corrente

Sidney Blumenthal has a nice column in the Guardian titled "Bush goes to war with modernity." (Can't we get Brooks off the Times Op-Ed page and get someone in there as a bookend to Krugman?) Anyhow, I'll quote a good deal of it, since it's interesting:

Bush had campaigned in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative", softening his edges and separating himself from the hard right. As it was, he lost the popular vote by more than half a million. Now he has decided he has no choice but to chase his base.

The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg. Bush proposed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. He dismissed two scientists who dissented on his bioethics board, which he has used to ban forms of stem cell research, replacing them with adherents of the religious right. Bush made a recess appointment of William Pryor of Alabama as a federal judge, blocked in the Senate for his extremism. ... Then the attorney general, John Ashcroft, subpoenaed the medical records of women who have had abortions at planned parenthood clinics.

Bush followed by supporting the unborn victims of violence bill, creating a new federal crime of foetal homicide that passed the Republican-dominated House of Representatives on February 26. At Bush's order, the Senate is being transformed into a battlefield of the culture war.

But Bush's instigation of religious wars in America, while it mobilises the evangelical Protestant faithful, is also unexpectedly thwarting him. The born-again Bush, who reconstructed his self-image after 9/11 as a messianic leader, assumed that the agendas of the neocons and the theocons were one and the same. However, Bush outsourced his foreign policy on the Middle East and Israel to the neocons in part for an electoral purpose, hoping to capture the Jewish vote, which will not be fulfilled because of his anxious devotion to the theocons.

The neocons and the theocons were bound together in reaction against the 1960s for different reasons: the neocons by foreign policy, the theocons by their continuing fundamentalist revolt against modernity. Under Ronald Reagan, this coalition was held together in the crusade against godless communism.

With his culture war the son is echoing another political error of the father, who alienated Jews and Catholics by permitting his 1992 convention to be used as a platform for the religious evangelical right. This latest revival is frightening Jews, cautioning American Catholics (overwhelmingly of the liberal John XXIII/Vatican II persuasion, and holding the same view on abortion as other Americans), and scourging mainline Protestants. The more Bush supplicates his base, the more he repels the others. Moreover, Bush is running against a Democrat who's a modern Catholic, with lineage to the oldest mainline Protestant families of New England and Jewish ancestry.

This political miscalculation at home is far outweighed by the disastrous consequences in the Middle East. With increasing desperation, Bush is campaigning on behalf of his various fundamentalisms in a crusade against modernity in America, his greatest war of all.
(via The Guardian)

OK. Blumenthal's article is a rather uneasy mixture of political calculation and and bigfoot-style musing. But he offers some interesting analytical tools.

First is the idea of the "neocons" and "theocons." I've been looking for a term for the fundamentalist and evangelical politicians for the right, and Christian Right doesn't do it for me, since these politicians are about as far from being Christian as it is possible to get. So I gratefully accept "theocon"—with the emphasis where it should be, on con.

Second is the more interesting idea of a war against modernity; I can see how this is what the theocons are doing. Take education. Orcinus has a terrific and terrifying post on how the theocons are trashing science by forcing "intelligent design" to be included in curriculums. What next? Putting the notion that the earth is only 6000 years old into Geology courses?

At bottom, it really is a war—not really a shooting one, except for bizarre winger eruptions here and there—about what kind of country we are going to have.