Totally bonkers

From Johann Hart: Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

    These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.

    This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

    You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

...

  It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

    These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

    This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

...

 How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

    Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

    This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

Comments

[old - Doug Johnson]

A very good article, I especially enjoy the bit about Stephen Hawking that I hadn't heard before, until it gets to the part about religion. The idea that faith is believing something without evidence is a very poor one, certainly nothing close to what Badiou would understand by faith/fidelity. Nor is it what most evangelicals understand by faith. Billy Graham often says something like, "I've never seen the wind, but I've seen the effects of the wind." I'm just astounded at times by how often liberals just don't get anything about the religious right. There is no doubt that the religion of the right has to be frontally challenged. But to do so, you've got to have something better than a kindergarten understanding of the way the evangelical universe operates.

[Jodi]

Old--I think I've mentioned that I grew up Southern Baptist. In this evangelical setting, the strength of faith was that it was not the same as evidence. It doesn't take anything to believe on evidence. It takes a lot, a special kind of commitment, to have faith. Now, as you say, there is more to it than this--there are effects. So, people talked about the effects of Jesus in their life, the effects of prayer. The thing is, seeing these effects as effects required faith (rather than saying the effects were luck, attributable to individual hard work, etc).

Is it possible, then, that as aspect of a specific discourse and practice--religious faith--has flowed way over its bounds, into all sorts of other areas where its effects are more pernicious? It seems to me that the answer is yes, particularly in the decline of symbolic efficiency when for most of us nothing is ever sure or grounded and everything seems to require a leap of faith.

[Old - Doug Johnson]

I'd be open to a certain amount of spillover, but don't by any means think it's the main cause of religious right disbelief of global warming or persistent belief in Iraqi WMD, etc. I'm much more convinced that these affirmations and denials are more bound up in a much more complex web of ways of being in the world, of whom to trust and whom to immediately receive with suspicion, what kinds of rhetoric and evidence to count as persuasive and what to blow off. It is interesting what you describe in terms of your baptist upbringing. I was raised in a variety of baptist settings and can certainly think of moments where I heard something along the lines of what you experienced. By and large, however, those that schooled me growing up insisted that faith and reason, science, evidence were not exclusionary, but rather complementary.

[Karlo]

As Lakoff points out in his discussions on framing, once Dems feel the need to defend themselves against these accusations, they affirm the frame--the notion that death panels and Kenyan conspiracies to smuggle in babies to become president are ideas that belong somewhere outside of tabloid headlines.

[colin bowers]

Karlo, my fear is that their is no non-tabloid style journalism left, at least on television in the USA, and it's even leaking into print sources. If you have a significant portion of the population that is willing to be spoon-fed information, and believe in "sources" like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Keith Olbermann, and unwilling to take the time and effort to get the facts straight, then the media has even more of an ethical burden to present balanced and fair coverage of timely issues. The media is the facilitator of the kind of vitriolic nonsense that gets bandied about in these 'debates' thinking that each and every opinion, whether professional or faith-based, should get equal airtime when clearly the media has a responsibility to denounce nonsense for what it is.(In point of fact, the more outrageous the claim the more likely it will get airtime, because people tune in to listen to nut-jobs. They make for better television than a Johns Hopkins U. scientist.) Not all opinions ARE equal. A climatologist ought to receive more credibility than some rancher in Montana who considers the weather every so often. But expert opinion gets labelled 'elitist' by the Right.

[bob allen]

one thing I find interesting is the difference between the virtual reality of the media, and reality. For example, in my workplace there is alot of rightist sentiment, because we have privileged blue collar jobs. So the fox news tea party stuff goes down well with about half of these folk- yet there is no real organization, they have no orientation toward collective action other than NRA gun club hot air. In contrast, when I went to a pro choice clinic defense in Nebraska recetnly, leftist activists crushed the theocrats of Operation Rescue, far outnumbering what the rightists hoped to mobilize. True, there had been a killing of Dr. Tiller that mightve thinned their ranks, but my point is, Fox News and even the banter of coworkers would make it seem a rightist uprising was nigh when in fact, Obama is prez, and we outmobilized and humiliated a group like Operation Rescue. Which only makes them more violently desperate of course...

[colin]

Bob, LOL@ the 'fox news tea party stuff'... seems more like beer-hall putsch fodder in many ways, but I get the point. And it is interesting, as a Canadian observer of US culture, politics and media, (and of course I know what you're saying is the reality) just how much sway the lunatic fringe has there, how loud their voices scream, how chock-full the media is with this stuff. I am not surprised at all that they are disorganized, that they don't come out to rallies like the one you mention in the same numbers as progressives, yet the 'virtual reality' of the media clearly has an agenda to puff them all up like giant blowfish to make them appear far more threatening than they actually are.

In Canada, which has become much more of a centrist country over the past 25 years, although still has a reputation (largely undeserved now) of being left-wing, the far-left and the far-right just don't get heard or seen to the same extent. We know they're out there, but they somehow feel immodest at blasting their idiosyncratic views throw megaphones, almost as though it would be a touch embarrassing to publicly air them.