And so the attorney general remains in a position to pursue what seem to be his favorite pastime: attacking secular “progressives” and propounding his own right-wing, religious vision of how the government should function. He was at it again on Wednesday during a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. Barr’s erudite citations in the address could not disguise the ugly, extremist sentiments he espouses.

The theme of his address was that there is a battle going on in America today pitting proponents of “liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty,” against advocates of “totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda.”

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The idea of “totalitarian democracy” is borrowed from a 1952 book by Israeli historian Jacob Talmon. He used the term to describe states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which had some trappings of democracy but were, in fact, dictatorships. A more common phrase today is “illiberal democracy” — which is used to describe countries such as Hungary, the Philippines or Poland, where a strongman evokes the popular will to undermine the independent judiciary, freedom of the press, protection of minorities and other characteristics of liberal democracy. Barr displays his ideological blindness and utter lack of self-awareness when he ascribes these tendencies to his political opponents rather than to his own boss.

It isn’t the “so-called ‘progressive’ movement,” as Barr calls today’s liberals, that is undermining American democracy. It’s Trump with his pardons for politically connected criminals; his demands that his political enemies be prosecuted; his slander of the intelligence community, FBI and Justice Department; his interference in criminal cases involving his cronies; his attempts to use the threat of withholding military aid to coerce a foreign country into helping him politically; his incessant dishonesty; his purges of apolitical civil servants; his unhinged attacks on political opponents and his mistreatment of immigrants. Barr must be aware of all this, yet he apparently objects to none of it. Indeed, Barr has been Trump’s accomplice and enabler. No wonder more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees recently demanded the attorney general’s resignation.

The selectiveness of Barr’s outrage is breathtaking. He had the gall to complain in Nashville that there is a progressive plot against the hallowed doctrine of federalism: “We have come to believe that we should have one national solution for every problem in society. You have a problem? Let us fix it in Washington, D.C. One size fits all.” This, as Trump battles states that want to set their own emissions standards or refuse to cooperate with federal roundups of undocumented immigrants, because Trump believes that he always knows best. The president’s motto is “I alone can fix it.”

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Barr’s hypocrisy on federalism was exceeded only by his hypocrisy on freedom of the press. He piously paid tribute to the “free press … as a check on the despotic tendency of democracy” before veering off into an attack on what his boss calls the “fake news media” and the “enemy of the people.” The attorney general complained that the “corporate — or ‘mainstream’ — press” has become “remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change.” He said that this development jeopardizes the media’s “role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority.”

The attorney general seems unaware of the existence of an entire right-wing media industrial complex, led by Fox News, that peddles conspiracy theories and falsehoods advancing Trump’s political interests. (Just this week, some of Trump’s fervent media fans were claiming that coronavirus is an anti-Trump plot, because a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the sister of former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein, a one-time target of Trump’s ire.) That is truly a threat to the media’s role as a check on government abuse — but one that Barr doesn’t mention. Nor does Barr mention the threat posed to press freedom by his own boss, whose reelection campaign just this week sued the New York Times over an op-ed that was critical of him.

Perhaps Barr’s most bizarre statement was his contention that we need more religion in politics, because “religion tends to temper the passion and intensity of political disputes.” Has he never heard of the Thirty Years War — or the more recent conflict over abortion in America? Only in Barr’s fantasy-world is religious fervor a force for political moderation.

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Barr is the second most dangerous man in America not only because he abets Trump in undermining the rule of law, but also because he seems determined to put a highfalutin’, pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s power-grabbing. His Nashville speech was simply his latest attempt to make the indefensible appear acceptable.