Why are Republicans so stupid – or so insane – or so evil? Maybe they’re simply wrong or misguided.
Sometimes I think about how Republicans think (and I wrote something back in July, called The Three Flavors of Republicans).
Last night I was bouncing around the internet, clicking on links, and I found a reference to Max Blumenthal, which led me to McCarthyism, then President Eisenhower, and then Eric Hoffer. I thought that some of the ideas I found were suitable for discussion in a DKos diary. I’ll tell you more below the fold. Please follow me down.
Max Blumenthal wrote an op-ed for the N.Y. times a couple weeks ago on September 2, although I don’t think I read it back then. Here’s the article: Ike’s Other Warning.
Blumenthal talks about a letter that President Eisenhower wrote in 1959 to a terminally ill soldier named Robert Biggs. Eisenhower (the war hero who led the Allied army that defeated Hitler) did not like Joseph McCarthy or the John Birch Society (because he thought they were doing some of the same things that Hitler did). And Eisenhower had thought deeply about why people would follow someone like Hitler. Here’s what Blumenthal said in the NY Times piece (the initial quote is from Ike):
"I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed," Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. "Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy, debate is the breath of life."
Eisenhower also recommended a short book — "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer, a self-educated itinerant longshoreman who earned the nickname "the stevedore philosopher." "Faith in a holy cause," Hoffer wrote, "is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."
Though Eisenhower was criticized for lacking an intellectual framework or even an interest in ideas, he was drawn to Hoffer’s insights. He explained to Biggs that Hoffer "points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions." The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society.
Think about that – dictatorial systems give people "the freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds." So you pick a dictator (or a preacher or a talk show host), then he (or she) tells you what is true, and you don’t have to make up your own mind. Sounds like teabaggers blindly following Glenn Beck.
Who Is Max Blumenthal?
I’d never heard of Blumenthal. He’s a documentary filmmaker and blogger and has written for The Nation, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. He recently published a book called "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party."
You can listen to an interview he did on NPR’s "Fresh Air" here: A 'Shattered' Republican Party?
Even if you don’t listen to it, go to the website and read the excerpt from his book. Here’s his interpretation of the 2008 Republican Convention:
This was a portrait of the Republican Party fully in the grip of its right wing: almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly evangelical, fixated on abortion, homosexuality, and abstinence education; resentful and angry; and unable to discuss how and why it had become this way. Noticeably absent from the convention were moderate Republicans. Senator Lincoln Chafee, legatee of the moderate Republican tradition in Rhode Island, was defeated in the 2006 midterms, and he was endorsing Obama. The last Republican House member from New England, Representative Chris Shays of Connecticut, would lose his seat in two months. None of the great Republican families of the past, from the Rockefellers to the Eisenhowers, were there either. Both of Ronald Reagan's natural children, Ron and Patti, endorsed Obama. President Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter, Susan, addressed the Democratic National Convention in Denver just moments before Barack Obama appeared to accept his party's nomination. How did a party once known for its "big tent" philosophy become a one-ring circus? How did a Republican Party that had dominated American politics for over twenty-five years become so marginalized?
And he's right -- no Eisenhower kids, no Nixon kids, no Reagan kids appeared at the 2008 Republican convention. Where was their history?
The website about Blumenthal's book is here: Republican Gomorrah.
Here are some quotes from that website (and, boy oh boy, can this guy write!):
The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is "the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood," according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical males with visions of "Ultimate Fighting Jesus." This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.
...<snip>...
The movement’s macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from "Hot Tub Tommy" into a dictatorial House majority leader known as "The Hammer." Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right’s most reliable financial angels. Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional.
The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s. Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.
Wow. You go, guy. I’m gonna have to find that book. And Blumenthal actually put his boots on the ground. He went to the Republican convention. He went to evangelical churches. He interviewed people. He did what journalists do.
And he mentioned that Eisenhower recommended a book about mass movements written by Eric Hoffer.
What About Mass Movements?
I’ll admit that I’ve never read anything by Hoffer. I don’t know if he’s brilliant or not-so-brilliant or a hack. But here’s a paragraph from Wikipedia:
The mass movements discussed in The True Believer include religious mass movements as well as political, including extensive discussions of Islam and Christianity. They also include seemingly benign mass movements which are neither political nor religious. A core principle in the book is Hoffer's insight that mass movements are interchangeable; he notes fanatical Nazis later becoming fanatical Communists, fanatical Communists later becoming fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, becoming Paul, a fanatical Christian. For the true believer the substance of the mass movement isn't so important as that he or she is part of that movement. Hoffer furthermore suggests that it is possible to head off the rise of an undesirable mass movement by substituting a benign mass movement, which will give those prone to joining movements an outlet for their insecurities.
And that’s a really odd thing to think about. Could it be that the anti-Obama teabaggers really just enjoy being part of a group that’s following a leader? If Glenn Beck announced tomorrow that he had a revelation and that a single-payer national health system was a good idea, would his followers believe him? What is the nature of mass movements?
Normally, I’d end a diary with an "in conclusion" paragraph. But that quote from Hoffer just floors me. Maybe the teabaggers are just followers who want to follow a leader. I’ll have to think about it.