How the Lunatics Took Over The Republican Party

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal has a new book out that explains how the radical Christian right hijacked the Republican party - Republican Gomorrah.  I haven't read it yet but you can find a review over at BuzzFlash.com.

This is an explosive book that gets to the heart of the winger
psychoses. Max Blumenthal sees the inner truth that "many of the [right
wing] movement's leading figures are united by more than political
campaigns; they are bound together by a shared sensibility rooted in
private trauma. Their lives have been stained by crisis and scandal --
depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with
homosexual urges, attraction to drugs and pornography, serial domestic
abuse, and even murder."


And that's for starters.

"Inspired by the work of psychologist Erich Fromm, who analyzed how the
fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian
settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture
of personal crisis has defined the radical right."

Even better you can watch or read an interview with Blumenthal at Democracy Now. Here are a few snips from the interview.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, what I found riveting in your book was
the�most people associate the rise of the modern radical right in the
Republican Party with Barry Goldwater and the elections of 1964. But
you actually trace it much further back to a bunch of people that few
Americans have ever heard of: Francis Schaeffer or R.J. Rushdoony, R.H.
Ahmanson. Could you talk about these individuals and their enormous
impact on the current crop of radical right leaders?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, and I don�t want to go too far back in the past; I want to try to keep it present.

But I talk about R.J. Rushdoony, because this theologian, who�s
almost unheard of, influenced the Christian right and provided them
with their blueprint for what they saw as the promised land, which is a
actually theocratic dystopia. He advocated substituting theocracy for
the Constitution, wrote, you know, thousand-word tomes explaining how
this would work out during the 1960s, during the battles for
desegregation, and influenced people like Jerry Falwell. And, you know,
under Rushdoony�s plan, disobedient children, witches, blasphemers,
adulterers, abortion doctors would all be executed, according to, you
know, Leviticus case law. As extreme as it sounds, it had an enormous
impact on the right-wing evangelical movement as it moved from the pews
into the political realm, because it gave them something to campaign
for, even if what they were going to get was going to be more along the
lines of a Republican Gomorrah than what they saw as, you know, a
theocratic Canaan.

Francis Schaeffer is the guy who really gave them the tactics to
make this happen. During the �70s, people like Jerry Falwell were still
preoccupied with segregation. They were still upset that their
Christian schools had to accept African American children. And Francis
Schaeffer told them, �No, we have to campaign on abortion. Abortion is
the issue.�

Francis Schaeffer gave the religious right the tools in needed but he never felt comfortable with many of it's leaders.

The tragic part is that Francis Schaeffer despised so many of the
evangelical, you know, Southern Baptists who had converged around him.
He thought Pat Robertson was a pathological lunatic after Pat Robertson
told him at dinner, as I write in my book, that he burned a Modigliani
painting in his fireplace. He thought Jerry Falwell was a charlatan. He
thought James Dobson, who was studying him very closely, was power mad.
But at the same time, Francis Schaeffer was giving�creating tactics and
urging evangelicals to get out in the streets and fight even a violent
war to stop abortion. And he wound up inspiring the group Operation
Rescue, that�s responsible for the assassination of several abortion
doctors, including Dr. Tiller recently in Kansas.

But the central character in all of this was James Dobson.

Dobson is a fascinating figure, because although he�s leading what is
widely considered a religious movement, he�s not a religious leader. He
has no theological credentials. He�s not a preacher. What is he? He�s a
child psychologist. And the way that he�s won so many followers is by,
you know, doing radio shows about common, mundane problems, like
bedwetting, for example, or dealing with a child that has, you know,
issues with their sexuality, something like that. And he has a
correspondence department in Focus on the Family that�s so large it
occupies an entire zip code in Colorado Springs. People write in with
their personal problems. He sends them�his workers send them
Dobson-approved advice. After they get into the database that Dobson
maintains, he bombards them with political mailings and slowly
cultivates them into Republican shock troops. So Dobson has, you know,
turned personal crisis into political resentment.

Go watch or read the entire thing.

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