Politics as religion in America [hilarious liberal fears]

The Los Angeles Times ^ | 10/2/09 | Neal Gabler

[Ron C.]

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents.

It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles. Theoretically, you can learn how to improve your message or how to match wits with adversaries, and a lot of liberal hand-wringing has been dedicated to doing just that. But it is becoming increasingly clear that liberals haven't just been succumbing to superior message control, or even to a superior political narrative (conservatives' frontier individualism versus liberals' communitarianism). They are up against something far more intractable and far more difficult to defeat. They are up against religion.

[R. Scott]

We also referred to ourselves as a “Republic” until FDR started using the term “Democracy”. I wonder why the words of the Pledge of Allegiance haven’t been changed from “the Republic for which we stand” to “the Democracy for which we stand”.

[agere_contra]

Unfortunately, they are right. Having opted out of political discourse, they are not susceptible to any suasion. Rationality won't work because their arguments are faith-based rather than evidence-based.

Describes the left perfectly.

Try and find a democrat-run city that isn't a cesspool of violence and corruption. There's all the evidence one needs that the Left are faith-based rather than evidence-based.

[crescen7]

A truly stunning article.

I’ve never read anything so absolutely wrong as this.

It is a complete inverse of reality. As Rush says, 180 degrees out of phase. Clearly it is the left that substitutes politics for religion - after all it’s the only religion they have.

Its almost as if he’s trying to be satirical, he cites a “rightness so unshakable that it is not subject to political caveats” as if he’s oblivious to “We hold these truths to be self-evident’.

He may be right on the reciprocal point though - for people as far gone as he is - there may be no hope.

[Brugmansian]

Thanks. I didn’t know when it started. Lots of FDR’s crew came out of Wilson’s Creel Committee. They refer to America as a democracy under him? Or hadn’t America “progressed” yet to the point people would let it pass unremarked?

[R. Scott]

Remember “Keep the world safe for Democracy?” I don’t remember FDR, but from Truman on I’ve been hearing that phrase.

[listenhillary]

Bump

[DocRock]

"Fascinating. The writer knows, or pretends to know, nothing of American history.

The Revolution was preached from the pulpit (a very liberal minister, Jonathan Mayhew fired the first shot)."

The Library of Conress has a great online exhibit on Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. I am from Muhlenberg County Kentucky which was named after General Peter Muhlenberg. The Library of Congress website says:

A Fighting Parson
Peter Muhlenberg (1746-1807) was the prime example of a "fighting parson" during the Revolutionary War. The eldest son of the Lutheran patriarch Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg, young Muhlenberg at the conclusion of a sermon in January 1776 to his congregation in Woodstock, Virginia, threw off his clerical robes to reveal the uniform of a Virginia militia officer. Having served with distinction throughout the war, Muhlenberg commanded a brigade that successfully stormed the British lines at Yorktown. He retired from the army in 1783 as a brevetted major general.

And here is a pic of the statue of Gen. Peter Muhlenberg in the U.S. Capitol. It clearly shows the preacher pulling off his robe as described above.

[grey_whiskers]

the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents

OK, douchebag. Let's see how your side treats the flag, Mom, and Apple pie.

The flag:

Motherhood:

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

"Listen Bitch, I don't care about you or your baby"

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “... but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

Apple pie:

Hey Neal, stuff it.

Cheers!

[MrB]

They are fighting against God and His natural laws.

Everything about leftism is contrary to Reality, ie, the way God created the Universe, the “Rules” thereof, and the human nature that He put in it.

[MrB]

We know what we’re up against.

Do we? How many of us realize that, given the power to do so, leftists would use the power of the state to kill all of their ideological opponents?

[MrB]

“Framing their message” means “figuring out how to conceal their beliefs in the most convincing manner possible”.

They DO understand this. They know their beliefs can’t be widely know, because the hoi-paloi aren’t smart enough to understand the superiority of those beliefs.

[caseinpoint]

You are correct about your comment on human nature. The basic difference between liberals and conservatives is their view on basic human nature. Liberals believe that mankind is by nature good, virtuous, instinctively communitarian. They believe people are only corrupted later by corrupt influences in society, primarily what they perceive as the unfairness of abilities, the capitalist system, prejudice. Further, they believe mankind is evolving into higher forms and hence they discount the argument that their prescribed cures for society have never worked in the past. They believe this time it will work because mankind (meaning themselves) are smarter, wiser, more perfect. (Remember Obama’s oft-cited “more perfect” union talk regarding American society.)

Now conservatives believe that mankind’s nature is basically selfish, greedy, individualistic, competitive. It is informed partly by the religious philosophy of “fallen man”. Conservatives don’t pretend that capitalism is anything other than a private means of channeling mankind’s basic nature into something that can benefit everyone (”enlightened self-interest”). Conservatives believe that any combination of people has the capacity to merely concentrate and feed upon mankind’s basic venal instincts. Capitalism does this. No conservative in his or her right mind believes that unfettered capitalism is any better than the humans who run it. So, conservatives believe, is government. Conservatives believe (and facts bear this out) that government is also a collection of venal, greedy, power-hungry people. The difference is that government has coercive powers denied capitalist organizations and therefore government is more dangerous than capitalist combines.

Liberals believe, religiously, that government is a refining, virtuous organization intended to allow people to remain as perfect as they were designed to be by nature, even if it must do so by force. Conservatives believe, religiously, that mankind is not perfectable by natural means but only by supernatural means and that government fulfills its mandate by placing consequences on mankind’s most egregious evil and leaving the rest alone to private controls. The writer is correct that the views between the two philosophies are quite irreconcilable.

[infowarrior]

Remember “Keep the world safe for Democracy?” I don’t remember FDR, but from Truman on I’ve been hearing that phrase.

The sentiments, if not the phrase itself, goes back further than FDR, into the days of Woodrow Wilson..

the infowarrior

[R. Scott]

Great.

[Chode]

good stuff...

[Texas Federalist]

I think Republicans ran from the “Democrat” label to distance themselves from the Democratic-Republican Societies that Washington considered treasonous because it was a political party that disagreed with him. Later, after taking power, Madison and Monroe embraced the moniker. Unlike today however, the Democrats were the party of limited government.