I'm open to a fresh terminology for these theocrats. I appreciate Chip's point, from a while back, that direct mail caricatures distort more than they clarify. I'm agnostic on whether or not they are a latent populist constituency. I'd like to believe so. Still, as a Texan, born and raised, and having spent three years in a Church of Christ jr. high, their _creed_ is, at base, authoritarian. When I hear some blue-staters speak, I don't always hear that recognition.
Trying to make sense of the election, I looked back over the debates through the prism of the wildly popular Left Behind series. In Left Behind, the UN is the tool of the anti-Christ, and Israel is one of God's most favored nations. Applied to the debates, the candidates' respective stances on the UN make Kerry look mad and Bush resolute. Beyond this there is the administration's Likud support, for which the Christian right provides the major popular base of the pro-Likud lobby in the US. Furthermore, it suggests to me a fundamental divide, according to the exit polls, between those who are practically (as in, part of the reality-based community) concerned about the current state of Iraq, who favor Kerry, and those who view the war on terror as a crusade, who came out for Bush.
Scalia has claimed "democracy obscures the divine will." The more of the tirades against "secular humanism" I heard over the years, the harder it became to separate democracy from the ostensible targets. For them, legitimacy does not come from the consent of the governed. Legitimacy comes from God -- their God, as they define Him. (Hence active voter suppression on their part causes no cognitive dissonance. Whether or not you honestly win the election is secondary to whether or not God endorses you.)
Ditto individual rights; our rights flow from God. For sin (abortion, homosexuality, unbelief), there are no rights. This may seem pedantic, but I think it gets lost in much of this debate. That eleven out of eleven states just pasted constitutional genital quotas for marriage underscores this. (The marriage debate hasn't been exclusively about homosexuality. Too quickly forgotten was the congressional push in the '90s for outlawing divorce for all couples on anything but Biblical grounds. Ireland's legalization of divorce not so long ago sounds nauseatingly similar to the attacks on equal rights for marriage in America today.) And, as always, their unyielding litmus test: state mandated births for all fetuses. If you fail to support that, you forfeit any claim to "morality." (The erosion of public support for abortion is a factor Doug has noted, and may need more emphasis in broader debates. Kerry and Edward's vote against banning "partial birth" abortions is a BFD for these people. They never let this stray to far from their thoughts.)
If you think you're on the right side of the apocalypse, then hastening it's approach is a source of affirmed righteousness. It could be that the more Bush f---s up the world, the more right they believe themselves to be. I have no idea how to crack this. But we'll have to correctly discern the malady if we're to find a cure.
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