When Onnesha Roychoudhuri interviewed Michelle Goldberg about her new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Goldberg observed that
There's a myth on the left that's been fostered by Thomas Frank. I think it's a mistake to think that the religious right hasn't got anything. Frank has fostered this idea that the right votes to end abortion and gets a repeal of the estate tax. They've actually gotten quite a bit
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Among liberals, there is always talk about fascism and there's a kind of agreement that you can't talk about it more publicly without sounding like a lunatic. You don't want to sound like you're comparing Bush to Hitler. We have no language to talk about the intermediate stages of this kind of thing. But there are these really unmistakable parallels to fascism, not as a government system, but to fascism in its early stages. Before fascism is a government, it's a movement. It's not born in power, it comes to power. I think it's time to talk about fascism or another word for it. Christian Nationalism is one way to talk about it. But there are things that are going on that are not normal, they're not politics usual. (See "The Growing Threat of Right-Wing Christians" in today's Alternet at .
http://www.alternet.org/...)
met Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter With Kansas, at a booksigning. I told him that I had connected the dots he presented in a way that he had not done specifically. He had observed how politicians being applauded on religious grounds by those their policies damaged economically seemed a bit baffled but pleased by this support. He concluded that for Midwest getting-poorer white citizenry, fanatical belief now trumped common sense. It seemed to me, however, that the most significant consequence of the new apparently belief-based organization on the right that Frank described was more potential political power for little WASPS than they had ever enjoyedin the past. He himself had described how their leaders did not worship the Incumbent. Rather they insisted that he honor their needs in return for their support.
As public coffers are steadily depleted, fulfilling Grover Nordquist's strategy of starving the government of funds to the point that it can simply be drowned in the toilet, private funding for those loyal to the current regime grow more and more available. Thus may members of the religious right be better positioned than any other group of "little people" in the United States to protect themselves from a plummeting economy.
The primary assumption that unites the religious right, it appears to me(in one form or another I've heard it stated far more often by political conservatives than by liberals)has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with politics: it is the assumption that the United States is shifting from being a constitutional democracy, to a different model -- which I dare not label for fear of being called a conspiracy theorist.
Frank did not disagree with my analysis.