[Dialogue] Maybe Huck's not a rube at all!
KroegerD at aol.com
KroegerD at aol.com
Mon Dec 24 13:59:00 EST 2007
The Evangelical Rebellion
by Chris Hedges
The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic
shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right.
Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing
Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in
American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the
yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the
fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members
of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated
to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family
values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted
territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of
a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and
set the stage for a Christian fascism.
The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created fertile
ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the alarm bells. It is
scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary
Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits. Columnist
_George Will called_ (http://www.whittierdailynews.com/opinions/ci_7762832)
Huckabee’s populism “a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican
beliefs.” He wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core Republican
policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s
corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.”
National Review’s _Rich Lowry wrote _
(http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjJiZDBjZWFiNmFmY2M1NDg2ZjM1Y2YwZjdjNzliMDg=#more%20) that “like [Howard] Dean,
his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.”
Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show. “There’s a sense in
which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the
Republican Party,” he said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day
one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re serious.’
They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would
want to be a part of the discussion.”
George Bush is a happy stooge of his corporate handlers. He blithely enriches
the oligarchy, defends a war that is the worst foreign policy blunder in
American history and callously denies medical benefits to children. Huckabee is
different. He has tapped into the rage and fury of the working class,
dispossessed and abandoned by the mainstream Democrats and Republicans. And he
refuses to make the ideology of the Christian right, with its dark contempt for
democratic traditions and intolerance of nonbelievers, a handmaiden of the
corporate establishment. This makes him a much more lethal and radical political
force.
The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass movement in
American history. It has been controlled and led, until now, by those who submit to
the demands of the corporate state. But the grass roots are tired of being
taken for rubes. They are tired of candidates, like Bush or Bill Clinton, who
roll out the same clichés about working men and women every four years and
then spend their terms enriching their corporate backers. The majority of
American citizens have spent the last two decades watching their government
services and benefits vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching
as their communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It is their
kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old guard in the Christian right, the
Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits to deliver the votes of naive
followers to the corporatists, is a spent force. Huckabee’s Christian populism
represents the maturation of the movement. It signals the rise of a truly radical,
even revolutionary force in American politics, of which Huckabee may be one
of the tamer and less frightening examples.
Hints of Huckabee’s bizarre worldview seep out now and then. Bob Vander
Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, for example, when asked about his
candidate’s lack of foreign policy experience, _told MSNBC_
(http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2007/12/19/huckabee-iowa-manager-were-fighting-radical-
religion-islam%20) : “Well, I think Gov. Huckabee has a lot of resources
that he goes to on national security matters. Here’s a guy, a former pastor, who
understands a theological nature of this war as we’re fighting a radical
religion in Islam.”
Robert Novak noted that Huckabee held a fundraiser last week at the Houston
home of Dr. Steven Hotze. _As Novak wrote_
(http://www.unionleader.com/columns.aspx/Opinion?channel=fe1d0db2-6b0f-459a-ad33-e0ad5ae9d650%20) , Hotze is “a
leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement.”
Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or _Dominionist
_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominionism%20) branch of the Christian right.
The Dominionist movement, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the
Christian faith and American patriotism, is small in numbers but influential.
It departs from traditional evangelicalism. It seeks to redefine traditional
democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on
the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features
with classical fascist movements, at least as such movements are defined by
the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as “a form of political
behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or
victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in
which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy
but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic
liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal
restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to politicize
faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with
leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a
master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist
movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict each
other. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist
movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus
not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the
ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist
public language” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral
feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”
Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to
make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most American
fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following _the Scopes trial _
(http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAscopes.htm%20) has been replaced by a call for
Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the Earth
itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to actively build
the kingdom of God on Earth. America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an
agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s
Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian
dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which
the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, in which
creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the
media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions,
civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed
from the work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently
Christian will be denied citizenship.
Baptist minister Rick Scarborough, founder of _Vision America _
(http://www.visionamerica.us/site/PageServer%20) and a self-described “Christocrat,” who
attended the Texas fundraiser, has endorsed Huckabee. Scarborough, along with
holding other bizarre stances, opposes the HPV (human papillomavirus)
vaccine on grounds that it interferes with God’s punishment of sexual license. And
Huckabee, who once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public
and opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure, comes out of
this frightening mold. He justified his call to quarantine those with AIDS
because they could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”
“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the
AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this
plague,” Huckabee wrote. “It is difficult to understand the public policy
towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the
carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population,
and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated
as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”
Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but he remains
deeply hostile to gays. He has used wit and humor to deflect reporters from
his radical views about marriage, abortion, damnation, biblical law,
creationism and the holy war he believes we are fighting with Islam. But his stances
represent a huge step, should they ever become policy, toward a theocratic
state and the death of our open society. In the end, however, I do not blame
Huckabee or the tens of millions of hapless Christians-40 percent of the
Republican electorate-who hear his words and rejoice. I blame the corporate state,
those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working class, rape the
country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a political price.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly
two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “
_American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America._
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim) “
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