More On The Heathens

by digby

Following up on my post of yesterday about the ridiculous Matthews and Duffy discussion about the Democratic heathens, I see that Lance Mannion unpacked their foolishness in much more detailed fashion than I did.

This observation is particularly smart — and important:

The Right Wing capture of the evangelical churches and a mass movement of Catholic voters into the Republican column, both of which occurred almost 30 years ago now and neither of which were much due to, as Duffy seems to think, Democrats making fun of Jerry Falwell.

Both movements were limited in their impact too, in ways that have now turned out to be no longer particularly helpful to the Republicans.

The evangelical vote was mostly Southern and Midwestern and rural. The Catholics voted for Republicans, all right, but only Republican Presidential candidates. Otherwise, in the Northeast and the Rust Belt, where they were concentrated, they kept sending Democrats to the Congress and the Senate. There was a reason they were known as Reagan Democrats.

Reagan Democrats were not moved so much by their religious beliefs as by a reaction to trends of the 60s and 70s, one of which included Roe vs. Wade. Their motivations were also economic—times were tough and Jimmy Carter didn’t seem to be helping or have a clue how to—and “patriotic”—they hated the anti-war movement which they confused with the counterculture in general; they accepted the cant that Democrats were soft, not just on defense, but on crime, drugs, and bad behavior by uppity women, uppity black people, uppity college kids, and uppity gays.

In short, Reagan Democrats were reactionaries, angrily at odds with the times. But times always change, and with them so do people’s attitudes. Reagan Democrats have been disappearing from the political landscape since the middle of Reagan’s second term. Many have died, many have gotten used to the changes they used to hate and fear, and many have just come to realize that, mad as they were at the “Liberals,” the Republicans are not on their side, economically, culturally, or even spiritually—the Religious Right is anti-Catholic, after all.

Meanwhile, the evangelicals have allowed themselves to be used as tools for the Republicans’ Southern Strategy, which has always been racist not religious. Piety is just the mask for the the racial animus of a great many white male voters.

The racism that has undergirded Republican victories for the last four decades has never figured in Beltway Insiders’ analysis of the political scene. Republican Presidential candidates make the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University every four years because they like the food in the dorm cafeterias.

To the degree that the evangelical vote has been actually a vote of religious conviction, it has been an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-feminist vote.

How Democrats are supposed to win that vote, or why they’d want to, just by talking more about God and Jay-sus, I don’t know.

I know why Beltway Insider types think they should try. But I’m getting to that.

The Democrats’ loss of these “religious” voters hurt them most in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Since then, as I said, Reagan Democrats have been disappearing and the evangelical vote, because it has been mainly a Southern and Midwestern vote, helped the Republicans control Congress when the nation’s demographic upheavels temporarily favored the Southern wing of the Sun Belt, but it’s not won them the Presidency on its own ever, and as the Reagan Democrats have left the ranks, certainly hasn’t won them any Presidencies since the first George Bush. The Insider Media can only make the case that it has by ignoring the fact that the Republican candidate has lost three of the last four elections, came very close to losing the fourth and probably only didn’t because Karl Rove stole votes.

This is why I say that in their minds Ronald Reagan is still President; at least, he might as well still be—the history of the country since 1985, and particularly the history of the last 15 years, doesn’t figure in their thinking at all!

But Duffy’s blockheaded remarks are based not just on willful amnesia but also upon assumptions that are elitist, unconsciously anti-religious, and, basically, racist.

Republican propaganda on religion has been very successful; a new consulting industry has even grown up to promote these erroneous and self-defeating themes in liberal circles. But the real problem is that the press dishonestly uses this nonsense to pretend to the public that they aren’t the very elites they are slamming. There are indeed some average secular people who do not mingle with or understand the concerns of average religious people — and among them are these two lazy insiders who are clearly so far removed from the salt of the earth, regular Joes they deign to speak for that they might as well be Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg. (You pick which is which.)

Lance has much more to say on this, all of it interesting.

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