It continues to be entertaining - and a bit frightening as well - to watch the far right and Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, charlatans and snake oil merchants of the professional Christian set foam at the mouth and send out sheets of spittle in reaction to Barack Obama's reelection and the GOP net loss of seats in the U.S. Senate where gerrymandering could not be used to protect GOP incumbents. One has to wonder whether at this point the GOP can save itself from the extremists who were allowed to hijack the party as the party leadership grasp at short term expediency rather any long term view. Andrew Sullivan summarizes much of it very well:
These charlatans and money-grubbers have turned the broad tradition of Anglo-American conservatism into Southern Fried Fanaticism - and I wanted to see them crackle in their batter. They have replaced empirical doubt with unerring faith in an ideology that had its moment over thirty years ago and is barely relevant to the world we now live in. That faith has been cynically fused with fundamentalist religion to make it virtually impossible for the GOP to accept that women are the majority of voters in this country, that gay couples are equal to straight ones, that 11 million illegal immigrants simply cannot be expected to "self-deport" en masse by a regime of terrifying policing, that war is a last and not a first resort, that the debt we have is primarily a function of two things: George W. Bush's presidency and the economic collapse his term ended with.
This kind of total fanaticism about an ideology that bears no resemblance to Burkean conservatism is often called religious. But the truly religious person is not focused on the Electoral College math, but on living her own life the right way in accordance with the God she worships. She is not obsessed with policing society to keep the "other" at bay - the homosexual, the African-American, the Latino immigrant, the single mother, the young straight dude who is truly baffled by the anachronisms of homophobia and the belief that alcohol is less harmful than marijuana.She knows that living a good life is hard enough without controlling the lives and fates and dignity of others.
A political party can adapt and change; a fundamentalist religious party loses its entire authority if it admits error, because its message is based on religious texts that are held to be inerrant. The biggest obstacle in front of today's GOP therefore remains theo-political fundamentalism, and how it can be overcome.
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