The Road of Ideological Purity

A recent article in the New York Review of Books uses the term ‘civic dead end’ to describe the atrophied left-right dispute over what’s wrong with American education, and it struck me as a perfect summation of what Republican know-nothingism has done to all public debate, most recently about health insurance reform. Furthermore, it aptly names the phenomenon by which reactionary Christianity has generated what it most loathed and feared—a weird side B of 1960s counterculture.

It might seem odd to compare the straitlaced, churchgoing family men and women with pot-loving longhairs, activists and cop-baiters, but I maintain that the former have steadily absorbed, reified and evolved into a version of their own worst nightmares, dating from the days in which radical Christians drew together as a political movement in opposition to the feminist, gay, anti-racist and anti-war upheavals of four decades ago.
Sears Roebuck trumpeted an ad campaign back in those days for its kitchen wares as the company’s ‘Counter Revolution’, and at the same time Republican operatives were busy exploiting a similar distaste for youthful ’60s radicalism in the political realm. They reproduced the successes of the grassroots civil rights and women’s equality movements by bringing concerned citizens together for prayer and issue-based activism in thousands of church basements.

Their organizing tool at the time was profoundly ‘anti’—anti-abortion and antigay primarily. But they also held up old-time religion as the antidote and the solution to a raft of social problems—the right to restore prayer in schools being the most emblematic.

The conservative counter-movement flourished dramatically in the 1980 elections that swept both Ronald Reagan and a slew of new-right Republicans into Congress. Their attack campaigns showed the potency of negative advertising on so-called ‘social issues’, driven, ironically, by closeted homosexual Terry Dolan’s innovative techniques. They were ideological and full of themselves but remained within the known confines of planet earth. Those were the good old days.

Back in the 1960s, we felt moral superiority in the face of the slaughter occasioned by the Vietnam war and the very recent dismantling of Jim Crow segregation laws. We got in the face of politicians of both parties and in many ways refused to be part of ‘the system’ at all, believing it hopelessly corrupt and perverse. Today, that’s the outlook of followers of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

Our dropping out led us to a version of the ‘civic dead end’ that the Review laments. We could be crude, rude and self-righteous, and it was only when our own Utopian schemes fell apart—collectively-owned stores in Washington, D.C., rural Oregon communes, experimental urban living arrangements, radical politics of various domestic and international stripes—that we trudged back very gingerly into participation in some pre-established structures.

The radical Palinites and Beck-worshipping troops remind me of ourselves in those days and not in a good way. Their eager assault on Dede Scozzafava in the upstate New York congressional race reflects their mood of millenarian self-absorption and self-indulgence. They didn’t even bother to find a genuine member of the community to carry their ideological standard, blithely assuming that their Truth easily trumped such mundane details, and meanwhile their candidate, glassy-eyed Doug Hoffman [right], couldn’t answer basic questions about the district he suddenly wanted to represent.

Similarly, their rabid opposition to any initiative not led by their religio-patriotic brethren eliminates the possibility of civic cooperation on the pressing issues of the day, as evidenced by the Republican posture of automatic and furious resistance to anything emerging from the Obama White House. They are happiest in the camp of oppositional outrage where things are neatly placed in the categories of Right/Good and Wrong/Evil, as in Obama Health Care=Dachau Concentration Camp [below]. They are indeed the bizarre step-children of the 1960s.