New York Times prints portion of book attacking Right wing Voodoo economics

‘The Big Con’

By JONATHAN CHAIT

I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics-I mean, what's really happening-I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My politics are actually quite moderate. (Most real lefties, in fact, think I'm a Washington establishment sellout.) So please give let me a chance to explain myself when I tell you the following: American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. (Stay with me.)

The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago-that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government-are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.

The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies, not healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great public challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or intellectuals find the result congenial. Government is no smaller-it is simply more debt-ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites.

And yet the right-wing ascendancy has continued inexorably despite continual public repudiation. The 2006 elections were only the latest electoral setback. The right has suffered deeper setbacks before, and all of them have proven temporary. In 1982, after the country had entered the deepest recession since the 1930s, Republicans were slaughtered in the midterm congressional races, losing twenty-seven seats in the House of Representatives. Ronald Reagan, whose election two years earlier had seemed to augur a new conservative era, trailed his likely 1984 Democratic challengers by double digits in the polls and seemed destined to be a lame duck. "What we are witnessing this January," wrote the esteemed Washington Post reporter David Broder in the first month of 1983, "is not the midpoint in the Reagan presidency, but its phase-out. 'Reaganism,' it is becoming increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon." We know what happened the next year.

And the conservative revolution has had its obituary written many times since. In 1986, Republicans lost the Senate, and shortly thereafter Reagan saw his approval ratings sink as he became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1992, Democrats won back the White House along with both chambers of Congress, and there was widespread talk of "a conservative crackup." It happened again after the public turned on the Republicans following their 1995 government shutdown, and once more after the public rebelled against the Clinton impeachment. By the late 1990s, the Republican revolution had again been written off.

And yet the Republican right keeps coming back, and back, and back. Their fortunes rise and then dip, but each peak is higher than the last peak, and each dip is higher than the last dip. Consider the present situation. Things have gone about as badly as they could have in George W. Bush's second term. A Republican administration started and lost a major war in Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed to deliver higher wages for most Americans; contributed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the near-wipeout of a major American city; launched a failed assault on Social Security, the most popular social program in the history of the United States; and saw its members suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual and financial scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold their majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the structural forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll back any significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on crises like global warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking health insurance.

Global warming, come to think of it, may offer the best metaphor for understanding the conservative ascent. If you look at the temperature of the earth from month to month, it bounces up and down as seasons change and heat spells or cold snaps come and go. If you look at it over the course of many years, however, it is clear that it is moving inexorably in one direction. The arrival of winter does not mean the end of global warming. To confuse the short term blips with the long-term trend is to mistake the weather for the climate. The 2006 elections are one of those blips, a pause in the right's three-decade ascent.

Permanent partisan majorities are not possible in American politics. Power changes hands regularly. Sometimes the other party's president will preside over an economic boom or win a war. Sometimes yours will preside over a recession or sleep with an intern. Short-term fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party in power, are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every election but to control the terms of the debate. The conservative movement's signal triumph is to have done just this, reshaping what is possible in American politics over the long term. This is not, therefore, a book about the political weather. It is a book about the political climate.

Most people under forty fail to grasp how different American politics looked three decades ago. For me, there is no better evidence of the rightward lurch than recalling that my father used to be a Republican. A liberal Republican, to be sure, but a Republican. By the time I was old enough to understand anything about politics, he had long since abandoned the GOP, and at first his former affiliation puzzled me. In the political world in which I came of age -Ronald Reagan left the White House during my junior year of high school-it seemed inconceivable that someone like my dad, who today resides well within the center of the Democratic Party, could identify in any way with the Republicans.

But, of course, as someone my age could not have guessed, the parties of a generation ago bore only a faint resemblance to their modern versions. After World War II, the Republicans accepted the new role of government in American life ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt. The decades after the war saw a great American consensus. Democrats were a bit looser with the purse strings, Republicans a bit tighter, but their general vision of the country was the same. This vision was expressed by the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower just before his inauguration when he declared, "There is, in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless." This credo was the credo of the Republican Party my dad could identify with. He looked up to GOP moderates like Nelson Rockefeller and William Milliken, the long-time governor of our home state of Michigan-men born to privilege who used their power for the benefit of all, not just their own class.

Eisenhower left the top tax rate at a staggering 91 percent, and he repeatedly preached the virtues of budget balance. (When a colleague complained about this confiscatory rate, his treasury secretary, a wealthy former steel executive, replied acidly, "I pay 91 percent, and yet I don't complain and you do all the time." His line reflects a sense of social obligation totally alien to today's GOP.) This tradition of moderate Republicanism remained strong well into the 1970s. A Republican president, Gerald Ford, actually vetoed tax cuts proposed by Democrats as fiscally irresponsible.

There were, of course, Republicans of a more conservative bent in those days as well, but conservatism meant something altogether different from what it does today. Indeed, the whole face of American politics has changed. Opposition to deficits, which once made up the right wing of the partisan debate, is now closer to the left wing. ("I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans," Bill Clinton once noted wryly in a Cabinet meeting. "We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market.") Today's rightwing position-upper-bracket tax cuts wherever and whenever possible-was off the right edge of the political spectrum three decades ago.

The ground has shifted very far under our feet, and its manifestations are everywhere. In 1979, the highest-earning one-tenth of 1 percent of all taxpayers-the richest of the rich-took home only 3 percent of the national income. Today they take home 10 percent. And over that same span, their average tax rate has dropped from 32 to 23 percent. The minimum wage has lost nearly half its purchasing power. The health care plan proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, if introduced in Congress today, would be considered radically liberal and probably could not gain the support of any but a handful of the most left-wing Democrats.

American politics has been transformed, yet in this change lies the deeper mystery. The public has not clamored for it. While it is true that, starting around the late 1960s, polls showed a growing backlash against the welfare state, that backlash petered out during the 1980s and actually began to reverse itself a few years later. Which is to say, the public has actually grown less receptive to conservatism in general, let alone the particular upper-class variety practiced by today's GOP.

How do I know this? Here's one example. The National Election Survey has been asking voters for many years whether they would prefer a larger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer services. In 1982, the first year of the poll, 32 percent favored smaller government, and 24 percent preferred larger government (with the remainder right in the middle or expressing no opinion). By 2004, it had completely flipped, with 43 percent preferring bigger government and just 20 percent wanting a smaller one. Other polls have showed that the public has turned away from its antigovernment mood of the 1970s and favored a more active government and more progressive taxes. The public has been moving steadily left for twenty years, while Washington has lurched rapidly in the opposite direction.

This isn't supposed to happen. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed." This is the core of the American civic religion. But over the last thirty years, something has happened that strikes at that core. The underpinnings of American democracy have slowly frayed, and in the place of the great moderate consensus that once prevailed we have seen the rise of an American plutocracy.

One popular explanation for the triumph of right-wing economics, familiar to readers of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, is that cultural issues have obscured pocketbook ones. Conservatives have tricked the masses into voting on the basis of social issues, thus ignoring their economic self-interest. It is certainly true that tens of millions of potential Democratic voters support the Republican Party on the basis of its opposition to abortion, gays, and the like. But the phenomenon of conservative elites using culture and patriotism to win support from the masses is an old one. Left-wing populism of the kind that Frank and others favor may have failed to take root because of working-class social conservatism. This does not, however, explain a slightly different question: how and why the economic right has gained so much strength over the last three decades. After all, by nearly any measure, the American public has grown more socially liberal over this span. Since 1977, the proportion of Americans believing gays should be allowed to teach in elementary school has doubled, from 27 to 54 percent. Those favoring gay adoption has risen from 14 to 49 percent. Since 1976, the proportion of Americans who believe women deserve an equal role in business and political life has nearly doubled, from 30 to 57 percent. The proportion who believe that a woman's place is in the home has collapsed from 10 to 2 percent.

If the public is not moving right on economics, and if it is not even moving right on social issues, then we cannot explain the rise of right-wing economics by looking at the voters. We can only understand it by examining Washington.

This book has two parts. The first half explains how the Republican Party my father admired, the party of social and fiscal responsibility, was transformed into the party of class warfare. It is an astonishing tale, and it begins in the mid-1970s with the rise of a sect of pseudo-economists known as the supply-siders. This small cult of fanatical tax-cutters managed, despite having been proven decisively wrong time after time, to get an iron grip on the ideological machinery of the conservative movement. The supply-siders were not maverick conservative economists, as you might assume; they were amateurs and cranks, convinced that their outsider status enabled them to reach conclusions that had escaped the scrutiny of professional economists. The most prominent among them spent their lives advocating a number of patently ludicrous ideas. (One supply-side guru compared Slobodan Milosevic to Abraham Lincoln. Another said that American upper-class women "are averse to science and technology and baffled by it.") While their other preposterous ideas went nowhere, the equally preposterous notion of supply-side economics took the political system by storm. Why? Because it attracted a powerful constituency: the rich.

An almost theological opposition to taxation quickly took hold within the GOP, opening up the opportunity for business lobbyists to hijack the party's agenda. And so they did, as described in chapter 2. Far from being ideological fanatics, these were the most coolly calculating men. Their distinguishing quality was cynicism. Some of them were flamboyant crooks, like the gangster wannabe Jack Abramoff. But most were crooks of a more respectable variety- the kind with seven-figure salaries and offices at prestigious law firms. All of them understood that the destruction of the old Republican ethos of restraint opened up the public coffers to them, and they have availed themselves and their clients of a massive looting of the Treasury.

Their takeover of the Republican Party took years to complete. The supply-siders and the business lobbyists had two internal obstacles to overcome before they could take full control: the Republican rank-and-file voting base, and the old Republican Washington establishment, both of which still clung to the old ethos of fiscal responsibility and public-mindedness. To deal with them there arose a new breed of ideological enforcer-propagandists, party organizers, lobbyists, or often (as in the case of prototypes like Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) all of these things at once. They drove out the old party establishment and created a new party line that fused in a seamless web supply-side ideology with their own financial interests.

There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.

As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.

Original article posted here.

Excellent Analysis and Coverage

The wingnut media meltdown

If you really desire to find out more proof that conservatives are thin-skinned hypocritical chickenshits, then by all means, read on.

In the aftermath of the whole Don Imus controversy, conservotalk radio goons have their undies in a bunch. They're scared their little party is going to come to a crashing halt. As playing the 'blame game' has always been their trademark, they're trotting out Hillary Clinton, George Soros, the mainstream media and all the other usual suspects. This time, though, the main target of their ire is media watchdog group Media Matters for America.

They claim MMfA has a hitlist. And they're frightened that MMfA won't stop until they take down every right-wing radio host with access to a microphone. In other words, they're scared shitless. They're also claiming that the group endlessly monitors right-wing radio and TV shows, scouring the broadcasts for even the slightest infraction, report on it, and then blitz the mainstream media with their findings. Well, no shit sherlock! They certainly don't hide that fact. And isn't that the same thing you guys do?

Several things are always evident during any wingnut smear campaign. The name of George Soros often pops up. He's their top bogeyman. In fact, they claim that he's funded virtually every anti-wingnut and anti-George W. Bush internet and media venture out there, from Air America to MMfA. Well, we all know he opted not to invest in Air America, and MMfA has claimed time and time again that they've never received funding from George Soros. The closest remote connection between the two is that a few groups that received donations from Soros in turn helped out MMfA, minus Soros' involvement. The only activist ventures Soros is known to have invested in are the Center for America Progress, MoveOn, America Coming Together and the Democracy Alliance, in addition to the usual political donations. Granted, Soros is an interesting character. I've always been somewhat suspicious of his involvement in Carlyle Group, perhaps the tightest of the tightest of private equity funds, one who's members consist of or have consisted of the Saudi Royal Family, James Baker III, former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, former Time Magazine editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, the bin Laden family (yes, THAT bin Laden family) and, of course, both George Bushes. But again, what's the big deal about Soros anyway? Well, the wingnuts will never tell you he did anything shady, because, apart from some insider trading accusations, he hasn't really done anything evil like blow up buildings, fund Hezbollah, slaughter kittens or eat babies.

Fats Lowbrow er, Rush Limbaugh was among the first to play the Soros card. And for equal measure, he threw out the name of Hillary Clinton, almost as if sending a subconscious message to the nimble-minded Manchurian Candidates who listen to his show. According to Drugbo the Hut, MMfA is a "Stalinist" organization (doesn't Godwin's Law cover that tired commie cliche as an instant argument killer?) and part of the "Clinton machine agenda." He claimed that Imus was taken down by MMfA because he was critical of Hillary Clinton. "This is an election year. Clinton Inc., you get on their case, they're going to take you out." Limbaugh continued, "When I say the Clinton team, I include Media Matters for America, this supposed tax-exempt media watchdog group," adding, falsely, "They are George Soros-funded. This is clearly part of the 'Democrat' (sic) Party machine." Oxymoron had absolutely no shame in his lashing, claiming that Democrats are anti-Semitic, racist, totalitarian and are engaged in smear tactics.

Oh, and he even had the balls to use phrases like 'draft dodger' and "philanderer," evidentially with no sense of personal irony whatsoever. Well, at least he didn't say "drug addict." Irony is always in abundant supply on Limbaugh's show. He claims to take the high road, and that he is "not demeaning people on this program in any way." Yeah, right.

Michael Savage Weiner claims MMfA is "run by a homosexual activist who hates anybody in the media who does not kowtow to the homosexual agenda." He had previously referred to Media Matters as "a gay website that attacks me every day" and called Brock "a psychopath." All of this sounds pretty ironic for a guy who used to write overly friendly letters to and skinny-dipped with beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg. It really makes one wonder whether Weiner's, er Savage's reactionary radio shtick is all just an act.

One radio loudmouth who really is putting on an act is Tammy Bruce. The wingnut blogs are absolutely drooling over her appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show a few days ago on FOX 'News' where she claimed that there is a left-wing 'hit list' on conservojocks, and they're coming to put them all out of work. But let's call it like it is - Bruce is a fraud. She's not really a conservative. In fact, she started out doing liberal radio, until her job prospects started to look somewhat grim. Then, this pro-choice, pro-gay rights lesbian feminist shifted abruptly to the right, metamorphosing into some sort of 'conservative-but-not-really-conservative'. Or, as she describes herself, an "openly gay, pro-choice, gun owning, pro-death penalty, voted-for-President Bush progressive feminist." Her political orientation shifts back and forth with the breeze, adapting her outlook to whatever suits her arguments, employment prospects or FOX 'News' facetime. In other words, she flip-flops more than Mitt Romney. Newsflash to all wingnuts - she's a phony.

Now, is there a problem with this? I accept this as fact in the radio industry. Let's be real here - it's all show business anyway. Talk radio at times seems no different than professional wrestling, ridiculous braggadocio and all. This is commonly referred to in the wrestling business by terms such as 'work' or 'kayfabe.' Where two menacing thugs go out and beat the living shit out of each other, steal each others' girlfriends and blow up each others' cars on TV every week, yet go out for beers and share steroid needles after the show is over. Talk radio is similar, except for the exploding cars and physical violence. Bruce is all kayfabe. When Limbaugh exploded on the national radio scene, I thought the same, like he's doing a parody of a conservative moron. And to be honest, I thought he was pretty good at it. Over time, I think he started believing his own bullshit, thanks to fame and all that money. At least the money his three ex-wives haven't taken. Same with Sean Hannity, who often sounds like he's reading straight from the RNC faxes. Most likely, these guys are probably putting on an act to some degree, call it 'whoring for dollars.' The sad reality is that, unlike wrestling which we all know is a put-on, radio listeners actually think all of what these folks say is legit.

And these types of conservative gasbags, in increasingly widespread delusions of paranoia, are once again playing the victim, claiming that Hillary, Soros, the media (which they are a part of anyway) and organizations like MMfA are out to squash them like the bugs they are. What they fail to mention is that MMfA wasn't even there first. Actually, they got the idea from the wingnuts themselves. James Dobson and his righteous ilk have been attacking the media and the entertainment industry for decades. Hotheaded wingnut Brent Bozell was next in 1987 with his Media Research Center (and later, sister blog NewsBusters). And there's more where that came from, in the form of 'Accuracy' in Media. Sure, they claim to be neutral, but they're always out front in claiming liberal media bias, while rarely attacking conservatives. And guess what? All of these groups do the exact same thing that they accuse MMfA of doing. Pot, say hello to kettle. But hey, it's all a 'work' anyway, right? Just like pro wrestling.

And as far as deep-pocketed political sugar daddies go, Soros is a Johnny-come-lately to the party. Conservatives and Republican'ts for years have been relying on eccentric moneymen to help squash anyone who stands in their way. Ever hear of Richard Mellon Scaife? This trust fund baby used some of his $1 billion inheritance to lash out at all things non-conservative. He made borderline illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. He sent money to right-wing think tanks and political action committees. He bought a little newspaper in the Pittsburgh suburbs and turned it into an ultra-conservative attack rag. He threw money at magazines like the American Spectator, which in turn funded the Arkansas Project, a nefarious group whose sole purpose from the early 1990s onward was to dig up as much dirt on Bill Clinton as humanly possible. Scaife even funded this shady venture directly, and in many ways oversaw it. Ironically, one key journalist used in the smear campaign was none other than then-American Spectator writer David Brock, who later renounced his sordid muckraking past and flipped to the other side, founding MMfA. In essence, here was Scaife, a goofy billionaire who, with a right-wing group, was trying to overthrow the presidency. Hey, isn't that treason? Funny we don't hear Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage and Bruce talk about this crazy rich guy trying to silence the opposition. But I guess it would be a bit difficult to work that into a conversation on a daily three hour program, right? Oh, and Scaife himself directly sent money to the Media Research Center, further making this whole Soros thing moot.

Want more? Well, there's more where Scaife came from. Perhaps the grandaddy of them all is Sun Myung Moon, Korean leader of the Unification Church, an organization considered by many to be a high-powered cult. When authorities started to come down on his massive financial empire in the 1970s for fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion offenses, Moon sought to make some high-powered friends. He aligned himself with Republicans such as Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In the ultimate suck-up gesture to the GOP, he gave them their own newspaper, the Washington Times, on which he has spent over a billion dollars on over the past two decades without ever seeing a profit. Not to worry, since he can always bilk more out of his followers anyway. Ironically, his efforts have been defended in the past by the ACLU, another frequent target of the conservative movement.

And, need I mention Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, who went down the same media road as Moon, minus the cult and the lawbreaking? We're all too familiar with that story, and he's kind of a lightweight compared to some of these other characters.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. I could mention that the conservative movement has always been propped up by generous sugardaddies like Richard DeVos, founder of the Amway pyramid scheme, and countless others including many, many oil companies, media owners and defense contractors. But this article is getting way too long and off-track, so it's best that it come to a close.

So, wingnuts can go ahead and attack MMfA, Soros, Hillary, the media and all their other usual punching bags. But before they do, perhaps it's best that they take a good, hard look in the mirror at themselves and the people they're talking to. Their ideals are propped up by the billions of dollars coming from a traitor, a felonious Korean cult leader and a pyramid scheme ripoff artist. They'll realize that they're not so high and mighty after all. It's just them whining and ranting like the conservative crybabies they are.

Original article posted here.

Excellent Analysis of the Hate that Hate Produced

The Coulterization of the American right
The "faggot" episode isn't about Ann Coulter. It's about the deal conservatism made with the devil -- a deal that has cost it its soul.

By Gary Kamiya

Mar. 13, 2007 | So Ann Coulter has done it again. She called John Edwards a "faggot" at a major conservative conference and everyone is outraged. But do we have to go through this ridiculous charade again? Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the shameless buffoon who once compared Hillary Clinton to a prostitute (when Clinton was first lady, no less) and displayed her keen grasp of geopolitical strategy after 9/11 by declaiming, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Following her sage advice, George W. Bush acted on the first two recommendations, with splendid results, but the third, despite the best efforts of some of his holy pals, is proving difficult.) We all know that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books, appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a "nigger" is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place.

For this isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.

It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down. Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable" conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem it worthy of comment.

The right in America has always flirted with various forms of gutter populism, but its latest incarnation may represent its lowest limbo-dance yet. It's worth pausing for a moment to recall how this happened. Newt Gingrich, the adulterous moralist and demagogic hit man who led the vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994, is largely responsible for the GOP's debased state, along with evangelical holy warriors -- let's call them Christo-jihadists -- like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and James Dobson. In a reprise of Nixon's "Southern strategy," which used racist appeals to white Southerners to devastating political effect, Gingrich and the Christo-jihadists fired up the so-called values or social issues conservatives by ranting about guns, God and gays.

Just as important as Newt and the holy men was what former right-wing operative David Brock called "the Republican noise machine," the well-funded media apparatus that ceaselessly broadcasts right-wing propaganda. Figures like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, of course, Ann Coulter, using the enormous power of the new Fox News network and of talk radio, whipped their audience into a resentful, self-righteous fury, raging against "godless secularists" and "liberal elites" who they blamed for the moral collapse of America. This vicious culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans confronting massive societal and cultural changes -- a process brilliantly described in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic, heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to attack its enemies.

But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.

By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the Know-Nothing movement.

First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was demonizing the Clintons. This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision sufficed to get a featherweight named George W. Bush named president. But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his approval ratings were tanking. The old culture-war tricks weren't working anymore; the magic was wearing off. And then a miracle literally fell from the skies: 9/11.

The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to fold "national security" into its culture war portfolio -- a potent mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.

But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be short-lived. Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives, who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all credibility after the Iraq debacle.

That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over "values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise. The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines, ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red, white and blue banner inscribed with "Faggot!" may rally the hardcore, but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear.

And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done that. The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as one of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism. But like the boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" -- once too often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.

Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what "al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity. Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.

The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" -- especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."

Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message.

The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the garbage.

Original article posted here.

Holy Warriors

CHRISTIAN FASCISM: THE JESUS GESTAPO OF ST. ORWELL, a Carolyn Baker Exclusive

January 31, 2007 New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, has written an extraordinary book, American Fascism: The Christian Right And The War On America. Having survived a Christian fundamentalist background myself, I marvel at the timely urgency of Hedges’ book, but also, at the obtuse disconnect most Americans have with the pivotal thesis of his book: the power of the religious right in the United States to bring forth a nation whose totalitarian repression could dwarf that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. As Hedges notes, we are well on the path toward such a reality, and the Domionist Christian right is a principal player in the process. While the nucleus of that movement is small, measuring only about 1% of evangelicals and led by the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee, those leaders are supported by throngs of evangelicals sympathetic to their theocratic views who dutifully preach the consummate tenet of the movement, submission. Citizens must submit to their government officials, particularly the ones who claim to be born-again Christians and receiving their orders from God; wives must submit to husbands; children must submit to parents; and everyone must submit to the teachings of the bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity or burn in hell. I will herein use the term "Christian fascism" or "Cristo-fascism" as synonymous with a worldview and political philosophy which are both fundamentalist Christian and fascist in nature. Recently, I viewed a chilling documentary "Jesus Camp", which examines "the evangelical belief that a revival is underway in America that requires Christian youth to assume leadership roles in advocating the causes of their religious movement." [1]The film follows a group of evangelical kids who attend a summer camp where they are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God’s army. Under the leadership of control-freak youth pastor, Becky Fischer, who makes Nurse Ratchet in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest" look like Snow White, the children are told that theirs is a unique generation—perhaps the last on earth before the return of Christ to rapture his church, and that just as Musilm children learn at an early age to carry and use automatic weapons so that they can die for Islam, Christian kids must learn to fight in the Jesus army in order to save souls and take back America for God—and be willing to die for Jesus. One not need be a licensed mental health professional to find the emotional manipulation, indoctrination, and outright brainwashing of the Jesus camp both repulsive and enraging. Its squeaky-clean, almost exclusively white, puerile participants mouth all the right jargon, concepts, and scripture verses impeccably and robotically like good little Christian boys and girls—or more chillingly, like Hitler youth. Jesus Camp is nothing less than childhood spiritual abuse on steroids, leaving me personally and eternally grateful that as a child growing up in fundamentalism, I wasn’t subjected to anything worse in the context of religious services than the raspy screams of bible-thumping preachers Hedges’ brilliant article, "The Christian Right And The Rise Of American Fascism" outlines several principles inherent in Christian fascism, and to his list, I will add a few of my own: 1)Apocalyptic Violence—A central tenet of Cristo-fascism is the belief that after the Rapture or Christ’s returns to rescue Christian believers and take them to heaven, a period of seven years, or the Tribulation, will ensue in which an Anti-Christ will dominate the world, and every horror imaginable will be unleashed on humankind. Those who do not submit (again a pivotal word for Christian fascism) and accept Christ as their personal savior, will be martyred but will be assured of spending eternity in heaven with Christ. Those who do submit will be condemned eternally to hell. After the Tribulation period, Christ will return again with the "army" of Christians in heaven, and the battle of Armageddon will be fought against the Anti-Christ and his armies. The latter will be slaughtered by Christ and his followers who will set up Christ’s kingdom on earth where he will reign for one thousand years, followed by the total and complete destruction of earth as Christ and his followers return to heaven. Sounds like a scene from the movie "Independence Day"? Actually, that movie cannot begin to capture the heinous barbarity that Christian fascism fantasizes will befall the earth and those who reject Christ. That scenario is a bloodbath of unimaginable, avenging horrors. Note that not only will non-Christian human beings be decimated, but so will the earth itself, the outcome being twofold: Humans who do not submit to Jesus will be destroyed, and the planet itself will be annihilated. How delicious the vindication for the Cristo-fascist psyche! Not only will people who reject their Jesus be grotesquely punished, but their God will prove himself more powerful than the very planet on which they live. Obviously, no need here to worry about global warming—at least the kind created by humans. God will incinerate the earth--his own instantaneous global warming, triumphing over all enemies of both himself and the Christian fascists. As Hedges notes, these fantasies of monstrous cruelty are appealing to many within the Christian-fascist movement because "The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage."[2] And if any group of people on earth is enraged, it is the Cristo-fascists whose rancor is every bit as caustic and virulent as that of any Islamist fundamentalist on a suicide mission. 2) One reason Hedges labels these individuals fascist has not only to do with their positioning themselves on the political right, but specifically, their fanatical insistence on submission to theocratic government. Had George Orwell been a born-again Christian, twenty-first century Cristo-fascists would probably declare him a saint. (War is holy, and killing is sacred.) Their preferred polity is biblical totalitarianism in which the principles embraced by secular society are perceived as untrue and antithetical to their God and his Word. Unquestioning obedience to fundamentalist Christian theology and its resultant theocracy are the cornerstones of Cristo-fascism in twenty-first century America. 3) As a result, adherents are diametrically opposed to a secular world view and the tenets of modern science. As I have commented in other articles[3] in recent years, fundamentalist Christianity generally distrusts, and often despises human reason. Millions of children in America are being home-schooled, and 75% of them are children from fundamentalist Christian homes.[4] Home-schooling can offer an extraordinary alternative to attending public school, but for fundamentalist Christians, it serves, among other things, to shield their children not only from grappling with such issues as evolution and global warming, but learning the scientific method itself and the basic principles of critical thinking and logical analysis. 4)Cristo-fascism is overwhelmingly a white Anglo-American movement. While one sees growing numbers of African Americans and Hispanics joining their ranks, the movement remains predominantly white and rabidly Islamophobic. Most outspoken on this issue is San Antonio’s megachurch pastor, John Hagee, who perceives Islam as the new Satan which must be destroyed by Israel and the United States. 5) While Christian fascism cannot give enough lip service to the "culture of life" it is morbidly death-obsessed in its raging support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and capital punishment. The popularity of the grisly, sado-masochistic "The Passion Of The Christ" among fundamentalist Christians, as well as the Jesus Camp’s indoctrination of children to be willing and proud to "die for Jesus" further belie Cristo-fascism’s death fetish. 6) A new Christian Gestapo is in the works as the Christian right is working vehemently to take control of military chaplaincies and create in Hedges words, "America’s Holy Warriors." He points out that during the last century communist and fascist movements each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law. The frightening popularity and proliferation of the private security firm, Blackwater, founded by a mega-millionaire right-wing Christian, Erik Prince, has not only become a giant mercenary force in Iraq, but was heavily used in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Increasingly, Cristo-fascists are becoming more blatant about their wish to force conversion to Christ through the barrel of a gun. A typical image of this concept, dripping with testosterone, may be viewed at the website of Force Ministries. Just this week, conservative theologian, Doug Giles, appeared on Fox News arguing that Christian males should be tougher because "Jesus wasn’t a bearded lady". Christians, he said, should stop raising nice boys and raise warriors who can fight terrorism. In answer to the question of what is to be done, I would assert as I usually do: Knowledge is power. Fundamentalist Christianity is inherently delusional. One cannot reason with its adherents nor influence them with facts. What one can do is understand first of all that the United States has become a fascist empire. If one takes seriously Mussolini’s definition of fascism, "the corporate state", then this nation was well on its way even before the ascendancy of the Bush II administration and September 11, 2001. Furthermore, it is time for those who consider themselves politically progressive to stop "tolerating" Cristo-fascists. Certainly, these individuals have every right to believe whatever they choose to believe, but when one comprehends the inherently fascist nature of both their religion and their politics, one must necessarily confront not only their ghastly disregard for separation of church and state, but their implacable commitment to engineering a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in the United States. The exponential growth of the Cristo-fascist movement in the past six years is yet another symptom of empire and a somnambulant society in the throes of collapse. Whether or not one embraces Christianity or any religion, for that matter, it is instructive to engage in reality-checking the actual teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, and specifically, the gospels and other sacred writings which were excluded from the bible in the fourth century for political and socio-economic reasons in order to streamline Constantine’s hierarchical, imperial, Christian regime—the world’s first but not last, Christian theocracy. With that in mind, I highly recommend The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. is author of a forthcoming book, COMING OUT FROM CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM: Affirming Life, Love and The Sacred. Her recent book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You is available at her website: www.carolynbaker.org.

Original article posted here.