Review: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party

I know this is tedious of me, but I'm going to start with my one major gripe about Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party--it's about the title. While Blumenthal's informative and detailed book does shed a light on the relationship between the right-ward pull of the Republican party and the rise of the religious right from the Christian Reconstructionism of R.J. Rushdooney and the increase in power of figures like James Dobson of Focus on the Family, to the selection of John McCain's very divisive running mate, Sarah Palin, who in many ways represents everything the Christian conservatives could want--except for probably being the main reason one could point to for McCain's campaign so totally going under, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the GOP has been "shattered."

What this book reveals is the flawed personalities and contorted personal lives of some of these figures, who externalize their demons and wage a culture war in which people actually can get hurt. This "Gomorrah" is a strange, almost Bizarro-world, where some people feel genuinely grateful to James Dobson for giving them permission to beat their children to keep them from becoming hippies, and where Satan lurks in skin mags to turn people into serial killers. It's a place where people behave without accountability for their actions, because Satan tempts and Jesus saves, and the blood of the lamb and some tears wash an awful lot out.

Some of the observations in this book reminded me strongly of John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience. In that book, Dean had chalked a lot of what was wrong with current-day conservatism to authoritarian personalities, which created these unaccountable leaders and doggedly loyal, even rabid and unthinking, followers. The picture that emerges when reading Republican Gomorrah is of a religious "justification" that fuels the authoritarianism by framing the political sphere into Good vs. Evil, or God vs. Satan.

The problem with this highly-simplified and emotionally charged view is that it doesn't permit debate, that it creates heroes who are always right and villains to be reviled, and that Republican candidates seem to have to pass certain "purity tests." Not necessarily for their personal lives, but for their ideology.

(I find this sort of thing was particularly evident during the 2008 GOP primary, where questions like "Do you believe in evolution?" were seriously proffered to the candidates, and some actually answered in the negative. Americans live in a country where a handful of people may genuinely believe being a Creationist is a prerequisite for getting elected. Regarding the question of abortion, it seems like there just aren't many pro-choice Republicans. Things like "abstinence education"--which doesn't apparently work very well, school voucher programs--which always strikes me as a taxpayer-funded giveaway to religious schools, are also about throwing sops to these people. Ditto "Faith-based" anything.)

Although the religious right has had setbacks--the revelation of Ted Haggard's dalliances with a male prostitute, the Terry Schiavo debacle, where activists protested to keep a functionally-brain-dead woman on a feeding tube, and the realization that the religious beliefs and rhetoric of a conservative sweetheart like Sarah Palin (Witches? Seriously? and her "real America" talk that excluded, well, most of us) weren't ready for the big time, I suspect they aren't going anywhere. As long as they have something to be angry about--they have purpose. And they do anger very well.

Also, as I started off saying, I don't think the Republican party is entirely "shattered", although the association with the assorted nutters of the religious variety hasn't helped. What I would say is that its credibility has been eroded by these people as if it were being devoured by a cancer. Cancer can be beaten--but it has to be cut away. It seems to me that the Republican party would benefit if reacquainted with intellectualism, and the kind of sensible conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Some of the pandering to the "base" is, well, appeasement. The party would do better by expanding the base, not feeding the beast within it. But then again, I'm a liberal, secular Democrat. What do I know?

Max Blumenthal is a very good writer and thorough journalist who really has put together an informative portrayal of the connections between the religious right and the Republican party. Money is followed, and peccadilloes are exposed. Where this book could have become lurid, or a screed against these "whackos", he has actually written a book that is fair, that shows these people in the movement with their flaws on display, but humanity intact. Republican Gomorrah isn't a book that is anti-religion or anti-conservatism, so much as against the treacherous intersection of church and state that has been playing out. I recommend it, and think that while liberals and secularists might enjoy it better, conservatives and people who identify with the religious right might benefit from reading it more.