THE DISENTHRALLING. The new Democratic congressional majority has no job more critical right now than forcibly disenthralling the national Republican party from its worst instincts, and from its reliance on the worst in American politics as its primary enabling mechanism. It has fouled the national discourse. It has blighted the national politics. It created the conditions that made the current Executive cargo cult not merely possible, but inevitable. (It's hard to know where to begin, but it might help if important government officials stopped taking these folks seriously.)
For example, long ago, after being publicly humiliated by the Scopes verdict and the attendant national hooting, extremist American Protestantism sensibly withdrew from the national stage. However, in the 1970's, it came roaring back, thanks in part to the genius of Richard Viguerie. However, its revival was as a useful tool in the profane context of politics. Its revival was cultural and political, not spiritual, and those secular underpinnings have crumbled under the combined weight of the knowledge now becoming general among the folks in question that a) a lot of their leaders are towering moral and personal hypocrites, and b) that, like David Kuo and John DiIulio before him, they have been played for suckers by politicians who don't deliver. The problem is not with their faith -- although, as the product of the best the Jesuits had to offer, I still find the whole "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" business too much of a short-cut to hubris -- it's the fact that it was put to use in areas where it had no business being in the first place, and it was inevitably used to further the more reactionary parts of the GOP agenda and, thereby, became publicly radicalized. It was an extremist religion to begin with, and it has become an extremist political movement. It can survive as the former. (Who cares? Handle the snakes if you want to, just don't hand them to me.) It has to be crushed as the latter, as do all the other enabling mechanisms of what passes for modern conservatism. Marginalize the worst of it.. That job began the other night.
--Charles P. Pierce
