The Blue Voice

Sunday, April 16, 2006

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a godless subversive

Billmon links to the following news article: GOP Campaign to Focus on Flag Burning, Gay Marriage, Abortion FOX News/AP 04/16/06.

"It seems like for only six months, every two years — right around election time — that we're even noticed," said Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council.

"Some of these better pass," he added. "You notice when it's just lip service being paid."

Don't take complaints like that too much at face value. Hardcore rightwingers tend to keep on repeating their favorite slogans even after they've become obsolete. The Bush Republican Party embraces the Christian Right theocratic goals for real. They emphasize them more around election time for the sake of the base, sure. But the political backlash against the Terri Shiavo fiasco a year ago is a reminder that for voters outside the Republican base, the Christian Right's favorite issues tend to be as popular as the garlic booth at a vampires' convention.

Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer agreed that the effort matters.

"If they get to these things this summer, which we expect that they will, that will go a long way toward energizing the values voters at the base of the Republican Party," said Bauer, head of Americans United to Preserve Marriage.

Billmon has some good observations about some of the more troubling characteristics of the growing authoritiarianism of the Repubublican Party.

He's probably using the word "cult" a bit carelessly. But the phenomenon he points to is real, and it is an increasingly prominent feature of today Republican Party.

I don't know why this is. Maybe limited minds can only grasp a limited set of issues. Or maybe it's because so many things in the wide world just aren't moving as they are supposed to do in the conservative cosmology. But whatever the reason, the movement's growing obsession with relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things) issues like gay marriage, flag burning and cartoon Mohammads now borders on the pathological.

The most accurate way to describe it, I suppose, would be to say that the social conservative movement is developing the traditional characteristics of a cult, in which the semiotic symbols and concepts used in the outside world begin to take on very different and emotionally charged meanings to the initiated.

In other words, figuring out what the right is trying to say these days – and what agitates it so – is becoming more of an exercise in hermeneutics (if not psychiatry) than political science.

This is a characteristic of cults, that familiar phrases "take on very different and emotionally charged meanings to the initiated". This makes communication with outsiders even more difficult, because the cult member is interpreting words with strange or even bizarre meanings.

And we do see this is our contemporary politics. For instance, to most people "liberal" means something like "Democrats who support social security and believe in the power of government to accomplish things and are more likely to want higher taxes than Republicans".

But the bogeyman of Chrisitian fundamentalism for a over a century is what they call "liberal" theology. And "liberal" in that context means not just "wrong", but evil, Satanic, heretical, poisonous. Rush "Mr. OxyContin" Limbaugh and Mad Annie Coulter and others make a secular version of this by branding liberals as unpatriotic, treasonous and generally anti-American.

So where most people would regard a "liberal" as someone who is sympathetic to labor unions and civil rights, a movement conservative might well regard them literally as an enemy of God and someone who should be interned in a camp for enemies of America.

It can make for a lot of confusion. And a lot of meanness in political life.

posted at 1:29:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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