Who's Sorry Now

There are a number of Republicans who don't like what they see. The latest is Kevin Phillips who predicted the Republican majority and the methods the Republicans would use to get there. Well he's seen it come to pass and he is having buyers remorse and doesn't like what he sees. Alan Brinkley explains in Clear and Present Dangers. While Phillips is upset about the budget deficit and the fact that US foreign policy is built entirely around oil hegemony but his major fear is the rise of the theocrats.

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.

As I reported below one aspect of the Republican strategy this fall will be to fire up the the American Taliban by introducing a number of socially divisive issues. The danger for the Republicans is that they will finally go too far for the libertarian Goldwater and Reagan Republicans. On the other hand if they don't pander to the Religious wingnuts they will lose them. They might not vote for Democrats but they might just return to not voting at all. They need both bases to win. Good luck.