancy, the capture of the executive branch of the federal government by what have otherwise been nascent conservative evangelical coalitions. The vision is publicly accessible on the Project 2025 website and, at more than 900 pages, covers each department of the executive branch, from the state department and immigration to the lesser-known aspects of executive action such as foster care.

Attention to lesser-known initiatives reveals the essence of Project 2025 and previews a second Trump term. For example, when it comes to serving the nearly 400,000 children presently in foster care across the United States, Project 2025 states that the chief problem is legal threats levelled against private Christian agencies for refusing to place children with adoptive LGBTQ+ individuals or couples.

READ MORE: Labour 'to continue Tories' post-Brexit power centralisation project'

This de-centres children and confuses the goals and best practices of foster care with adoption. But these errors reveal the essence of Project 2025, organised to address not so much whether American children will be provided or cared for, but rather whether or not conservative Christians are privileged in providing care from their own private institutions. This is just one point that proves how essential it is for outside observers to understand the appeal of a second Trump term involves understanding the role a certain Christian identity and ideology plays in public life in America.

Without analysis that covers (and translates) religious identities and communities, it can be hard to identify just what a second Trump term might look like. Even Project 2025 can be theoretical and aspirational. Though it’s concerning, it is yet to be seen whether its vision can be implemented in an administrative sense on an executive level. But what it does do is capture how conservative Christianity claims a sort of primacy in American public life.

This is where foreign observers of American politics don’t have to see into the future. They don’t have to ask, “what if?” — rather they can look at America right now to get a better idea of a second Trump administration. This potential becomes clearer by looking at the policies enacted by conservatives and Trump allies at the state level, right now.

The state of Louisiana provides one such case. As of this past week, all public classrooms in Louisiana will be required by law to display a form of the Bible’s 10 Commandments by 2025. Outsiders should know that American public schools don’t provide pluralistic religious-based moral education like Scottish council schools. The bill goes by the name LA HB71.

There's a strange paradox in this policy as we consider the way Trump is framing the upcoming election. Trump has long framed his legal battles and felony convictions not just as political targeting, but as Christian persecution. This rhetoric continues to organise Trump’s base while Trump allies at the state level realise a new, ascendant public morality. This paradox is the key to understanding Trump’s continuing appeal. So long as Trump’s supporters feel themselves embattled, they are emboldened and justified in the total culture war.

Yes, there may be felt apathy over another election. But that is nothing compared to the palpable anxiety which breaks out in view of the perceived loss of so-called Christian influence in everyday American life. But this is not so much public influence or presence as it is dominance.

And indeed, much of the popular Christianity that moves within the American mainstream can do little else but affirm this bill as a positive. This form of Christianity is the heir to a long legacy of white Christian supremacy. And this sort of Christianity persists. It continues to reinforce the idea that a decidedly monocultural Christianity alone can furnish the moral content necessary for a functioning democracy. This ethnic, monocultural narrative becomes the basis for a politics of conquest that MAGA did not create but harnessed to great effect.

The Louisiana law mandates an 11x14 poster in every classroom. Each poster will include an edited version of the 10 Commandments plus a “historical context” statement that begins with the claim, “the 10 Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.

Predictably, there will be a host of counter-legal challenges. These challenges are meant to set up court battles that conservatives hope will shrink the limits of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which prevents the federal government from establishing a state religion.

The history of religious disestablishment in America is complex. While establishment was illegal at the federal level, there were religious tests for public office in states well into the late 19th century, a fact that seems to escape many historians serving as sympathetic activists to the progressive left in the contemporary American public square. There is a contested history here that has never been fully resolved in American life.

The contested and conflicting history of religious establishment in America is a fault line running beneath the presidential election. Not surprisingly, former president Trump has seized on the strong reactions to the legislation, leveraging the bill for his campaign, stating in a Truth Social post this past Friday: “This [bill] may be, in fact, the first major step in the revival of religion, which is desperately needed, in our country.”

Trump’s support all but ensures the Louisiana bill will become a flashpoint for the debate this week, and the election at large. It’s not a flimsy stunt, but was passed with defence measures built in. These draw from a 2019 Supreme Court ruling, American Legion v American Humanist Association. The precedent protects the public display of the 10 Commandments on the basis they were not strictly religious, but also preserved an element of US cultural or historical heritage. The Louisiana bill includes a “historical context statement” as a way to survive by this precedent.

IN spite of the former president’s claim that the bill’s passing signifies a “revival of religion”, it is precisely as a person of faith that I’m struck by the contradictions now made painfully visible in Louisiana classrooms where “thou shalt not kill” will seem to mock children whose school day involves active shooter drills. Moral words without liberation are empty words. These are not the revival of faith, but its weaponisation for ascendant dominance.

Those who so flippantly lift words from the Hebrew Bible and weaponise them towards such ends cannot do so without incredible loss, without forgetting the story of liberation and salvation which gives these commands their meaning. Apart from this story, these commands become tyrannous abstractions, susceptible to all sorts of retributive causes in the hands of authoritarian leaders and their allies who promise deliverance publicly while planning for dominance privately.

This bill will surely be a point of discussion at the debate, a flashpoint for both campaigns to make their case to the American people. But beneath this surface is a raging current running through the heart of the American experiment, carrying forward into our time unresolved questions of tolerance, of religious freedom, and whether or not the “We” in “We the People” can truly represent all the people. As American voters weigh competing visions for our shared future, and while the world waits, the question will be whether or not Americans opt for fate or responsibility.