SALON
Thursday, Oct 10, 2013 9:40 PM UTC
Why aren't Republicans more frightened of a
shutdown and a default? Part of the reason is magical thinking
By Amanda Marcotte
This article originally appeared on
Alternet.
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.
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