Bravo! This is a great series of articles. Every good Christian should be apalled by the actions that the GOP is taking in the name of Christianity. I think it's about time we whip out the story of Christ tossing the moneychangers out of the temple...
Posted by Jefe Le Gran at May 23, 2005 09:10 AMI'm not in marketing but we need one term to identify Republicans as corrupt power hungry radicals. Overturning 217 years of Senate tradition so a simple majority rules is revolutionary. Cromwell's Round Heads come to mind but there must be newer better themes to define the Radical GOP. It sure is not Christian.
Posted by at May 23, 2005 09:25 AMI like using 'hypocrites' the best for describing the worst of the GOP myself. Particularly since it's a word steeped in traditional Christian teaching. Frist, Dobson, Delay, Bush, and other True Belivers have shown themselves to be immoral hypocrites repeatedly.
Posted by idiosynchronic at May 23, 2005 09:48 AMTheocracy is correct bacause it is a caste of priests who sell their product( religion is just a corporate business and like any corporation it seeks to control government to further it's interests) in order to empty the pockets ( and minds) of the populace , who sell morality while they practice none. It is the true oldest profession. Why do you think Christ spent most of his time talking about money and pharisees?
Posted by emeldir at May 23, 2005 10:36 AMA friend of mine lived in San Francisco for a while. One of the priveleges of living in SF is that you can hire a gay male housecleaner, which is what my friend had done. I happened to be staying in the house one day when it was scheduled for a cleaning. The kid (high 20s) was predictably very talkative and liked to talk about politics. At one point, I used the word "demagogue", which he did not understand. After I explained what I meant, he commented, "Why do you use Latin words when perfectly useful English ones exist?" Never mind that the word is Greek. The point is well made.
When you go to Kansas or Oklahoma and try to talk about "theocrats", "autocrats", "cleptocrats" (for that matter, anyone but Democrats), the commentary will fall on deaf ears because people will not get the point of your message. Local Democratic candidates usually get it--they come from the millieu. The national ones don't--they come from Yale.
If there is anything the Democratic Party needs is learning about code switching--they need to know how to talk to different groups of people and be understood, rather than just to stay on message (they finally learned that lesson, but then quickly forgot it in 2004). Without code-switching we get the infamous, "I voted for the 82 million before I voted against it," and a lot of other Kerry howlers. We also get Gore's "favorite book", The Red and the Black, of which 98% of the country has never heard. Come to think of it, 98% of his Harvard classmates probably never heard of it.
If all Democratic rallies were held in Cambridge or Westchester, it would be no problem. But Gore's comment came in response to a question in a national debate and Kerry's response was replayed for a year as an example of flip-flopping and obfuscation--two qualities that were far more characteristic of his opponents.
That means that whether we talk about theocracy or autocracy, the result will be similar to a Far Sight cartoon of what the dog hears--the pet owner is mouthing full sentences in one frame while in the other you get what the god hears: "Blah-blah-blah-food-blah-blah-blah-fetch!" It may sound odd, but national Democratic leadership and candidates have to learn to treat the public just like that dog. At the moment, the only one who says "Fetch!" is Dobson and his ilk.
We don't have British-parliament-style debates, where each side gets away with rather wild and colorful accusation of the other. Even members of each party occasionally zing their own colleagues with epithets that most in Congress (and certainly their constituents) would find inappropriate. Yet, Little Dick Cheney got away with a "Fuck you!" to a colleague, Baby W got off an off-mike remark directed at a reporter, "He's a major-league asshole!" and the public just chucked. At the same time, Democrats get lynched for using the word "hate".
What is worse, occasionally such criticism arises from within the ranks. So, next time Joe Lieberman tries to criticize someone for language that is a little too colorful for his taste, another Senator should get up and say, "Shut up, Joe! We're not interested!" Or when Barney Frank gets an overwhelming desire to criticize Howard Dean for calling Tom DeLay "a crimininal", muzzle him right away. Don't get me wrong--Barney Frank is a great guy, but his constituency is not Middle America. It's upper middle class, white suburban population with post-graduate degrees in liberal professions.
Liberal causes have always been convoluted in their attempts to answer hard questions. There is no black and white for liberals, but lots of shades of gray--well, not quite: it's just that we don't talk about the black and white issues since they are too obvious to us. We'd rather agonize over difficult decisions than convey a simple message. In contrast, a conservative's job is easy--there are no difficult decisions and equivocal issues. Everything is either right or wrong. A person is either good or evil. And that appeals to the masses. No wonder so many people end up voting against their own interests--they can't decipher what the Democrats are telling them, so why would they vote for the message they don't understand?
So let's give them what they want--Tom DeLay is a crook. Don Rumsfeld is a liar. Dick Cheney is a thief. George Bush is an idiot--scratch that, that offends the average idiot in the crowd. George Bush is a selfish rich boy who got by on his daddy's dollar. Try to stick to three- or four-word sentences with mostly Anglo-Saxon words. Avoid Latin and Greek. Avoid high moral concepts that require readings in philosophy. Get a translator, if necessary. Run a speech by a pig farmer for comments before you listen to your overeducated advisors.
Peace!
Posted by buck turgidson at May 23, 2005 10:43 AMHi. I've been following your blog for months and appreciate the in-depth and insightful work you do.
I have to say that, though it would be nice to reappropriate the "theo" of "theocracy," I think it impossible. They are powerhungry and deeply un-American--and that is precisely why I think we should use the term theocracy.
By avoiding the term, you are suggsting that a majority (or large minority) of Americans would prefer a theocracy to a secular democracy. I think that is untrue. It is important for Liberals (and Libertarians, though they are a strange group) to stand up and call the people what they are hypocrites and theocrats, people who want to destroy the very secular beleifs that brought this country into being.
If we are to become a theocracy, then let's fight them there too. There are many people who have strongly held religious convictions that disagree with the current administration and the Religous Right. The point to me is not avoid the term, but to reappropriate it. In its heyday and today still, the Left has many religious and quasi-religious figures animating and espousing its philosphy (Al Sharpton, Chris Hedges, Liberation Theology...).
We should be fighting this battle on two fronts: 1) keeping government secular; 2) establishing, as Jim Wallis suggests/implies, clear moral stances to counter the Republican ones.
OF course many of the Repubs are devious, immoral and hipocritical. Their "religion" is more often than not based on racism and hatred, and they espouse these "ideals" on both conscious and subconscious levels. (See this month's Harper's)
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Posted by Andy Wallis at May 23, 2005 10:51 AM“Fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Fascism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Fascism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Fascism's emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media.�
Benito Mussolini, 1935
What buck says. Its a "dictatorship." Not short and Anglo-Saxon, but they know what it means in Kansas.
Posted by mamayaga at May 23, 2005 11:01 AMJefe Le Gran said Every good Christian should be apalled by the actions that the GOP is taking in the name of Christianity.
Are they bad christians if they know the GOP hasn't done anything at all in "the name of Christianity"?
The GOP hasn't done anything in the name of Christianity. You cannot find one example of any action that the GOP has taken in the name of Christianity.
Feel free to make up your rhetoric as you go. But unfortunately you cannot make up your own facts.
/end
In its heyday and today still, the Left has many religious and quasi-religious figures animating and espousing its philosphy (Al Sharpton, Chris Hedges, Liberation Theology...).
Wait, Chris Hedges? He doesn't have a political bent. He's a reporter for the NY Times. Pass the Fool-Aid please.
Andy Wallis: The first step to recovery is to stop reading Harpers. The oil money that floats the rag is a good place to start.
Furthermore, a better place to start is the realization that most of law in the United States is rooted in theocratic principles. Second, higher education, the so called point of liberation, is also rooted in theocratic principles. You can keep raking the leaves all you want, but the roots still bleed theocracy.
Your fight is with the hemisphere.
Posted by Reality Based Nutrition at May 23, 2005 11:43 AMI have to admit I didn't read your whole post. I agree with the thrust of your argument, but I disagree that we should be calling these people immoral. How does that advance the cause for our values? How can we resist them calling gays immoral and then turn around and spit it back on them? Let's just tell the truth about the values we both stand for, and let people make the choice about which values they truly identify with. I think progressives would win the debate if we compare our values--individual liberty, belief in the role of government to provide safety net and security, being a model for human rights in the world, etc--to the rightie values of imposing social authoritarianism in the name of God and a laissez faire economy. But the name calling and judgment language just ramps up the hostility even further. This is why I hate to see Howard Dean talking about jail terms for DeLay. Too much heat, not enough light..
Bruce
Posted by Bruce K at May 23, 2005 12:09 PMBuck - liked your post. Delay is a crook, Rumsfeld liar, Cheney, thief etc.
Re: Bush
George Bush is a War Criminal
Posted by Michael Alton Gottlieb at May 23, 2005 12:10 PMRBN - Maybe you take exception with me saying that the GOP does what it does in the name of Christianity, but the Religious Right has long claimed to represent all Christians and I fail to see the difference between Jerry Falwell and the present day GOP. Once upon a time they were seperate, but no longer.
Posted by Jefe Le Gran at May 23, 2005 12:36 PMWhat no one seemed to notice...was the ever widening gap...between the government and the people...And it became always wider...the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway... Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about...and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated... by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us...Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures"...must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing...Each act... is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble."...But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed...You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father...could never have imagined."
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
via: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Bageant0523.htm
Posted by Thomas Ware at May 23, 2005 02:41 PM
TheocracyAutocracy