Posted on 10/11/2013 2:46:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Why aren’t Republicans more afraid? The entire premise of both the government shutdown and the threats to force the government into debt default is that Democrats care more about the consequences of these actions than the Republicans do. Republicans may go on TV and shed crocodile tears about national monuments being shut down, but the act isn’t really fooling the voters: The only way to understand these fights is to understand that the GOP is threatening to destroy the government and the world economy in order to get rid of Obamacare (as well as a panoply of other right wing demands). Just as terrorists use the fact that you care more about the lives of the hostages than they do to get leverage, Republican threats rely on believing they don’t care about the consequences, while Democrats do.
So why aren’t they more afraid? Businessweek, hardly a liberal news organization, said the price of default would be “a financial apocalypse” that would cause a worldwide economic depression. This is the sort of thing that affects everyone. Having a right wing ideology doesn’t magically protect your investments from crashing alongside the rest of the stock market.
The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of damage it would cause.
The press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is.
It’s not just that the rogue’s gallery of congress people who are pushing the hardest for hostage-taking as a negotiation tactic also happens to be a bench full of Bible thumpers. Pew Research shows that people who align with the Tea Party are more likely to not only agree with the views of religious conservatives, but are likely to cite religious belief as their prime motivation for their political views. White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to approve of the Tea Party. Looking over the data, it becomes evident that the “Tea Party” is just a new name for the same old white fundamentalists who would rather burn this country to the ground than share it with everyone else, and this latest power play from the Republicans is, in essence, a move from that demographic to assert their “right” to control the country, even if their politicians aren’t in power.
It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects.
It’s hard for the Christian fundamentalists who run the Republican Party now to worry about the serious economic danger they’re putting the world in, because they are swept up in worrying that President Obama is an agent of the devil and that the world is on the verge of mayhem and apocalypse if they don’t “stop” him somehow, presumably be derailing the Affordable Care Act. Christian conservatives such as Ellis Washington are running around telling each other that the ACA will lead to “the systematic genocide of the weak, minorities, enfeebled, the elderly and political enemies of the God-state.” Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist.Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner argued that Obama is using his signature health care legislation to promote “the destruction of the family, Christian culture”, and demanded that Christians “need to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against President Obama’s signature health care law”.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined in, demanding that the Republicans shut down the government rather than let Obamacare go into effect. The excuse was their objection to the requirement that insurance make contraception available without a copayment, saying ending this requirement matters more than “serving their own employees or the neediest Americans.”
The Christian right media has been hammering home the message that Christians should oppose the Affordable Care Act. Pat Necerato of the Christian News Network accused the supporters of the law of committing idolatry and accused people who want health care of being covetous. The Christian Post approvingly reported various Christian leaders, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, saying things like the health care law is “a profound attack on our liberties” and lamented “Today is the day I will tell my grandchildren about when they ask me what happened to freedom in America.”
Some in the Christian right straight up believe Obamacare portends the end times. Rick Phillips, writing for Christianity.com, hinted that Obamacare might be predicted in Revelations, though he held back from saying that was certain. Others are less cautious. On the right wing fundamentalist email underground, a conspiracy theory has arisen claiming that Obamacare will require all citizens to have a microchip implanted. While it’s completely untrue, many Christians believe that this means the “mark of the beast” predicted in Revelations that portends the return of Christ and the end of the world.
In other words, the Christian right has worked itself into a frenzy of believing that if this health care law is implemented fully, then we are, in fact, facing down either the end of American Christianity itself or quite possibly the end times themselves. In comparison, it’s hard to be too scared by the worldwide financial collapse that they’re promising to unleash if the Democrats don’t just give up their power and let Republicans do what they want. Sure, crashing stock markets, soaring unemployment, and worldwide economic depression sounds bad, but for the Christian right, the alternative is fire and brimstone and God unleashing all sorts of hell on the world.
This is a problem that extends beyond just the immediate manufactured crisis. The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions. Witness, for instance, the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been harnessed to promote the notion that climate change isn’t a real problem. Average global temperatures are creeping up, but the majority of Christian conservatives are too worried about the supposed existential threats of abortion and gay rights to care.
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded. Take right wing Christian Senator Tom Coburn, who celebrated the possibility of default back in January by saying it would be a “wonderful experiment”. Being able to blow past all the advice of experts just to make stuff up you want to believe isn’t a quality that is unique to fundamentalists, but as these budget negotiations are making clear, they do have a uniquely strong ability to lie to themselves about what is and isn’t a real danger to themselves and to the world.
Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.
Typical athiest fag views from a fag rag. Why do they hate God? Because he doesn’t approve of faggotry. There I said it.
“Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist.”
Early on I considered that possibility. He fits a lot of the criteria. But he has not managed to garner world support nor to maintain his popularity within his adopted country.
Tip of the iceberg. He also prescribes views that define right and wrong. They hate that, too. They don’t like the rules that define decent society and wish to rewrite them because they think they know better than Him.
Cut her hair and she looka like a man. May have to check the plumbing to make sure it hasn’t had an out’y changed to any in’y. Why do fags always have “that look” about them?
5.56mm
Communist delusions driving the Dems insane.
> ........She’s a dunce.
Like a majority of students graduating from institutions of propaganda and feminist-justice studies.
Or gender studies. What an idiot course to take in college but it might be useful for getting hired at a place like Salon...
Socialist regimes need a scapegoat to blame their failures on. Germany and Judaism under fascism is the most recent example.
The socialists must believe that Christianity has gotten to such a low point of support that they can make such an endeavor work.
They are at least one or two generations too early. A united Christianity could still swallow them politically.
Amanda Marcotte: Looks like my cousin, the liberal, in her younger days.
Ah... the REAL basis of leftism is coming to the surface-
hatred of Christians, God, and His Word.
Indeed - they have their own eschatology that is driving them [insane]...
They believe that mankind’s inherent “goodness” will express itself to the full when the “environment”, ie, the government, has all the proper rules in place,
and there will be a man-made “end times” utopia.
Indeed!
I can see the demon in her... these people are lost souls.
Every percent we shrink the Gov will cost the Communists from the 60’s one year to gain back, and they’re growing old. Fear.
The "only way" to understand it? Okay.
As a constitutional libetarian, I recognize that most of what the Federal Government does is unconstitutional and a chainsaw needs to be taken to the Federal Government. I support the legal activity and authority of the Federal Government. I've heard only of a few people, who want to dismantle the entire Federal Government and they're certainly not in the GOP and the problem with the GOP is that it wants to increase the size and scope of the Federal Government.
The Federal Government is currently on the path of declaring the People as the enemy and they are out to destroy this country. We must cut back the Fed's before they cut us down.
They also willingly gave up thier weapons for false security thinking compliance would end peacefully. .
Utopianism has many expressions. Some are religious like Christian and Jewish religions which envision the Garden of Eden free of all worry and sin and a heavenly afterlife. These are the more noble pursuits of mankind. I am concerned with political Utopianism which expresses man's desire to have heaven on earth and have a common rejection of a belief in God. I compare such pursuits to cults like the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon or the Heaven's Gate UFO religion doomsday cult based in San Diego. These cults are no more extreme than the manifestations of political Utopianism in Marxism, Stalinism, and go all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The Left has been immersed in political Utopianism since our country's founding and have at its roots the Utopian archtype of a perfect state free from pain, poverty and death. It is the trek down the Santa Monica Pier to catch the Mother Ship descending down from the Hale-Bopp Comet.
The progressive left with adherants like radical feminist Amanda Marcotte are too chasing comets. Their Utopianism is a Death Cult along with their expressions of homosexuality, abortion, the end of the father role, infanticide, euthanasia and suicide.
I see the liberal leftist Culture of Death end like similar manifestations of Utopianism in the ash can of history. They all end with a drink of their flaming liberal collision course with self-destruction.
Will they blink? If they default and it is shown that it was due to vindictiveness or incompetence, maybe then we would see millions of pissed off Americans descending on DC with rope in hand.
Funny that she sees the maintenance of the debt limit as a cause for worldwide economic catastrophe,
and not the out of control creation of money and spending into debts that could never be repaid as the cause.
This points out that when the crash comes,
DUE TO LEFTIST POLICIES, AND ON PURPOSE,
people like this will NOT learn, and will still blame conservatives and the Christians (and Christ) that they hate.
I am a Christian— the unbeliever calls me delusional. I don’t care what they say. What matters is what the Bible teaches. IF the world hates me for being a Christian— It Hated my Lord and Savior first.The US Army trained us to consider the foundations when we prepared to oppose all enemy foreign or domestic. The history of America —it’s founding as the nation we ought represent is that of Christians bearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Cross of Christ to the New Wold. The New World Order they spoke of was Christian NOT atheistic— NOR what is spoken of by our Govt./ progressives today.I am not ashamed of being a Christian and if the enemy foreign or domestic are troubled by the Truth — so be it. I am happy to be of service to them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.