On Nov 4, 2004, at 5:25 PM, Jim Sharkey wrote:
The secret weapon of the neo-conservative movement is self-righteousness.
Nah, it's even simpler than that. Just point out that you're against the two all-time great objects of Christian fear and loathing, the twin bogiemen of Sodomites and Saracens, and you're guaranteed to get a least *some* votes.
While I agree that it's possible to get *some* votes among a certain kind of bigots who advertise under the name of Christianity through Crusading and gay-bashing, I'm afraid I was after something a little deeper.
I am not simply trying to paint the Republican party as bad guys who use cynical tricks to win a few votes, but to deeply understand what it is that they've cleverly (and, yes, cynically) tapped into.
It's not as simple as the bogeyman argument makes it, and they're not after "*some* votes." They're using real and deep psychological needs in masses of people for their purposes. Fear, of course, has been mentioned at length. People have a very deep need to feel safe, and they've played that up to extraordinary success for decades.
But I think there's something that's more than fear at work here. It's self-righteousness, and Dan's comments in an earlier post (to which I hope to respond later) that that is /itself/ a major sin in the eyes of the Bible are spot on. But again, I'm not as much interested in incriminating them as I am in understanding how they succeed.
Self-righteousness is why the President first called the war on terrorism a "crusade" and why he uses words like "axis of evil" -- it's not just that there are /dangerous/ people and bad ideas in the world that we should resist, it's that, as the last bastion of morality in the world, we are forced by bad people to get tough to save the remnant of goodness is left.
The problem is that, despite all the evangelical language that accompanies the bombast, this line of thinking dethrones God. It denies the gift of the cross and says that we, not Christ, are the savior. When self-righteous people start looking around for the antichrist, they would do well to head to the bathroom, where there's a nice mirror waiting for them.
Anyway, I need to get some more work done today, so I'll leave it at that.
Dave
No Simple Answers Maru
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