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It’s not possible to fully understand American politics without understanding the language that is employed in political discourse, and how the terms are defined by those who use them. Interestingly, one American political faction has come to define all terms as precisely the opposite of what the rest of us have long understood them to mean.
Whereas some people, for instance, think that the word “liberty” refers to a lack of infringement on freedom of thought and action, and lack of intrusion on privacy, careful observation of how those on the Right use it reveals that we have all been mistaken all these years. Apparently, it really means:
1) allowing members of the dominant race, ethnicity, religion, and sex to impose their will on all others and to protect the privileges inherited from a history of oppressing and exploiting others;
2) facilitating the displacement of political power from the people, through their elected representatives, to private corporations unhindered by democratic processes or public accountability;
3) ensuring that individuals are as unprotected as possible from the greatest threats to their well-being, posed by organized others in service to an obscenely inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity, while simultaneously ensuring that we react as vindictively and counterproductively as possible toward the impoverished and destitute;
4) fetishizing both privately owned instruments of violence and nationally organized acts of violence (as long as the perpetrator of the latter is one’s own nation); and
5) insisting on policies that have led to the incarceration of the highest percentage of any national population, and the highest absolute number of people, of any nation on Earth, bar none (making the United States, in the most literal sense, the least free nation on Earth).
More specifically, “liberty,” apparently, is a value which dictates that
1) Adherents of Islam who have engaged in no crimes nor done anything to draw suspicion should be placed under covert surveillance and have dossiers dedicated to them in order to ensure that any crimes they might commit in the future are pre-empted (otherwise known as “Ethnically and Religiously Exclusive Liberty,” or, more simply, “Police State Liberty”);
2) Impoverished people who migrate toward greater opportunity without governmental permission, or the children of such people who migrated with them as infants, should be rounded up and placed in detention centers, often subjected to poorly maintained facilities and poor treatment, until such time as they can be forcibly removed from the “land of opportunity” to which they migrated (Otherwise known as “Geographically Exclusive Liberty,” or “Fortress America Liberty,” or “‘If You’re Lucky’ Liberty”);
3) Women should be reduced to the legal status of human incubators, with no rights over their own bodies once they become impregnated, whether by their own choice or by force (otherwise known as “‘You’re a Toaster’ Liberty”); and
4) People who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex should be denied the kinds of legally and socially defined rights that those who are attracted to people of the opposite sex enjoy, because it as an affront to the ideal of “liberty” not to discriminate against those who are different from you in any significant way (otherwise known as “‘Liberty as long as we white Christian heterosexuals are okay with how you use it, but otherwise, not so much’ Liberty”).
5) Each of us has a God-given right to leave our home packing heat and looking for people to defend ourselves against, decide that an unarmed black teen in a hoodie innocently walking home from the store is just such a person, pursue them and initiate an altercation that leads to the armed person out looking for trouble shooting to death the unarmed black teen walking home from the store, and then complain bitterly whenever anyone points out that maybe, just maybe, that teen’s right to his life was greater than the shooter’s right to go out looking for people to “defend” himself against.
This imaginative definition of “liberty” is reminiscent of how this political faction’s historical predecessors used the word. For instance, John C. Calhoun, the famous Antebellum Southern politician, used the word “liberty” to refer to the freedom to own slaves, and “minority” to refer to those who believed that they had an inalienable right to own slaves, and was very strongly committed to protecting the rights and liberties of that embattled minority. In other words, to these neo-nullifcation-doctrine adherents, liberty means “my freedom to screw everyone else.”
Similarly, the venerable phrase “United States Constitution,” which to most of us means that document drafted by a group of very intelligent but historically contextualized propertied white men in 1787 in order to strengthen the federal government and overcome the disintegrative dysfunctionality of The Articles of Confederation which had preceded it, and which is the foundation of our rule of law, in reality refers to the complete disregard for the actual provisions of that document or to the rule of law established in accordance with those provisions. Rather, it refers to a strange, incoherent combination of Fundamentalist Christian theocracy, corporate oligarchy, and indifference to gross social injustices produced by current and historical distributions of privilege disproportionately favoring the racial, religious, ethnic and sexual orientation categories to which those who adhere to this imaginative interpretation of the phrase “United States Constitution” coincidentally belong.
For instance, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, which grants Congress the power to tax and spend in service to the general welfare, in reality prohibits Congress from taxing and spending in service to the general welfare, the rest of us failing to understand that the Founding Fathers meant that Clause tongue-in-cheek, and that a literal, non-judicial-activist reading of the Constitution requires us to realize that it means the exact opposite of what it says.
Or, the First Amendment, which protects the right of each to adhere to and practice the religion of their choice, and ensures that the government does not favor any religion over any other, really means that the government must assiduously favor Christianity over all other religions, and decline to extend the same permission and accommodation to, for instance, adherents of Islam practicing their religion, because to do so would be to force good, all-American white Christians to endure people of other religions practicing non-Judeo-Christian religions in “our” country (not “their” country, because, of course, if they’re Muslim, then they’re not American…, right?).
“Liberty,” in Right-Wing New-Speak, means indifference, injustice, predation, violence and mass incarceration. “Freedom of religion” means Christian Theocracy and intolerance of any disfavored religions. The provision granting Congress the authority to tax and spend for the general welfare means that Congress is prohibited from taxing and spending for the general welfare. You almost have to admire such an impressive commitment to the complete inversion of reality.
So, if you find yourself driving a car with a right-wing ideologue riding shot-gun, and he or she shouts in a panic “Floor it!” …don’t. Hit the brakes instead. The wayward gay Muslim Hispanic pedestrian who wandered into your path will thank you for it.
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(This is the second in a series of four posts which discuss Tea Party “Political Fundamentalism”, comprised of the unholy trinity of “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry.)
There’s something fascinating about the Tea Party, about the combination of grass roots energy, passionate conviction, profound ignorance, “Constitutional Idolatry”, and well, popularly imposed political dysfunctionality. The similarity to, and overlap with, its previously most robust incarnation, in the Christian Fundamentalist movement that has been such a major presence in conservative politics since the 1980’s, is striking. But it’s the continuation of the progress of this particular populist disease, like the nation’s auto-immune system attacking the body it was activated to protect, triggered in opposition to real infections, but doing the nation far more harm than those infections ever would have.
Mike Littwin coined the title phrase in his excellent column on the Tea Party phenomenon in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/littwin/ci_16412033). I’ve always thought that the two sides in the debate whether the Tea Party is an organically arising grass roots movement, or a creation of wealthy corporate conservative donors manipulating and exploiting popular angst to their own advantage, missed the obvious: It’s a synergy between the two.
The Tea Party isn’t the only example of political fundamentalism in America. There are political fundamentalists on the left as well, those who think that the Tea Party, Obama, and the OFA, in which all actors are a “faux”-something-or-other, are all involved in “a pincer movement” controlled by “corporate fascists,” launching a concerted assault on all of the “true”-something-or-others (as one particularly shallow and intolerant-of-dissent left-wing blogger put it on SquareState recently). Michael Bennet, of course, and the Obama/OFA organized “theft” of the Colorado Democratic U.S. Senate primary are the principal mustache-twirling villains in the story (with Andrew Romanoff tied to the tracks as a steam engine chugged toward him?).
The similarities between these conflicting fundamentalisms are far more significant than the differences, in much the same way that the similarities between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are far more striking than the differences. They are all edifices of assumed truths, oversimplified constructs informed by superficial understandings of complex dynamics, constantly reinforced with post hoc rationalizations and interpretations. And they are highly militant, utterly uncompromising (indeed, seeing any compromise as betrayal), trumpeting some kind of call-to-arms or another against some externalized enemy that renders the inherently innocent populous mere dupes of the all-powerful villains.
But left-wing fundamentalism in America, while certainly no better than right-wing fundamentalism, is far less of a threat, because it has attracted far fewer adherents. In a country in which a significant portion of the electorate calls Obama and Michael Bennet “socialists,” the overwrought left-wingers who call them willing agents of corporate fascism are about as significant as a disheveled guy on 16th Street Mall wearing a sandwich placard announcing impending doom. (I’m not disputing the alarming role that corporate money plays in American politics, but rather its reduction to an oversimplified narrative of “good guys” and “bad guys”, the former defined as all those who both agree on all points with the speaker and refuse to make any compromises, and the latter as any who either disagree with the speaker on any point or work within the system as it is, whether to reform it or to preserve it.)
It is right-wing political fundamentalism in America which marks the progress of the disease that has been incubating since our conception, a sort of proud anti-intellectualism that generally has privileged ignorance over knowledge, false certainty over humility, and dogma over analysis. Many who were concerned about this undercurrent of American culture saw Christian Fundamentalism as its most threatening incarnation, but Christian Fundamentalism was never something that would grow beyond certain bounds: The country as a whole had become too libertine, too materialistic, and too pragmatic for it to have spread much farther than it already had.
However, like a virus that “knows” it had found the limits of its reproductive vitality, and mutates in order to be able to spread, Christian Fundamentalism secularized itself, transforming itself into political fundamentalism, replacing biblical idolatry with constitutional idolatry, altering its memes to better resonate with more people, focusing all of its self-destructive militant energy on causes which any uninformed individual can easily embrace.
With this mutation of American fundamentalism, the disease is raging like a fire through the polity, a mania, made only more robust and threatening by the attempt by wealthy corporate interests to foment and co-opt the spread of the disease itself (Systems Analysis, Politics, and the Uneasy Alliance of Ignorance and Privilege). But it may be more accurate to say that the disease is co-opting the wealthy corporate interests: True to the auto-immune disease metaphor, the virus has co-opted the central nervous system in an out-of-control synergy of self-destruction. And it is a phenomenon truly worthy of concern.
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