When people ask me (these days), "why focus so much on Bachmann, her presidential bid's over"--I kinda shake my head in sorrow. I've been doing all these diaries on Bachmann since 2006. Doing them regularly because this Bachmann thing isn't just about Bachmann. Bachmann is and will continue to be a figurehead for political institution in American life: a religious right that's morphed into a more or less centrally directed "political party" over the past thirty years or so.
If you keep an eye on the figurehead, you have some idea of where the ship is headed. Most people (even the press and academics who study the daily operation of US politics) don't even know there is "a ship." They continue to consider the American religious right as some kind of aggregate of different evangelical conservative power bases. They don't realize that that model became obsolete decades ago; that the American religious right is now as centrally coordinated as either of the two major political parties. This new "third party" grooms its own political candidates to run in local, state and national races (Bachmann is one such candidate.) This new "third party" operates state and regional political organizations that do GOTV, influence election results, organize referendums, etc.
The reason more people don't accept this reality is that the "third party" I write about in these Bachmann diaries operates within the Republican brand. The thinking seems to be: if this institution doesn't identify itself as a third political party and the media don't identify it to the public as such--then it can't really be a third, major American political party.
But it is, and I take comfort in the fact that there is one place in American where it is recognized as such. The Republican Party and its ostensible leadership know that it's now a third party, even though they'd never admit that publicly. Here's how I know that:
(CONTINUED)
From Bloomberg:
...The annual (Values Voters) gathering focuses on efforts to “champion traditional values,” limit government and cut federal spending. This year’s Republican contest elevates the significance of this and similar events for candidates seeking support from the evangelical movement, a major force within the party since it helped promote Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
That's still comparatively unusual, for a piece of straight news reporting to acknowledge that something called "the evangelical movement" is and has been a major force within the GOP for decades. Most of the press still refers to candidates conservative evangelical candidates as "social conservatives." Why do they do that? Because they (the candidates) would rather be identified to the public with that label rather than with the sectarian "conservative evangelical" label.
There are other labels that the press and the scholars have used over the decades to describe the new institution. "The religious right" is the common term in the press. Scholar tend to use the term "Christian right" in their policy papers. But "the evangelical movement" (the term used by these reporters in this story) is more accurate than either. As for the conservative evangelicals themselves: when they are talking to each other they simply use the phrase "the Christians" to describe themselves. By doing that, they appropriate the label "Christian" from hundreds of millions of believing Christian who don't share their sectarian beliefs or worldview.
The reporters introduce their readers to coverage of this year's Values Voters Summit by asserting that "the evangelical movement has been a major force in the party since it helped promote Ronald Reagan's presidency." Strictly speaking, that's not true. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority did claim that it was important in bringing Reagan into office in 1980, but the serious studies of that particular election don't really bear out that claim.
Still: it's proper to note that the Moral Majority represented the birth of sustained and public right wing evangelical political activism. Prior to the Moral Majority, political activism based on a sectarian evangelical conservative agenda did exist. But it wasn't as respectable or powerful or widespread as it is today. With the birth of the Moral Majority (and its successor, the Christian Coalition) right wing evangelical political activism began to matter in party politics and partisan political activity became a fact of life in conservative evangelical media and message.
And for the last twenty five years or so, we've been living in an America where failure to secure the support of the leaders of the conservative evangelical right spells doom for particular Republican political candidacies. Republicans seeking the White House do understand that a third party operates in the US (a party with its own leadership, a leadership outside the control of the leaders of the GOP. Even if most of the rest of the country doesn't understand that that party exists, the GOP leadership and its backers do.
This year, the leading Republican contenders are lining up to get the support of the leaders of that third party--again. For these Republicans, going to the Values Voters Summit is kind of like the legendary "pilgrimage to Canossa"--the political, humbling themselves publicly before the authority of our own "evangelical Vatican." The presence of Romney, Cain, Perry, and Bachmann at the event (all at the same time!) indicates their deeply held (and undoubtedly correct) belief that failure to sell themselves as the candidate of this institution effectively ends their hopes of winning the White House.
That's a huge change from the state of the American political dynamic at the end of the 1970s, when Falwell launched his Moral Majority. It's been this way since at least the nineties. The de facto leaders of the evangelical right have to be courted and appeased and effectively included in the Republican government of the United States--or they will make Republican candidates suffer and effectively drive them out of the race. And as I've said: it's a political party (it creates its own candidates, runs its own election apparatuses in states and regions.) It's coherent and it has a discrete leadership; it's more than just a lobby, more than just a social/political phenomenon.
Palin’s decision not to run is “certainly good news for all those candidates who are really relying upon this constituency as a sort of a booster rocket -- and that would be Bachmann and Cain in particular,” said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “She was the 800- pound gorilla that might get in and did not.”
The names of the "front" organizations change, from year to year and from state to state. But the leaders and organizers and personnel are fairly consistent. Here you have Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition organizer and Jack Abramoff crony, indicating that Palin was a protege of the evangelical right (because her constituency in that quarter is now "up for grabs.") There was an awful lot written about Sarah Palin prior to the last presidential election, but her status as a favorite of the evangelical right received comparatively scant attention in that coverage.
I'd agree with Reed if he's arguing from this premise: that one of the most important things you always needed to know about candidate Sarah Palin, was her status with the evangelical right. Palin's status with a group of leaders called the Council for National Policy (CNP) was critical in understanding why she was nominated, why she gained a national cult following. (The CNP and its leading members are the umbrella organization that effectively directs the American religious right. If you haven't heard of it, don't feel too bad. Most evangelical Christians don't know about it either, even though its leaders set the agenda for their politics and decide which presidential candidates will be available to them.)
Evangelical Bloc
The evangelicals -- who in the 2008 campaign accounted for 44 percent of Republican primary voters, according to exit polling -- are the party’s largest constituency, Reed said.
In the 2008 general election, evangelical Christians accounted for 23 percent of the electorate, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, and 73 percent of their votes went to Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
You see: these diaries about Michele Bachmann are not really "all about Michele Bachmann." It just turns out that Bachmann and her career have served as a kind of prism for analyzing the changes in the American right and the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan. Those sectors have become more sectarian, more supernaturalist, more anti-rational and anti-secular. And they've become more "conspiracist." (Many of the founders of the CNP were former John Birch Society members. If you turn on evangelical conservative political broadcasting you will often hear their spokespeople talking about the world in dark, conspiracy-thinking terms, dismissing "secular" views of history.)
Bachmann's career and her rise to prominence in US political life reflects all of this. For example, Bachmann (a career-long protege of the national evangelical right) was tea party before there was such a term. But the media and political analysts made little of the fact that conservative evangelical figureheads like Bachmann and Palin "automatically" became leaders of the theoretically secular tea party. Paying close attention to Bachmann's career, would have tipped off the professional observers in American political media and academia. Her career represents major trends.
People who want to understand why the left and the liberals lose to right regularly, need to understand how mental non-entities like Bachmann and Palin can appear suddenly to rise so high in American politics. Even as their own careers go into remission, those careers and their beliefs and their rhetoric continue to reflect the political institution that is kicking the ass of the GOP, the Democratic Party, and liberals and the progressives on a daily basis.
You're right, "Bachmann's crazy." But as Bachmann falls out of the running--a national candidate with equally crazy views, designed to appeal to crazy people, will spring up to replace her. As in the past, Bachmann's career and political affiliations and ideological roots will tell you how that is going to happen, and who is going to make that happen. The political institution that made Bachmann into a national GOP contender, is "the place where the crazy comes from."
LINK:
http://www.businessweek.com/...