Legal Commentary

Republican Gomorrah: Deconstructing the Radical Right

By Jeralyn

My copy of Max Blumenthal's new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party , arrived Friday. It's an expose of the Radical Right -- detailing how the fundamentalist Christian movement infiltrated the Republican party, transformed it, and now dominates it.

Max spends a lot of time on James Dobson and Sarah Palin. But there are others too, from Tom DeLay to GW Bush, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich. He explains how the leaders of the radical right "use authoritarian religion to excuse their personal hypocrisies." Max presents Sarah Palin not as a fringe player, but as one who represents the core of the GOP.

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Max writes that he was inspired by the work of psychologist Erich Fromm who analyzed "how the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings." Max explains how "a culture of personal crisis has come to define the radical right."

Another fascinating read on the topic of radical mass movements is Eric Hoffer'sThe True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classic.) , that I read in college and re-purchased a few years ago. (I also remember reading Fromm's The Art of Loving in those years.) Max mentioned Hoffer's book a few days ago in this New York Times op-ed and in this interview, talking about how President Eisenhower recommended it. Max says:

And the central thesis of Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, is that faith in a holy cause is really a substitute for lost faith in ourselves. And that’s sort of the thesis of my book and how -- and what I’ve discovered from the true believers of the Republican Party that I’ve been around for the past six years.

I wonder what Fromm and Hoffer thought of each other's work. Fromm was an educated student of Freud and Hoffer was a longshoreman turned self-taught philosopher. They were just a few years apart in age. Here are some Hoffer quotes and here are some Fromm quotes.

The Daily Beast has this excerpt from Max's book on Palin. It's an expose of her and her frighteningly radical, Pentecostal mega-church, Wasilla Assembly of God.

[One last note: I don't use the term "Christian Right" or "Conservative Christians" because those terms imbue them with legitimacy and mask that they are radical extremists and there is very little that is truly Christian about them or what they preach. Thus, I only refer to them as "radical right" or "extreme fundamentalists." ]

David Neiwert has an excellent review of Max' book over at Crooks and Liars.

Max's book is destined to be a seminal work on the rise of the radical right. I hope everyone reads it. We need to marginalize them and keep them from becoming any more dominant in our political future.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 06, 2009 (boomark / email).