Three More Reasons to Ditch the GOP

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Unbearable as the experience often is, I can’t resist peeking in on news related to the Republican presidential nomination race from time to time, and each time, it seems, I find another damning testimony which reveals how tenuous the connection between the GOP and anything recognizably Christian is becoming.  Perhaps it is now not so much the party of the “Christian Right” as the “Cold-Hearted Pelagian Right.”  Here are three examples I’ve saved from the stories of the past couple weeks:


The new media favourite of the race, Herman Cain, whose chief qualification for governing the most powerful nation on earth seems to be that he ran a pizza chain once, had this to say about the recent Wall Street protests: “Don’t blame Wall Street.  Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. . . . It is not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for.”  

Excuse me?  Not that long ago, even Republican leaders had been willing to join in the chorus of hatred against Wall Street, against a banking system that is fantastically rich and incorrigibly corrupt, and which, after nearly leading the whole world into the abyss, has happily resumed its intemperate ways.  And not only does Cain have the guts to defend them, but he wants to tell everyone who hasn’t managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become super-wealthy, that this is simply their own fault and they don’t deserve any sympathy.  Survival of the fittest, you know.  If you don’t have it in you to succeed in this dog-eat-dog world, then you’re not worth the world’s time, and should resign yourself to being trampled underfoot.  

But Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

Meanwhile, Rick Perry has been having a rough time of it lately because he has dared to show any sympathy for the scum of the earth.  Perry, of course, presides over a state with a large number of  “illegal immigrants.”  His state has passed a law that decides to treat the children of these impoverished workers as state residents, with access to Texas’s lower in-state college tuition rates.  Perry argued, sensibly enough, that the alternative is to deprive children of illegal immigrants of the opportunity for an education, thus increasing the likelihood that they will become a costly drag on society, and that “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”  Unfortunately for him, most Republicans do not, it seems, have hearts.  Strategists and pollsters say this is a “90-10 issue” (against Perry) for Republican voters, and voter testimonials confirmed this picture.  One declared that she liked Perry “until I heard about him giving all these kids a free ride.  I absolutely, positively disagree with any benefits that these people are getting, and if it were up to me, I’d round them all up and sweep them out of here.”  Others were turned off by Perry’s disinclination to back the building of a fence along the entire US-Mexico border to keep these workers out.  

But Jesus said, “”When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

 

On one front, though, Perry has shown a hard enough heart to lure Republican voters: capital punishment. In a recent Bloomberg article, Margaret Carlson reports how, “In a debate in September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, moderator Brian Williams tried to pose a question to Perry, beginning: ‘Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you — ’ Before he could finish, Williams was drowned out by lusty cheers and piercing whistles from the audience.”  And she comments acidly, “It’s one thing to support the death penalty. It’s quite another to relish it like fans cheering a winning touchdown.” 

After discussing the troubling record of modern death row cases, Carlson tells us Perry’s equally disturbing response to the question: “Perry confidently told Williams that he had never lost sleep over any of the 234 people executed during his tenure as governor,” and goes on to comment, “It’s an alarming statement if false, a contemptible one if true….It’s worth losing sleep over life-and-death decisions. It’s what presidents, and other moral beings, do.”

But Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

 

(NB: In each of these stories, especially the last, I am at the mercy of how the media is portraying things.  It is possible that each of these stories has been reportedly falsely or one-sidedly, and if so, I welcome the corrections of anyone who follows this news more thoroughly than I do.)

The Problem with Palin

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As the race for the Republican presidential nomination starts heating up (as it well should–after all, we’re within 17 months of Election Day now!), a lot of focus continues to fall on Sarah Palin, who continues to tantalize constituents and the media by positioning herself as a candidate but equivocating on whether she will actually declare as one.  And, as they have been doing ever since 2008, many conservative Christians seem to be fawning over her, or at the very least eyeing her candidacy with interest.  This has always deeply disturbed me, and although it seems highly unlikely that she could ever actually win (though stranger things have happened), I wanted to finally try to put the reason why into a nutshell, in case she does declare her candidacy and I find myself compelled to comment.  

 

I won’t concern myself with her policies.  While I’m happy with her pro-life stance, my agreement pretty much stops there, and I find many of her viewpoints, particularly on foreign policy, downright frightful.  But that’s not the core of the problem.  The problem is that Palin embodies all that is worst about the American political process–that politicians today are celebrities and demagogues, purveyors of image and slogans, rather than experience and thoughtful ideas.  Palin is as it were the reductio ad absurdum of the politician-as-celebrity, abandoning the very minimal political experience she had midstream in order to pursue a career of unabashed high-profile politicking, inviting the media spotlight and guaranteeing political exposure by making unfounded and polarizing assertions.  But even that isn’t the root of the problem (although her carelessness with the truth is even worse than that which we have come to expect of politicians in this day and age).

What concerns me most is how self-consciously she taps into the peculiarly American sentiment of anti-intellectualism. Americans like to think of themselves as no-nonsense, down-to-earth people: all you need is common sense, not a bunch of academic mumbo-jumbo. We think that anyone who tries to add intellectual complexity to a problem is simply trying to obscure something that should be black and white–to hell with their Harvard degrees, we know the American dream when we see it, and we know socialism when we see it! 

This is the American attitude, and one that has long had a destructive influence on the American church, where fundamentalism has tended to glory in a sort of least-common-denominator, de-theologized Christianity.  Oddly enough, many of the same Christians who are so quick to decry this anti-intellectualism in the Church cheer for it when it comes to politics–this, they say, is Palin’s strongest suit: the fact that she’s so genuine and down-to-earth and black-and-white, so free of the suspicious obfuscating intellectualism that we identify with “the Left,” and which Obama exemplifies.  We decry such “elitism” and vote for the candidate who claims to represent the no-nonsense common man.  

Palin not only claims to do that, but she actually does, because she’s really not all that bright, or at any rate really doesn’t seem to understand politics much at all. And to us, that’s a virtue. But the problem is that politics is an extraordinarily complicated business, especially in this day and age. Plato thought that no one could govern rightly unless they were a philosopher…others since have realized that was impossible, but have still felt that the ideal ruler was the most wise, the most educated. You can’t simply take charge of the most wealthy and most powerful nation on earth with nothing but a dose of common-sense and a conviction that everything is more or less black and white. You would either destroy the nation in no time, or perhaps worse, given Palin’s fiercely nationalistic rhetoric, go about destroying other nations in no time.

Now, Palin’s defendants might be likely to retort that of course she wouldn’t govern alone, but would surround herself with people who know what they’re doing.  That’s even more scary, it seems to me.  Because the intellectuals, the insiders who’ve been around the block a few times, and know their way around Washington, have agendas of their own, and if the person in charge of the show isn’t extremely shrewd and extremely knowledgeable, they’ll run circles round her and turn her into a pawn.  After all, these people didn’t last so long in Washington by being nice people, but by having no scruples, and knowing how to play the game of realpolitik.  My view is that this is what happened to Bush, who I think was probably fairly well-intentioned, naive, and relatively uncorrupt by politicians’ standards, when he took Rumsfeld and Cheney on board, who then quickly turned his presidency to their own sinister ends.  

 

Admittedly, there aren’t many politicians today with enough brains, experience, and grit to hold their ground against these characters, but if anyone can do it, it’s certainly not going to be anyone as naive and impressionable as Palin seems to be.