Many theocons are promising that if given another chance they will do better next time. There is no reason to think they can, too many Americans refuse to be fooled twice for the Republicans to regain the advantage over the Democrats, and even many theocons are too disillusioned by their own failings to keep up the fight (leading some to call for a return the old fashioned separation of the conservative faithful from the temptations of the larger world). By coming to the power that always corrupts the powerful, the conservative Repubs inevitably self destructed. And that exposes the problem for American theoconservatism and for its GOP. They don’t really have any good options. As futile as Rove’s grand strategy was, it’s not like there is much in the way of alternatives. No matter what conservatives and the Republican Party do they are likely to loose ground. If the theocons break their alliance with and denounce the corporate machine that is doing so much to deChristianize the culture, then both elements lose much of the social and political power they have, and the Republican Party becomes a small rump of what it is. Nor will this do anything to encourage capital let up in its project to commercialize and secularize the populace, quite the opposite. But continuing the coalition will do no more to stem mass consumerization and secularization than it has so far. If the Republicans -- perhaps under the aegis of Palin, or Huckabee, or both -- swing further to the right they are doomed. Not only because the theocon base has lost credibility following the incompetence and corruption of their period of rule, but because the religious right is shrinking as the consumer culture continues to batter theism across the left-right spectrum. But the right wing Reagan GOP cannot return to the center and its Rockefeller Republican heritage because it will lose the many tens of millions of right wingers that make up their base. Besides, many in the center will see little point in supporting Repubs over Dems if the former are no longer all that different from the latter. The Rockefeller GOP was the minority party, after all. Yet the status quo obviously is not working out very well either. Unlucky McCain was the first Republican candidate to face the bad set of contradictory options that will leave many of his successors fighting an uphill battle.
These days a growing evangelical movement is broadening their political agenda a little towards the left to address poverty and the environment. Whether or not it is a good idea in ethical terms, in the political arena this adoption of liberal secular policies is not likely to help the demographics of conservative faith any more than it has the liberal wing. But if theocons continue the tradition of sticking to the standard wedge issues they will not reverse their decline either. They are boxed in. Even if the Republicans had managed to keep the White House, and then finished their program to pack the Supreme Court, it would have merely slowed down the secularization that is being driven by consumerist modernity. Even if the Democrats blow it in the next few years and are replaced on a large scale by Republicans the pattern still holds – all the more so since the theocons are bound to screw it up again. One way or another, the right lacks the mechanisms needed to recapture the national culture and political majority.
The central role played by the health care problem in these seemingly unrelated matters is far greater than most realize. It has yet to fully sink into the popular consciousness how the American system is a full blown economic disaster that is gravely damaging the national economy as well as commercial and personal finances. Universal health care systems are much more effective and efficient -- they cost only half as much per person while delivering longer lifespans and lower juvenile mortality rates. The American arrangement is an outright scandal that wastes literally a trillion dollars each year, costing every person an extra $3000 per annum, or a quarter million over a lifetime, for no good purpose, and bankrupts millions while leaving a third of the population uninsured or underinsured. Nor can corporations afford the current arrangement, they would be much better off paying into a universal system than into insurance companies that blow a third of the take on overhead. In other words adopting a universal health care while not, as most assume, increase the national financial burden -- it is the thing that more than anything else the country can do to reduce personal, commercial and national expenditures and debt loads by the colossal amounts needed to save the economy. Because the current system is becoming ever more unsustainable (unless reformed it will absorb a crushing fifth of the economy in the next few years) the US will have to join the rest of the 1st world and implement a dramatically lower cost and more efficacious comprehensive system (something that the Obama plan does not do because, like the McCain alternative, it is not sufficiently universal to bring down costs). If an when that happens the enhanced financial security that will be enjoyed by the middle class will further suppress interest in god and church as it has in the rest of the west, a trend boosted by the materialist popular culture (it is the combination of mass consumerism and middle class financial security that has sent democratic secularism to historic heights in all other 1st world nations). The increased secularization will favor more progressive policies that contribute to further secularization in the sociological feedback cycle that has already remade the rest of the 1st world in the secular-progressive mold. Although accidental, this system is so effective that it has never undergone a major reversal. This is just not good for the Republicans.
As big a factor religion is in these matters, as well as economics, other factors play important rules. There is the ethnic problem. For the Republican Party that is. America is well on its way to becoming a nation of minorities in which the European stock is no longer the majority. At the 2008 GOP convention an outrageously diminutive 1.5% of the delegates were black. How the Repubs will ever make significant gains among those of African descent has never been logically explained. Nor is it possible for the GOP to become the majority party unless they capture much if not most of the expanding Hispanic vote. But every decade or so the Republican right goes nativist in another orgy of anti-immigration sentiment that drives Hispanics into the arms of the Democrats to the horror of more sensible Republican pols like Bush and McCain. Its unavoidable internal flaws and contradiction kept the even the Reagan-Bush era GOP from really being the majority party even at it peaks before the 2006 debacle. That’s why Rove had to play the margins. Now that his calculations have inexorably gone awry the Grand Old Party is increasingly an organization of lily white, upper income or rural, older conservative Christians whose geographic base is largely constrained to the evangelical southeast – it is not even a truly national party. Although it too has it serious defects and internal conflicts, the far more ethnically and geographically diverse, socially tolerant, secular, progressive and metropolitan Democratic Party is much better positioned to exploit the changing American scene as it becomes less exceptional and more like other the advanced democracies.
If the scenario presented here is correct, then America will not continue to experience the liberal-conservative-liberal-conservative cycles sketched by Arthur Schlesinger, but will permanently become a more liberal and secular democracy in which the Democratic Party is dominant. This does not mean the Republican party is on the way out and will not enjoy the occasional success -- many presidents were Republicans even as the Dems were the national majority, and the latter did not control all of Congress every cycle. It is just that their hopes to become the sustained majority are illusory. The last time the Repubs were the true majority was back in the 1920s, even since Reagan got the White House their majority status has been at best marginal and intermittent. The GOP long has and will continue to suffer from the critical flaw that it has since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s been and always will be the party of the wealthy elite, that most Americans are not and never will be upper class, and the party of wealth cannot therefore ever be the majority organization. For all the power of the upper crust, the votes of the American majority actually do count. A number of advantages should ensue from the Permanent Democratic Majority. The culture will become more open and less bigoted. The economic bubbles and collapses that have marred Reagan-Bush economics should be ameliorated as the financial security of the middle class is enhanced and poverty is suppressed by greater income equality. Many Americans who continue to see the US as the world’s Shining City on the Hill do not realize the great societal success being enjoyed by other western nations, including lower – sometimes dramatically lower -- levels of homicide and incarceration, adult and juvenile mortality, and adverse consequences of sexual activity. No one will ever again go bankrupt because they get seriously ill. On the negative side chronic Democratic rule will fuel the corruption inherent to a party confident that its dominance is unassailable. Liberal over reaching on economic regulation and government intervention risks repressing the economic vitality of the free markets that create most of the real wealth and much of the technological progress. And the popular culture created by the collaboration of corporations and consumers has its dark sides. The opposition will exploit these failings to make the occasional partial comeback, but it will not be enough to regain the high ground.
A few who have been keeping tabs on the long term demographics saw the secular-progressive future of America when Rove and company were still living in their theocon fantasy land. This researcher noted the trends in a Free Inquiry article in 2002, the same year that political strategists John Judis and Ruy Texeira predicted The Emerging Democratic Majority in a book that one wonders if Rove read, and if so comprehended its implications. Many on the left as well as the right missed it because they based their thinking on assumptions or ideology. If you are really interested in where America is likely to head in terms of politics, you have to know the religious, cultural and economic stats and trends the drive the system. And it also needs to be understood that there is little that seemingly clever political strategies can do to alter the course of an entire democracy where mass opinion moved by enormous forces has the last word.
Documentation - Gregory Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health With Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005), moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html.
Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, “Why the Gods Are Not Winning,” Edge (2007), www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html.
Gregory Paul, “Buckley's Big Mistake” Dissident Voice (3/5/08)www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/buckleys-big-mistake. Gregory Paul, www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/04/if-socialized-medicine-is-such-a-bad-thing-then-why-not-privatize-the-police-and-fire-departments.
Gregory Paul, “Creationism in Decline” New Scientist (2008), www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.000-creationism-in-decline.html. Penny Edgell et al. “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” American Sociological Review (2006) 71: 211-234 demonstrate the discriminatory attitudes that intimidate Americans from acknowledging their irreligiosity.
Harold Taylor, “While Most Americans Believe in God, Only 36% Attend a Religious Service Once a Month or More,” (2003), www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=408 explains the problem of measuring American nonbelievers, and the steps Harris took to overcome them and record the large body of religious skeptics. Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll, (2006), www.harrisinteractive.com/NEWS/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1130 verifies the results of the prior study, plus the even greater secularization of other 1st world countries.
PEW U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (2008) religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-full.pdf and PEW Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, (2007), people-press.org/reports/display.php3?Report ID=312 document the national trend towards secular opinion.
Tom Smith & Seokho Kim discuss the NORC data showing that Amerofaith is declining as the nonreligious rise in “The Vanishing Protestant Majority,” GSS Social Change Report 14 (2004), www.norc.uchicago.edu/issues/PROTSG08.pdf. In “The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States,” Institute for Jewish & Community Research (2004), www.Jewishresearch.org/PDFs/religion.pdf, Sid Groeneman & Gary Tobin explore the demographic factors behind the decline.
W. Haug and P. Warner “The Demographic Characteristics of the Linguistic and Religious groups in Switzerland.” Population Studies (2000) 31, R. Low “The Truth About Men & Church.” Touchstone (2003) www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-05-024-v, and H. Brinton. “Praying for More Men.” The Washington Post (2004) 12/19, B4 explain how the loss of the men is damaging western and American faith.
Penny Marler and C. Hadaway. “Testing the Attendance Gap in a Conservative Church,” Sociology of Religion (1999) 60:175-186 and Stanley Presser and Linda Stesson “Data Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported Religious Attendance,” American Sociological Review. (1998) 63:137-145 show that actual church attendance is much lower than indicated in surveys.
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