“How the GOP Became God's Own Party”

Kevin Phillips in the WaPo:

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics…

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing…

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Read the whole thing.

Last night, the four of us were talking about how long this state of affairs is sustainable. Forget for a moment the crushing deficit, our woeful foreign policy disasters, tax cuts, corporate welfare, cronyism, and all the rest of it—how far can the seams of the union strain from the pressure of the competing themes of secularism and dominionism before the fabric tears? Any attempt by advocates of secularism (who count among their numbers personally religious but politically secular people) to reinforce the wall separating church and state agitates dominionists into radicalism. Attempts by dominionists to fashion an effective theocracy radicalizes secularists. Neither faction is going to be content to sit back and respectively watch Christianity be pushed completely out of the public (by which I mean governmental) sphere or become the basis of our rule of law. Empirical “rightness” or “wrongness” of the positions make no difference in terms of averting confrontation; both sides are fueled up for the long haul by the surety of their own correctness.

Phillips notes that “the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860,” and I don’t suppose I need to point out that a civil war ensued shortly thereafter.

I’m not suggesting I believe another civil war is imminent. In fact, in spite of their asinine and infuriating war rhetoric, I think most of the members of the rightwing nut brigade are inveterate cowards, who are about as likely to pick up arms and go off to culture war as they are to sign up for service in Iraq. In other words, wholly unlikely.

I’m just beginning to wonder how far this can and will escalate before something diffuses this increasing tension, and what that thing could possibly be.