Friday, December 12, 2008
GOP Confederacy
Movement Conservatism's scuttling of the auto bailout is both ideological (the "philosophy" of welfare for the rich, market discipline unto death for the rest) and opportunistic (deep pocketed anti-union foreign automakers in key Red States), but the result exacerbates what was already looking in the aftermath of Obama's crowbar to the Southern Strategy as a permanent marginalization of a contemporary GOP catastrophically beholden to its corporate-militarists and Christianist-theocratic base. If that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling, though, have a look at ongoing trainwreck of California State politics to see what kind of damage they can still manage to do under these circumstances.
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2 comments:
Are you talking about Prop 8, Dale? I'd hold the Mormons more to blame for that one than the GOP. In a way, the Mormons are bigger and scarier than the GOP, since their ambitions are not just worldly, they are theological and planetary in scope. Unlike the situation during the 19th-century scaremongering about Catholics being more loyal to the pope than they were to the country, the Mormons have shown that they are more loyal to their leaders than they are to the country.
Utah was rejected for membership in the union many times due to the Mormons--Congress had the right idea.
I really was talking about the GOP's crazy-ideological effort to scuttle the auto bailout and risk millions more job losses in a moment of major recession verging on total collapse just to stick it to organized labor, just as I said.
I disagree with you that Mormons are either bigger or scarier than the GOP -- if that were true, Romney would have gotten the GOP Presidential Nomination, surely? I think the GOP is quite as theological as the Mormons are (quite apart from the complication that many Republicans are also Mormon, and so on) -- although they do have the larger structural problem of representing an effectively pathologically unstable chimerical marriage of two fundamentalisms: a quasi-randroidal market fundamentalism and a Christianist theocratic fundamentalism, united in racist-inflected patriarchal rage and panic at the prospect of democratic equity and multicultural diversity.
I certainly don't think that being Mormon should be seen as disqualifying a person for democratic citizenship, any more than any other practice of faith.
It's true I'm not a religious person myself, but I am an aesthete and something of a pervert and these facts give me some insight and some appreciation of what it means to devote yourself to a path of private perfection at odds with the majority and with commonsense. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. Except to the extent that they are working to strip others of a say in the public decisions that affect them, people of faith should certainly have such a say themselves, however weird their beliefs look to me, and I'm quite willing to fight for that as ferociously as I fight for my own.
By the way, as far as I'm concerned, Mormonism isn't that different from Singularitarianism, Raelianism, or Scientology -- except that it has a jump on them, has more resources and members in consequence, and has flourished long enough to have grown a bit more resilient and supple in the vicissitudes of historical struggle. To this crusty atheist they all look like silly UFO Cults to me.
Still, I don't see Mormonism as more essentially incapable of grasping the force of secularization, that is to say the institutionalization of the private/public or church/state split which enables democratic politics than, say, Catholicism or Quakerism or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, so, you know, let a bazillion freaks and flowers bloom if you ask me, Mormons, hippies, geeks, puritans, whatever.
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