Secular Café: The (Republican) Party is Over

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The (Republican) Party is Over Aug 9th 2012, 23:24 GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party | Alternet Quote: In the new book, "The Party Is Over," veteran Republican Mike Lofgren writes about the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism and how the GOP devolved into anti-intellectual nuts. The following excerpt is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted," by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren. In effect, how the Republican Party became the party of Jefferson Davis. Mike Lofgren: Quote: Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP's main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. ML concedes that he did not notice what was going on until it was at full strength. He recalled such fundie kookiness as considering dinosaur fossils a hoax and wanting to go to Greece to convert the heathens there -- except that Greece has had a Xian sect as its official religion for over a millennium and a half. Quote: The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized the GOP's premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public debate. Like all the attention Mitt Romney has gotten for his Mormonism. He then gets into how Republicans and movement conservatives are willing to overlook the sins of someone who makes a big fuss about how they had become the appropriate sort of Xian. He considers a plutocrat-theocrat split unlikely, noting how willing the plutocrats have been to fund the theocrats, and how the theocrats have been willing to push prosperity theology. Quote: Rick Santorum did not blink at legislative schemes to pay off his campaign contributors: In 2005 he introduced a bill to forbid the National Weather Service from providing weather forecasts for free that commercial forecasters—like AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania- based company which had contributed to his campaign—wanted to charge for. The Tea Party, he notes, was essentially rebranded Republicans. He also notes that many right-wingers have a taste for concealing their more extreme positions until after they get elected. Seems like it's an interesting book. I'd like to see what he says about the Democrats.

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