Henry C.K. Liu
"D.L." wrote:
> 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