[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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