It's the ideology, stupid | Main | The last day of the first half of my life
June 24, 2006
Where'd you go, Ohio?
"Some Might Call It Treason," Mark Crispin Miller (via gl):
The Democrats refuse to talk about election fraud because they cannot, will not, wrap their minds around the implications of what happened in 2004, and what is happening right now, and what will keep on happening until we, as a people, face the issue. In short, whatever clever-sounding rationales they may invoke (no doubt in all sincerity), the Democrats won't talk about election fraud because they're in denial, which is itself based on a lethal combination of inertia, self-interest and, above all -- or below all -- fear.
Such fear is understandable. For the problem here is not simply mechanical or technological, legal or bureaucratic, requiring that we merely tweak the rules and/or build a better mousetrap. Any such expedient will naturally depend on a consensus of "both sides" -- and there's the rub, because in this great clash the "other side" detests American democracy itself. The movement now in power is not conservative but radical, intent on an apocalyptic program that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, on which, lest we forget, this revolutionary secular republic was first founded. The movement frankly disbelieves in reason, and in all the other worldly goods that every rational American still takes for granted: pluralism, checks and balances, "the general welfare," freedom, progress, the pursuit of happiness. For this movement, condom use is worse than death by AIDS, however many millions the disease may kill; the ruination of the planet should be hastened, not prevented, as it means that He will be returning soon; the "war on terror" is a matter not of geopolitics but metaphysics, as our national enemy is "a guy named Satan"; homosexuals should not be citizens, the US having been conceived as a "Christian republic"; and -- most relevant to this debate -- the movement's adversaries, which means all the rest of us, are not human beings with divergent interests but literal "agents of Hell," demonic entities against which any tactic, however criminal or sinful, is permissible, because they are likely to use any tactic, regardless of its sinfulness or criminality, to force their evil program on the Righteous Ones.
Of course, that theocratic bloc does not comprise the whole Bush/Cheney movement, which, at the top, is heavily dominated too by frank neo-imperialists, corporate profiteers, careerist sociopaths and livid paranoids compelled by the intense self-hatred typical of such perennial types as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Revolution tends to work by unifying the energies, or bile, of only roughly complementary interests. This revolution certainly is no pure upsurge of religious fervor, for its plutocratic animus is just as powerful, apparently, as its crusade to "Christianize" the world. However, while it would be very foolish to ignore the movement's secular agenda (i.e., the avarice and power lust of Cheney/Rumsfeld and their corporate cronies), it is just as foolish to imagine that the movement's theocratic program is mere smoke, calculated just to daze the pious masses so that Congress and Wall Street can rob them blind.
This theocratic program is no secret, as the conquest of the GOP has been the top priority of US Christianist extremists since the early Nineties. It was their aim to put George W. Bush in office, and then to keep him there, despite the will of the electorate; and having done so, they have rapidly transformed our government into an instrument of their crusade. "George W. Bush is our agenda!" as the Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, boasted candidly to Salon's Michelle Goldberg a few years ago. He had every right to crow. The executive departments and top federal agencies are now in theocratic hands, and this government pursues no policy, foreign or domestic, that has not been devised or vetted by the party's theocratic apparat. The government now generously subsidizes many theocratic groups that proselytize explicitly, pushing both their own creed and the interests of the Bush Republicans. And now that Congress too is full of theocratic militants (who seem to have no strong opponents), the Supreme Court is just one seat away from an entrenched majority as frankly hostile to the church/state separation as it is to voting rights for all Americans.
The power and fury of the US theocratic movement have been amply documented by a range of keen observers, including Esther Kaplan, Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin Phillips, Stephenie Hendricks, Max Blumenthal, Frederick Carlson, Katherine Yurica, Michael Lerner and Salon's Michelle Goldberg, among others, as well as in my own books Cruel and Unusual and Fooled Again. The threat has also sounded strong alarms on solid Christian grounds, in writings by Jim Wallis, John Danforth, Jimmy Carter, Davidson Loehr, Rich Lang and Bruce Prescott. (Of course, the theocratic program is explicit also in the oratory and writings of the theocrats themselves.) It now remains for us to face the crucial fact that this regime's miraculous "re-election" in 2004 depended heavily on the countless block-the-vote activities of theocratic true believers, who did whatever they could do, from coast to coast, to cut the Kerry vote and pad the Bush vote. That effort was essential to the regime's inexplicable political success. Of all the interests collaborating in Bush/Cheney's drive against democracy, the theocrats alone have a grass-roots constituency -- not large enough, by any means, to sway elections honestly, but large enough, and fierce enough, and with sufficient funds and discipline, to help Bush/Cheney disenfranchise the majority. Although the corporations and the neo-cons wield awesome clout, they have no grass-roots muscle. The theocrats alone can claim that necessary asset, and it has given them enormous power.
It is a terrifying development -- although not insurmountable, unless we let ourselves be blinded and/or paralyzed by fear. Since the last Election Day, that terror has silenced nearly every sector of what ought to be the opposition, including most top Democrats, the press, a lot of principled conservatives -- and outlets like Salon. In his dogged effort to explain away the massive evidence of fraud by the Republicans, Manjoo has based his case not on the facts but, finally, on denial -- as he himself made very clear in his review of Fooled Again. "If you want to improve how Americans vote, here's one piece of advice," he wrote:
"Don't alienate half the country by arguing, as Miller does here, that the president and his followers -- whom Miller labels 'Busheviks' -- think of their political enemies as 'subhuman beings' and believe they must 'slaughter' their opponents in the same way that religious fanatics slaughter their holy foes. Even if you believe this to be true, and even if it is in fact true, shut up about it; this sort of unhinged rhetoric can't help, and can only hurt, our capacity to solve the problem of voting in America [emphasis added]."
That an American reporter would make such a statement, and that any liberal magazine would publish it, suggests how thoroughly we have repressed all memory of what America was once supposed to mean. "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816, in a spirit of scientific progress and republican self-liberation. "Even if it's true, shut up about it," Farhad Manjoo wrote in 2005, in the spirit of Bill O'Reilly.
As though we're ever going to make friends of that third (not "half") of the country with our virtuous moderation. When moderates--Democrat or Republican--lay down for the radical right, the radical right beats them over the head with a baseball bat, rolls them up in an old rug, and throws them off a cliff into the pounding surf below.
While we're at it, Rush Limbaugh stole that song from Chrissie Hynde (though eventually she made him pay PETA for it). It's time to steal it back.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.puddingbowl.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/2531
Comments
Great article.
It's tough to keep your cool when such simpleminded cretins are taking over.
Common sense died long ago, and this is the time of the tribulation.
Posted by: crallspace at June 24, 2006 11:14 AM