Tag Archives: fascism

The 2025 US coup and the triumph of pre-modern values

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The world is witnessing a coup taking place in the USA as Trump and Musk set about dismantling the US government, ignoring all congressional legislation and fiscal authority. The Constitution has effectively been suspended. Trump and Musk are leading extra-governmental operatives (young white male engineers employed by Musk) who have seized control of the Treasury payment system, and IT systems in other agencies such as USAID. They are starting to eliminate agencies created by Congress, the first being USAID. They are suspending payments authorized by law, re-interpreting the Constitution, and ignoring the judiciary. Already, several judges have made orders suspending various of their activities. They are being ignored. Ultimately, much later, such orders may end up in the Supreme Court who have already ruled that Trump has immunity for official actions.

What has led to this? How did the world’s richest man and a deeply ignorant psychopathic criminal get to seize control of government in the USA?

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What proportion of the population are actively religious across the world? 

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I recently encountered a discussion about which countries are the most and least religious. This post presents some comprehensive results for the year 2020 based on my earlier analyses of global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, and the prevalence of atheism (see earlier posts here, here, and here). These analyses used data for 110 countries from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS), covering the period 1981 to 2020 [1-3]. In previous analyses, I defined four religiosity categories as follows:

Practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God* and is practicing**, OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 5 points of a 10 points scale.

Non-practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God and is non-practicing OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is non-practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 6 points.

Non-religious: A non-religious person who believes in God but rates the importance of God as any of three points at the not important end of a 10-point scale.

Atheist: A “confirmed atheist” and/or does not believe in God

Respondents were classified as “practicing” if they attend religious services or pray to God outside of religious  services at least once a month. I assigned all people who do not believe in God to the atheist category. This will include some religious people who practice non-theist religions such as Buddhism.

For this post, I decided to move the atheists who said they practiced religion at least once a month to the “practicing religious person” category.  In most of the regions where the prevalence of atheism was high, the percent of atheists who are practicing religious is small, at most a few percent. Its likely these are regions where there is no stigma or danger in being atheist, and the few percent practicing are likely attending religious services with other family members who are religious. In regions where the prevalence of atheism is very low, the proportion of atheists who attend religious services is generally much higher (30-40%), almost certainly reflecting stigma and danger in being openly atheist.

I moved the proportion of atheists who are practicing religious to the practicing religious category for the maps below. This adjustment makes little difference to the results. The first map shows the global variations in the proportion of country populations who are practicing religious.

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The widening gulf between values in Red and Blue states of the USA

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Benjamin Cain recently posted an article on Medium.com, The Trump Cult and the Albatross Around America’s Neck, in which he argued that the Trump cult is fueled by southern racism, religious fundamentalism, and a backlash against modernity. He claims that “In this respect, half of the US is closer to the anti-modern Islamist states than to ultra-secular Europe.”

I realized that my recent analyses of levels of pre-modern beliefs in over 100 countries included in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) (see here and here) could be extended to check this claim. The IVS is the combined data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, which have carried out seven waves of surveys in over 100 countries, spanning the period 1981 to 2021.

To examine variations in pre-modern versus modern values across countries and time, I estimated a continuous latent variable “modernity” based on responses to 11 selected questions in the IVS (see following box) whose responses will vary depending on how modern or pre-modern the respondent’s values are. which assumed there is an unobserved underlying continuous variable that describes the individual’s level of modernity of values and predicts (or correlates with) their answers to specific values questions. I used general linear modelling methods to estimate a continuous latent variable “modernity” from the responses to the 11 selected values questions. See here for more details.

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Reading Mary Beard on Rome and Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism

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Mary Beard covers what she calls the first thousand years of Roman history from around 753 BCE, the traditional date of the founding of Rome by the mythical Romulus and Remus, through to 232 CE when the Emperor Caracalla made every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen. Unlike many histories which focus on the so-called decline and fall of the Roman Empire during the following period through to around 476 CE, when the Gothic Odoacer deposed the last Emperor and declared himself King of Italy, Beard attempts to examine the question of how one tiny and unremarkable Italian village became so dominant a power over so much territory in three continents.

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In recent weeks, I’ve been reading SPQR: a history of Rome by Mary Beard (2015) and simultaneously dipping into the classic The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951). Hannah Arendt in much slower going and about halfway into SPQR I became so engrossed I just binge read to the end.

Mary Beard covers what she calls the first thousand years of Roman history from around 753 BCE, the traditional date of the founding of Rome by the mythical Romulus and Remus, through to 232 CE when the Emperor Caracalla made every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen. Unlike many histories which focus on the so-called decline and fall of the Roman Empire during the following period through to around 476 CE, when the Gothic Odoacer deposed the last Emperor and declared himself King of Italy, Beard attempts to examine the question of how one tiny and unremarkable Italian village became so dominant a power over so much territory in three continents.

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Prevalence of pre-modern values across the world

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In a previous post, I described my use of the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS) to develop a measure of pre-modern religious values (approximately corresponding to “fundamentalism”). I have used this to calculate the prevalence of pre-modern religious values using data from waves 5-7 of the surveys, covering the period 2005-2020, but with most results relating to the recent decade 2010-2020. I somewhat arbitrarily chose a cutpoint of 6.45 on the religious values scale to classify people as having pre-modern values (<6.45) versus modern values (>=6.45). The value 6.45 was chosen as the point where the distribution of scores for individuals 2 and 3 (described in the  previous post) crossed over.

The following graph shows the prevalence of pre-modern values (as % of adult population) for countries in waves 5-7, ranked from lowest (Denmark at 13% and Sweden at 14%) to highest (Bangladesh, Myanmar and Qatar at 100%).

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Pre-modern values, religion and culture

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Many people outside the USA have watched with astonishment as fundamentalist Christians have aligned themselves with a serial adulterer and sexual assaulter who lost the recent election and is now seeking to undermine democracy in order to stay in power. Since first elected, Trump has worked hard to equate disagreement with treason. He has banished loyal opposition, sacked people for doing their jobs and called for the criminal investigation of ordinary opponents. But this alignment is not as bizarre as it seems on the surface. Fundamentalists share the value of demonizing and seeking to punish those they see as “other”, one of the key characteristics of fascism, as I discussed in my previous post. This applies to Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists alike, as evidenced by the recent murders in France and Austria by Muslim terrorists angered by cartoons.

What is fundamentalism?

So I have extended my analysis of the the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS) (see earlier post here) to see what it has to say about the extent of religious fundamentalism in the world today. Most religions developed in the pre-modern era and their sacred texts and teachings incorporate pre-modern culture and values to varying extents. Peter Herriot has written extensively on fundamentalist religious beliefs, characterized these movements as attempts to return to the pre-modern origins of their faith as prescribed by their sacred books [1]. He identifies five main general characteristics of fundamentalist religious movements:

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Trump’s threat to democracy: an attempted fascist coup?

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Over recent months, there has been a steady stream of commentary in the Australian and European media arguing that the Trump program is fascist. Based on a couple of discussions with people who know much more than me about 20th century European fascism, I thought these claims were overblown, and that Trump’s program lacked a defining feature of fascism, the co-opting of industry of industry and the economy for ultra-nationalist goals. I’ve since realized this is too narrow a view of fascism, and that its expression is quite dependent on history, culture and period and may take a different form in different places and times. Mark Twain expressed this well when he said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the debate around definitions of fascism. But I was most struck by some of its quotations from various historians who have specialized in studying 20th century fascism (Wikipedia gives references):

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