Musings of the Great Eric

A Washington Post columnist takes a look at how the Republicans became God’s Own Party:

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before — in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

Surprisingly enough (to some who know me) I’m not about to agree with this. The author talks about about the Republicans being an alignment of an oil-military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the Religious Right. While there’s no doubt that these are indeed three pillars of the modern Republican party, I don’t believe that these ideologies have fused in any serious way.

The Republican party is now (and has for quite a long time been) the party of old, rich white guys. This demographic has a rather narrowly defined set of interests which is by and large opposed to the interests of the rest of the nation. Obviously, being rich white guys, they had the money and the power to have a heavy influence in politics already, but in our wonderful system of checks and balances, even that will only take you so far. The challenge for these rich white guys was this: How do you get half the country to vote against their own self-interests?

To some extent, the answer lay in media manipulation and propoganda. We saw a number of well funded right wing think tanks emerge in the 60’s and 70’s that developed some of the Orwellian talking points of the modern Republican party, ie “Small government” and “personal responsibility”. But even that, by itself, wasn’t enough. What they needed was an army of single-issue voters, on an issue that wasn’t opposed to their plutocratic aims. This is why they started pitching to the religious right. (By the way, this isn’t an original idea, it’s basically a synopsis of Thomas Frank’s excellent What’s the Matter With Kansas)

And while modern Republicans are unquestionably aligned with these religious nutjobs, I believe it’s a marriage of convenience, not any merged ideology. Bush is a corporatist, his whole time in the White House has been marked by creating a socialist state for the wealthy, with only the occasional bone tossed to the relgious right. The author of the column notes that Middle East policy is seemingly fueled in part by the religious notion of the end times; but I think that’s simply the religionists seeing what they want to see in it - Bush’s motives are purely financial. That’s the predominant attitude of all the Republicans in power - they’ll go along with James Dobson when there’s no financial stake (think gay marriage, Terri Shiavo), but corporate interests will always, always come first.

The link between Republicans and the religious right exists only as they need each other to win, with the Republicans in power always doing just enough to keep that voter block. But it can only last until one half starts to perceive the other as a liability. And my gut says that it won’t last all that much longer, one or two more election cycles at best, given how things are going - both sides are overreaching, and both sides are going to come up against a backlash. My suspicion is that both sides will blame the other and then this alliance will fall apart, or at least weaken considerably.

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