If you want to do your part for the left, send two checks today to the right: one to the political-action arm of the Chamber of Commerce and another to that of the Southern Baptist Convention. Then sit back and enjoy, knowing you have helped finance the Right-Wing Family Feud.
The abovementioned lobbyists for corporate heavyweights and religious totalitarians are knocking heads over Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement in their struggle for ideological supremacy within the GOP. In literary terms, they’re merely confirming John Huston’s 1948 brilliant, cinematic allegory of singular power and political ruthlessness. When Key Largo’s good-guy Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) asks Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) how much power is enough, the question catches the gangster off guard. He’s never really thought about it. So McCloud supplies the answer: “More.” At which point Rocco still fails to appreciate the futility of an infinite goal: “Yeah, that’s what I want. More.”
There’s not a reasonable soul alive who’d dispute that both big business and big religion don’t have “more” than enough already in today’s power heirarchy. I’d elaborate if it were necessary, but it’s so blithering obvious, I won’t bother. These 800-pound gorillas of the GOP, however, will never concede that they have enough. More is all that satisfies.
As such there is brewing the mother of all right-wing interfaith squabbles, one that could bring down the right’s entire, artificial edifice: “Setting up a potential clash with religious conservatives, the national business lobby for the first time is marshaling its forces to persuade the White House to pick an industry-friendly Supreme Court nominee…. Business leaders are working behind the scenes to influence the process, an action that threatens to break apart the long-standing Bush coalition of corporate and social conservatives.”
Big business is demanding a less-product-liability-hugging lapdog a la O’Connor, while big religion is demanding a ten-commandments-hugging lapdog a la Scalia, guaranteeing that one of these camps is going to be rather unhappy with whatever dog Bush chooses -- and thus with Bush, and thus with the party. The theocrats are already threatening wholesale mutiny: “If Bush fails to appoint a solid conservative on issues of abortion and gay marriage, [Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention] said that many Southern Baptist voters will withdraw from the public arena.” So if you can afford to send only one check, I’d say best send it to the Chamber of Commerce.
A few lines ago I mentioned this squabble could bring down the right’s “artificial” edifice, only because that’s what has prevailed since right wingers got their ideological act together more than 40 years ago.
In the years leading up to the Goldwater phenomenon, far-right strategists set out to meld an ideological synthesis that would bring its traditionally opposing factions together in a unified front against liberalism. The leading thinker (in my opinion) along these lines was a dialectic-loving, former Marxist by the name of Frank Meyer. In 1960 he laid it on the line in a famous essay urging that Christian traditionalists and economic libertarians come together and strive for electoral victory through “a hard-fought dialectic -- but a dialectic in which both sides recognize not only that they have a common enemy [in liberalism], but also that, despite all differences, they hold a common heritage … of reason [capitalism] operating within tradition [Christianity; emphases original].”
What Meyer proposed was elegantly simple -- that traditionalists and libertarians put their major differences aside in the pursuit of power.
They did, largely, and electorally they thrived. But it was always a shaky and contrived alliance, with old and profoundly real differences lingering all the while. Now that they have the power they sought -- and now, especially, that the lack of a once-strong liberalism fails to unify -- both seek preeminence and neither is willing to play second banana.
In his forward thinking Meyer neglected to mention the one dialectical inevitability, however -- every synthesis splits, creating a new antithesis. And that, it is to be hoped, is what’s happening right now to the right now.
Nothing kills so softly like success.
(For more on this topic, see last week’s piece, “The Revolutionary Right’s Bloody Civil War”)
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