| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michael Gray" |
| Date: |
16 May 2006 09:19:23 PM |
| Object: |
GOP = God's Own Party |
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0514-26.htm
Published on Sunday, May 14, 2006 by the Seattle Times (Washington)
God's Own Party
by Kevin Phillips
"Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the
trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted
him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican
Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.
We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before — in
Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power
such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the
conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes
himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that
represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican
voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it
all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical
worldviews.
Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's
domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political
prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.
The United States has organized much of its military posture since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines
and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another
dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the
White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom
the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits
— oil and biblical expectations — require a dissimulation in
Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role
of an informed electorate.
The political corollary — fascinating but appalling — is the recent
transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the
election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have
become central: the oil/national-security complex, with its pervasive
interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and
massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which
extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.
President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and
their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has
been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security
and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to
evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.
Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the
Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests
— a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading,
simplistic Christianity; and a reckless, credit-feeding financial
complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican
politics.
On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the
Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a
rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that
controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.
I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican
coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican
Majority," which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican
presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and
voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the
fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek
as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."
In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil,
military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to
California, but debate concentrated on the argument — since fulfilled
and then some — that the South was on its way into the national
Republican Party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the
alliance of oil, fundamentalism and debt.
Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the
United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading
fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential
to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial
complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial
and political proximity and collaboration.
Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. But
members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never
enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say nothing of
preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of
God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.
While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been
intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder,
a prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that
heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In
North America, I thought, the coming together of a heartland — across
fading Civil War lines — would determine control of Washington.
This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland,
from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal
states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral
hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy
carbon-dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. air
strikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries
fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.
Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil
sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy.
Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and
Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that
bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang
economically.
The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has
become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that
some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their
holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green
IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some
reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which
stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.
Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP
coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals,
who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions
believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon.
Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually
heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil-price spikes, murderous
hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further
credence.
The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept
pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the
financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by
foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch
U.S. voters enable such policies — the GOP coalition is unlikely to
turn back — is depressing to someone who spent many years researching,
watching and cheering those grass roots.
Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a
major infusion of conservative Northern Catholics and Southern
Protestants. This troubled me not at all. I agreed with the
predominating Republican argument at the time that "secular" liberals,
by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United
States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral
opportunity.
Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United
States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and
thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of
the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist
and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures
becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its
leadership.
Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq — widely
anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon — the Republican
coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of
science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of
evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological
explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global
population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to
stem-cell research.
This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for
a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That
embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the
outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.
These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral
coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to
America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a
captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern
knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th
century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain,
disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the
Earth, was the center of our solar system.
Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United
States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not
happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is
irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought
they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that
he apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late
stages of each national decline.
Over the past 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political,
economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The
concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the
bull market of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of
previous world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in
Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian
England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative
collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what
Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial
distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into
this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing — all too
plausibly — that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock
bubble that burst in 2000.
Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these
past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and
industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military
overstretch. Politics in the United States — and especially the
evolution of the governing Republican coalition — deserves much of the
blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today."
Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy: The Perils and
Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st
Century" (Viking).
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
--
Michael Gray.
Founding Member and Doorman,
Earthquack's 666 Club.
EAC Trainee Inquisitor of the month (2nd runner up: April)
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
.
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: GOP = God's Own Party |
17 May 2006 12:26:37 AM |
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In article <av1l621jeqbf4v4b8i90d8735cs2m5cg39@4ax.com>,
Michael Gray <fleetg@newsguy.spam.com> wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0514-26.htm
Published on Sunday, May 14, 2006 by the Seattle Times (Washington)
God's Own Party
by Kevin Phillips
"Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the
trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted
him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican
Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.
Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy: The Perils and
Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st
Century" (Viking).
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
I have the book on order.
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
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