by Stanley Rogouski
Traditional Republicans are rugged individualists.
‘Get the government off my back’, ‘pull yourself up by your
bootstraps,’ and ‘personal responsibility’ are phrases that come quickly to the
mind of a small capitalist who sees himself as a ‘self-made man’. The reality
has always been different. Big government in America
has always been a necessary component of big business. You need judges to issue
injunctions against strikers and tax breaks for the rich. But I’m talking about
mythology not history.
Traditional Republicans
have also been largely secular. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Ingersoll,
and HL Mencken were Republicans, not liberal Democrats. It would be difficult
to imagine Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, or Robert Taft using the religious
imagery that comes so easy to George Bush. Nelson Rockefeller would have
probably set the dogs on you had you showed up at his door asking him to join
your bible study group.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are not the
anti-religious boogeymen some people on the right have made them out to be. The
reality is just the opposite.
The prosecutor in the Scopes Trial William Jennings Bryan,
for example, was a liberal Democrat, not a conservative Republican. His
rejection of Evolution had as much to with his dislike of the idea of social
darwinism as it did with a literal reading of Genisis. Jimmy Carter was the
first evangelical Christian to sit in the White House. After the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire in New York City,
Catholic Democrats like Al Smith and Robert Wagner joined together with Jewish
socialists to introduce protection for workers the Republicans only got around
to repealing in the 1980s. Traditional Democratic Party machines, like the one
Richard Daley ran in Chicago, were
run by church going Irish and Italian Catholics, not Ivy League professors. The
concept of the ‘wall of separation of church and state’ was developed, not by
atheists, but by Jews and Catholics who wanted the freedom to practice their
religion without interference from the Protestant majority.
In the 1990s, both the Democrats and Republicans underwent a
radical transformation. The Democrats cast aside their traditional New Deal
liberalism and reinvented themselves as conservatives. The Republicans ceased
to be the party of rugged individualism and adopted a radically authoritarian,
statist ideology that had more in common with European fascism than with the
party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight David Eisenhower.
The watershed year
was 1988. The Democrats, beaten and humiliated throughout the 1980s by Ronald
Reagan, who had played off of Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ like a virtuoso,
bringing northern blue-collar Catholics into the Republican party along with
conservative southern protestants, found themselves at a crossroads. Do they
move right or left? Do they bring more people into the party, mobilize that
significant percentage of the American population that doesn’t vote at all, or
do they try to win back those conservative southern Protestants and northern
blue-collar Catholics?
The most popular, charismatic politician in the Democratic
Party in 1988 was in fact a Christian minister, Jesse Jackson. But Jackson, who
spoke in the cadences of the black church and the language of traditional
Democratic liberalism was a threat to the ruling class elite in the Democratic
Party and the Democratic primaries of 1988 ended in a stalemate, with Jackson
the obvious choice to run for President declared ‘unelectable’ by the media and
the Democratic elite, Democratic Party heavyweights Mario Cuomo and Bill
Bradley sitting it out, and Al Gore and Bill Clinton not quite ready for prime
time. So they nominated a compromise
candidate, the hapless Michael.
Dukakis not only lost in 1988. He was humiliated, smacked
around by the news media, manhandled in the debates by George Herbert Walker
Bush, and beaten silly by Bush’s fearsome campaign manager Lee Atwater. He
crawled off into obscurity and was never heard from again. It almost appeared
that the Democrats were more worried about keeping their own grassroots
activists out of power than they were in beating the Republicans. It felt like
they took a dive.
But the Democratic Party wouldn’t die. Instead it would
reinvent itself, throw away its liberal, quasi social democratic party idealism
and transform itself into a center-right party that would proclaim the end of
big government as we know it and dismantle the welfare system.
The keynote speaker of the Democratic convention of 1988 of
course was Bill Clinton. Even though his speech was a disaster — it went on so
long that the audience started cheering, not because they liked it but simply
because they wanted him to finish. Bill Clinton was the future of the
Democratic Party. His conservative politics appealed to the Democratic Party’s
elite but his slick, emotive style also brought in women, working class whites,
and, most importantly, kept blacks inside the same party that had
contemptuously rejected Jesse Jackson as the party leader. Even though Clinton
set up a staged confrontation with an obscure Black Nationalist rapper Sister
Souljah to distance himself from black nationalists, Toni Morrison would
proclaim him as the ‘first black president.’ Even though he dismantled welfare,
set up a climate where people were thrown out of public housing and where civil
liberties were constantly under attack, liberals treated him like a rock star.
He was a political genius. He knew how to win.
More importantly, he drove the right crazy. Nixon went to China.
Arial Sharon dismantled the
settlements in Gaza and Bill
Clinton chopped away at the liberal tradition of the Democratic Party in a way
no conservative Republican would have dared.
Clinton gave
conservatives everything they could have possibly wanted. But this left the
mainstream right without an identity and the radical right (on ugly display at
the Republican convention in 1992) seething with resentment. Here was this lip
biting, smooth talking, seemingly liberal Democrat taking apart the welfare
state, curtailing civil liberties, balancing the budget, putting uppity black
nationalists in their place better than they could. Here was the classic
‘self-made man’, a poor white from rural Arkansas
who, by virtue of his charisma, intelligence, and determination pulled himself
up by his bootstraps to become a Rhodes Scholar, one of the youngest governors
in the history of the United States,
and eventually president. For the media elite in Washington,
the idea that a poor white southerner like Clinton
was smarter and more articulate than they were was unforgivable. For the
hardcore radical right, the idea that a man who smoked pot and played the saxophone
on TV was a threat to their very existence, the coming of age and to power of
the 1960s counterculture.
Bill Clinton’s brilliant theft of the language and imagery
of traditional American conservatism left the Republicans unable to speak in
terms of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’
and ‘getting the government off their backs’. In the toxic stew of elite resentment
over Clinton’s outsider status and
the coming to maturity of the religious right, the Republicans reinvented
themselves as radical authoritarians. If the Democrats under Bill Clinton cast
off their watered down social democratic ideology, the Republicans under George
W. Bush proved themselves equally capable of adapting to the times, discarding
their traditional Social Darwinist libertarianism, checking their mistrust of
government power at the door, and prostrating themselves before the White
House.
The transformation was stunning. Where only a decade before,
the right had been stockpiling weapons in Montana
and getting ready for the showdown with the black helicopters, now they were
ready to give the executive unlimited power to spy on American citizens and
curtail civil liberties. Where in 1995, Tim McVeigh destroyed the Federal
Building in Oklahoma City to protest the massacre of the Christian cultists at
Waco under Janet Reno, McVeigh’s heirs in 2003 found themselves getting ready
to serve as the auxiliaries to Reno’s successor John Ashcroft in a Holy war
against liberals, gays, Muslims, anybody they saw as threatening the absolute
power of George W. Bush.
But the radical authoritarian right of 2005 carried over an
important concept from the radical libertarian right of 1995, a sense that they
were outsiders and victims. It wasn’t enough for them to control all three
branches of government, to set policy in Washington.
They need absolute control over American culture. They needed a theocracy. Anybody
who stood in their way or even criticized their plans was not only a political
opponent, but their persecutors. Attack Michelle Malkin’s over the top racism
and you hate women and Asians. Question Clarence Thomas’s qualifications to be
on the Supreme Court and you’re a racist. Demand that Israel
live by the same standards as other western democracies and you’re an
anti-Semite. Accidentally say ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ and
you want to prevent Christians from participating in public life. Instead of
the party of Lincoln and Grant, the Republicans were now the party of the ‘lost
cause’, the crucified south, the blood and soil past of victimized southern
whites.
Republicans no longer saw themselves as Teddy Roosevelt
charging up San Juan Hill or even Dirty Harry blowing
away long hairs in the liberal hell of post 1960s San
Francisco, they saw themselves as Terri Schiavo. How
ironic that while the standard bearer of the radical right, George W. Bush,
lost the popular vote in 2000 to Al Gore only to be appointed to the White
House by the Supreme Court, the judiciary is the primary target of the
Christian right. To look through the transcript of the simulcast of Justice
Sunday III, one can only conclude that for most evangelical Christians the
devil no longer carries a pitchfork. He wears black robes.
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=LH06A11
If classical American conservatism that was born under
Alexander Hamilton had a mistrust not only of state power but of the power of
the mob, the new theocrats see the (Christian) masses as an incorruptible army
of the Lord that must not be impeded by the checks and balances so carefully
written into the Constitution. Where to most liberals, George W. Bush is an
inarticulate fratboy, a son of privilege in power only because of who his
parents were, for most conservatives, his very shortcomings are proof that he
speaks for the theocratic masses. His inability to think on his feet reminds
them of themselves. The way he stumbles over his words echo their own
narcissistic urge not to see anybody better than themselves in the spotlight.
He becomes the voice of the (Christian) people and the voice of God and woe be
it to any judge or liberal organization who would question his authority. Their
ideal is no longer Democratic capitalism. It’s theocracy.
The phrase ‘proclaim liberty throughout the land’ echos like
a Wagnerian leitmotif through the Justice Sunday transcript and, of course it
comes from Leviticus 25:10.
‘Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty
throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each
one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan.’
Why don’t we look at Leviticus 24, Leviticus 24:13, to be
precise?
‘Then the LORD said to Moses: 14 “Take the blasphemer
outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head,
and the entire assembly is to stone him. 15 Say to the Israelites: ‘If anyone
curses his God, he will be held responsible; 16 anyone who blasphemes the name
of the LORD must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether
an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.’
FUCK JESUS WITH A RUSTY CHAINSAW.
Should I be stoned for that?
Presiding over the evening was Tony Perkins. Perkins, who
first came into the spotlight during the Teri Schiavo circus, looks more like a
Wall Street banker than a Bible thumper. His perfectly trim body and boyish
good looks would make him all but indistinguishable from the crowd waiting for
the first train from Greenwich Connecticut.
It’s much easier to picture him reading the Wall Street Journal than laying on
hands or speaking in tongues. But appearances are deceiving. Tony Perkins is as
far to the right of the American political spectrum as you can get. As Max
Blumenthal makes clear in his article for the Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050509/blumenthal), Perkins is a long time
extremist with ties to white supremacist organizations.
‘Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana
chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (
America’s
premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens
Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former
Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time,
Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the
US Senate in Louisiana. The
Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for
attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.’
Yet ties to David Duke notwithstanding, Perkins worked the
largely black crowd at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church like a pro. There was
little open bashing of gays. Perkins left all the fiery speeches to Wellington
Boone and Herbert Lusk while he struck an almost conciliatory tone of voice. He
even acknowledged ‘the concerns’ of the protesters outside. All he wants is for
Christians to be allowed to take their rightful place alongside Satanists,
militant atheists and wiccans at the table of American politics. Listening to
Tony Perkins speak on Sunday a stranger to the USA might have come away
thinking it was run by the early Roman emperors, with Christians being thrown
to the lions and meeting in secret in the catacombs under the streets of Rome.
You would have never guessed that the Catholic Church is the second biggest
landowner in NYC, that religious organizations in the United
States pay no taxes, that politicians on the
right and left fall all over themselves trying to prove they can talk about
‘faith’. You would have come away more with an impression that Perkins was
talking about the black church, and that his audience was made up of escaped
slaves. And I have to say, he was good at what he did. The largely black
audience cheered him on. Perkins, Santorum. Falwell had an easy rapport with
the audience and a (overtly at least) warm relationship with Lusk and
Wellington Boone.
Of course, the rapport of Falwell, Perkins and James Dobson
with the black crowd in Philadelphia
perhaps had less to do with their ability to persuade and more to do with the
idealogy of the audience. Herbert Lusk, it seems, was a Democrat until he was
given close to a million dollars in faith based government handouts. But
Wellington Boone is a long time right wing extremist and Alveda King is so far
out of the mainstream of the black church that, her relationship to Martin
Luther King notwithstanding, she actually works for an organization that
subsidized the Bell Curve. There were no mainstream, moderate, or liberal black
clergymen in attendance. There was no member of the congressional black caucus.
This was a fringe, extremist crowd that represents blacks no better than Pat
Robertson represents white Christians. To get an idea of just how far to the
right some of the black ‘leaders’ at Justice Sunday III are, examine the career
of Wellington Boone and look at some of the things he’s said about slavery and
the civil rights movement.
from http://www.acloserlook.com/9607acl/christianliving_faith/breakingthrough.html:
‘A frequent speaker at Promise Keepers conventions, Boone
tackles unmentionable subjects with abandon in Breaking Through. âThe black
community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom,’ he writes. âHe is a role model who,
when he was stepped on like a worm, at the point of crisis, evidenced the
nature of the classic, model worm, Jesus.’ Rather than accuse Uncle Tom of
selling out, Boone charges readers to sell out themselves until there is
nothing left -ânot the domination of your culture, not your coloring, not your
gender, not your denomination.”
In other words, this was a show to convince the American
public that the theocrats behind Justice Sunday III are moderates with ties to
the black community.
And while it is unlikely that the Republicans, especially in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina are going to be getting any more than a tiny
fraction of the black vote, they don’t really have to since the Democrats don’t
really want it. The key to American politics right now is stalemate. Both the
Democrats and Republicans are competing for an ever smaller number of
‘moderate’ white voters and just as determined to ignore people who don’t vote
at all. While the Democrats have a passive strategy ( Do nothing and hope the
Republicans self-destruct.(the Republicans are more pro-active. While the
Democrats can’t move to the left or openly oppose the war in Iraq
for fear of alienating their corporate donors, the Republicans, in turn, can’t
appeal to any kind of common economic interest, especially since it’s in their
interests to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This is where culture
comes in. All the Republicans have to do is to peel off a small percentage of
the black vote over the issue of gay marriage the way they peeled off a small
percentage of the Jewish vote over the perception that the Democrats were soft
on Israel. Then they can extend the same strategy to conservative Hispanics and
Asians.
But more importantly, the Republicans need a patina of
‘compassionate conservatism’ to continue their radically authoritarian agenda.
Holding Justice Sunday in a black church, appealing to a common sense of
victimization, and, more importantly, handing out generous financial rewards to
black ministers who accommodate them allow them to keep up at least some
appearance of being moderates. The key to driving Samuel Alito through the
Senate is not to get every Democrat to vote for him or to win over Naral. The
Democrats are a minority in both the House and Senate, and beating Alito will
take a determined, organized effort it’s unlikely the Democrats are up to
mounting. The Republicans have to plant enough doubt in the minds of a few
Democratic and Republican Senators, to flex the muscle of the Christian right
and threaten to pump money into the organizations of enough key compliant black
leaders and voila, the Democrats will decide that Alito isn’t worth fighting
and they should sit back, do nothing, and worry about the elections in 2006.
Watching the slick, packaged program of Justice Sunday
was troubling. There’s little reason to think they won’t be successful.