It Seems Paranoia Makes People Ideological and Stupid

I was busy over the weekend so I missed this little bit of craziness.  Had I found the Allen* West piece sooner, I would have added it to this post about being ideological and stupid.

Sixty years ago, Joe McCarthy claimed to have the numbers of Communists seeking to destroy American from within:

"I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five [people] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."

Then there was Michele Bachmann, who found people holding un-American ideas in Congress.  The State Department was being run by members of her party at the time.

She wasn't a purist; however, she didn't offer a number.  Allen* West apparently has done what the media apparently did not.  He has investigated and knows how many members of Congress are un-American Marxists.

I suspect both West and Bachmann have used paraphrased this McCarthy line more often than they have found a true Communist in Congress.

"You are seeing today an all out attempt to marshal the forces of the opposition, using not merely the communists, or their fellow travelers-the deluded liberals, the eggheads, and some of my good friends in both the Democratic and Republican Parties who can become heros over night in the eyes of the left-wing press if they will just join with the jackal pack"

*I was apparently trying too hard to make a connection between McCarthy and West.  The original version of the post identified Allen West as Joe West

The Ron Paul Conundrum

I have trouble getting my head around Ron Paul.  The big boy bloggers seem to have the same problem.

Andrew Sullivan endorses Paul for the Republican nomination because Paul is relatively strong on civil liberties and doesn't seem to be a politician for hire.

And I see in Paul none of the resentment that burns in Gingrich or the fakeness that defines Romney or the fascistic strains in Perry's buffoonery. He has yet to show the Obama-derangement of his peers, even though he differs with him. He has now gone through two primary elections without compromising an inch of his character or his philosophy. This kind of rigidity has its flaws, but, in the context of the Newt Romney blur, it is refreshing. He would never take $1.8 million from Freddie Mac. He would never disown Reagan, as Romney once did. He would never speak of lynching Bernanke, as Perry threatened. When he answers a question, you can see that he is genuinely listening to it and responding - rather than searching, Bachmann-like, for the one-liner to rouse the base. He is, in other words, a decent fellow, and that's an adjective I don't use lightly. We need more decency among Republicans.

On the other hand, Jon Chait asserts,

Ron Paul is not a kindly old libertarian who just wants everybody to be free. He’s a really creepy bigot.

Around four years ago, James Kirchick reported a lengthy story delving into Paul’s worldview. As Kirchick writes, Paul comes out of an intellectual tradition called “paleolibertarianism,” which is a version of libertarianism heavily tinged with far-right cultural views. The gist is that Paul is tied in deep and extensive ways to neo-Confederates, and somewhat less tightly to the right-wing militia movement. His newsletter, which he wrote and edited for years, was a constant organ of vile racism and homophobia. This is not just picking out a phrase here and there. Fear and hatred of blacks and gays, along with a somewhat less pronounced paranoia about Jewish dual loyalty, are fundamental elements of his thinking. The most comparable figure to Paul is Pat Buchanan, the main differences being that Paul emphasizes economic issues more, and has more dogmatically pro-market views.

Tod Kelly damns with faint praise.

And for all the talk of him being a crackpot, in my mind he in not nearly as bats**t crazy as Gingrich or Bachmann.

In short, the big boy blog community seems to indicate that a man who has published or, at the very least, has lent his name to racist, homophobic publications and who wishes to return the country to the gold standard has more character, is better on civil liberties, and has a range of policy ideas that are sounder than those of every other Republican candidate in the race.  It is indeed a curse to live in interesting times.

Contrasting A Person Who Thinks With One Who Doesn't

Cruising around the interwebs, I came across some prime examples of each person.  Representing the non-thinkers, Michele Bachmann,

"The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state,” she said. “If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

Bachmann's analysis, of course, ignores the fact that China's command and control economy makes Johnson's Great Society look positively libertarian by contrast.  Then there's the minor problem that China doesn't seem to have any political ideals that square with either democratic or republican principles.

Representing the thinkers, a person who seems to have anticipated Ms. Bachmann's lack of thought, G.K.Chesterton.  In an essay entitled What's Wrong With The World, Chesterton writes,

Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does not alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is "Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot have equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. We must have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy." I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain. It might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, for instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all born in a state; we were not all born on a ship;. . . . But we live and die in the vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and the popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the modern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking, "too old at forty" and all the rest of the filth.

Of course if one is seeking to be the nominee of  a political party that has devoted " itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance," it's easy to see why one would be willing to overlook despotism, commercial or otherwise.

Minor Musings From A Road Trip

Last evening, I needed to take road trip that began shortly after 8 pm and ended around 2:45 am.  Since my passengers slept after midnight, I had a bit too much time to myself and had a few recollections and committed some bumper sticker philosophizing.

At some point I noted that during the early 1980s I met people who had the same beliefs as Tea Party members now hold.  The biggest difference between those people and the current Tea Partiers is tone and volume. I now hear pompous anger; in the 1980s, I heard sincerity and reflection.

I also came to the conclusion that it's more Biblical to start a home church than it's American to start a home school.

I wondered if more fundamentalist Christians would accept the arguments about climate change if they had been told that they were right when they claim God gave humans dominion over the whole world and sent humanity out to subdue it, but there's a huge difference between subduing and destroying.  We have reached the point where we are destroying.

Before she went to sleep, my wife mentioned  this NPR interview with Ryan Lizza, author of this New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann's rise to prominence.

During the interview, Lizza lists Francis Schaeffer, Nancy Pearcey, and John Eidsmoe  as authors who have influenced Bachmann.  I have not read anything by Pearcey or Eidsmoe, but I did read Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto in the early 1980s.  As Lizza points out, Schaeffer and Pearcey believe that Christian faith should dominate believer's lives and worldviews.

"Michele Bachmann has mentioned Pearcey's book [Total Truth] as one that was important to her," . . . . "[The book] is in line with the Schaeffer-ite view of taking your Christian faith and making sure that it permeates all parts of your life. The key thing here is Christians should not just be go-to-church-on-Sunday Christians. Their religion should permeate all aspects of life."

It's not too difficult develop that principle when the Bible contains injunctions like Romans 12: 1-2.

¹I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

 ²And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

The Bible says faith should affect philosophy.  It also says I should start losing lots of weight.  I can understand why Christians who believe in absolutes would take issue with ideas like these presented by Stanley Fish.  I have no clue why people who hold that view can ally themselves with Ayn Rand's followers.

Is The Confederacy Endorsing Michele Bachmann?: A Minor Theological Musing

Even if I give Michele Bachmann a pass on being confused by John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy, she continues to confuse me.

Writing for The Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg reports

At Coburn, Bachmann studied with John Eidsmoe, who she recently described as "one of the professors who had a great influence on me." Bachmann served as his research assistant on the 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy, and that it should become one again. "The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God," Eidsmoe wrote. "In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy."

Eidsmoe, who hung up the phone when asked for an interview, is a contentious figure. Last year, he withdrew from speaking at a Wisconsin Tea Party rally after the Associated Press raised questions about his history of addresses to white supremacist groups. In 2010, speaking a rally celebrating Alabama's secession from the Union, he claimed that Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than Abraham Lincoln.

Let's begin with the irony alert.  A woman seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln claims that a person who believes that Jefferson Davis "understood the Constitution better than Abraham Lincoln" had a great positive influence on her.  Why would one become a Republican if one believes secession was the proper course?

Further, Bachmann and her influential professor seem to imply that the US government shares a unique relationship with God akin to that shared by Old Testament Israel.  At a simple level, what happened to Christ's injunction to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's?  That phrasing, taken at either a metaphoric or literal literal level, implies that both the secular state and the religious realm have divine protection.  Further, Romans 13 states,

¹Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For
 ²Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

I've always been confused by people proudly asserting that the US was uniquely established by God if there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God."  It seems all governments come from God. I freely admit my finite human wisdom doesn't understand how that can be fact when North Korea exists, but  I'll accept Isaiah 55:8-9

⁸ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.   
⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my  thoughts than your thoughts.

Still, doesn't the fact that the "powers that be are ordained by God" and whoever " resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God," imply that the Confederacy was resisting God when it seceded from the Union?  It seems that Bachmann and her professor are siding with sinners when they claim Davis and Calhoun were more correct than Lincoln, the elected leader of a divinely established government.

Writing in the New Republic, Ed Kilgore asserts that Republican leaders

will find another angle to go after Bachmann, such as her occasionally isolationist-sounding foreign policy views. But the bottom line is that Bachmann’s moment in the sun makes her vulnerable to attacks that are being formulated as we speak, and we’ll know soon enough who takes the lead in cutting her down to size, and whether it actually works.

Maybe Republicans should look to their first President for ways to put Bachmann's extremism in perspective.