In order to understand what is truly going on with the McCain campaign right now, and why--in spite of overwhelming evidence that the American people are not responding to it--the Republican nominee seems hellbent on attacking Barack Obama for everything from associations "with a domestic terrorist" to allowing babies to die, as he did yet again in last night's debate, you have to realize that what we are seeing in the Republican party right now is basically a split between thinking, fiscal conservatives and the more moderate of the party who accept most of their precepts, and the religious right wing who have, in effect, seceded from the union already and are trying to take the party with them.
I would love to take credit for this brilliant observation, but I have to bow, once again, to HuffingtonPost's own Frank Schaeffer, who understands this world and its dynamics better than anyone. As most of you must surely know by now, Mr. Schaeffer's father, the late Francis Schaeffer, is largely credited with having laid the foundation for the fundamentalist evangelical movement. During the 80's and 90's, the father and son were hosted and toasted by all the big names from the movement, from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Buchanan, and Billy Graham to the Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes who courted them and their base.
As he details in his fine book, CRAZY FOR GOD, How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, a movement that started out passionate and faith-based became progressively joyless, hypocritical, legalistic, and judgmental, with charismatic, ego-driven mega-pastors becoming far more concerned with building their own empires and securing their own power than with promoting the quiet and compassionate ministry of Jesus Christ.
When amoral and canny politicians and their handlers recognized the gold mine such a voting block could provide, the politicization of religion was complete, and the saddest point in all of this, in my opinion, is that the religious right and the many well-meaning believers who adhere to its rather rigid rules, do not even know they are being deliberately manipulated for the most cynical of reasons.
But the thing is, the more separate and isolated they become from the bulk of American culture, the easier they are to manipulate, especially when the powerful comprehend the underlying code-words, and use it to further their own power.
In a recent interview with Amy Goodman, for Democracy Now! and posted at TruthOut.org, Schaeffer compares the shady organization that GOP VP-nominee Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, had belonged to until just recently, that advocates Alaska's secession from the United States, to what is happening with the religious right:
"But really, over the years, distancing myself from that evangelical background, as I talk about in the book, I've come to a place where...speaking of the secessionists in Alaska, the evangelical right-wing subculture in this country, particularly the Assemblies of God, by the way, that Sarah Palin comes from, have really already ceded from our union, in the sense of the fact that they have, you know, between home schooling and their own schools, their own publishing, their own radio, their own TV, many times very fundamentally anti-American, waiting for the Apocalypse, waiting for Jesus to take everybody away in the Rapture, weirdly Christian Zionist and at the same time assuming that the Jews will all be killed in Armageddon, when Jesus comes back, as part of their Rapture enterprise.
"You know, just to put it frankly, the evangelical movement that I grew up in as a child used to be a fairly respectable and respectful group of people. They regarded themselves as Americans and part of the system. And now, I really think it's been taken over by a group of people that have to be described fairly as just wingnuts...And the fact of the matter is, the movement has gone off the rails. "
Mr. Schaeffer raises an important point that cannot be overlooked here. The advent of home-schooling, once the purvue of only a tiny sliver of the population, has boomed in recent years. Public schools were considered secularist, even anti-God, and so more and more Christian homes began to teach their children at home, even as private, church-supported Christian schools also began to proliferate.
Since the rock-bottom line of the fundamentalist teaching is that EVERY WORD IN THE BIBLE IS INSPIRED BY GOD AND IS THE LITERAL TRUTH, then it follows that such things as scientific inquiry must be filtered through that gauze--hence the refusal by many fundamentalists to accept that evolution exists.
You have to understand that such a rigid understanding of Biblical teachings makes it IMPOSSIBLE for Christian fundamentalists to question ANY of it. To do so is A DIRECT THREAT to their faith. They are literally afraid that if they ask too many questions, their faith and its belief system will collapse, and they will be left alone in the universe with no God and no direction.
This severe either-or interpretation of life extends into political policy and must be embraced by any politician who courts their vote.
When John McCain got the nomination, this large segment of the Republican establishment was highly suspicious of him, because although he is strongly pro-life, he has not exactly embraced their entire agenda and has certainly not been as strong a proponent of their policies--or as overtly religious--as, say, I dunno...Tom DeLay?
Although it was Ronald Reagan who first saw and exploited this voting block--even though he, himself, never attended church--it was Karl Rove who elevated that exploitation to an art. (Even though he admits that he is actually an agnostic. How cynical is that?)
Rove understood that the religious right takes seriously yet another scripture that says, "Believers, be ye not yoked to unbelievers."
This tends to cause fundamentalists to stick strictly to church-oriented settings in their daily lives. As the commercial world also caught on to the amount of money to be made in this area, a whole new marketing campaign exploded--Christian romance novels, Christian rock music, Christian movies, Christian radio and television stations, Christian toys, and so on.
At that same time, those same marketing forces, aided and abetted by politicians, emphasized the idea that regular news sources--broadcast news, ranking newspapers and news magazines, and the like--were LIBERAL and therefore, NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
This meant that respected news sources such as the New York Times or the Washington Post could all be lumped in with the liberal media and ignored, while "the truth" could be found only on Christian news sources.
So you can educate your children at home, teaching from the same Bible they read in Sunday School and in church on Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday nights, driving to and fro while listening to Christian radio in the car, pay attention to Christian news networks while preparing dinner, watch a Christian video with the kids, put them to bed, and read a Christian book before you go to sleep, then wake up to your morning Bible devotional.
Almost all your friends are Christians, and when you go online, you hang out in Christian chat groups.
This is what Mr. Schaeffer meant when he talked about the secession of Christian fundamentalists from the rest of the country.
And with this extremely narrow worldview and lack of exposure to outside influences, it makes this particular voting block very easy to manipulate.
And it is done, for starters, with code-words.
One of the most outrageous moments of last night's debate occurred when John McCain snorted in derision when Barack Obama said that he would not vote for an anti-abortion bill that did not take into account, "the life and health of the mother."
Making air-quotes with his fingers, McCain sneered that "the health of the mother" was an "extreme pro-abortion" concept.
The vast majority of people viewing that moment were repulsed by McCain's comments, and rightfully so--but for the religious right who were watching, this was a moment of high satisfaction.
It has long been a sticking-point with anti-abortion advocates that doctors would only use "health of the mother" as an excuse to provide on-demand abortions. The idea was that all a doctor had to do was say that the mother's health was in jeopardy, even if it wasn't. They believed--and still believe--that "health of the mother" is a mere ploy to get away with more abortions.
To religious fundamentalists, it is always either-or. There is no nuance in their world.
This one moment, more than any other--with the possible exception of lumping Obama in with "extremist environmentalists" because he wants to see to it that nuclear power is safe--was the tell in the poker game that McCain and his handlers are playing.
From the time the Republicans--carried on the wave of right-wing evangelicals--took over congress in 1994 until only recently, religious right-wingers have dictated public policy, Supreme Court nominees, political discourse, and legislation.
But as they have become increasingly isolated even within the Republican party itself, they have failed to understand that the rest of the country is not as conservative or fundamentalist as they are.
And as their howls of protest grow increasingly more shrill, their message is growing increasingly more extreme, to the point that now, even contraception is considered by many of them to be a form of abortion, and some fundamentalist pharmacists won't even fill prescriptions for women for birth control pills.
It was a good run, for a while there, for the Republican party. Voter guides passed out in churches, lots of God and flags waved around during speeches and rallies and conventions...consequently, when McCain decided who was going to run his campaign, he aligned himself with those who still believe that to energize THAT "base" for the Republican party is, in effect, to energize the entire electorate, all the way to victory.
But wedge issues, waged so skillfully by Karl Rove in previous campaigns--abortion, gay rights, and gun control--only worked, at the time, because during and for a while after the Clinton years, this country was at peace and in a time of prosperity. More moderate people could afford to vote against their own economic self-interest and feel righteous doing it, because after all, their candidate was a good, God-fearing man.
It's Rove's protegees now running McCain's campaign, and they've tried mightily to create new wedge issues out of such made-up horrors as Bill Ayers and ACORN, while at the same time, whipping up their rallies into a frenzy with that original secessionist--Sarah Palin.
But they have lived in their own world for so long now that they failed to realize that the rest of the country was moving on. This is why they keep pushing issues that voters just don't care about--especially now that there are two wars going on and the economy is imploding. It's why, to the mystification of pundits everywhere--they continue to ignore polls which state--loud and clear--that Americans not only don't care about these things, but that the constant referencing of them is only causing a backlash for their candidate.
They HAVE to ignore the polls now, because the vocal minority of religious right-wingers that dominate their rallies and fund-raisers INSIST upon it. Even as McCain was tanking in the polls on such non-issues as Bill Ayers, the religious right-wing was demanding that he push it harder.
There's a reason for this, too, and Frank Schaeffer discusses it in CRAZY FOR GOD:
"Fundamentalists never can just disagree. The person they fall out with is not only on the wrong side of the issue; they are on the wrong side of God...
"A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide that they are more pure and moral than their brethren...
"And each splinter group within our culture...sees itself as morally, even 'theologically,' superior to its rivals. It is not just about politics. It is about being BETTER than one's evil opponent. We don't just disagree, we demonize the 'other.' And we don't compromise."
It must be stated here that we can be just as bad on the left sometimes, but the sheer organization and size, and cultural reach of the evangelical movement puts its self-righteousness in bold-face, as Christopher Buckley, son of conservative godfather William F. Buckley found when, after recently endorsing Barack Obama online, he was hounded out of the magazine his father had founded, the National Review:
"Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted--rather briskly!--by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
"My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman...
"My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much...
"So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it's a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.
"While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
"So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."
Christopher Buckley is not the first well-known thinking conservative who is breaking away from the current direction of the party, as I detailed in my own blogpost, "Hell Just Froze Over."
What we're witnessing right now is a fragmenting of the Republican party as the religious right-wing breaks away from the conservative and/or moderate wings of the party. They've had power for a while now, and they don't want to let go. This is part of why there is so much rage and nastiness at their rallies. And you can bet that if John McCain loses, the religious right-wing will say it was because he wasn't fundamentalist ENOUGH, that he didn't push Bill Ayers and ACORN and other wedge issues ENOUGH, that he didn't get mad ENOUGH, and they will back someone wild-eyed enough for them next time--maybe Sarah Palin herself.
But this country, the world, and the Republican party itself will have moved on by then. They will have to do some serious soul-searching to rediscover what it means to be conservative. And if that happens, expect the religious right-wing to put forth a third-party candidate. (And be stunned when they don't win.)
As Roger Cohen put it in the New York Times, in his op-ed, "Presley, Palin, and the Heartland,""And it dawned on me that Palin, with her vile near-accusations of treason against Barack Obama, her cloying doggone hymns to small-town U.S.A., her with-us-or-against-us refrain, is really an impostor.
"She's the representative of a kind of last-gasp Republicanism, of an exhausted party, whose proud fiscal conservatism and patriotism have given away to scurrilous fear-mongering and ideological confusion.
"It's a party in need of a break from power after the Bush years in order to re-learn what (Branson, Missouri mayor, Raeanne) Presley represents: the can-do, down-to-earth, honest, industrious, spend-what-you-earn civility of the heartland. That civility has been usurped into Palin's trash talk."
But I think Christopher Buckley should get the last word, part of his original piece, "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama," the one that got him thousands of hate e-mails and letters and threats: "Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protege had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, 'You know, I've spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.' Well, the dear man did his best."