The Republican corporate agenda is a serious threat to society.
February 15, 2015
Woe to the American president who says anything sensible on the
subject of religion. President Obama forgot that unwritten rule recently
at the National Prayer Breakfast when he pointed out what an
eighth-grader could tell you: that acts of violence have been committed
in the name of many faiths, not just Islam:
“Lest we
get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,
remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed
terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and
Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. … So this is
not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a
sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
Cue
Christian right fake freakout. The holy rollers, naturally, seized the
opportunity to present themselves as persecuted patriots defending
America’s regular folk against godless liberal elites. They came
charging out of the gate, sending blast after blast of ridiculousness
across the media. Catholic League president Bill Donohue
retorted that the Inquisition “only” piled up 1,394 bodies, while Rush Limbaugh
professed
Jim Crow to be something that is “not around today … a thousand years
ago, yeah. But not today.” On Fox & Friends, Catholic priest
Jonathan Morris warned viewers of a rising “Christianphobia,” a
pernicious “hatred of Christians is on the rise in America.” Past and
current Republican presidential candidates including Rick Santorum, Rudy
Giuliani, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee hustled to outdo each other
in their faux outrage,
accusing the president of supporting only Muslims and setting himself against everything Christians stand for.
The paroxysm of pandering culminated with a guest appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” by Christian conservative Star Parker, who
declared
herself so violated by the President’s reference to the obvious she
pronounced his remarks “verbal rape.” Star commented: “We were not
expecting it, nobody wanted it, it was horrible to sit through, and
after it was over we all felt like crap.” She went on to claim that
Obama was sending a message to Muslim terrorists to “keep doing what
you’re doing over there in the Middle East.”
America’s Christian
right has a long history of demonstrating its devotion to fanaticism,
extravagance and folly, but since the Reagan era, these tendencies have
been deployed very effectively by politicians who want to appeal to the
sensibilities and loyalties of ordinary Americans while picking their
pockets. That’s what this latest round of rabble-rousing is really all
about.
From talk radio and cable news pundits to reactionary
evangelical pastors, the holy rollers form strategic alliances with
politicians who back corporate power and wealthy individuals, working
overtime to whip their followers into a religious frenzy sufficient to
make them forget that their wages are falling and they will not be able
to afford to send their kids to college or to go to the doctor. As
Sophia Rosenfeld
once put it in the
Washington Post,
you've got to beware of Republicans bearing the common touch because
before you can bat an eye, they have stolen your retirement money and
shoveled more money toward the rich. Masking the elitism of their
economic policies and politics with fundamentalism in religion has been a
tried-and-true formula for the 1 percent to expand their power.
The god of the Christian right and the god of unregulated capitalism show themselves to be on intimate terms in the
philosophy
of evangelicals, like discredited pastor Ted Haggard, who was the
leader of the National Association of Evangelicals before he was forced
to resign amid a male prostitution/crystal meth scandal. For him,
free-market capitalism is “truth” and “globalization is merely a vehicle
for the spread of Christianity.” Getting Christianity and elite
economics together on the same page is useful in signaling that policies
that serve the rich are simply articles of faith, the dispute of which
is akin to arguing with a literal interpretation of the Bible.
But
there’s a little fly in this ointment that just won’t go away. Good
old-fashioned American common sense, as normally understood, has
something to do with fairness, and since the financial crisis, plenty of
people have woken up to the idea that something very unfair has been
happening under their noses, and a so-called recovery that’s basically
been a party for the rich but a bust for everybody else has not done
much to convince them otherwise.
Do financiers deserve to pay a
lower rate in taxes for their unearned income than hard-working
Americans who toil on the job all day? No, they don’t. That's just
old-fashioned folk wisdom. Does a person who has worked and contributed
to the community all her life deserve to live on peanuts in her golden
years? No, she doesn't. Common sense.
That’s why a few Republican
presidential hopefuls have started tentatively trying out messages that
sound like they care about economic fairness as they parade their godly
credentials.
Recently in Iowa,
Chris Christie lamented the plight of the working class and Rick
Santorum declared that the Republican party should be the party of the
worker. Jeb Bush has been lately heard testing out messages about
helping a bereft middle class. Of course, they tend to talk about
inequality or “unfairness” as something the evil government has created,
a position the demonization of Obama only bolsters. But will it work?
After all, the hatred of redistribution is a core tenet of the GOP, as
is opposition to unions and taxing the rich more. Even raising the
minimum wage a few nickels is still anathema to the GOP: senators Rand
Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have all opposed the President's plan to
raise the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current $7.25, warning that
young people will lose jobs if employers are made to pay them enough to
purchase food and shelter.
The pivot to populism ought to be a
hard sell, but unfortunately, many liberals spend too much time trying
to deliver Republican-lite policies instead of tapping into real
economic common sense and advancing ideas that would restore some actual
fairness to life in America. As long as they are praying to the god
Mammon and seeking to do the bidding of their wealthy donors, they are
vulnerable to Republican populist appeals, as hollow as they may sound.
When Republicans deliver economic nonsense with a megadose of
megachurch, plenty of Americans are willing to swallow it.
Lynn Parramore is
contributing editor at AlterNet. She is cofounder of Recessionwire,
founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx:
Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her
Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU. Follow her on Twitter
@LynnParramore.
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