Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.

In what sounds like a most interesting book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, award-wining journalist, Max Blumenthal, looks at what the Christian Right take over of the Republican Party has done to a once sane and rational political party. As a former Republican I saw the early stages of the Republican Party being captured by its extremist wing and left the party because the concept of separation of church and state was quickly being extinguished. Since I left the Party the trend has accelerated and insanity and extremism are now the main characteristics of a party untethered from objective reality. Here is a sampling of what is on the website for the book:

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The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s. Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.

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As Dobson consolidated his status as Republican kingmaker, the destructive tendencies of his closest allies began exploding, plunging the party into Gomorrah-like revelations of bizarre sex scandals and criminality. Ranging from DeLay’s misadventures with the felonious super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Christian right operative Ralph Reed to Haggard’s gay tryst with a male escort to Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom stall come-on to an undercover cop, the scandals never ceased to surprise people who had once envisioned the Grand Old Party as a bastion of “family values.”

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The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag. But even at the height of Bush’s glory, in his 2004 campaign, a few isolated moderate Republicans warned that the Republican Party was in danger of collapse. Of course their jeremiads were ignored. That year, Christie Todd Whitman published a book titled It’s My Party Too, decrying the takeover by what she called the “social fundamentalists.” A member of a distinguished and wealthy eastern Republican family, with deep ties to the party, she had been governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush, only to quit when fundamentalist ideologues substituted right-wing doctrine for science in its studies.

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Palin’s candidacy mobilized the Christian right elements that McCain alienated, but she repelled independents and moderate Republicans in droves, winnowing away the party’s constituency in every region of the country except the Deep South.

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Republican Gomorrah is an intimate portrayal of a political, social, and religious movement defined by an “escape from freedom.” As Erich Fromm explained, those who join the ranks of an authoritarian cause to resolve inner turmoil and self-doubt are always its most fervent, rigidly ideological, and loyal members.

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I truly believe that many in the Christian Right rather than being of strong faith, in fact, have weak faith. As a result they cling desperately to fundamentalist dogma which removes the need for independent thought and any need for personal responsibility. Similarly, they approach anyone and anything that rocks their weak belief system with hatred and animus - gays being a prime example of this phenomenon. Indeed, the Christian Right followers become like robots taking commands from demagogues like James Dobson and other professional Christians who laugh all the way to the bank. In a recent interview at Democracy Now, Blumenthal made these remarks:

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You know, for the past six years I’ve covered the radical right. I’ve gone to their conventions. I’ve interviewed their leaders. I’ve gone to their houses of worship. And I’ve gotten a sense of what conservatism has become, how radical it’s become, and the extent to which the Christian right has taken over the Republican Party.

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[T]he central thesis of Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, is that faith in a holy cause is really a substitute for lost faith in ourselves. And that’s sort of the thesis of my book and how—and what I’ve discovered from the true believer of the Republican Party that I’ve been around for the past six years.
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Where did Dobson’s fortune come from? How did he erect this empire? It came mainly from one book, which I quote from extensively in my book, Republican Gomorrah—Dare to Discipline, which is essentially a manual for corporal punishment, for beating your child. In this book, he says pain is a marvelous purifier that a child should be—that pain goes a long way with a child, that pain should be dispensed sufficiently enough to make a child cry, but then the child will crumple to your breast, and you should welcome the child with warm, open arms. This is a recipe for sadomasochism.

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Sarah Palin’s selection as vice president, while it was necessary for the Republican Party, was also a complete disaster. She wasn’t qualified. Most Americans saw that. But the Republican base had been winnowed out and was so heavily evangelical, so Southern, that they had no other choice but to pick this person, who the patrician former Republican senator from Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, described as a “cocky wacko.” Peggy Noonan, I think, the Reagan speechwriter, you know, called her, I think, a “lunatic.” But that’s what the Republican Party had become, the party of Palin.

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I do not readily know how to stop the further insanity of the GOP. It is essential, however, that rank and file voters understand the psychosis that now controls the party and its ignorant and religiously fanatical base. Common sense, logic and objective facts mean nothing to these people and electing them to office - Bob McDonnell is a case in point - poses huge dangers for constitutional government.