Quote for Day: David Brooks's "Neurologically Miraculous" Cognitive Dissonance re: the GOP

At Huffington Post, Marty Kaplan observes that David Brooks appears, well, a tad bit irony-challenged, if he's capable of writing the following stinging denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood without ever entertaining the notion that he might well be writing about the leaders of his own beloved GOP:

The End of Men Discussion: Reflections

Occasionally, David Brooks will write a column that I'll find worth reading.  To be honest (and I've said this repeatedly here), I find Brooks in general a turgid and unoriginal thinker whose primary mission as a journalist seems to be to give a pseudo-intellectual gloss to pretend-serious conservative ideas. To ideas that don't bear careful inspection, once one looks beneath the glitzy surface of "intellectualism."

David Frum's "Conversion": Neocon Morality Tales and History's Judgment

Mark Oppenheimer's fascinating roadmap of the twists and turns neocon Wunderkind David Frum has taken in his talking-head career is well worth the read.  I find it valuable for the following reason (among others): it bluntly says what many similar reviews never say outright, as they survey the careers of other neocon young Turks who have now broken with the crazy show that the GOP has become.

Katrina vanden Heuvel on Corrupt, Unhelpful "Center" and Its Flight from Reality

As a complement to the two postings I've just made: there's been valuable discussion recently of the shortcomings of beltway centrism and the predictable cry of centrists as each election cycle rolls around that we just need to get along, be more bipartisan and cooperative--and move right as the political pendulum moves ever more decisively to the right.  

David Brooks Misses the Point Again: What Has Gone Wrong with American Society . . . .

Speaking of the inability of centrist powerbrokers to see and learn (I'm building on what I just published about the teachable moment for American Catholicism): David Brooks is singing his very tired old song again today in an op-ed statement in the New York Times.  You know the song, the one whose irritating little tune never varies and whose shallow lyrics have grown so threadbare you can't believe the elevator wants to keep piping them into your ears one more day as you ascend and descend:

Mr. Santorum the Catholic: Really?

And speaking of circuses (I did so just now, didn't I?): with the spectacle that has just taken place in the cornfields of America's heartland, Mr. Santorum is back on the radar screen of Americans as a viable candidate for the highest office in the land.  And because he's a Catholic (and a self-avowed super-Catholic), his connection to his Catholic faith is getting a bit of media attention lately.

The News That's Fit to Tell: End-of-Week List

From a week of news-reading in which I haven't felt sufficient energy to comment on these stories as carefully as I might have wished: here's a set of recent stories/commentary (about widely scattered matters) that have caught my attention, and may interest readers:

David Brooks on Obama's (Unproven) Break with the Center: Continued Special Pleading for the Super-Rich

I'm glad to see David Brooks's overwrought cri du coeur on behalf of rich folks being bullied by big, bad Mr. Obama getting the negative attention it deserves.  Here's Jason Linkins at HuffPo.  And here's Steve Kornacki at Salon.

David Brooks on the Atrophy of Theology Today: A Matter of Perspective

I'm not surprised to see a number of leading figures of the American Catholic intellectual center celebrating David Brooks' recent observation that our culture has a hole in it caused by the atrophy of philosophy and theology.  My centrist brothers and sisters seem unable to understand that what Brooks persistently decries, as he decries the loss of theology in our culture, is the very backbone of theology in the Catholic church following Vatican II, and of similar strong movements in all the Christian churches in the same period: the attempt to connect the dots between abstract theological ideas and the lived experience of human beings, an attempt at dot-connecting that tries to make sense of the truth claims of religious groups by examining the effect of those truth claims on the real lives of real human beings.

David Brooks on Niebuhrian Need for Renewed Sense of Sin: Where Does Incivility Arise in American Society?

Moderate conservatives like David Brooks are eager to bring civility back to American society--to retie the now-frayed ties that bind us.  And, as a critique of any theological and political analysis that might point to a progressive solution to our problem of civility, moderate conservatives like Brooks propose a highly selective reading of Niebuhr which removes from Niebuhr's theology its very foundation: the social gospel presuppositions out of which this theology moves, even as it eclipses those presuppositions with Christian realism.

War on the Right: New Brand, Same Old Product

John C. Santore reports at Media Matters yesterday that there’s increasing internecine fighting in the American political right, as the Republican party casts about for new directions and new leaders. Lindsey Graham and Glenn Beck have been trading insults, Joe Scarborough is miffed at Rush Limbaugh for gloating over America’s loss of the Olympics, and David Brooks wants to distance himself and thinking Republicans from Beck, Limbaugh, and the other right-wing talking heads spewing out a constant stream of lies and invective about the new president.

But it’s not so easy. It’s not so easy for neoconservative intellectuals who have made common cause with—and significantly empowered—Limbaugh, Beck, and others for years now suddenly to disclaim any affiliation with these fellow travelers of the neoconservative movement. Or better, it’s not so honest for neocon ideologues like David Brooks to claim that Limbaugh and Beck have nothing in common with him and other fiscal conservatives representing the elite power centers that determine the direction of popular political and cultural discourse in this country.

This was one of the primary points I wanted to make in my two postings last week (here and here) about Brooks’s call for a new culture war centered on economics. Dig beneath the rhetorical layers of the discourse of fiscal conservatism, and you’ll find the same bedrock ideological foundations that support Limbaugh, Beck, and other culture warriors of the right.

At base, it’s all about a philosophy that promotes the rights of the individual over against the good of the whole. Whether that philosophy is dressed up in religious or economic garb, it’s the same philosophy.

And it has had and will continue to have extremely deleterious effects on American culture, as long as its fundamental assumptions remain unchallenged in this period in which the influence of neocon ideology remains powerfully persuasive at the center of American culture and thought. Until we begin to think seriously about the common good and act to rebuild the common good in a culture fractured to its core by a philosophy of economic individualism, the culture wars will continue, and those who benefit most from the culture wars—the economic overlords of the nation—will tacitly encourage them, as they dip their hands deeper into the till while we quarrel about same-sex marriage and abortion.

Continued Merging of Religious and Teabagger Right: Right-Wing Watch on Take Back America Conference

Readers know that I’ve been paying attention to an emerging meme in neocon rhetoric, which weds traditional culture-war presuppositions with a purported post-culture war economic analysis fundamentally hostile to government. In my initial posting about this, I noted David Brooks floating this meme in a recent New York Times piece entitled “The Next Culture War.”

My posting concludes:

Far from portending the end of the culture wars and the influence of the religious right in our political and economic life, this new trope fuses traditional culture-war presuppositions with a new, bogus post-culture war economic analysis. In doing so, it continues the very culture wars it claims to eclipse. This is a dangerous—and fundamentally dishonest—new rhetorical game for neoconservatives to be playing ....

I’m happy to see that others are taking note of this emerging rhetorical strategy of the right. Peter at Right Wing Watch has just recapped the major themes of the recent How to Take Back America conference in St. Louis 25-26 September (and see also Pam Spaulding’s summary at her House Blend blog). The conference drew together right-wing gurus and power players ranging from Phyllis Schlafly and Janet Folger Porter to Mike Huckabee and Michele Bachmann.

Peter’s first bullet point as he summarizes the conference themes? It’s interesting, indeed:

▪ a continued merging of messaging and organizing among the Religious Right and “teabagger” right

There you have it in a nutshell. There’s where the neocon movement is going now. There’s where David Brooks’s recent op-ed piece about the need for a return to Calvinist sobriety, the work ethic, and self reliance—and the need to get government off our backs—wants to go.

Far from repudiating religious right fixation on culture-war issues like same-sex marriage, the neoconservative movement is seeking to merge that fixation with the government-is-the-problem preoccupations of the teabagger set. The pseudo-moral rhetoric proposed by Brooks to end the culture wars fuses the two, with a sleight-of-hand trick that appears to make the religious right fixations disappear, only to reintroduce them in a new anti-government rhetorical disguise.

As Peter reports, the How to Take Back America conference was full of workshops that demonstrate the coalescence of religious right and teabagger themes in current neocon ideology. He states,

The wide range of issues covered by workshops indicated the ongoing merging of Religious Right and far-right anti-government rhetoric that has been a hallmark of anti-Obama organizing.

The culture wars aren’t over. They haven’t gone away. Any of us concerned about their deleterious effects on our culture, religious life, and political process would be well-advised to pay attention to what’s really happening with the purported shift in emphasis in neocon rhetoric from culture-war issues to economic ones.

This shift represents a fusion of anti-government themes and religious right themes that ultimately only gives a broader base and greater power to the religious right. The Republican party is desperately casting about for a base—for any base at all. Republican leaders are not about to repudiate any of their constituencies, no matter how far to the right those constituencies may move.

The danger of the current strategy from the Republican side is that it may well identify the party with right-wing fringe groups. But to my mind, there’s a more serious danger for all of us who don’t buy into right-wing fringe rhetoric in any form or fashion: the fusion of teabagger and religious right themes may mainstream the religious right, as fiscal conservatives who profess to be social liberals make common cause with their right-leaning religionist counterparts in a coalition that pretends to have repudiated the culture wars.

As I revisit this discussion today, I want to take note of an outstanding comment a reader, Ralph in Charlotte, left at yesterday’s posting about these issues. Ralph responds with the following observations to the text I excerpted from a book glorifying the Calvinist past of mainstream American culture:

“As we pen these words we think of the hardships our parents and ancestors bore in their fights with the Indians … to protect their families.”

As I pen these words, I think of the hardships our ancestors inflicted on the Indians, whose native land this is. I think of the Indians’ struggles against those encroaching on their land and against those denigrating their culture. I think of the countless Indian women and children massacred so that our ancestors could steal (Exodus 20:15) their land and establish the basis for future wealth.

As our fine Republican/Christian adherents advocate sending illegal immigrants back to their own countries, I wonder if they pause to thank their ancestors for killing (Exodus 20:13) so many of this land’s indigenous inhabitants.

Points well-taken. Brooks’s neocon myth of America’s hard-working, sober, self-reliant Calvinist past obliterates the messy reality of our actual history. The land those hard-working Calvinists were tilling came from the native peoples, who were not reimbursed for it and who were systematically decimated by the early European settlers of the land. And many of those who were actually toiling in the fields were enslaved people of African descent.

We have a selective memory of our history, we Americans. And a highly selective way of using convenient scripture verses to legitimate our power game du jour—as Ralph’s comments also remind us.

O Tempora, O Mores: On the Politico-Religious Uses of the Calvinist Myth in American Culture

I blogged yesterday about an emerging neoconservative meme represented in yesterday’s op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times. As I noted, this meme celebrates the good old-fashioned Calvinist work ethic, with its stress on self restraint and delayed gratification.

It does so by way of commenting on our current cultural and economic crises, and what—in the view of this perspective—has brought us to this crisis. Brooks appears to believe that at some unspecified point in the past (well, before the government intervened in our lives by setting up safety nets that mitigate the consequences of lack of self restraint), we adhered to Calvinist virtues that made us great as a nation, and brought us wealth without causing us to wallow in the self-indulgent luxury of nations with a more pliant moral fiber.

Brooks calls for a new moral revival to return our nation to its Calvinist roots. He urges neoconservatives to transfer the moral fervor of their culture-wars fixations to the economic sphere, and to help bring in this moral revival of our nation.

Having analyzed Brooks’s thoughts about these matters yesterday, I was intrigued later in the day when I picked up a book I had ordered recently through interlibrary loan and discovered it promoting the same religio-political analysis of American culture that Brooks makes, at an entirely different period of American history. The book was written in 1930, when Hoover was president, and when the nation was on the brink of an economic crisis created by several presidencies that gave big business free rein while doing little to assure that the corporate sector served the common good. That crisis would require the visionary leadership of FDR—and strong government intervention—to set the nation back on track politically, culturally, and economically.

Because this book is not in copyright, I’m going to cite it without providing a title or publication information. My primary reason for going that route is that I do not want to cause pain to any living members of the family of the person who wrote the book. I see no reason to do so. What I make of the book might well appear to them to be critical in a way that slams the legacy of their family member—though that is not my intent. My intent is to juxtapose analysis of the mythical hard-working, morally upright Calvinist past of our nation from two different periods of our history, to show how persistent (and how predictable) this theme is in conservative cultural commentary at times of cultural crisis.

The book in question focuses on the colonial history of a family that happens to be one of my own family lines—one of those Ulster Scots families who left Ireland in droves in the first decades of the 18th century to begin new lives in the middle colonies. Like many of these families, the Kerrs moved from Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia prior to 1750. The book focuses on their lives and legacy in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

As Ulster Scots, the Kerrs were intense Calvinists. Since they were among the first Scotch-Irish families to make the move from Pennsylvania to Virginia, they played a founding role in setting up an historic Presbyterian church, Tinkling Spring, near their homeplace. The family’s progenitor, James Kerr, is on a 1741 list of settlers in the Shenandoah Valley petitioning for the formation of Tinkling Spring church, and a 1742 list of founding members of the church. My ancestor Samuel Kerr was baptized in 1741 in the church, soon after his birth.

It would be hard to find a more prototypically Calvinist family than the Kerrs—the kind of stiff-backbone, hard-working, morally upright family that Brooks’s mythology about the American past celebrates. Through blood, marriage, and shared religious ties, the Kerrs connect to several noted Ulster Scots families who have left long political legacies in the United States, including the Pickens and Calhouns.

It’s interesting to see what one family member made of that celebrated Calvinist heritage just as the Depression hit in 1930. His interpretation of this heritage sounds remarkably similar to Brooks’s thesis as we struggle through the economic downturn of the first decade of the 21st century.

As he writes about the house James Kerr built in Virginia between 1730 and 1740—a house still standing in 1930—the author looks back at his family’s Calvinist heritage and compares the values he believes the Kerrs held in the past to those he sees dominating the culture in which he lives in 1930. He’s appalled at the discrepancy:

As we pen these words we think of the hardships our parents and ancestors bore in their fights with the Indians and British to protect their families and homes and crops they labored so hard for, cutting down trees into wood and mauling rails for fences, and hewing logs to build houses and barns, raising flax and scotching it and their wives spinning it for clothes. And of the bearing of children of which my grandmother and mother each had a dozen, and what awful pain, anxiety, and care! And now we fuss about hard times while riding around in automobiles and reaping their labors, without shame, and boys and girls having a good time, smoking cigarettes and going to movies—and that is not all, by a long shot. And we are taxed heavy for schools to teach them to play baseball, football, basketball, and ball-room, etc., and a larger tax to build fine macadam roads for lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God; and for Scripture on the perilous times, read 2nd Timothy, 3rd chapter, and 24th chapter of Matthew; and it reads, “Except those days should be shortened no flesh will be saved.” And this fast, wicked life is ushering in these last days. I think of days when they went to church on horseback and took their wives and children and sweethearts on behind the saddle, and cut their hay and wheat and rye and oats with scythe and cradle, and when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was one of two that cradled seventy acres of wheat my father had on his 300-acre farm. . . . . Part of that land is idle now, and men are idle and won’t work it.

Past good, present bad. Calvinist past good, decadent secular present bad. Self reliance, wonderful; government intervention, not so much. Horses fine; paved roads and automobiles deplorable.

You get the gist. This is a timeworn trope of American thought, this comparison of the mythic past of hard-working (white, patriarchal) Calvinist families with what we have now. It is a trope that uses religious language to decry current developments (the book also lambasts those who drink liquor and vote wet) that the myth-maker sees as morally abhorrent. And it links that moral abhorrence rather predictably to attacks on government “interference” in the lives of sober, hard-working (white, patriarchal, Christian) families.

Much that the book says about moral decay of (white, patriarchal, Christian) American society in the 1930s sounds precisely like what conservative groups in the Christian churches are saying today about gays and the effects of gay-affirming attitudes in our society. There is a clear carryover from the political intent of this myth-making rhetoric about our Calvinist past to the current cultural and religious debate about welcoming and affirming gay human beings. In the past, the moral crusades focused on prohibition and resistance to public funding for schools and roads. Today it centers on resistance to gay folks.

Same rhetoric: different targets. Same players: different enemies at different moments of American cultural development. And the same scripture verses are used by these groups to decry whatever is their current object of moral ire. The section of the book attacking those who drink alcohol cites Timothy, as does the preceding passage, lambasting lovers of pleasure who reject God, lead “silly women” astray, and usher in the last days.

I grew up hearing sermons that applied all these texts to African Americans and the socialists and communists who were said to be collaborating with black folks to bring down Christian civilization in the United States, and precipitate Armageddon. In my growing-up years, I heard stories about how those same texts and that same rhetoric had been applied a generation previously to women who sought employment outside the house, bobbed their hair and used make-up, and dressed in men’s clothes (i.e., slacks).

I recently read a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of railroads written by a late-19th century American evangelical writer. The writer claimed that when railroads were introduced, the culture went to hell in a handbasket and natural disasters began to proliferate as God tried to get our attention. God’s beef about railroads? That they ran on Sunday, breaking the Sabbath.

Given the way this religious rhetoric about our purported golden Calvinist past and our purported current decadence keeps cropping up in both American religion and American political commentary—always with the same political goals, though the objects of the moral wrath vary at different periods—one wonders why anyone continues to try to promote such religio-political analysis. It wasn’t right in the past. It didn’t stop necessary social changes in the past.

Why would anyone imagine it is suddenly right today and that it will succeed today in blocking social changes that have long been overdue in a land committed to democratic ideals and human rights?

David Brooks Ends the Culture Wars, or Does He? New Neocon Meme about Self Restraint

As neoconservative political and religious commentators cast about these days for some new theoretical center to ground a badly faltering conservative movement in the U.S., they seem to be floating a rhetorical trial balloon. And what they're suggesting has me worried.

David Brooks pushes the emerging new center of neocon political analysis in an article at New York Times today entitled “The Next Culture War.” Brooks’s article is an obvious move on the part of a leading neocon spokesman to shift the emphasis of American neocon political analysis and strategy from hot-button culture-war issues like same-sex marriage to economic issues.

On the face of it, that would be a welcome move, if the economic presuppositions being promoted by this move had anything to do with recognizing and decrying the deleterious (and immoral) consequences of an economic system in which the vast majority of wealth is owned by a tiny minority of people. Where the new neocon analysis appears to be headed, instead, is in the direction of blaming the large number of us who don’t share in that wealth for our lack of self-restraint and ability to defer gratification.

We’re the reason for the economic and cultural mess the U.S. is in, it seems. Not the lords of Wall Street and their enablers in the federal government.

Brooks’s piece is interesting to read as an attempt to re-ground key neocon narratives about moral decay in economic analysis. Brooks takes terms that neoconservatives have enjoyed using in recent decades to discuss sexual morality and applies them to the economic sphere—something neoconservatives have been hesitant to do, because talking about morality in the economic sector will inevitably lead to questions about the immorality of systems that leave the market free to do whatever it wants even when it tramples on have nots to enrich haves.

Brooks announces that we need a “values shift” now, a “moral and cultural movement,” even a “moral revival” to get us back on the right track economically and culturally. And where should that revival look for its core values? It should, Brooks proposes, remember the “Calvinist restraint” that built this nation and its wealth—the ethic of hard work and self-denial that urged sober laboring people to defer gratification as they struggled to make life better for their children. The new “moral revival” Brooks urges will “champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who can argue with hard work, self-denial, and delayed gratification, especially when we apply those standards not only to the “small” but to the “large”?

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s where this analysis is really headed—that is, I seriously doubt that this is a call for a moral revival in American culture that will hold the grossly wealthy accountable for their actions in any effective sense. I suspect that this analysis is really a way of allowing the grossly wealthy to celebrate their wealth (earned through self-restraint and hard work, it goes without saying), while shifting the blame for our current economic malaise to the millions of Americans who are stung by the economic downturn. This analysis is implicitly telling all the rest of us, the non-rich, that we wouldn’t find ourselves in embarrassing circumstances now, if we had practiced good old Calvinist restraint and had delayed gratification as consumers when the bubble was developing.

The problem is, you see, government. It was government that let us get into this mess by, well, being government. And by doing what government does, trying to mitigate the consequences of economic disparity and to form safety nets for those at the bottom. Brooks argues that Calvinist restraint worked as a key cultural force in the golden ages of pre-government intervention, when people knew that they’d better scrimp and work hard, by golly, because no one was going to bail them out: “Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.”

And so this new meme is, in the final analysis, a nasty little political-religious text about the dangers of government intervention and econonmic restraint (on the rich and powerful), and the blessings of personal restraint and delayed gratification (for the middle classes and the poor). It is an old trope that has run through our nation’s rhetoric from its foundations, one with Puritan roots, which imagines the wealthy as favored by God and everyone else as under God’s curse.

This is not, as I say, a call to moral analysis of our economic life that will in any way touch on the real issues that any sound moral analysis of economic life has to touch on, if it is to be either accurate or grounded in core moral values of most communities of faith. Sound moral analysis would refrain from blaming the vast majority of Americans who are the victims of the current economic downturn for an economic situation that originates in the greed and lack of self-restraint of our economic movers and shakers—and in the malfeasance of political leaders who enable that immoral behavior.

Sound moral analysis would note that, as the middle and lower classes bear the brunt of the current recession, the wealthy elites that have brought us to this point are still making off like bandits (and see John Aravosis at Americablog on this point). Even as Brooks writes about the need for a renewal of Calvinist self-restraint in our culture, the greed of those at the top of the economic pyramid continues without any boundaries at all, defiantly proud of its lack of restraints or curbs.

The meme Brooks is promoting does not in any significant way move beyond the neoconservative moral analysis that got us into this economic mess in the first place, with its narrow, blinkered focus on pelvic issues as the center of moral analysis and its refusal to apply moral analysis of any sort to the economic realm, and especially to the growing economic disparity created by the free market neoconservative political and religious thinkers champion. As Sarah Posner reminded us recently, though the tea-party focus on big government as the enemy and the waning interest of the culture at large in same-sex marriage as the defining moral problem of our time might appear to portend a shift to a post-culture war politics centered solely on economic issues, we may be seeing, instead, the convergence of traditional culture-war politics and tea-party attacks on government restraints on the market. Rather than eclipse culture-war politics, the analysis Brooks is promoting simply enfolds the presuppositions of religious-right culture warriors into a bogus post-culture war analysis of the political and economic sphere.

In fact, the rhetoric Brooks is promoting—back to self-restraint and delayed gratification—has been floating around for some time now on many blogs discussing same-sex marriage and the prop 8 battle in California. A significant meme that has emerged in these discussions is that prop 8 passed because affluent white gays do not know how to delay gratification and wait for rights like marriage, whereas people of color, gay and straight, understand that rights don’t fall from trees. One has to work and wait for rights, something affluent gay folks don’t understand—or so this meme goes. Because affluent white gays do not understand this, they have failed to understand the cultural disaffection between their community and communities of color, and have failed to build bridges with communities of color.

This meme is being actively promoted by the religious right as yet another way to drive a wedge between the gay community and communities of color. And it is precisely the same meme—a meme about delayed gratification and hard work and Calvinist restraint—that Brooks and other neocon spokespersons who want to declare the end of the culture war are pushing, as they call for a shift in emphasis from traditional culture-war moral analysis to a new moral analysis of the economic sphere, centered on questions of self restraint.

Far from portending the end of the culture wars and the influence of the religious right in our political and economic life, this new trope fuses traditional culture-war presuppositions with a new, bogus post-culture war economic analysis. In doing so, it continues the very culture wars it claims to eclipse. This is a dangerous—and fundamentally dishonest—new rhetorical game for neoconservatives to be playing, one that deserves the attention and critique of anyone interested in real moral analysis of our economic life, as well as in fair-minded and ethically enlightened analysis of same-sex marriage.

Jindal on Obama: A Betrayal of Catholic Tradition about the Role of Government

Returning for a moment to Andrew Sullivan’s blog today (here): Sullivan links to a discussion by David Brooks at Direct Democracy of Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama’s speech last night (here):

Brooks argues against Jindal, and for government—and in doing so, he demonstrates the deep fissures developing these days between the hidebound ideologues of the intransigent right, and more moderate conservatives like himself who realize that the intransigence is a manifestation of intellectual bankruptcy on the right.

Brooks states (re: Jindal’s response),

But to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism (my emphases).

Precisely. This is why I’ve drawn attention to the rich strand of thought within some Christian traditions, including the Catholic tradition, about the necessity of government in a fallen world. As I noted some time back when I compared Mike Huckabee’s use of the two-cities metaphor of St. Augustine, Huckabee does not have a clue re: what Augustine was talking about in his classic City of God (here).

Augustine argued that, in a fallen world, the powerful will always try to lord it over the weak. In his view, the only safeguard against that tendency is to create strong governmental structures that hold in check the arrogance, greed, and inhumanity of the powerful, and that defend the weak.

The story I told in my first posting today, about how people of color were treated throughout the American South in the Jim Crow period, as the majority trampled on the rights of the minority and used law to justify its abuse: that’s a story about what happens when there is not a strong central government structure in a society committed to defending the rights of the weak against the powerful. It was not until the federal government stepped in and forced the Southern states to accord civil rights to black citizens and to integrate schools that things began to change.

In key respects, Catholic conservatives of the right who have bought into neoconservative ideology about government as the problem in recent years have betrayed Catholic tradition, though they frequently paint themselves as the only authentic Catholics left in the nation. Jindal is Catholic. He is a Catholic who would, it appears, refuse resources provided his state by the federal government to help those in need in his state, to prove an ideological point.

This is obscene. It is morally indefensible. It is a form of idolatry, a worship of a bloody idol who asks us to sacrifice the lives and future of those in need to uphold the claims of the ideological figure we worship.

It is not what the gospels are about, or what Christian tradition is about, at its best. As David Brooks says, only the federal government is big enough to get us out of the mess that several decades of hidebound neoconservative ideology have gotten us into, with the foolish claim that government is the problem, and the fatuous trust in the rich that this claim implies. It's a pity, indeed, that it has taken some of us so long to see this, while well-nigh irreparable damage has been done to our democracy and its institutions.