Fixing Faultlines
by digby
Max Blumenthal, who closely follows the religious right, has written a must read article on the Palin phenomenon. Despite the fact that polls show she is incredibly unpopular among mainstream Americans and reviled by conservative intellectuals, her hold on the base of the GOP appears to be growing. Blumenthal explains why that is:
The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots — a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.
By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the “liberal media,” Palin has established an invisible, indissoluble bond with adherents of that subculture — so visceral it transcends any rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders — and followers — not as another cynical politician or even as a self-promoting celebrity, but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of everyday life, assuring them that they represented the “Real America.”
These are the bitter enders who stuck with Junior all the way to the end, even though many of them have probably abandoned him now. She seamlessly took his place in their hearts and minds as the True Believer who would smite the liberal terrorists (are there any other kind?) and cut their taxes for Jesus.
Which brings me to this fascinating article in The Atlantic by Hannah Rosin, which I think opens up the path for mainstreaming the Palin effect, if not with her (which I agree is highly unlikely) but with someone who can properly synthesize this idea into something that the Republican establishment can use for their own purposes:
America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”
Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.
In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”
Rosin’s argument is that this was a cause of the housing bubble and the subsequent meltdown and she’s pretty convincing. But I think it could also end up being the conservative movement’s salvation if people’s lives don’t materially improve fairly soon.
If there’s a path to patching over the differences between the intellectual elite, the Big Money Boyz and the base after the Bush debacle, this offers some promise if handled deftly. The populist message doesn’t come from a class basis, but a religious one and it offers not a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work, but riches on earth and a heavenly reward. Powerful stuff.
Failure, redemption,riches, heaven. Sounds like just what the witchdoctor ordered.
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