Tories in trouble

D.L. boddhisatva at mindspring.com
Fri Apr 30 00:34:29 PDT 1999


C. Burford,

Welcome to the post-conservative-revolution world. After 1994 we have seen exactly the same trend here in America where the Republican party has essentially divided into the pro-business wing (ascendant, ultimately dominant) and the radical Protestant - isolationist wing. "Corrective" is exactly the way I would describe the Reagan administration. It was meant to put capitalism back at the top of the agenda. The social agenda of Reaganism, as I see it, basically came out of the ascedancy of Pentecostalist/Evangelist religion. As the industrial capitalist class system finally cleared out the last vestiges of small town communitarianism, it stirred the mud and creatures full of fire and brimstone poured forth from the backwaters.

Pentecostalism/Evangelism cannot be underestimated in American society. They are prevalent in American Christianity and represent the continuous influence of radical Protestantism that has characterized American religion from the first. However, as those many preachers who prophesied doom at the turn of the millennium face the embarrassing lack of any signs of the Rapture, so it seems that the Pentecostal fire is burning out. Evangelists have either gone mainstream or have been marginalized by their own excesses. They have moved American Christianity to the right but they have done all the moving they can, it seems.

With their momentum gone, the Christian Right in America is now saddled with a problem: their mostly working-class identity. While it's true that many capitalists took on the lingo of the Pentecostal movement, their religion is Mammon, not Christ. That is clearer and clearer and Republicans are quickly abandoning religious rhetoric for capitalist rhetoric. Their problem, and the Tories share it, is that Clinton/Blair accepted the international capitalist religion before the Right did. While the Right in England, America and throughout Europe are saddled with social agendas that are losing popularity, the present right-swinging elites of the traditionally "left" parties are now encumbered with no social agenda at all. Their social window-dressing is a sales scheme, a softener for the capitalist hard line. They offer mildly increased social spending the way a capitalist firm offers a coupon to get you to buy the product. They reach out to popular sentiment the way capitalists reach out to focus groups.

The problem is that once a society has taken on the dialectically important parts of a party philosophy, that political party is essentially superfluous. The "correction" complete, what do we need with the old guard?

peace



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