Oogedy-Boogedy-Boo
Posted on November 19th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
Kathleen Parker is melting down:
And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.
This is wrong, but the sort of conventional silliness that we have all come to expect in mid to late November of an election year. It is, of course, entirely incompatible with her statement later in the same column:
Meanwhile, it isn’t necessary to evict the Creator from the public square, surrender Judeo-Christian values or diminish the value of faith in America. Belief in something greater than oneself has much to recommend it, including most of the world’s architectural treasures, our universities and even our founding documents.
“Something greater than oneself”? Is John McCain writing Parker’s copy now? But this can’t be right–Parker just informed us that religion must return to the privacy of the heart where it belongs. If religion belongs nowhere but inside the heart, it had better not be expressed, confessed or discussed in public. However, to speak of religion is to speak in large part about practice, which is done almost anywhere but inside one’s heart. I’m not sure how you can seriously claim that there ought to be some meaningful public role for religion, or that we should acknowledge our Creator, affirm those “values” or emphasize the “value” of faith, and at the same time say that religion must retreat into the closet.
So Parker’s broader claims don’t seem to make any sense. What about her more specific political recommendation? She writes:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party. I am trying to think of some comparable example on the other side. It would be something like blaming the travails of the Democratic Party in 2002 on antiwar progressives or civil libertarians, groups that clearly had little or no pull with party leaders at the time and haven’t had nearly as much since then as you might suppose they would. Despite their numbers, and in large part because of their reliability as Republican voters, evangelicals and social conservatives draw very little water in the GOP. Each cycle GOP leaders see how little it will take to get these voters to turn out for their candidates, and what that amount of lip service is each cycle they try to reduce it. The voters continue to turn out, despite having less and less reason to do so, and for their trouble they are accused of the errors that the party leaders made and into which the establishment dragged them.
Certainly there is an argument to be made that dead-end partisans qua dead-end partisans who cannot speak to anyone outside their party are a problem, and you can make the case that the holdouts who still think Bush has done a good job are complicit to some degree in all of his errors and crimes. Maybe there is some significant overlap with the so-called “oogedy-boogedy” set, but then the problem with them wouldn’t be their religiosity or their social conservatism or any of the cultural markers that freaked out every pundit east of the Appalachians when Mike Huckabee would start to speak. Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.
Of course, the war was a major reason why the GOP fell into disrepute, and Parker notably still has nothing to say about that. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she has rarely, if ever, written a single word of serious criticism of the administration regarding the war. You cannot diagnose what ails Republicans if you have no credibility on this most basic of policy questions, and there is no reason to think that Parker has any.
Filed under: politics
but then the problem with them wouldn’t be their religiosity or their social conservatism or any of the cultural markers that freaked out every pundit east of the Appalachians when Mike Huckabee would start to speak. Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.
I think this misses the point. The Republican party no longer stands for any principle. It has, as Kathleen noted, morphed into a party of white Christian ethnic identity politics. Being a Republican is not about what policy positions you endorse, or even what political philosophy you embrace–it’s about who you are. Are you one of us, or one of “them”? The blind loyalty to the Bush administration and the unquestioning consumption of Fox News and the right wing radio swill are merely symptoms of the descent into identity politics. Bush falls into the “us” category, and consequently can do no wrong. The aggressive approach to enshrining religious beliefs in and through government is just another symptom of the same disease. It’s about promoting the status and cultural beliefs of one ethnic group above those of everyone else.
Your attempt to split out the support for Bush from the social conservatism of the oogedy-boogedies misses the basic thrust of Kathleen’s column: that the Republican party has shifted from a party of policies and ideas to a party of identity politics. Have you missed the deliberate rhetoric of recent Republican campaigns to stigmatize non-whites, non-Christians, gays, people who live in cities, people who are educated–people who “don’t see America the way you and I see it.” These are base ethnic appeals.
And, as Kathleen further notes, identity politics, while always ugly and rarely productive, is particularly problematic when your ethnic group is a minority. As we learned two weeks ago, the white Christian ethnic voters are already a minority. They’ll become a smaller minority with each passing year as the country becomes less white and less Christian. And a political party that is married to that ethnic identity group is, as Kathleen rightly concluded, doomed. The Republican party will either reinvent itself or fade into obscurity. It cannot survive as it is.
I oh so wish that one of these secularist Enlightenment liberals who still feigns some respect for Christianity would point me to the Bible verse that suggests that Christianity should be merely a matter for the “privacy of one’s heart” “where it belongs” no less. I can think of a whole lot of verses and passages that suggest otherwise.
Ironically, the people that this instruction is primarily meant for, the evangelicals, are somewhat responsible for this mentality themselves because of the way they have incorporated a lot of unbiblical Enlightenment principles into their own theology.
“It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party.”
Without the social conservatives (broadly understood) the remainder of the conservative “movement” could move into a smallish phone booth.
“Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.”
That is exactly right whichever branch of the conservative tree you hail from. The circular firing squad typified by Parker’s rambling clap-trap will continue unabated until conservatives internalize this fact: “The Iraq War was a mistake, we screwed up, we shouldn’t do that again.”
BTW, Oogedy-boogedy would be a great name for a rock band.
Of course, the war was a major reason why the GOP fell into disrepute, and Parker notably still has nothing to say about that. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she has rarely, if ever, written a single word of serious criticism of the administration regarding the war.
That’s true, Daniel…but it’s also true that the war has discredited the establishment religious conservatism as well. The evangelical right is seen (fairly, I think) as mindless cheerleaders for Bush jingoism.
That stain will take some time to wash away in the public eye.
Daniel, it may be that you miss Ms Parker’s point - even in doing just enough to bring the religious conservatives into the Republican fold the party is alienating the entire rest of the body politic. It’s not that religious conservatives shouldn’t have a voice, but rather that if the Republicans choose to be the voice for religious conservatism, it is relegating itself to a position on the sideines. Unless, of course, religious conservatism somehow becomes representative of the nation.
Which, for my part, I sincerely hope never happens.
Really, isn’t this a bit harsh? For those of us who are neither Republicans nor conservatives, Parker’s comments, disjointed as they are, suggest a return to a bit reason, or whatever passes for it in the pages of the WP. Frankly, I see no contradiction between the two comments you find contradictory. It’s the difference between hollering at the top of one’s lungs about Terry Schiavo on the one hand, even to the extent of calling Congress back into session to deal with that poor woman, and accepting (and appreciating) the fact that America remains a vigorously religious (and most of this religion is Christian) nation, and basing our social commonwealth on the implications of that fact. Of course, I’m what used Sean Hannity (or anyone at Fox, for that matter) would call a Liberal, so I probably can’t be trusted on this issue to begin with. I agree, btw, that Parker can be a dumbell much of the time, and she can’t write for beans. So it’s easy (maybe too much so) to find holes big enough to drive a truck through. But she’s groping, in her limited vocabulary, towards an issue that from this end of the political spectrum, I think conservatives really do need to address, how central should religion be to the core principals of political action. Actually, the debate that has emerged on this issue is entertaining and informative (and getting livelier by the day), and we’re all learning from it.
On another note, and in terms of the general convulsions over the future of conservatism and the future of the Republican party, and to what extent they’re intertwined, here’s the question I’d like to see addressed: When did conservatives stop being conservationists? When I was young (and Republican), it was the Republican party (and large swathes of what passed for conservatism in those early Buckely days) that argued on behalf of the environment. When did this change, and why? When I see conservatives (and Republicans, for that matter) addressing this issue, then I’ll know they’re serious. Your post on Wendell Berry a few weeks back, and the various arguments for and against him from a conservative viewpoint, revealed much about the tensions among those who call themselves conservatives, I thought, and was exactly the type of discussion that we need more of. I’d actually suggest a discussion of Douglas John Hall’s The Steward, except it seems out be out of print. Sorry to go off on a tangent here.
“Something greater than oneself” sounds like a phrase an AA meeting.
Pour me another tequila, Sheila.
“at an AA meeting.”
Like I said all they care about is economics. I am sympathetic to those who got taken for a ride but I’m also glad to see this issue getting some light. I think we should call the republican party the Christianist party. Christianist because they use Christianity as a toll in the same way Islamists use their religion as a blunt instrument.
I oh so wish that one of these secularist Enlightenment liberals who still feigns some respect for Christianity would point me to the Bible verse that suggests that Christianity should be merely a matter for the “privacy of one’s heart” “where it belongs” no less.
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Are you really unfamiliar with this and similar passages? They aren’t obscure.
And yes, the conclusion requires cherry-picking such passages and ignoring others that do celebrate the social aspects of religion. But there is your answer, assuming you really wanted to know.
Isn’t it possible to make a distinction between arguments that are appropriate for the cultural sphere and others that are appropriate for the political sphere? In the cultural sphere, which is very much a public sphere, I can advance arguments regarding the truth and validity of my theology as robustly as I feel inspired to do. I can write books, blogs, get a radio show, found a school, a church or whatever suits me. But in the political sphere, my theology should be irrelevant to the arguments that I advance there, even if they inform my political views. I might be anti-abortion because of my theology, but I don’t advance theological arguments to justify my position in the political sphere, I would use rights language because that is the lingua franca of the political sphere in which people with diverse theologies seek to find common ground to solve problems proper to the political sphere.
I should add that the political sphere should not be a forum in which different theologies battle one another for supremacy–that’s a fight that should take place in the cultural sphere. People who believe their theolgoy correct and others to be wrong should argue for their views as vigorously as they can, but they should not use the power of the state to force their views on those who are unconvinced.
Isn’t it either “oogly-boogly” or “ooby-dooby”?
[...] simply are sick and tired of the holier than thou pushing their views on us. Having said that, Larison is correct that the theocon wing of the GOP does not deserve all the blame for the current mess. People like [...]
‘People who believe their theolgoy correct and others to be wrong should argue for their views as vigorously as they can, ‘
I’ve always been of the opinion that if someone can feel that strongly that facts support their belief and not yours that maybe your both wrong.
‘Isn’t it either “oogly-boogly” or “ooby-dooby”?’
I was going to say iggledy-piggledy but I think thats what happens when you flush all the toilets in the Pentagon at the same time.
We still have a government that functions with promise of freedom to worship as you choose — if you choose to worship.
We have a government that also offers the promise to function without the influence of theocratic doctrine; else we are no better then Iran.
We are not a Christian nation, we are a nation of many gods. I’m sorry if this offends, Daniel. But it’s what our constitution promises.
And again, conservative have lost their way with too close an embrace of a single god.
I think the phrase is “ooga-booga” but she adapted it for use as an adjective.
Either way, she has a point, and her lack of discussion of the war (I don’t know, I don’t normally read her) isn’t necessarily a disqualification to make the simple observation that the Republican Party will go even farther out of touch with the electorate if it keeps pushing the social conservative agenda. The youth vote went 2:1 for the Democrats, and by and large, they are far more egalitarian about civil rights, gay marriage, etc. than what makes up the Republican Party. Never mind that the mindless backing of Bush has led in part to the disgrace that has been the torture issue.
The party of small government does not dictate people’s morals, lest it grow tentacles upon tentacles to enforce them. Separation of church and state is still a good thing.
It’s not that the GOP is en thrall to its Christian base, it’s that this base very much cops the attitude that if you’re not Christian, you’re not welcome at the party.
“It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party.”
The bomb-em-all neocons would never have been anything more than some dusty academics if they didn’t have tens of millions of dogs who will reliably salivate whenever they ring the patriotism bell.
Furthermore, the idea that demons exist and are behind the problems of the world damn well deserve the label “ooga-booga”. They are sacriligious perversions of Christianity that appeal to the basest and most ignorant part of out superstitious brain. The “Spiritual Warfare” movement where, fake-Christians battle “sin” by praying in groups to expel demons is as “ooga-booga” as the work of any Voodoo priest .. and about as Christian too.
For example, when Palin’s African priest drove that witch out of town for causing traffic accidents, he didn’t just do something stupid or oppress an innocent woman - He indulged and defended the bad-driving habits that caused all the wrecks. He told the citizens, who are obviously driving way too recklessly on bad roads, that they didn’t need to change their behavior at all. And people are still dying on those roads.
Large portions of the Fundamentalist American Right have embraced an ignorant, selfish theology that discourages per which makes them ready-made suckers for cynical and unscrupulous people willing to manipulate them.
Movements require leaders and followers and its wrong to focus exclusively on the leaders and ignore the followers who lift them into power.
That was supposed to be “…embraced an ignorant, selfish theology that discourages personal reflection and focusing on improving ones own self and actions…”
I think gsmart has it just about right. While the Christian Community may be generally satisfied with “lip service”, at a minimum they want some vague reassurance -however insincere -that a candidate is reliably pro-life. The result has been that there are less and less pro-abortion Republicans with every passing election cycle. This may not be important as a policy-making matter, but I think it does have some salience as a cultural marker. To a lesser extent this is true of the other hot issues as well; gay rights, cloning, evolution, etc..
Kathleen Parker correctly identifies a major problem facing the Republican party. Her conclusions are wrong, and Daniel correctly point out her inconsistencies. But her article is really about demographics, and she is just echoing what Alan Abramowitz explained more clearly:
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/article.php?id=AIA2008050101
Yes, the manner in which Bush prosecuted the war in Iraq hurt the Republican brand. But that issue was completely marginalized, if not largely resolved, by the time the voters hit the polls on November 4. So how do you explain the massive, across the board Republican losses? The economy? The demographics?
I’ll concede that the Republican party’s most recent defeat was due to a combination of the economy, Iraq, and a shifting demographics. But in coming elections, two out of those three factors will decline in relevance. One will grow. The economy will improve, we will be out of Iraq, but America will not become more whiter, christian and married. If Republicans continue to organize their campaigns in way that appeals to these voters, the Republican party will decline in importance and relevance. And to be clear, the problem isn’t trying to appeal to these voters, it’s doing it in a way that excludes most other voters. But that’s what the Republican party insists on doing.
And the selection of Sarah Palin as VP is further proof that the Republican party is in the custody of the religious right. Choosing Palin may not be the reason McCain lost, but the choice of Palin and her subsequent ascension to the position of Major Party Leader discredits the Republican party and conservatism to the extent it remains tied to the Republican party.
Turnout by the religious right is utterly necessary in order for Republican’s to win elections. The religious right is then ignored by Republicans when it comes time to legislate, and Daniel correctly points this out. But that’s a different question.
I normally find Larison a thoughtful commentator but this time he’s falling into some of what have become the besetting sins of conservatism. First, personalizing his attacks on Parker. You may disagree with Parker but do we need all this character assassination to go with it. Far too much of conservative commentary is about personality and not issues and facts. Secondly, the disconnect from reality. Religious fundamentalists are the least powerful part of the Republican coalition. Really? If that is so why do presidential candidates like McCain have to make pilgrimages to kiss the rings of Land, Dobson, Falwell et al. Unfortunately Ms Parker is all too accurate in her analysis. The Republican party for the past thirty years has been a coalition of three groups. American nationalists, economic conservatives and christian fundamentalists. Graduallly the latter, who are much more numerous, tend to be concentrated in the South, where American militarism is also a strong sub text, and provide much of the shoe leather in political campaigns, have taken over as the main voice in the party. Generally speaking its probably fair to say this group enjoys a lot of overlap with the nationalists(the south?) but not much with the economic conservatives. The nationalists and the economics aren’t very interested in the fundamentalist’s concerns and almost certainly don’t pay any heed to them in their personal lives but were willing pay lip service to controlling womens productive rights, stem cell research and other matters just so long as they didn’t have to really do anything about them when in office because it would provoke an uprising from the majority of Americans who don’t support them. The complete failure over the past eight years of so many policies that lie at the heart of the conservative belief system (think deregulation, ideology over competence, preventive wars, global warming denial) has put the coalition under enormous stress. If one had to itemize which were the most toxic parts of the policy offering available from the GOP today it’s a tough call whether it’s values issues or economic ones. In the short term it’s probably economic ones but in the longer term it’s surely the values issues. The nationalists and the economics would dearly like to to junk them. Parker is a nationalist and has been an unremitting cheerleader for the most ill conceived and appalling executed set of foreign policy initiatives in our history. Unfortunately, the fundamentalists are not going to quietly into the night. Hence a civil war which I expect to last some time. If Obama is reasonably succesful in governing which I’m bound to say on evidence to date seems likely, this struggle could last a long time fuelled as it will be by a money making media apparatus of talk radio, tv and publishing who will keep beating every bruise. Parker may have skeletons in her own closet as Larison implies but she’s not far off hte mark in her analysis of power for good or evil of christian fundamentalists in the GOP.
Lol, Larison, Parker is just keepin’ it real.
The conservos really need to admit that the Grand Misadventure of the Manifest Destiny of Judeoxian Democracy was an epic fail.
Bush spent 700 billion dollars and 4000 lives so that the Iraqis could write shari’a law into their constitution and become a defacto Islamic state.
You can’t heal until until you admit how Bush screwed us all because he was too dim to understand evolutionary theory of culture.
Perhaps that evangelical thing is a bad thing in a world leader?
Mr. Tomlin, the verses you cite are not germane. They have to do with not doing acts for the sake of being seen. That is a different matter than what Ms. Parker is suggesting. She is suggesting that religion (not just acts) “belongs” purely as a private matter of the heart. NO Bible verse even comes close to suggesting that. The Church historically has never thought that and Christendom until a few hundred years ago never believed such nonsense.
If Ms. Parker is going to make religious statements then she needs to be prepared to back them up theologically, and not with just some flippant throw away Enlightenment phraseology masquerading as Americanism.
For the Christian, Christianity makes a claim on the entirety of your being. A Christian should be a Christian first and foremost. They should have a Christian “worldview.” Christianity as a purely private matter of the heart is a toothless Christianity, no threat to secularism. But Christianity is a threat to secularism just as it was to ancient Rome. The secularists know this and that is why they fear all but a toothless Christianity, as did the Emperors.
Daniel, how did you pick up so many liberals reading your blog? They must like the anti-war and Bush bashing stuff.
They have to do with not doing acts for the sake of being seen
Which covers 99% of the acts of the religious right.
For the Christian, Christianity makes a claim on the entirety of your being. A Christian should be a Christian first and foremost. They should have a Christian “worldview.”
Yes, but to those, like those on the religious right, who are largely deluded about what it means to be a Christian, such an attitude just compounds their delusion and error.
“Daniel, how did you pick up so many liberals reading your blog?”
I believe many Sullivan and John Cole readers come over here expecting to find the same kind of thing, and then realize to their amazement that they have found someone who rails against Bush and the GOP for their *leftward* moves.
All readers are welcome to the conversation here, of course, but it might reduce the experience of shock if everyone understands that I am antiwar and anti-GOP *because* of my religious and social conservatism, which entails taking other views that are necessarily not going to appeal to everyone.
“You may disagree with Parker but do we need all this character assassination to go with it.”
Character assassination? Okay, perhaps the melting down remark was a bit much, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Parker is being driven by her resentment of the backlash against her Palin criticism, which she has unfairly chosen to pin entirey on evangelicals. I get it. She’s angry about how people have responded to what she thought was reasonable criticism. That doesn’t justify her new position, which is also just ever so slightly self-righteous. She is staking out increasingly untenable positions to demonstrate her independence from what she thinks is the party line, but the result is that she ends up mothing pretty conventional Ryan Sager talking points that virtually no one on the right can take seriously.
Candidates don’t have to go to Lynchburg and Colorado Springs to make it in the GOP. McCain went to Liberty to mend fences from 2000 to repair the damage he had done by declaring Falwell et al. “agents of intolerance.” Indeed, I’m fairly sure McCain did not go to the latter until well after he had won the nomination. This election better than most demonstrated how politically weak evangelicals were inside the party. Their representative candidate could not get any money, and the entire establishment rallied behind anyone but Huckabee in no small part because he was the evangelicals’ candidate. Look at federal policies under this administration, allegedly a redoubt of religious zealotry, and find for me significant policy initiatives that demonstrate the power of evangelicals and social conservatives. *That* is how you measure real clout–by the influence a group has in advancing a policy agenda. I submit that you can’t find very much that shows social conservative and evangelical power. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Amusingly, the smoke and mirrors the GOP uses to con these voters into supporting it are mistaken by outsiders for meaningful concessions to them.
“And the selection of Sarah Palin as VP is further proof that the Republican party is in the custody of the religious right.”
The selection of Palin was the bone that the party leaders threw to the base to keep them happy, which was an admission that these voters, particularly evangelicals and social conservatives, didn’t have much reason to be happy with the party before then. If the party were “in the custody of the religious right,” then the issues that “the religious right” cares about would have been given high priority for a long time before this. If we are talking about the national GOP, these issues have largely been ignored or, in the case of the administration’s partial federal funding for ESCR, rejected.
daniel protests too much…
Parker: “And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs…. ”
this is half right….the demographics ARE working against the gop…the country continues its move towards the younger and less-white…and they overwhelmingly vote democratic [the exception being white marrieds, but their size is diminishing, too.]
ask why these voters DON’T VOTE for the gop… it’s the social issues, bible-thumping values that chase them off….
now returning religion to “the privacy of the heart” is irrelevant here…tossing the evangelicals overboard is the way to go…but that’ll never happen..the gop woun’t dump the racists either…..there would be nobody left but the plutocrats…
now the war did help do the gop in, no doubt, but the war was supported most strongly by the religious and the southener….that’s the problem…….
“Candidates don’t have to go to Lynchburg and Colorado Springs to make it in the GOP. McCain went to Liberty to mend fences from 2000 to repair the damage he had done by declaring Falwell et al. “agents of intolerance.” Indeed, I’m fairly sure McCain did not go to the latter until well after he had won the
I’m not sure where you get that. McCain made his “famous” speech at Liberty in May 2006.
And the Palin pick simply confirms that the Republican party is entirely dependent on, even when it knows it doesn’t want to be, to the Religious Right. That her pick was necessary to enthuse the base simply makes clear that the party’s hope that it might move beyond the base with McCain and a pro-choice VP pick (e.g., Lieberman), wouldn’t work with the base - and the party reluctantly decided it must stick with the base. But it certainly doesn’t mean that the base doesn’t exist, or that the party must not bow to it to some large degree, or that the negative perception so many have of the base isn’t a huge problem for the Republican party.
This election better than most demonstrated how politically weak evangelicals were inside the party
hahaha, then why wasn’t Romney the nom?
Because he was a mormon.
They couldn’t force you to take Huckabee, but they could be spoilers for your Romney dreams. McCain just stepped into the gap.
I think a lot of the monastic orders would disagree on the point that “a purely private matter of the heart is a toothless Christianity”. If I may wear my Catholic hat for a moment, it seems to me that even an issue as important to us as ending abortion is only incidental to cementing our own right relation to God. I guess how one sees this depends a little on whether one is more a ” St.Martha” or a “Mary”.
I don’t know if I count as a liberal or not, as that probably has as many flavors as “conservative”, but I am a Democrat and i think I can explain why some of us visit this blog. We agree that the war was stupid. We agree that the Cold War is, or should be, over. We like to hear religion discussed in a serious and sophisticated manner, rather than in a strident tone that suggests that we may be being fitted for The Virgin Of Nuremberg. Lastly, instead of screaming us down DL attempts to engage and to persuade….this used to be thought of as quite a good thing, and a way to win elections. Most of my friends are Republicans, and I was always pleased if I could shake their confidence in the Iraq adventure (it got a lot easier as time went by). I thin the conservatives would be better off if there were more folks out there that would calmly try to demonstrate why I am wrong for preferring a single-payer health care system as opposed to just calling me a commie moonbat.
There are a lot of folks out there who voted for Obama but who are filled with trepidation at the thought of Waxman, Pelosi, Reid, Dingell and so forth running the show. Someday a party may notice us again and reap a huge benefit.
Sorry–”the latter” was originally meant to refer to Co. Springs. I inserted the other sentence and forgot to rephrase.
“hahaha, then why wasn’t Romney the nom?”
Because he had all the credibility of a used car salesman. Actually, that’s not fair to used car salesmen. At least they have some standards of honesty.
Yes, his Mormonism put a ceiling on his level of support in the GOP, but it was his absolute phoniness that really did him in. Of course, anti-Mormonism is also pretty evenly distributed throughout the entire population of the U.S. If his Mormonism was a deal-breaker with some GOP voters, it would have been the same in the general election among a lot of non-evangelicals. Lack of enthusiasm for a flawed Mormon candidate is rather different from the stranglehold on the party that many people seem to think evangelicals have.
Late to the party.
Not sure why Kathleen Parker hit such a nerve with Daniel. Yes, she’s been something of a media darling since she dissed Palin. But her column on the religious right isn’t worthy of much blogging, seems to me. She’s clearly out of her depth on these religious and cultural matters, and so gets some things kinda-sorta wrong, which I suppose Daniel feels obliged to engage because he’s parsed the faith and country angles more thoroughly than Parker.
But on the larger difficulties for the GOP and its troublesome fundies determined to create a theocracy via electoral politics, isn’t Parker just telling us what we already know? That the GOP seems destined to tack ever rightward, toward noncritical thinkers and theocons and electoral losers. And this radical tack to starboard means a GOP lost at sea until the captain comes to his senses, or a sensible sailor stages a mutiny.
Larison is absolutely right to observe that
We need two separate posts: one discussing only the theocons and fundies and WTF they are thinking, and another on equally deluded neocons and money cons responsible for the recent debacle at the polls, for which this longtime liberal dem thanks them most profusely.
For the Christian, Christianity makes a claim on the entirety of your being. A Christian should be a Christian first and foremost. They should have a Christian “worldview.” Christianity as a purely private matter of the heart is a toothless Christianity, no threat to secularism.
RedPhillips, I think you just proved my point:
It’s not that the GOP is en thrall to its Christian base, it’s that this base very much cops the attitude that if you’re not Christian, you’re not welcome at the party.
Without the fundamentalists, John McCain would have been beaten more soundly - they might have stayed home instead of voting, and the only reason why many of them voted was their hope in Sarah Palin, that she’d get the training she needed to become president in 2012 or thereafter.
I agree with paxr55, Parker didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. The GOP is doubling down on the social issues as a litmus test, and throwing out the people who criticize it in any degree. Part of it is demographic, seeing how the youth voted 2:1 for the Democratic ticket. But as has been noted, here, the millenial generation is very distinct from their parents and grandparents, and they are much more egalitarian, much more diverse, much more tolerant than them. And they look nothing like the Republican Party.
The theocons go to the Republican well because there is nowhere else to go. Ironically, they ally with the alleged party of small government, where it takes anything but that to enforce morality.
I thought it worth commenting on because it is representative of a trend that we are seeing from a fair number of “reformers” and advocates that the GOP change to meet new circumstances. They tend to have one thing in common: blame the Christians. I’m entirely in agreement that changes are needed, but the focus on social conservatives is far too easy and tends to fit in with the critics’ preconceived ideas of how the GOP needed to change long before ‘06 or ‘08.
I was talking about this subject with someone recently. That conversation comes back to me now, and I begin to understand why there seems to be such a huge difference between my view of the power of evangelicals and social conservatives and the views of many of the commenters. On the level of symbolism and rhetoric and one-off episodes such as the Schiavo debacle, I can see why the average person might conclude that the GOP is dominated by “the religious right.” Once you get beyond the surface, though, there’s not much there, and that’s what I’m talking about. To the extent that perception is reality in politics, it may be hurting the GOP in certain demographics to be perceived as an unduly religious party, but I have to tell you from the religious conservative perspective there is not much substance behind this perception.
“Theocons” (I really don’t like that term) rally to the party for at least one of a few reasons: they are single-issue voters on life, or they accept the GOP as the lesser of two evils using a similar calculation of damage to their social issue causes from Democrats in office, or the overlap between them and Jacksonian nationalists means that they respond as nationalists to the foreign policy of the more nationalist of the two parties. The latter in particular would make their nationalism the problem. To the extent that nationalism overtakes or becomes their religion, we might say that this secular religion is the main problem. That doesn’t mean that they are particularly influential, but rather points to how much they have been influenced by the “national security” bunch.
Daniel- I think you are blurring the distinction between legislating and campaigning. The GOP largely ignores the religious right when it comes time to draft or oppose legislation, but caters to the religious right while campaigning. There are some exceptions, but there is a noteworthy gap between what the GOP does for its base while in office, and what it says (or implies) it will do for its base while running for office.
Parker’s point is that Republicans currently design their campaigns in a way that caters to the religious right. Which is fine in theory. But in practice they do it in a way that turns off large, and growing, numbers of voters. Sarah Palin was about as perfect an example of that problem as one could imagine.
If the Republican party wants to start winning again, it needs to figure out how to talk to a lot of voters. To do so, it needs to rethink the way it talks to it’s base. Setting aside the serious problems with how he governed, Bush in 2000 seemed to figure out how to do this. I’m not saying that he is the model, but balancing the needs of your base with the concerns of those outside of it is not impossible.
On the level of symbolism and rhetoric and one-off episodes such as the Schiavo debacle, I can see why the average person might conclude that the GOP is dominated by “the religious right.” Once you get beyond the surface, though, there’s not much there, and that’s what I’m talking about. To the extent that perception is reality in politics, it may be hurting the GOP in certain demographics to be perceived as an unduly religious party, but I have to tell you from the religious conservative perspective there is not much substance behind this perception.
But it’s the perception that matters.
Make no mistake, the GOP’s opponents - particularly now - are very interested in seeing the Republican Party identified with its culturally conservative base. Because the notion that the whole party believes, even now in the midst of this economic meltdown, that (for example) abortion is the premier political issue facing the nation, and should trump all else, helps the Democrats immensely. The Democrats then say - look - these people are untethered from reality. And that perception, particularly if you’ve lost your job or have watched your home-heating bill double, sticks.
So what Parker is talking about, in the long run, may be the GOP’s PR problem. I agree with you that the party has done little but throw symbolic bones to cultural conservatives, but those symbolic bones have been (as they were intended to be) very high profile. It actually may be in the GOP’s interest to deliver a little more on the promises made - while at the same time de-emphasizing those promises in terms of public rhetoric.
“It’s not that the GOP is en thrall to its Christian base, it’s that this base very much cops the attitude that if you’re not Christian, you’re not welcome at the party.”
gsmart, I am most certainly not the GOP base. I am a member of the Constitution Party, attended their convention, vocally supported Chuck Baldwin, voted for him and urged others to do the same.
Hey Daniel, I’m one of the (somewhat) Liberals who’s been haunting here since Cole turned me on to you several weeks ago (though usually keeping my mouth shut, even while reading you consistently).
Why do I come here? Because I’m looking for some intelligent and fair-minded conservative to discuss the ailing and future of the party (because I believe in the necessity of a contrary movement to liberalism if the best of both worlds is to be achieved).
And, notably, it would be interesting if a conservative could admit that this would be an ideal state of affairs, acknowledging that numerous progresses of the 20th Century that we now take for granted came from the liberal direction. It would be ideal if conservatism became a brake against the excesses, and quit being obstructionist against the good ideas (like single-payer or, God help us!, action on climate change).
But to the issue at hand, it would also be good if sensible Christians could play a role in marginalizing the whackjobs. Because you may have noticed that the “conservative” movement is driving away *most* of the sensible people. And who or what is doing that? The people and policies that are hostile to science, facts, and *reason*.
Abstinence-only is INSANE. Terry Schiavo’s plight illustrated delusion. Disbelief in global warming is *suicidal*. That “more God in the public sphere” will solve our problems has proven irrelevant to the serious issues of this century. And urgency about creationism, or even lip service toward it, is making a laughing stock of a party that *used* to be about policy, reason, and pragmatism.
Somewhere along the line, fueled by the Christian whackjobs and Rush Limbaugh, your party quit being the party of decency, honesty, science, and reason. It became the party of disdain and contempt and “win at any cost,” regardless what they’d do with the victory. And catering to the whackjobs has both fueled this and institutionalized it.
I am not telling you this to rail at you. I am telling you because I hope you can see that it is true (or give you a little help if you’re still fuzzy). Yes, Iraq was the debacle that contributed to the landslide, but Bush himself was the logical culmination of whackjob principles writ large (not least of which: the utter disdain for facts, honesty, or second-guessing its motives).
I don’t give a damn about Kathleen Parker at the moment, other than her role in at least spurring further this discussion that conservatives need to have. The cancer within your party is also a cancer within our nation.
And the more quickly intelligent conservatives like you realize that the GOP *does* have cancer that has addled its brains, the more quickly you can engage the necessary surgery to become a functional and constructive party again. Which I dearly and truly want to happen.
I’m no Democrat really, with no outstanding faith in them. But the GOP of the modern era is a MENACE, owned by a force as dangerous as Islamic fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, regardless of its roots.
And I hope you could become one of the voices to help marginalize it in the USA. For all our sakes, not least of which your own ideals.
So about Kathleen Parker, don’t miss the forest she’s talking about while you nitpick the trees.
I like this formulation about the problem (for the GOP) with Palinite-type fundies who have conflated nationalism with their idee fixe anti-abortion and millenarian constructs.
This sort of thinking is, as most sensible Americans can see, irrational, ill-informed, intellectually unsavory, and a couple of other things, including whacked out. I have no idea how the GOP recoups from here, but I do think it starts (for the secular right) with chucking the knee-jerk wedge-politics cynicism and embracing real ideas that mean something and promise a better life to most Americans.
Suggestions for re-establishing the GOP as a constructive political force:
1. Establish the party’s bona-fides on good government. The party will find sympathetic voters if it adheres to an irreproachable level of ethics and accountability in managing the federal government. Republicans must expect no traction for criticism of Democratic ethical or other lapses until the they get their own house painstakingly sterilized. Just going two years, let alone four, without a major sex or money scandal would be an immense help in recovering support from independents.
2. Accept that several of the Democratic Party’s goals are contiguous with the will of most Americans: restraint in international conflicts, widened health-care access, infrastructure improvements, investment in renewable energy sources and environmental protection. Instead of devoting most of the party’s energies to strategies of blocking big-government efforts toward these goals, make bona-fide efforts to help Democrats achieve them as quickly, rationally, efficiently and fairly as possible. In the short run this very likely will require conservatives to swallow some pride and absorb some losses in power. But in the long run, if the nation is better off, the GOP is positioned as well as possible to take some of the credit. If the nation is worse off, the GOP is well positioned to tell voters, “We tried their plan. It didn’t work. Try ours.” Wouldn’t this be a more effective pitch than “We’re protecting your interests through gridlock”?
3. Instead of representing fundamentalists bureaucratically through broad and unrealistic legislative goals, engage them individually at the grass-roots level with a consistent, crystal-clear message: that however sympathetic the party is to achieving fundamentalist goals in Washington, legislative success is impossible while fundamentalists are a dwindling minority. The only truly effective way for their causes to prevail is to try to persuade their fellow citizens to support them. Besides establishing realistic expectations for the party, this has the added benefit of being true and therefore not insulting fundamentalists’ intelligence. Ideally it would also motivate fundamentalists to try to expand their influence in more constructive ways.
Why are liberals here? Because reading only people who agree with you is Boring.
But readable righties, who are willing to be open and honest about their goals for the future of the country (being something more than “win” or “f*** over the Democrats”) and engage with their political opponents, are extraordinarily rare.
So rare, that I find it this blog to be one of a very short list that includes:
Culture11
Outside The Beltway
Volokh Conspiracy (especially since the election’s over)
and that’s about it.
(Other suggestions for thoughtful conservative commentary welcome.)
I didn’t mean to suggest that liberals shouldn’t comment here. Just was surprised that so many do. It would be nice if many of them dropped the elistist, sophisticated talking down to grubby conservatives style, however.
Check out http://www.conservativetimes.org for “thoughtful” anti-war and anti-Bush commentary.
“Parker just informed us that religion must return to the privacy of the heart where it belongs. If religion belongs nowhere but inside the heart, it had better not be expressed, confessed or discussed in public. However, to speak of religion is to speak in large part about practice, which is done almost anywhere but inside one’s heart.”
I think it distorts Parker to interpret her words literally. Of course religion has a place in the greater world, but essentially it does belong in the heart. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”. We need to be careful to distinguish between the sacred role of religion, and its public role. THe word “sacred” means “to set apart”, in other words, to keep it safe from worldly intrusions. This is why Jesus threw out the money-lenders from the temple - it’s not that there’s something wrong with money-lending itself, it’s that they were violating the sacredness of the temple by conducting worldly business with it. And likewise, the worldly business of politics needs to be kept out of the termple as well. They are two different domains, that can seriously damage one another if mixed too freely, without respect for the distinction between sacred and worldly domains. Public religion has its own face and its own public debates, and so does politics. It’s best to mix them as little as possible, especially in the public sphere. Religion’s public face exists to ensure that we remain spiritually alive and in remembrance of God while engaged in worldly activities - meaning remembering Christ in our hearts while doing things that are not appropriate to the temple. But when the church tries to dictate the order of the public sphere, it has overstepped itself, just as when politics tries to dictate how we should worship. Not respecting those boundaries is a violation of “conservative values” in the most basic sense of not conserving the natural order of things.
I agree with Francis - Daniel is a rare find. While I don’t agree with Daniel on much, I do enjoy reading here.
As for talking down (Red at 9:15), most of it isn’t that sophisticated or elitist - it’s just plain talking down. Republicans (and the conservative brand) got hammered. That’s what happens when you lose elections, and lose badly.
Putting that aside, this is an interesting place. I am glad Cole pointed me here.
Daniel, I think you have misconceived the reason for the GOP establishment’s rejection of Huckabee. It was not because he was “the evangelicals’ candidate,” but because he espoused economic policies that were anathema to the free-market fundamentalism that defines the anti-government, drown-it-in-a-bathtub element of the party. See:
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2007/11/updated_huckabee_white_paper.php
And how can you discount the very selection of Palin herself as a sign of evangelicals’ influence within the party? She had NOTHING of substance to offer the ticket except her pew cred. Let’s face it, going after corrupt Alaska Republicans is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, and governing the state is to governing the nation as, well, the Alaska high school basketball championship is to the NCAA Final Four.
Huckabee espoused one economic policy of any consequence during his campaign, and this was a national sales tax to replace all other forms of taxation. I have a very hard time believing that anti-tax activists opposed him because of his economic policy. Some of them, including the Club, disliked his fiscal record in Arkansas, but there really was no rational economic conservative argument for backing Romney rather than Huckabee, as their records were both poor by the standards the Club for Growth sets up. There was a visceral dislike of the man because he was a preacher and spoke in the idiom of “compassionate” conservatism, but in terms of his actual policies he was no more “big government” than his major rivals.
In the view of the McCain campaign, Palin’s virtue was that she was an energy “expert,” and coming out of the summer oil drilling had become the McCain campaign’s economic message. She was selected because she had “taken on the oil companies” and represented the new obsession with oil drilling. Whatever else she brought with her was incidental. Palin’s evangelicalism was not important to them, and the campaign made little or no use of her religiosity. She was well received by evangelicals and social conservatives, but that is a sign of how easily they are won over to support a lousy ticket. It is not an example of their influence.
I’m sorry, Daniel, but I think Brian Rust is right on Huckabee. He actually believes in government as a force for good.
Was there a visceral dislike of Huckabee? Sure, but I think visceral dread is more accurate. The moneycons prefer their rube Christianist/socon allies to be lapdogs or know-nothings like Sarah Palin–a lapdog for the Club (drill baby drill), and a sop to the rubes in the base. (N.B.:Sarah Palin is best described not as an Evangelical but as a Fundamentalist.)
With Huckabee’s intelligence, persuasive skills, suggestion of integrity, and personal charm (I wouldn’t vote for him, but he’s a natural), the man presented a danger to the Republicans’ internal balance of power that that keeps the Club in power.
Which *major* Republican candidate didn’t think of the government as a force for good? Among the three other leading candidates, you had the guy who signed off on government health care, a security state authoritarian nut and a warmonger who constantly talked about serving causes greater than oneself. The same people who loathed Huckabee thought Romney, Giuliani and McCain were all preferable and some thought them quite admirable; the adoration for Romney in some mainstream circles was embarrassing. Differences over policy and record cannot account for the loathing–the differences among the candidates were not as great as all that. His religion, his class, and his Southern background were all major reasons why so many mainstream conservatives evidently despised him. There were legitimate critiques to make of Huckabee on immigration, for example, and I made them, but judging by his record he was actually no more pro-immigration than any of his major rivals. On the whole, libertarians and economic conservatives who found Huckabee to be uniquely unacceptable were overreacting to his flaws and tended to ignore Romney’s and Giuliani’s.
The biggest mistake the Club for Growth made this cycle was making Huckabee their enemy. Now he has no incentive to cultivate them and those like them; he has decided to respond in kind and declare them anathema. People who think that Huckabee was some kind of economic populist once again mistake rhetoric for substance. No one would have said that Huckabee was well-versed in policy when he started running. He presented no danger to groups such as the Club. His tax proposal, while dismissed as loopy by the mainstream, should have been right up their alley with its abolition of corporate and capital gains taxes. For whatever reason, they opted to try to destroy him.
I guess by “good” I meant social good, animated by what Huckabee presents as a genuine concern for the poor.
In this sense Huckabee was different, as far as this Democrat could tell, from the fanatical anti-tax Republicans. I always thought he would have been a better general election candidate against Obama than McCain was.
> She was selected because she had “taken on the oil companies” and represented the new obsession with oil drilling. Whatever else she brought with her was incidental. Palin’s evangelicalism was not important to them, and the campaign made little or no use of her religiosity.
Well, a) she was selected because McCain thought she was HOT, and b) the campaign didn’t need to “use” her religiosity for her to be a massive concession to the evangelicals in question.
BUT, I’m mindful that I’m stating those premises as if they were facts, rather than speculative opinions. But similarly, I think your points above (other than perhaps the last one) fall under the same distinction.
At a minimum, she was an ardently pro-life individual (which doesn’t need to be “used,” but only needs to be true and public knowledge), and that was as least as important as pro-drilling?