GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party
Last edited Sun Aug 5, 2012, 09:21 PM - Edit history (1)
A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts
BY MIKE LOFGREN 8-5-2012
This article is an excerpt from the book "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted," available from Viking.
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizesat least in the minds of its followersall three of the GOPs main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
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The religious rights professed insistence upon family values might appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal behavior of many of its leading proponents. Some of this may be due to the general inability of human beings to reflect on conflicting information: I have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bounce off peoples consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely in theory, in the doctrine of cheap grace, a derisive term coined by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some religious adherents to believe that once they had been saved, not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, tooso one could pretty much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get- out-of-jail-free card. Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn to a new and more Christian life. The religious right is willing to overlook a politicians individual foibles, no matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify with fundamentalist values. In 2011 the Family Research Council, the fundamentalist lobbying organization, gave Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois an award for unwavering support of the family. Representative Walshs ex-wife might beg to differ, as she claims he owes her over one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid child support, a charge he denies.
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Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. If anything, the two groups are increasingly beginning to resemble each other. Many televangelists have espoused what has come to be known as the prosperity gospelthe health-and- wealth/name-it-and-claim-it gospel of economic entitlement. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of Gods favor. If not, too bad! This rationale may explain why some poor voters will defend the prerogatives of billionaires. In any case, at the beginning of the 2012 presidential cycle, those consummate plutocrats the Koch brothers pumped money into Bachmanns campaign, so one should probably not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/
Goldwater warned them;
kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)AndyTiedye
(23,500 posts)The most avaricious of the .01% (the top 1% of the top 1%) want a "Christian" theocracy here. They want this because a theocracy cannot be overthrown by the people, no matter how repressive it becomes. Some kings who somewhat incidentally claimed to rule by divine right may have lost their heads, but not once in all of recorded history has a revolution taken out a full-bore theocracy. Thus the final limits on their greed are removed and they can have it all, even if it forces everyone else to live in squalor.
It has been argued that the elite do not want to live under a theocracy. Of course they don't, and they wouldn't.
They would live above it, like the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, who are immune to all those religious laws that are so strictly enforced on ordinary citizens.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)bighughdiehl
(390 posts)What is it about theocracy that makes it so rock-solid?
Of course, I don't think it'll happen here. It would be bad for business.
Movies,Porn, booze, etc. Culture wars are a distraction.
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)If what you have said is true, then the Saudis'll just be the first.
RussBLib
(9,012 posts)and it makes its followers insane
doohnibor
(97 posts)Religion is the easy way to "know" something; all you have to do is ask the charlatan who is the keeper of the received wisdom. If you want to know something factual however, that will require science: observation, analysis, and deduction, and the keeper of that wisdom is a librarian.
Festivito
(13,452 posts)All of it for their true god, the almighty dollar.
Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)What a stunningly simple and all-encompassing way to sum up the fundies. It sure does explain why so many fundies are mean bastards 6 days a week and the 2nd half of sunday.