Category Archives: conservatism

Big Stupid

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Timothy Noah on neoconservatives:

To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. “Truly Hitlerian,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, opined that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers “misread our system as one that’s weak, that can’t take casualties. … Hitler made that mistake.” Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, said of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last spring, “Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system.” In the same month, the defense analyst Richard Perle mused on whether it had been “a correct reading” of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “to believe that business could be done with him that would produce a result? I don’t think so. These are the difficult decisions. Diplomacy with Hitler. Chamberlain went to Munich, presumably on the theory that you talk to your enemies and not to your friends, and what did it produce?”

Just about the only place the neoconservative movement can’t locate Hitler is Nazi Germany. As late as 1944, the founding-neocon-to-be, Irving Kristol, publicly dismissed the “near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger,” Jacob Heilbrunn reports in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.” While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 24-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.”

Questions

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There is so much good commentary floating around, and so many thoughts in my head, I hardly know where to start. So I’ll just jump in with a list of still-unanswered questions.

Is Barack Obama for real? He makes a good speech, but his record as a junior senator from Illinois is not all that inspiring. Even so, Charles Peters writes in today’s Washington Post that he accomplished remarkable things in the Illinois legislature.

Is George Bush relevant? Dan Froomkin writes,

In his 30-minute Reuters interview, Bush also explained his strategy to remain relevant in the coming year, as attention shifts to the question of who will succeed him. The strategy involves making sure Republicans in Congress don’t break ranks. (See my Dec. 13 column, Congress Goes Belly Up.)

Said Bush: “[M]y challenge is to remind the American people that while they’re paying attention to these primaries there is a President actively engaged solving problems. …”

Yeah, he figured out how to change the light bulb in his desk lamp.

Has Ann Coulter flown home to Planet Ogle-TR-56b? Her web page today as of 2 pm features a rerun of her infamous Kwanzaa column. Nothing about current political news.

Who’s in denial? Michael Gerson says Democrats are in denial because they want to undo all of George Bush’s popular and successful policies. Um, who’s in denial, Mr. Gerson?

Will the real next Ronald Reagan please stand up (and then sit down)? All of the GOP candidates claim to be the next Ronald Reagan. One says he will cut taxes just like Ronald Reagan did (before he raised them). Another says he will stand up to foreign enemies, real and imaginary, just like Ronald Reagan did. But John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin write at The Politico:

Huckabee’s message will be the most unorthodox, at least as the Bush-era GOP goes.

He’ll use class-based rhetoric to reach out to disaffected members of his party and those “Reagan Democrats” who are socially conservative but economically more populist. But his lynchpin is social issues — Huckabee’s success will validate the role of Christian conservatives in the GOP tent.

Certainly a lot of Reagan’s initial appeal was that he played the role of Wyatt Earp, riding into town and cleaning up the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The part Reagan actually played in that sorry episode is another matter entirely. But the Reagan mythos and the Reagan reality never did live in the same neighborhood. The myth is that his tax cuts brought about the best economy the nation ever saw and that he single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union. The truth is that he raised taxes as much as he cut them, his economy was based mostly on a housing bubble, and the Soviet Union brought itself down, more or less, after Reagan had left office.

Reading what Harris and Martin wrote, it struck me that Reagan’s appeal really never was about what he accomplished in office — his record overall was not bad, but not outstanding either — but about his persona. He was very good at playing the role of POTUS. His genius was in reading the public mood and giving the people the performance they wanted at the moment. And white working-class Americans embraced him as their friend and champion, even though (based on his record) he really wasn’t. He communicated to them that he understood — and thereby validated — their fears and their anger and their biases. He reached out to the disaffected.

That’s not a role Mitt Romney can ever play, no matter how many taxes he promises to cut.

Huckabee has stumbled badly in the foreign policy area, true, but other than bringing their sons and daughters home from Iraq I don’t know if most working-class Americans give a bleep about foreign policy at the moment. And, yes, the Republican establishment hates him because of the populism angle. Even suggesting that government might be put to use to make life more fair and secure for average Americans is the blackest of heresies among the GOP elite.

But Molly Ivors writes at Whiskey Fire that evangelicalism has become the refuge of the disaffected.

Religion, specifically the evangelical religion which replaces all sorts of community and cultural structures, has a pretty clear appeal for a lot of people who see in it an answer. Our own brilliant chicago dyke, who posts at corrente, once explained how this works:

    … Republicans have spent the last 25 years doing away with all the things that once made America a great place for the working class: decent public education, secure manufacturing and farm jobs, responsible government that meets the basic needs of the people, a critical media that calls out politicians who don’t, and balanced public political and social discourse that addresses the concerns of the little guy. These things are effectively dead in rural America today, and if you’re in Kansas or upstate Wisconsin or delta Mississippi, times are tough, and have been for a long time. I grew up in the country, and I cringe every time I go back, to see just how poorly a lot of folks are doing these days. The problem is that for many, they don’t even really know that once, life in rural working class America was much, much better.

The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Evangelicalism and civic life have been wound up together for generations in most Bible Belt communities, but I agree something seems different now. And I also think that what Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh and Rich Lowry never understood is that working-class Americans never really took their corporatist/imperialist brand of conservatism to heart. All along, they were just looking for a leader who could understand and validate their fears and anger and biases.

Thus, I think it can be argued that Huckabee is filling that part of the Ronald Reagan role better than anyone else at the moment, and that’s why he won in Iowa.

The question is, how much of the electorate is still looking for the next Ronald Reagan?

Strangleholds

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Michael Tomasky at the Guardian and Paul Krugman at the New York Times both point to the same phenomenon within the GOP — that the Republican presidential candidates are nearly all promising to continue George Bush’s policies, even though the public hates those policies.

Krugman writes,

All in all, it’s an economic and political environment in which you’d expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration’s economic policies and record — say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

And Tomasky writes,

It’s pretty astonishing, really – we’re at the tail end of a failed presidency, and the people running to succeed it are promising to continue its failed policies.

Now, many observers would say, well, they’re just pandering to their party’s rightwing base, and once one of them secures the nomination, he will tack to the centre. Undoubtedly, he will, for tactical reasons. But the real question is how the next Republican will govern should he happen to win. And the answer to that question is that there’s every reason to assume that he will be just as a conservative as Bush for one simple reason: the interest groups that run the GOP will not brook much deviation from the standard line.

Those interest groups are three. The neocons run foreign policy – the Iraq disaster has not affected their influence in the GOP one whit. The theocons run social policy. And the radical anti-taxers run domestic policy. Until forces inside the GOP rise up to challenge these interests, any Republican administration will be roughly as conservative as Bush. The candidates have slightly different theories of stasis, they will tinker around this edge or that, but that’s about all you can say.

Both Tomasky and Krugman point to John McCain as someone who has utterly sold out. Krugman writes,

Mr. McCain’s lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war — which Mr. McCain fervently supports — and with income inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he’s become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That’s an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren’t offset by spending cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here — if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be offset? — even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the time shows that he’s trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it’s better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn’t always a rock-solid economic conservative.

(See also “McCain’s Unlikely Ties to K Street.” The boy has utterly sold out every principle he ever had. He stood up to torture but not to the GOP Powers That Be.)

Tomasky:

And yet, by and large, the Republican candidates are running on exactly the same policies that Bush has pursued. Consider this list. All the major Republican candidates want to “stay the course” in Iraq, denouncing any discussion of withdrawal as evidence of pusillanimity. All see the fight against terrorism in more or less Bushian terms. All want to make the Bush tax cuts, now scheduled to sunset in 2010, permanent – even John McCain, who at the time voted against them. All have promised the leaders of the Christian right that they will appoint supreme court judges “in the mould of” Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

What this euphemistic language means is that whatever a candidate’s previous positions on abortion and gay rights – Rudy Giuliani, for instance, has supported both – the leaders of the religious conservative movement have exacted commitments from all the Grand Old Party candidates to appoint the kind of judges they want, and that matters far more than past positions.

There’s more. Healthcare is a priority in this election. But to hear these Republicans, you’d never know it. Their healthcare plans range from cynical to inadequate. Climate change? They barely acknowledge the problem and are particularly loath to acknowledge that human activity has contributed to it. They continue to insist, as Republicans since Ronald Reagan have, that the only real domestic enemy the American people face is the federal government, which they continue to want to starve.

Of course, the GOP candidates are not coming out and saying they are going to continue George Bush’s policies. From what I’ve seen (from a distance, here in New York), they are pretending George Bush doesn’t exist. But they’re singing the same old song Republicans have been singing since Reagan — cut taxes, shrink government, love God, hate minorities, and kick foreign ass.

These viewpoints long have been sponsored by the Moneyed Elite, who have used their vast media infrastructure to persuade un-elite Americans that these are the opinions they should have, too. And they’ve gotten away with this for a long time. But E.J. Dionne says there’s a different wind blowing in Iowa:

Us-vs.-them economic rhetoric is often said to be out of date, impractical, even dangerous. But in the closing days of a very tight race, Edwards has his opponents, particularly Barack Obama, scrambling to make sure a trial lawyer from North Carolina does not corner the market on populism.

Obama is vying with Edwards for the non-Clinton vote, and the Illinois senator was on the air yesterday with an Edwards-like television ad assailing the flow of American jobs abroad. Obama spoke last week of “Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart.” He had heard from seniors “who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can’t afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price.”

Even Hillary Clinton, whose discourse is typically longer on policy details than egalitarian wrath, told an appreciative crowd in Story City last week that the “interests of working middle-class families” had been “subordinated to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected” and that the Bush administration acted on the mortgage crisis “only after Wall Street began to feel the credit crunch.” She promised to “end the student loan industry’s scams, which have ripped off families” and condemned “no-bid contracts,” “cronyism” and “corruption.”

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation’s economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who “took risks” and “created wealth.” This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like “the guy in Orange City.” There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

Of course, the majority of the punditocracy, especially the ones who are incessantly on television, will not notice this trend. They will continue to insist the American people want tax cuts more than they want health care, and if economic populism does determine the outcome of the 2008 elections, the bobbleheads will be caught totally off guard. And then they’ll come up with a reason why the elections weren’t really determined by economic populism. Just watch.

What is harder to predict is what will happen to the GOP if it loses the White House and more seats in Congress by a decisive margin in November. In a normal world, such a defeat would cause a massive re-alignment of power within the Republican Party, allowing “moderate” (i.e., possibly not crazy) Republicans to come to the forefront and take over party leadership. But the Moneyed Elite will still own the party, so it’s possible that can’t happen no matter what.

A Conspiracy So Immense

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Tim Weiner writes in tomorrow’s New York Times,

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said. …

… Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

There is no evidence suggesting that President Truman approved any part of this proposal.

Reaction from the Power Tools was predictable: “Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000–but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.”

I feel nostalgic for a time when shredding the Bill of Rights was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.

Regarding the 12,000 — from 1950 to 1953 J. Edgar Hoover leaked copious amounts of information and names to Sen. Joe McCarthy, who then “investigated” and held “hearings” in which he bullied and smeared his targets. McCarthy’s sidekick, the infamous Roy Cohn, also had contacts in the bureau, who gave him access to confidential FBI reports.

Much of what [McCarthy] got came directly from the FBI, which had a habit of leaking information to favored politicians. Not only was Joe friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but several of his aides had either worked for the Bureau or built up good contacts there. Roy Cohn, for example, was very close with Lou Nichols, the assistant director. One source said that Cohn knew

    … all about FBI lists of supect Communists and has a fantastic memory for the names and backgrounds of practically all the important ex-Communists in the country. My friend has frequently been with Cohn when he picks up the phone, calls the FBI and demands to know the whereabouts of some ex-Communist or suspect Communist. Within a half hour or so the Bureau will call him back and give him the name of the special agent who is riding herd on the particular individual and Cohn will shortly thereafter get a call from the agent.

Despite his repeated denials, Cohn also had access to confidential FBI reports. One agent revealed that his colleagues “put in long hours poring over Bureau security files, abstracting them for Roy Cohn.” And Ruth Watt, chief clerk of the Government Operations Committee [chaired by McCarthy], recalled that “we had a lot of FBI reports because we could get them, you see.” Watt added that “Roy and J. Edgar Hoover knew each other pretty well, so it was not too difficult to get these things.” [David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy [Free Press, 1983], p. 257]

One suspects that if J. Edgar Hoover were seriously concerned about these 12,000 people, then information on at least some of them ended up with McCarthy and Cohn. And McCarthy and Cohn held investigations and hearings pretty much nonstop until the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. But not one of McCarthy’s investigations resulted in a conviction of espionage. And none of the many charges McCarthy brought against individuals were ever proved, even by the release of the Venona files. So it’s a good bet that the bulk of those 12,000 people that Hoover wanted to detain permanently were innocent.

Thinking

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Yesterday, Paul Krugman made the connection between the subprime lending crisis and Ayn Rand cultism.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

Randians have a remarkable capacity not to notice that we human beings very often do things contrary to our own self-interest. It would be to our own self-interest, for example, not to commit crimes of any sort, as we’re likely to get caught eventually. It would be to our own self-interest not to smoke or use drugs or eat too much trans fats. The fact is, if we all acted according to our own self-interest the world would be a paradise. Alas, the number of human beings on the planet today who truly and only act in their own self-interest is probably in the dozens. The rest of us are busily self-destructing, one way or another. This is what’s called “human nature.”

Krugman continues,

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Generations of real-world experience says that securities and markets need some kind of regulation to keep them honest or the forces of greed will take over and tear them apart. We saw this in the late 19th century during the age of the Robber Barons. We saw this in the Coolidge Administration. We saw it during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s.

Yet Rand culties and other wingnuts simply will not learn from real-world experience. They cling to their ideologies come hell or high water. The Narrative is their only truth.

For example, Michael Barone writes,

… the preference for smaller rather than larger government is not as ample as it used to be. The strongest case against big government has been its failures in the 1970s, typified by gas lines and stagflation. But the median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1964, so he or she never sat in those gas lines or struggled to pay rising bills with a paycheck eroded by inflation. That demographic factor helps explain why Democrats today are promising big-government programs, unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, when the median-age voter remembered the 1970s very well. …

… Republicans, facing an electorate half of which doesn’t remember the 1970s and most of which has not appreciated the generally good economy we’ve had since 2001, have yet to muster persuasive arguments for their policies.

Barone’s thinking is so sloppy one wonders if he can tie his own shoes. He blithely connects “big government” to 1970s gas lines and “stagflation,” but OPEC caused the gas lines and I see no consensus that “big government” — whatever that means — caused stagflation.

On the other hand, all those median-age voters probably do remember the country was a lot better off before the wingnuts took over.

I find myself speculating if right-wing polemicists like Barone are deliberately being deceptive, or if they are functioning on autopilot and never honestly stop to think through, say, what the connection between “big government” and 1970s gas lines might have been. If the latter is true, shouldn’t we be rounding these people up for further study? How exactly does the wingnut brain work? How can a man be bright enough to graduate from law school and still be utterly unable to think?

The Parameters of Religion

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I want to go back to what Charles “The Turtle” Krauthammer wrote here:

A certain kind of liberal argues that having a religious underpinning for any public policy is disqualifying because it is an imposition of religion on others. Thus, if your opposition to embryonic stem cell research comes from a religious belief in the ensoulment of life at conception, you’re somehow violating the separation of church and state by making other people bend to your religion.

This is absurd. Abolitionism, civil rights, temperance, opposition to the death penalty — a host of policies, even political movements, have been rooted for many people in religious teaching or interpretation. It’s ridiculous to say that therefore abolitionism, civil rights, etc., constitute an imposition of religion on others.

In the face of Mike Huckabee’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination, Krauthammer and other conservatives today are fine-tuning their ideas about church and state. Why is Huckabee’s religiosity objectionable, if Ralph Reed’s or Pat Robertson’s was not? Why was it OK, four years ago, to slam Howard Dean for his obvious discomfort with God talk and now say, as Krauthammer does in the op ed linked above, that a person’s religious beliefs are “None of your damn business”?

Well, we know why, so let’s move on.

Typically, Krauthammer refuses to engage with liberals in honest argument; he distorts our point of view so he can bash it. The examples he gives — abolitionism, civil rights, temperance, opposition to the death penalty — all had or have civil underpinnings as well as religious ones. Yes, even temperance. Temperance literature certainly was laced with reference to God, but public support for Prohibition grew after many decades of popular news stories and lithographs picturing drunken men neglecting or abusing their wives and children.

As for civil rights — Krauthammer, let’s consider the word civil in this context, an adjective meaning “Of or relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state.” A civil issue by definition has more to do with man and government than with man and God. Christians may believe that civil rights are endowed by God (which, if so, makes me wonder why it took Him until the 18th century to start endowing), but atheists can support civil rights with the same passion as any “person of faith.” In the U.S. the protection of the civil rights of citizens is basic constitutional law.

On the other hand, objections to embryonic stem cell research are entirely religious; I can think of no civil reason for banning such research. Thus, if your opposition to embryonic stem cell research comes from a religious belief in the ensoulment of life at conception, and you manage to impose a ban on such research by law, you are violating the separation of church and state by making other people bend to your religion.

Abolition of slavery gives us a more interesting example. In the antebellum U.S., persons on all sides of the slavery issue claimed biblical authority for their positions. The Southern Baptist Convention came into being in 1845 because of a split with northern Baptists over the issue of slavery. At the same time, many of the leaders of the abolitionist movement were Christian ministers. They were all reading the same Bible, but with different eyes.

I’m sure no end of Ph.D. dissertations have been written about the social differences that caused this schism. An obvious difference was an economic one. The antibellum South was, to a large extent, a plutocracy run by plantation owners. Although they were a minority of the white population, the plantation class hoarded most of the South’s wealth and, thereby, determined which clergymen had public influence, not to mention comfortable parsonages. I’m not saying that the Southern Baptists consciously betrayed their religion for the sake of the economic status quo. Rather, the economic status quo shaped their values and affected the way they understood scripture.

And this takes us to an often unrecognized truth about religious doctrine — much of what passes for religious doctrine started out as plain ol’ cultural values and mores. If you look at the history of the major religions, most of them have changed considerably over time. Often, when a religion establishes itself in new territory, within a couple of generations many of the values and even the folklore of that territory will have been absorbed into the religion. For example, when a new religion moves into a paternalistic society, soon enough paternalism will be hardwired into that religion even if it hadn’t been particularly paternalistic before. This happens because new generations of priests assume their culturally conditioned biases are the will of God.

And as cultural values change, religion changes with it. The abortion issue is an excellent example. The Bible says nothing whatsoever about abortion, even though we know it was widely practiced in biblical times. Some biblical passages seem to support the view that a fetus is fully human, but this may be the result of sloppy translating. The Catholic Church has changed its collective mind several times on the issue of abortion. Very generally, the Vatican was reasonably tolerant of abortion until the late 19th century. Similar shifts took place in conservative Protestantism, although I think somewhat later.

Yet for the past several years Americans have been beaten over the head with the claim that THE religious view of abortion is that it is FORBIDDEN BY GOD, and only dirty evil compromised secularist liberals don’t understand this. We hear this even though Judaism is, generally, pro-choice, as are many Protestant denominations. Many Catholics and conservative evangelicals are so obsessed with abortion you’d think no other transgressions matter. Only 150 years ago abortion was widely practiced yet didn’t raise nearly as much fuss.

Obviously, some sort of social-cultural shift took place that caused conservative Christians, especially in the United States, to become obsessed with abortion.

You could argue that a similar shift caused people in the 17th and 18th centuries to turn against slavery and toward an ideal of individual liberty. Some like to think that this shift, also, is a gift from God. Again, one wonders why He was so stingy with the generations that went before. However it came about, this change in values has had a demonstrably beneficial effect on civilization and the quality of life of millions. Thus, defense of liberty doesn’t rest on religious arguments.

But the results of the criminalization of abortion are not so beneficial. Those pushing for criminalization manufacture civil reasons, such as claims that abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn’t). They imagine that women suffer emotional damage after abortion, a condition they call Post-Abortion Syndrome that, by any objective measure, does not exist. Yet I have no doubt most of the criminalizers sincerely believe they are doing God’s will. This is fanaticism, pure and simple, not religion (click here for an explanation of the difference).

Let’s take the discussion to another level. Immanuel Kant argued that reason rests in part on what he called an “architectonic” order of the mind that organizes what we experience and in time and space. Whatever “architectonic” order we have in our heads effects how we understand our experiences, ourselves, everything. I think ol’ Kant was on to something here. I argue here that much of the objection to abortion is based less on religion doctrine than on particular architectonic notions defining selfness. If your head is organized in a different way, much of the criminalizers’ arguments — including “life begins at conception” — make no sense.

Where I’m going with this is that the line between “civil” and “religious” underpinnings is much fuzzier than Charles Krauthammer imagines. Many, if not most, religious doctrines are nothing but values arising out of society that have somehow, by accident of circumstance and history, become embedded in organized religion. And these values are no more or less likely to be beneficial to mankind than those values that have not become embedded in organized religion.

As a religious person myself, I appreciate how one’s religion does affect one’s opinions and outlook. Religion becomes a critical part of how our brains organize and interpret experience. Most of my political opinions have some kind of religious underpinning. On the other hand, I can respect a politician who says, as John Kennedy did, that he would not allow his church to dictate public policy. And for many of us, religion is a personal journey, not a global crusade. I think most religious people appreciate that, whatever our private thoughts, a public policy must have a clearly defined, measurable civic benefit.

This has been the argument of most of us liberals all along, and for this we were told we were “hostile” to religion.

Now many right wingers are frantically backpedaling. They don’t heart Huckabee. As Kevin Drum says, the high priests of mainstream conservatism are unglued. Suddenly they want to reclaim some separation between church and state. Don’t expect ’em to admit we were right, but some are starting to sound like us liberal religion haters. Heh.

Christian Nation

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I’m watching “Hardball” on MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow just said Republican candidates had called the United States a “Christian Nation.” Chris Matthews called her on this, expressing skepticism that any candidate had used that exact phrase. Put on the spot, Rachel could not name a time, date, place in which a particular candidate had called the U.S. a “Christian nation.”

But I’m sitting here with all the Web at my fingertips, so I could look it up. Here’s one –

John McCain: “I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

That’s a direct quote.

Even better — Linda Caillouet writes for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night.

“The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity,” he said. “And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior.” …

… Huckabee told the pastors gathered in the Salt Palace Convention Center that while the March 1, 1997, tornadoes which struck Arkansas were tragic, at least the devastation could be clearly seen from a helicopter. In contrast, he said, the catalysts for the nation’s recent school shootings — including the one March 24 near Jonesboro that left four students and a teacher dead and 10 others wounded — were harder to see but were driven by “the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God.”

I doubt there is any other nation on earth whose citizens get reminded of God with more regularity than this one.

“Government knows it does not have the answer, but it’s arrogant and acts as though it does,” Huckabee said. “Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed.”

The shootings were just one more wake-up call to the nation, he said.

“I fear we will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours.”

Um, for whatever reason, the U.S. has enjoyed random mass violence since its inception. I can’t say that, on the whole, we are more given to random mass violence than we’ve ever been. But the Rev. Mr. Huckabee has a new book out called Kids Who Kill: Confronting our Culture of Violence. According to one review at Amazon.com,

Tumescent with quotes and references to support every idea propounded, the authors rely almost exclusively on conservative voices from William Bennett to Alan Keyes to Michael Medved. Few open-minded people could serious question the knowledge of these sources, but their pandemic citings and the under-representation of liberal mover and shakers (and there a few who advocate such common sense values) may turn off those who ideology blinds them to the sapience of conservatives.

I know you’re all going to rush out and buy the book. Back to the Reverend:

“I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

He compared his entry into politics to “getting inside the dragon’s belly,” adding, “There’s not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what’s done when Jesus touches the lives of a sinner.”

The most basic unit of government is not the city council, quorum court or state legislature, Huckabee said. “It is Mom and Dad raising kids and teaching them respect for authority, others and God.”

The nation has descended gradually into crisis, Huckabee said, and repairing the damage needs to be gradual, too. He said the solution is simple: faith in Christ.

Yes, we know how well that works.

Update: More Christian nationalism.

Update 2: Pastor Dan begins a series on theological questions to ask the candidates. I’ll get excited when there’s a candidate who can explicate the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta.