This diary began as a comment in reply to DKos member Joe Bacon and the APR of Greg Dworkin on January 18.
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Conservatives are social Darwinists (which is of course the only form of Darwinism they accept).
Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon know exactly what will happen when their policies are implemented (I grant you Mr. Trump likely has little notion, but that’s really insignificant at this point)— they know people will lose health care, will sicken, will suffer, and will die.
But this is politics, some things are more important than some likely Democratic voters suffering and dying, right? (Sessions and Bannon might even enjoy the prospect).
I’m saying that ascribing their actions to ignorance is letting them off the hook. I believe in evaluating the choices of adults on adult terms— their choices reflect the absence of a moral conscience, masquerading (for all except Bannon) behind the facade of grandiose religiosity.
Why would anyone assume experienced political operatives like these guys don’t known the real numbers, and the real effects? If they choose not to believe what the ACA has done, then that is willful ignorance based on purely Machiavellian motives, but I’m not buying the ‘I can’t hear you’ pleading.
They lack concern for the well-being of fellow human beings. There is ample evidence to that effect, whether it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge it or not.
Somehow, they have been able to perpetuate the myth that they act from religious devotion (Pence being the clearest example of the moment), but it is as perverted a religious message as one can imagine (let’s set aside for the moment how many conservatives pay cynical lip service to Christian beliefs for the gullible rubes that vote for them, election after election).
Consider prosperity theology, and its nexus with fundamentalism, and the GOP, dating at least to the 1940’s
Here’s a great WaPo piece by Chris Lehmann about Trump and prosperity theology evangelicals:
The key bulwark of faith-based Trumpism is the prosperity gospel — a movement rooted in Pentecostal preaching that holds that God directly dispenses divine favor in the capitalist marketplace to his steadfast believers. Trump assiduously courted the leading lights of the prosperity faith well before his presidential run got serious enough for him to make the obligatory rounds at hard-line evangelical gatherings, such as last month’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. Last year, he hosted a conclave of three dozen leading prosperity preachers at Trump Tower, and his effort promptly netted him the vocal support of prosperity televangelist Paula White. Indeed, White is reputed to have presided over Trump’s born-again conversion.
In sum, conservatives do well not because of privilege and criminally rigging the political and economic system, they are blessed by God.
A little more of the history of the marriage between fundamentalists and the GOP:
televangelist Rod Parsley, a rising star of the Christian right who was lifted from political obscurity onto the national stage for his role in mobilizing voters in favor of his state's gay-marriage ban last year. Parsley, a Bible-college dropout who claims to have begun his evangelical career in his parents' backyard by preaching to a tiny congregation nearly 20 years ago, now boasts a 12,000-member church with affiliated schools offering education from preschool through college; a daily television program, Breakthrough, seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and other fundamentalist-Christian television outlets; a 2,000-member fellowship of affiliated churches; and a political organization, the Orwellian-sounding Center for Moral Clarity. But Parsley, who is hailed by the theocratic Christian right as a model of virtue and a representative of "values voters," has been questioned by congregants and even his own family about his church governance and secretive fund-raising practices.
"Probably President Bush would not be in office today had it not been for him," said Bishop Harry Jackson, a black pastor from the Washington, D.C., suburbs and a fellow rising star in the religious right.
Finally, this interesting, very recent take from ‘recovering fundamentalist’ Russell D. Moore, from the website First Things, which is an intellectual/political Christian site:
CAN THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT BE SAVED?
I am an heir of Bible Belt America, but also a survivor of Bible Belt America. I was reared in an ecosystem of Evangelical Christianity, informed by a large Catholic segment of my family and a Catholic majority in my community. I memorized Bible verses through “sword drill” competitions, a kind of Evangelical spelling bee in which children compete to see who can find, say, Habakkuk 3:3 the fastest. The songs that floated through my mind as I went to sleep at night were hymns and praise choruses and Bible verses set to music. Nonetheless, from the ages of fifteen through nineteen, I experienced a deep spiritual crisis that was grounded, at least partially, in, of all things, politics…
I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.
And then there were the voter guides. A religious right activist group from Washington placed them in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. With many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position—on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the line item veto? Why was there no word on racial justice and unity for those of us in the historical shadow of Jim Crow?
I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience…
The crisis before us now is not that many among the national religious right’s political establishment have endorsed a candidate but that they also ignored or downplayed some of the most morally troublesome questions of personal character, and, for instance, issues of torture and war crimes, an embrace of an “alt-right” movement of white identity ethno-nationalism and anti-Semitism, along with serious matters of sexual degradation towards women. Some—mostly Evangelical—political leaders have waved away misogyny and sexually predatory language as “locker-room talk” or “macho” behavior. Some have suggested that their candidate has never claimed to be “a choirboy”—thereby defining deviancy down to such a degree that respect for women, protection of the vulnerable, and a defense of sexual morality are recast as naive and unrealistic. One said that his support for his candidate was never about shared values anyway. Others suggested that we need a strongman (implying a strongman unencumbered by too many moral convictions) in order to fight the system and save Christians from a hostile culture. (emphasis added)
Let’s be clear: whatever their grandiose religious pretensions, these are people who will sell out their proclaimed moral values for political advantage, reflecting no moral principles or moral conscience whatsoever (if those terms are to have any meaning at all). Russell Moore is decidedly in the minority among conservatives and the GOP, he had a crisis of faith and conscience, rather than glossing over the gaping incongruities of voting for Mr. Trump.
I emphasized Mr. Moore’s acknowledgement that the questions raised about his faith and political allegiance represents an ‘an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world’’, because I have been arguing that this is crucial for understanding conservatives, and why they are essentially impervious to appeals from facts and logic— to challenge their beliefs is to threaten their existence, to make them feel their whole world will indeed shatter. Most will retreat from such a threat, or lash back at it. Appeals in the mildest, most polite terms will evoke this same ‘you’re threatening me and my family’ reaction, because it is perceived as just that.
My diaries have addressed this here, here and here. From the first of those linked:
The Authoritarian Personality and Trump Voters: conservatism’s true face is fascism.
See if this sounds like any conservative politician or voter you’ve know your whole life:
a. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender- minded.
e. Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and "toughness." Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
g. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
h. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
i. Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on."
These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syndrome, a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda.
These are not psychological features that are amenable to patient listening and reasoned discourse— in fact, patient listening and reasoned discourse are precisely the sort of displays that a conservative proto-fascist will respond to with disgust and hostility— (see items d., f. and g., above).
The swarming of conservatives— especially fundamentalists— to Mr. Trump is no mystery. He is the embodiment of a worldview, and aspirations, that are at the true core of their identity.
Take away the moralistic facade from a conservative, no matter how many platitudes they spew (like ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’), take off the mask of patriotism, their claims to be the ‘real Americans’, and what we see is Trump.