GOP eats itself
A seething brew among Republicans has come to a boil. The party may fall apart. “Everybody is basically pissed,” according to this account.
In fact the party has lost its lights. GOP leadership is shifting, undefined. And in the gloom there’s a rabid struggle for basics.
Republicans are profoundly divided. On one side, there’s a religious camp, people who are fervently principled. Their spiritual source is the distilled standards in the Bible, which cannot evolve – actually, it is backward-looking, into ancient times. Yes, this fundamentalist camp is anti-gay, anti-immigration, creationist, and prayerful.
On the other side, the other camp is everything modern: citified, cosmopolitan – wealthy centrists, lots of business people, who are everywhere willing to compromise in politics, just as compromise (bargain making) is a centerpiece of business. Their ‘book’- if you could call it that - is economics, Adam Smith’s book of self-centered acquisition. These folks are everywhere flexible, coiffed people, and writing forward-looking proposals and like that.
The fundamentalists hate that.
McCain looked like, sounded like, walked like a centrist. And now the fist camp has had it, is spitting teeth because McCain, as compromiser, diluted the party line to unrecognizable during his campaign. Interpretation: loss of soul, loss of strength.
Next, conservatives are by nature authoritarian. With Bush’s exit, the intolerable has happened: a strong-authority vacuum.
Now some brisk moves.
Weapons are being unsheathed and oiled for a streetfight. A righteous, Old Testament smack-up is coming, in which the religious ones will carve flesh from bone to take the party back from the market operators, the compromisers. Rush Limbaugh’s leading them, with his radio show. And lordy, is he pissed.
But it won’t work.
Listen. In America politics runs on money. But it’s the centrists who have the big money.
Concealed at the heart of this huge collision is a point rarely pursued on the radio: Religious fundamentalism is the natural enemy of capitalism.
All religions teach that materialism is a distraction from spiritual growth. (In Christianity the love of money is the root of evil.) It’s about purity of spirit and principle versus earthly pleasures. Truth versus decadent comfort - always has been.
And the other side, the centrists are mighty concerned, worried that this holy determination will lose them popularity – alienate voters.
That’s another concealed fold. See, religious fundamentalists don’t pay attention to the vote. Voting? Shove your votes. The Kingdom Of God is coming, and it is not a democracy.
This all looks interesting.
On the one side: God. On the other side: very big money.
Watch for damage.
11 Comments »
Leave a comment
— Archives below —
Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equality and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there was no center.
Ten years ago, the left reached crisis point.
It’s the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth.
Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich.
Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Look around – commercials even dominate left-wing blogs.
And in Congress, too. Too often, Democrats sit quietly, waiting for the lobbyists to call.
Sold out.
This President is new. But which way to turn?
No fallen flag to grab up. Well, what have Democrats been doing?
In Congress, the first order of business is the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the previous administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those have the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But that is not ‘forward.’
It looks like there is no unified ‘forward.’
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
Of course there’s leftist commentators. Talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whether exploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracy itself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here and here.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
[Comments: click on the title in the Header]
How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, deals out his thrashings on t.v.
Bill O’Reilly runs an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right. In this particular episode, Barney Frank is put through the meat grinder.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good should be enough to prevail.
Like all good theater, this domination is a performance. Watch the body language, and deconstruct how O’Reilly crafts drama with his arm-flinging in this YouTube.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
- here’s why.
Poll: foreign war
Left Blog
I feel completely betrayed by the republican party so I say let the religious right have the GOP. Its time for a party that consists of all the people disgusted by the (R)’s and the (D)’s and the people who don’t care what the answer is as long as its correct.
The bible clearly states that Lucifer was given dominion over this world. It has always been that way and the political machines of this world are completely run by the devil and his demons. The Holy Church has never preached politics from the pulpit and when the evangelicals started to, even though they were trying to do The Lord’s will, they were not following the teachings of Christ and were led astray.
“The first religion began when the first con man met the first fool.” Mark Twain
#1 John: Libertarians. Run the country how the founding documents tell us how it should be run.
#2 John M: you’re a fool and a religitard. Kill yourself now if you think everything’s already been decided. There is no god. Get over it and think for yourself instead.
To everyone else: the GOP is more than happy to have gotten away with what they’ve done to the country under the Bush regime: allowing fundmanetalist jyhadists enter the US and train as pilots, the Patriot act, the Military Commission Act, diving the country between two parties both of which have the same goal in mind: to suppress the public. Anything the GOP does now can’t even compare with how much they’ve gotten away with. And undoubtedly they’ll rise to power again because democrats are spineless and Americans are stupid and only care about their home team and, as John M pointed out, are ignorant enough to believe in fairy tales.
Read tinyurl.com/1mn to see how it’s not a war on (some) drugs, it’s a war on minorities to replace slave labor with prison labor. Alcohol is the most dangerous substance known to man because no other drug turns people into blubbering, belligerent, uncoordinated assholes.
Saddam was the ‘unpopular kid’ in the middle east and the rest of the area turned a blind eye when the bully, the US, invaded and had him executed *for 143 gassing deaths.* Even though Reagan SOLD him WMDs.
eat G.O.P, eat until your belly’s are full and your eyes droop with that sleepy feeling on thanksgiving day, then when you wake up and see that you have all eaten each other with the gluttony of the almighty dollar, then we can remake this country into a country that once again believes in shared sacrifice for the greater good of all mankind.
I have an idea: Why not just send everyone to Catholic school — grades 1-12. By senior year everyone will be sick and disgusted by religion that “values voters” wll be as scarce as honest Republicans.
The ‘centrists’ will flock to any party they feel can win an election. What do they care whether its religous nutbars or liberal nutbars, as long as they vote for the ‘centrists’ slate of candidates. Once the election is decided the ‘centrists’ can do whatever they want until the next election – ideology be damned. This is unlikely to ever change much – get used to it.
Sorry, but I don’t buy there being only two faces of the GOP. For one thing there’s a significant 3rd face your forgetting to mention. The Ron Paul republicans who want to return the GOP back to what it was at the founding, a fiscally conservative pro-Constitution party. They do not fall completely into either of the other two groups. They are fed up both with the religious right and the neo-cons that have highjacked the GOP and drove it off a cliff. If nothing changes I imagine that many of them will either run off to the Constitution or Libertarian Parties. If the GOP is run by Cheney supporters and the like it is finished.
Yes we all know the system is rigged and the bankers and Fed run the show so who cares about this old relic called the GOP the sooner it is gone the better.
I don’t think the left will like what takes it’s place, it will be nationalism. Contrary to what many say, most Americans are not centrists they are non political. Most Americans don’t vote. So the grass roots movement of Ron Paul and others will be what wins in the end, whoever mobilizes the non political into action…
This site is interesting in that it is blatantly a left wing site. I found it via a link on DU. All the articles are hard left yet when I answered the many polls, nearly everyone of them where strongly answered with conservative answers.
I suspect that many self-proclaimed left-wingers actually think in terms of “natural” conservatism and are not even aware of it. Being a lefty is cool. Hollywood is left, the media is left, acdemia is left. So it is cool to say that you are left and will probably increase your chance of getting laid. But at the end of the day, when you ask people how they think on particular issues, they are much more Right. as per the polls…
Jesus Christ was the biggest bleeding-heart LIBERAL Who ever walked the earth. Christians need to stop attacking Liberalism.
The Constitution and Jesus both supported separation of Church and State. Why do Christians get involved in politics? Hypocrittes. Something Jesus specifically loathed.