Robert Kuttner: How the Religious Right Has Taken Over the Republican Party
[Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.]
Anyone who has followed Max Blumenthal's investigative writings on the far right's takeover of the Republican Party should not have been surprised when John McCain added Sarah Palin to the 2008 ticket. His running mate had to appeal to the Republican base, and the Grand Old Party has now become entirely captive to its fundamentalist wing. Next time, it is inconceivable that a figure even as moderate as John McCain will get the Republican nomination....
You may not have heard of R.J. Rushdoony. He is a kind of American Talib, whose 1973 magnum opus, the 890-page The Institutes of Biblical Law called for literal application of all 613 laws described in the book of Leviticus, including as punishments flogging, slavery, sale into indentured servitude, and death by burning at the stake. Rushdoony also called for a Christian theocracy to replace American democracy. One of Rushdoony's acolytes was Jerry Falwell.
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., another protégé of Rushdoony, organized other wealthy individuals to finance stealth campaigns by anti-gay, anti-abortion, and pro-business far-right political candidates in Republican primaries and thus facilitate the fundamentalist takeover of the GOP. Ahmanson also underwrote the improbable career of Marvin Olasky, whose 1992 volume, The Tragedy of American Compassion, became part of the playbook of Karl Rove and George W. Bush.
Blumenthal is superb at tracing and narrating how the various strands of the theocratic far right came together into a movement that was anti-abortion, anti-gay, often anti-school integration, pro-"traditional values," and, improbably enough, friendly to big business. This capture is now so complete that today's Republican Party would rather give up a safe seat, as it did recently in upstate New York when the congressional leadership drove out a sure winner in favor of a carpetbagger fundamentalist, than allow a moderate to assume office....
In 1986, a young journalist also named Blumenthal published a prescient book titled The Rise of the Counter--Establishment. In that book, Sidney Blumenthal, Max's old man, wrote about the links that went from Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley's National Review to the neoconservatives who gave the intellectual weight to Reaganism and the modern conservative movement. That book was mainly about people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Nathan Glazer, George Gilder, David Stockman, and Jack Kemp. The volume, appropriately for the time, included just three pages on the religious right. The conservative cast of characters a generation ago was an intellectually serious and largely secular lot. At worst, they wanted to destroy the New Deal and the Great Society, not impose theocracy. Those were the days.
Read entire article at American Prospect review of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal, Nation Books, $25.00, 394 pages
Anyone who has followed Max Blumenthal's investigative writings on the far right's takeover of the Republican Party should not have been surprised when John McCain added Sarah Palin to the 2008 ticket. His running mate had to appeal to the Republican base, and the Grand Old Party has now become entirely captive to its fundamentalist wing. Next time, it is inconceivable that a figure even as moderate as John McCain will get the Republican nomination....
You may not have heard of R.J. Rushdoony. He is a kind of American Talib, whose 1973 magnum opus, the 890-page The Institutes of Biblical Law called for literal application of all 613 laws described in the book of Leviticus, including as punishments flogging, slavery, sale into indentured servitude, and death by burning at the stake. Rushdoony also called for a Christian theocracy to replace American democracy. One of Rushdoony's acolytes was Jerry Falwell.
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., another protégé of Rushdoony, organized other wealthy individuals to finance stealth campaigns by anti-gay, anti-abortion, and pro-business far-right political candidates in Republican primaries and thus facilitate the fundamentalist takeover of the GOP. Ahmanson also underwrote the improbable career of Marvin Olasky, whose 1992 volume, The Tragedy of American Compassion, became part of the playbook of Karl Rove and George W. Bush.
Blumenthal is superb at tracing and narrating how the various strands of the theocratic far right came together into a movement that was anti-abortion, anti-gay, often anti-school integration, pro-"traditional values," and, improbably enough, friendly to big business. This capture is now so complete that today's Republican Party would rather give up a safe seat, as it did recently in upstate New York when the congressional leadership drove out a sure winner in favor of a carpetbagger fundamentalist, than allow a moderate to assume office....
In 1986, a young journalist also named Blumenthal published a prescient book titled The Rise of the Counter--Establishment. In that book, Sidney Blumenthal, Max's old man, wrote about the links that went from Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley's National Review to the neoconservatives who gave the intellectual weight to Reaganism and the modern conservative movement. That book was mainly about people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Nathan Glazer, George Gilder, David Stockman, and Jack Kemp. The volume, appropriately for the time, included just three pages on the religious right. The conservative cast of characters a generation ago was an intellectually serious and largely secular lot. At worst, they wanted to destroy the New Deal and the Great Society, not impose theocracy. Those were the days.