This post first appeared, in a different form, at OneUtah. The changes here are intended to provide greater clarity and to improve readability.
Fundamentalism is a rigid overreaction to changes in society. It represents an attempt on the part of believers to manage those changes, to reduce their anxiety about them and ultimately to sustain their sense of the necessary social order.
At the same time, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. Fundamentalism, as a religious movement, first emerged in the late 19th Century as believers rejected evolution and sought alternatives to it's apparently godless worldview. It took it's name from a series of 12 pamphlets published in the U.S. under the name The Fundamentals which was mailed to millions of Christian pastors. The core concepts of fundamentalism might be described:
Their religion forms their identity, both personal and communal.
There is one and only one truth, and it is theirs.
They are purposefully shocking.
They see themselves as part of a "cosmic struggle".
They interpret historical events as part of their "cosmic struggle".
They try to make any opposition to them look bad and immoral.
They only emphasize some parts of their heritage (in other words, they ignore what it is convenient to ignore).
Their leaders are typically male.
They try to rebel against the current distribution of power.
Fundamentalism rejects the modern world which fundamentalists feel is racing in the wrong direction but which is also leaving them behind. The values, beliefs, and ways of life face fundamentalists hold dear confront societal forces and movements that feel alien, anonymous and dangerous. In response, they hold even more firmly to their values, which become a stabilizing force in their lives.
If you look at the contemporary conservative movement, you can see a repetition of the themes on fundamentalist religion:
Conservatism forms a core part of their identity, both individual and communal.
There is only one patriotism and it is theirs - only one way to be an American and it is their way.
They are purposefully engaging in shocking behavior (carrying loaded weapons to political rallies?)
They see themselves as part of a cosmic struggle - as part of a cosmic struggle against socialism, marxism, fascism, collectivism and in favor of a very particular understanding of freedom.
They interpret historical events through the lens of that struggle for their understanding of freedom
They try to make the opposition look immoral and bad
They only emphasize some parts of their heritage (in other words, they ignore what it is convenient to ignore). The right continually whitewashes American history, they ignore the long history of slavery and racism; they deliberately misread or ignore evidence that the Framers wrote a constitution that was a secular document and one which permitted, even favored, slavery
The right's favored leader is typically male (although there are noteworthy exceptions, I'm hardpressed to imagine a sustained rally for a female conservative in the US).
They are rebelling against what they perceive as an emerging and changing power balance in the US. Their rebellion against a host of incoherent cultural forces, such as feminism and gay rights, is a rebellion against a social and political order which they feel is being created against the wishes of Americans, and certainly against their wishes
The core of the birther movement an attempt to disqualify Barack Obama from being an American. It's goal is to deny his birth in America and therefore his identity as an American. Conservative historians are doing everything in their power to argue that FDR made the Depression worse rather than improving it (despite the actual evidence to the contrary). Claims made by right wing leaders to speak for "real" America and/or "real" Americans are another example. The identification of conservatism with small town America and its presumed values is just one more way in which American conservatives advocate for a particular identity as the only valid American identity. It's not accidental that the teabaggers are almost entirely white, older, conservatives who were driven to outrage by the election of a black man with a funny name to the Presidency.
Something deeper than a simple rigid overreaction to changes in American culture is driving the American right into its embrace of political fundamentalism. Manuel Castells' three volume study The Rise of the Network Society offers a surprisingly simple, yet equally complex, explanation:
The emergence of religious fundamentalism seems also to be linked both to a global trend and to an institutional crisis . . . It is significant that fundamentalism, whether Islamic or Christian, has spread, and will spread, throughout the world at the historical moment when global networks of wealth and power connect nodal points and valued individuals throughout the planet, while disconnecting, and excluding, large segments of societies, regions, and even entire countries
Castells also observes:
There seems to be a a logic of of excluding the excluders, of redefining the criteria for value and meaning in a world where there is shrinking room for the computer illiterate, for consumptionless groups, and for under-communicated territories. When the Net switches off the self, the self, individual or collective, constructs its meaning without global, instrumental reference: the process of disconnection becomes reciprocal, following the refusal by the excluded of the one-sided logic of structural domination and social exclusion.
To put it more simply - as the world has changed, millions of Americans feel the new social, political and economic world is excluding them, so they turn their back on it and construct an identity which defines the new world as invalid, as inauthentic, as morally wrong and bad, as having lost possession of the Truth - in a nutshell, it isn't the real America and must therefore be resisted. These excluded Americans retreat into a realm in which their values, mores, and perspectives are defined as the true values, mores and perspectives and they enter a feedback loop. Talk of the right's epistemic closure is an observation of that dynamic at work.
As Republican Presidential hopefuls have debated, we've witnessed the outcome of the excluded retreating into their own world. Many of the policy proposals have crossed the line into the absurd. It's not that the people running for Republican nomination are stupid (I would say quite the opposite, they are quite clever); it's not that they are ignorant or even uninformed (although I suppose that could be debated). Instead, it's that they represent and speak for a group of Americans who experience the emerging world as exclusive of them and have responded by rejecting it, its ideas, its ways of doing things and solving problems. To put it simply, if the emerging America believes we need to rely on diplomacy and negotation in the international sphere, these excluded Americans embrace militarism, if the new America believes in raising taxes on the wealthy, excluded Americans believe we should cut taxes on the wealthy. As a matter of their core identity, conservatives are screaming "Not just no, but hell no" to an emerging America that is urban, multi-and no faith, multi-racial and multi-ethnic, but more importantly, one which is increasingly unconservative in its embrace of ideas and morals.
America's excluded have embraced an ideological fundamentalism that provides an explanation for their exclusion - the people out there aren't real americans and don't understand real america, while it comforts them, assuring them they are the real Americans, an oppressed majority/minority, a silenced and besieged remnant of the faithful.
The key idea here is that is people are experiencing exclusion. They see Castells' network society as a society without a place for them. They see a world that not only does not embrace their values but which can seem to be actively disdaining and destroying their values and by extension the people who hold them, a world which is destroying the spaces in which they themselves are welcomed and embraced. Simply stated, millions of people around the world feel left out and disconnected, and embrace fundamentalism as way to feel connected and included.
In 2009, the American right exploded into a series of corporate funded teabagger rallies. In a nation that had, two elections in a row, repudiated their world view.
America's increasingly revanchist right wing is fighting to rollback not just the Great Society programs of the 1960s, or even the New Deal programs of the 1930s, they're fighting to roll back most of the governmental reforms of the last century, including Federal income taxes and the Federal Reserve. Such policy positions make sense if and only if you ignore the history of what took place before that last 100 years of reform occurred. Newt Gingrich suggesting we should get rid of child labor laws is proposing that we dismantle 100+ years of social reform, but more importantly signalling to other conservatives that he's willing to undo all the bad things that have happened that led to the culture in which those individuals feel excluded.
Paradoxically, the same technological advances that have fueled the network society Castells' describes as excluding lots of people, has also provided those same individuals with the tools to connect to one another to attack the network society. With email, the internet, Facebook, texting and cell phones, it's far easier to organize than it's ever been and conservatives have proven extremely adept at leveraging these tools for their causes. The teabaggers are literally unimaginable without the communication tools available to us today; rather than defusing conservative anger at the Obama presidency, those tools have served to intensify it by connecting conservative activists who then passionately trade and believe emails filled with misinformation, disinformation and outright lies.
Conservative activism over a host of social issues makes sense to me when understood through the lens of social conservatives experiencing exclusion in contemporary society. A favorite video of mine was from a town hall meeting in Delaware in which a woman stood up and demanded to know why Congress wasn't investigating the president's birth certificate, waved around her own birth certificate, said she was descended from someone who fought in WWII, then led the entire assembly in reciting the pledge. It was complete nonsense from beginning to end but it was also a powerful public symbolic enactment of the values of political fundamentalism. This woman was invoking her right to belong as an American, invoking an almost sacred identity and defending that identity in a cosmic battle against usurpers of that identity. The America that won the Presidential election in 2008 was pluralistic, multi-faith and no faith, multi-racial, and comfortable with itself; the America that won the House of Representatives in 2010 was white, Christian, and deeply anxious, clinging to its patriotism and American-ness as a precious totem of something about to be lost forever.
Confronting the fundamentalist right won't work. They've already taken a defensive crouch, prepared themselves to be besieged. Engaging them is going to be incredibly difficult. But it's absolutely necessary.