Pelosi Attack: Violence Far More Prevalent on Right Side of Political Spectrum, Though Republicans Want to Deny This

Hammer photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Malene Thyssen

Jill Filipovic notes the prevalence of violence emanating from the political right as opposed to the left, and explains why this is the case:

Defensive Responses to Critiques of Hillary's "Misstatement" About Reagans and AIDS: What Do They Portend for Future of Democratic Politics?

I've been noticing an interesting (yes, that word again) thing lately in comments in my circles of Facebook friends. I'd like to think out loud about this interesting thing now, in dialogue with any of you who might care to respond to my meandering thoughts here.

El Salvador Martyrs: Valuable Educational Resources Now Coming Online

Patricia Miller, Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church — Excerpts

I'm now reading Patricia Miller's book Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church (Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 2014). Here are several snippets from it that have caught my attention as I've read (all of which seem to me clearly pertinent to major stories still unfolding in American Catholicism):

Peter Beinart on New York Elections and Rise of a New Left in American Politics

For Peter Beinart, national political indicators are to be seen in Bill de Blasio's win in the New York Democratic primary. Beinart argues that for the last two decades, the American political conversation has been to a great extent a conversation between Reaganism and Clintonism, a conversation that, with its starry-eyed infatuation with terms like "capital" and "free" and "market," tilts ideologically towards the right. But a new millennial generation now coming of age, which has been disproportionately the victim of that starry-eyed infatuation of both Reaganism and Clintonism with the capitalist free market, is now shifting the conversation to the left: 

Glenda Jackson (and I) Remember Mrs. Thatcher: A Legacy of Sharp Elbows and Sharp Knees

Chris Morley has kindly posted a link here today to a YouTube clip of Labour MP Glenda Jackson speaking yesterday in the House of Commons about Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Jackson remembers the dramatic increase in homelessness under Thatcher (and the same thing happened in the U.S. under her friend and ally Reagan, it has to be noted). 

Matthew Fox on Benedict's Legacy and the Necessary Destruction of the Imperial Church

Last week, Rob Kall of OpEd News's Up Radio interviewed Dominican theologian and former Catholic priest Matthew Fox regarding the transition in the papacy and what it portends for the future of the Catholic church.* A two-part transcript of the interview is at the OpEd News website here and here.

John Atcheson on Marlboro Man Myths (Plus Papal Preferences in Cigarettes)

John Atcheson thinks it would be dangerous for America to return to the mythology of Marlboro Man and his rugged individualism and hostility to gubmint.  Three of the Marlboro Men, after all, died of lung cancer.  And the Republicans peddle such retrograde mythology and the hard and fast gender roles it comprises primarily to distract us from their determination to help the über-rich pick more money from the pockets of the rest of us.

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.

Mr. Bush the First Goes to War (2)

The following journal entry is from February 1991:

I’m haunted by the question, What if someone generations hence reads this journal and wants to know re: the war, and I say nothing? I try not to write self-consciously for an audience, but of course one always looks nervously over one’s shoulder as one scribbles in a journal.

Another difficulty is that all I would want to say about this war is prosaic and trite in the worst sense of that word. Or perhaps better to say it feels prosaic and trite. Having lived and thought through Vietnam, I read the newspapers now in a kind of daze. Can people really still believe these clichés? All that poets and others were already seeing during Vietnam—the demonic technologization of war that makes war a macho blood-sport pursued from an easy chair, the subversion of plain sense in military rhetoric (body bags as human remains packages)—only seems accentuated now, so outré that one assumes everyone reads the news to laugh and cry at the black absurdity of it all.

In this war, adding to the above, of course, is the almost breathtaking arrogance of the political and military manipulation of the media. What strikes me in this regard is not just that the conservatives have begun to manage the media with this war (or the Panamanian or Grenadan one), but that they began to do so immediately between the Vietnam debacle and the mediazation of America in the Reagan period. We had a president who was pure image—and false image—precisely because the media enabled us to penetrate the façade of the military-industrial complex in Vietnam.

The intent of the powers that be to give us a media-driven, media-groomed, façade-president had everything to do with the way the media allowed us to see what was really happening in Vietnam. The powers that be were determined not to allow this to happen again. And they have been effective about controlling the media ever since. And the media have colluded.

All of which is to say that I feel a great sense of futility about saying anything re: this war. The government’s ability to manipulate the media has grown so strong and is so cunning that one senses whatever one says in opposition to the war actually becomes one more way of supporting the war—no matter how violently one’s words oppose it.

And this makes me want to make a more personal decision to live outside the controls the government and all powers that be want to place on my thoughts. I want so much to lead a life of quiet and intense protest and to write poetry that distills my grasp of the other that lies beyond control.

+ + + + +

Wars and rumors of war,
And one lone heron on the bayou shore.

It stitches the shallows,
Here a silent sentinel,
There a shadow sliding over the still dark water
To stand again nearer, then past, the bridge.

At each cycle
My dogs lunge in mock fury,
Strain their leashes out towards the teasing game.

All along my walk,
I think, try not to think, of our latest little war.
I shut mind room
To what's better left unthought,
But back again it comes:

Live oaks sporting jaunty yellow ribbons,
Car antennas flying tiny flags,
And--most startling but not unexpected--
Police motorcycles swathed in red, white, blue,
As if the flag extends the power of the driver
Out, behind, to all the world and space
One could ever dream.

The heron comes as welcome antidote
To my shadowboxing with futility,
Keeping apocalypse at bay.

It, this one thing perfect and complete, invites me
To consider the healing promise of the everyday,
The never comprehended fullness of the flight,
The shore, clouds floating, sinking
To water's mirror.

Mr. Bush the First Goes to War

The following journal entry is from January 1991:

Bush has gone to war. Always obscene, but what is particularly obscene this time is the immediate media transformation of this tragedy into spectacle. No new observation, this. Yet the process this time is further down the road than in Vietnam. This time, big t.v. studs—Rather, Brokaw—jaw with big army studs while all the world is supposed to look on breathless. It’s no more and no less than a football game, the telecaster conferring with the coach.

And what coaches. The living dead, swaggering and fit for the finest board rooms, these generals stand before the camera and deliver grave messages. They love it, love their attention. It’s as if the real scene behind the scenes is finally before us—these men who run it all behind the scenes finally on camera to tell us who and what and why. I don’t recall any war in which this has occurred so prominently as in this “war.”

Why so? Two terms of Reagan have made the always passive, always hypnotized American public even more susceptible to media manipulation. Comments in the newspaper today about the job our boys are doing—awesome to see the planes take off, just have to deliver those bombs, business to do. The sense of suppressed excitement that something is finally happening. Stay tuned, folks—the next installment of WWIII airs shortly. Popcorn in the bomb shelters.

+ + + + +

Always the same mideast city as a backdrop,
Muddy against the screen behind the t v man
Asking us to humanize the bombs
In the comfort of our living room.
Play by play the war unfolds,
Red starburst streams on maps
Fondled o so lovingly by Mr. General
So and so.
His pointer trembles with suppressed delight
That at last now today Jan. 17 1991
We're finally doing something
Kicking some oilgreasy Eyeraqui ass
To shout it to the world, America is BACK!

And how.
Rambo couldn't say it better--
Kaboom! Kachuga! Pow, pop, pow!
The movies pale beside this theater
Of George's little war.

While mamas pray
And widows weep
And justice cries to heaven for one day.

Thugs Are Thugs Are Thugs: Joan Walsh and Tim Rutten on Cardinal Newman Society

Meanwhile, the Cardinal Newman Society (here) remains the gift that keeps on giving—for bloggers like me, at least; for those of us interested in the interface between religion and politics in the U.S., who think it’s important to track the efforts of right-wing pressure groups to keep American churches in a little box owned exclusively by the right.

Two recent articles comment on the connections between the Cardinal Newman Society and the Republican party—connections I have teased out in my own postings about the Cardinal Newman Society. As Joan Walsh notes in a 1 April Salon article entitled “Right-Wing Catholics vs. Obama” (here), what we’re seeing in the attempt of Cardinal Newman Society to force Notre Dame University to rescind its invitation to President Obama next month is not just any old media scrap, but a well-organized and highly-funded right-wing attempt to punish Catholics who voted Democratic in the past election, and to force Catholic voters back into the Republican fold:

But the growing movement to stop Obama's visit isn't your ho-hum sort of Catholic League media dust-up, where Bill Donohue harumphs on television and then goes away. It's part of a well-funded lobbying effort by a group of right-wing Catholics to run liberal Catholics, and dissenting doctrine, out of the church, and to recruit the remainder of the faithful for the GOP.

This is a group of rabid right-wingers who came together to make sure Catholic universities enforce Catholic doctrine. They publish the work of ultra-right Opus Dei member Rev. C. John McCloskey, who has argued that "for a university to be truly Catholic," its faculty must be "exclusively" Catholic. Operation Rescue fanatic Randall Terry, who converted to Catholicism recently, is bringing his special kind of crazy to the movement. "The faithful Catholic world is justly enraged at the treachery of Notre Dame's leadership," Terry rants. "Notre Dame will rue the day they invited this agent of death to speak." Once a thug, always a thug.

Tim Rutten offers a similar analysis in an op-ed piece on 28 March in the Los Angeles Times (here). In Rutten’s view, what Cardinal Newman Society and its allies are trying to do with this protest is “fresh and consequential”:

There are a couple of things about this culture-warfare-as-usual controversy that are fresh and consequential enough to be of interest. The first is the protesters and their connections. Many are part of a vocal, Internet-savvy lobby that has been agitating to coerce the church's prelates into denying Communion to Catholic officeholders who deviate from a rigidly "pro-life" line. Made up of a number of smaller groups, this lobby has campaigned to keep other pro-choice officeholders (of any religion) from speaking at Catholic schools. Its supporters also have been vociferously active in the movement to use abortion as a wedge to lever Catholics into the religious right.

The effort turns on convincing Catholics -- for decades now, the principal swing voters in presidential elections -- that they're obliged to vote on the basis of moral issues important to the right wing of the church, such as abortion, stem cell research and, more recently, marriage equality.

As Rutten notes, this is an effort that has a clear partisan political objective—to convince Catholics and the culture at large that being Catholic and voting Republican are synonymous:

The Newman Society is linked to two organizations -- CatholicVote.org and the Fidelis Center -- whose programs are clearly geared toward bringing Catholics into the Republican Party.

Both Rutten and Walsh note that the Cardinal Newman Society (and the U.S. Catholic bishops who buy into this partisan political agenda) are working against certain odds. Polls indicate a majority of American Catholics satisfied with Obama’s leadership, and they also indicate that on the hot-button issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and sexual ethics, American Catholics may even be to the left of the American mainstream. The response of Notre Dame students to the attempt to force their school to disinvite the president is also running heavily in favor or the decision to bring President Obama to the campus.

By allying themselves with groups who are using the church for partisan political purposes, some bishops are turning their backs on the majority of American Catholics and the culture in which those Catholics live. One wonders how those bishops justify such a decision on pastoral grounds.

I note one other interesting point in Walsh’s and Rutten’s articles. Both note that, in inviting the new president as its commencement speaker this year, Notre Dame is carrying on a long tradition of inviting the newly elected president to its graduation the spring following each election. Notre Dame invited Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush to speak following their elections, and there was not a whisper of protest—even though Bush opposes abolition of the death penalty, a position contrary to Catholic teaching about the sanctity of life.

I’m interested in this tidbit of news, because several bloggers at centrist Catholic websites that have recently held discussions of the Obama invitation have speculated that Mr. Obama deliberately accepted the Notre Dame invitation in order to consolidate Catholic support. I wonder why that malicious motive would be attributed to him if he is following in the footsteps of predecessors who accepted Notre Dame’s invitation because Notre Dame has a longstanding practice of inviting the new president to its commencement?

Clearly, there is, in some Catholic minds, a Catholic exceptionalism regarding President Obama. I wonder why that is the case? I wonder on what basis we are to conclude that, say, George W. Bush clearly represents Catholic values, whereas Mr. Obama does not do so?

Something about the new president seems to strike fear into the hearts of Catholics of the right and of many Catholic bishops, who appear to have thought that the Republican party had locked up the Catholic vote in perpetuity. What is that something, I wonder?

The Uday-Qusay Aesthetic and the Baby-Boom Generation

Since reading Frank Rich’s reflections in the Sunday NY Times about the tacky, sordid “culture” Americans have produced since the 1970s, as a result of our blind faith in the free market, I’ve been thinking (here).

Rich points out that the ultimate cause of our present economic conundrum was that we, as a people, have permitted an “obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s.” And this has produced a “bubble culture” in which we assumed that “money ennobled absolutely.” Our bubble culture is a culture of the utmost tawdriness: “The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height had less in common with the Medicis than, say, Uday and Qusay Hussein.”

Rich is right. I know. I’ve seen the Uday-Qusay line of fashion in my own city, with my own eyes. And he’s right about when all of this started: my recollection is that there was a significant cultural turn as the 1980s got underway, and that turn is continuous with—it is largely responsible for—the mess in which we now find ourselves. It was a deliberate turn away from the openings represented by the 1960s, and a turn inward by those with most economic and political clout in our society, who were determined to call a halt to social change after that change had served their own selfish ends.

Here is what has happened in my own city, what I have seen with my own eyes, as a result of that cultural turn: I live in a city with a wealth of good housing dating from the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, which is now (in many cases) decaying. Boarded houses. Empty houses whose roofs are leaking. Abandoned places with overgrown, uncared-for yards.

At the same time in which these perfectly good (and in many cases, architecturally valuable) houses were being abandoned, my city has grown by leaps and bounds to the suburbs, to the northwest portions of the city that border on white-flight counties filling up with people moving away from the urban center. I should say, my city has grown by leaps and bounds geographically and through the construction of new houses, office buildings, restaurants, cinemas, shopping malls in the direction of its white-flight neighbors. It has not grown demographically.

The movement to the white-flight suburbs in the latter decades of the 20th century does not represent a demographic phenomenon requiring new housing. It represents a cultural choice—a choice to flee a city full of good houses and with a racially mixed population for suburbs that are largely white and middle-class.

And as in Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Greenville-Spartanburg, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana—all over the South where this same movement has occurred in this same period—those suburbs are soulless and devoid of meaningful culture. I’ve been in some of the houses, the Uday-Qusay houses that are supposed to bowl me over with the luxury of their appointments.

I know a designer, a gay one, who “designs” for the occupants of these houses, and whose fundamental aesthetic principle is that if a little raw silk is good, a lot of it is better. Much, much better. Said designer promotes “puddles” of raw silk on the floor, at the bottoms of windows and wherever a puddle can be accommodated.

Another local designer who has gained national attention and who also subscribes to the more is better aesthetic specializes in plaids. And reds. If a little plaid and a little scarlet are good, more is better. Much, much better.

The Uday-Qusay houses I have visited in the white-flight outskirts of my city gleam—with marble, granite, crystal. They cause the eyes to pop with their puddles of raw silk and plaid. They make one oooh and aaah over bathrooms—ten of them for two people—larger than one’s bedroom, a comparison sometimes helpfully pointed out by the proud occupants of the Uday-Qusay house.

And they give one headaches. Literally. When I took a job in another state a few years ago and was expected, as an administrator at a university, to visit and oooh and aaah over the oceanfront Uday-Qusay temple in which the chair of the board of trustees lived—one of the most godawful displays of tasteless conspicuous consumption it has ever been my ill luck to witness—I came down with the worst retinal migraine of my life. From the moment I walked through the door and the bright sunlight glinting off the marble and glass inside the house blinded me.

The sunlight was, needless to say, not deflected by books. It never is, in these Uday-Qusay houses, I find. When I visit them, I instinctively look for books to remind me that I am in a house and not some frightful shrine to a postmodern nightmare from which I would prefer to wake. And I don’t find them, certainly not in the white-flight suburban houses of my own city.

Oh, I might find a set of tasteful leather-bound books here and there, bought at a “designer” shop by the yard, fetchingly displayed next to a plaid appointment or a puddle of silk or a faux Roman bust made of concrete fussed with in some “antiquing” shop. But I see little evidence that the occupants of these houses actually read, as they vie to send their children to the best of private schools and ivy-league universities, where said children will, it is hoped, replicate the Uday-Qusay life of their parents in some yet-to-be-discovered gated white community. Or as they go to the polls to pull the lever for the Republican party and its defense of family and values and the free market.

What wonders we have wrought, since the 1970s—we Americans, we baby-boomers. My people. My generation. We took the promise of the 1960s and produced . . . this. Because we were afraid of the hard work of systemic change that the 1960s signaled. Because we were selfish. If the cultural revolution of the 1960s had served our own purposes, it had done what was needed. No need to extend it further, or explore its implications for all of us.

The people most resistant to the idea of gay rights in the latter decades of the 20th century have been not precisely the religious right, but baby boomers. The very people who themselves benefited from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, insofar as that revolution opened the door to women and to heterosexual couples. Having gotten what they needed from the 1960s cultural revolution, they turned around and decisively slammed the door in the faces of their gay brothers and sisters, while taking full advantage of their own sexual revolution.

The Clintons are the face of a whole generation of people in that respect.

And so along came Reagan, and we welcomed him. We put him into power. My people. My generation. The baby-boomers who had begun to get what we wanted. And to hell with everyone else.

Frank Rich is correct to locate the roots of our present economic (and cultural—far more cultural than economic) crisis in the 1970s and the economic changes that began then, which Reagan consolidated with his voodoo economics and trickle-down magic. Bob Herbert confirms Rich’s analysis in a marvelous op-ed piece in today’s NY Times (here). As he notes, when we let the right-wingers get hold of us following the turmoil of the 1970s, we began the process of smothering the American dream, in full collaboration with the snake-oil salesmen of the right.

Who have sought to convince us that greed is gospel. And who have been permitted to spread their false gospel right in the bosom of the churches, which have become so fixated on abortion and homosexuality as evidence of cultural decline that they cannot see the real process of decline taking place all around us. Above all, in those affluent suburbs that have become the bastions of the “family-values” party for decades now, while the thoughtless hedonism and self-centered me-first philosophy that drive life in our affluent suburbs undermine family life more decisively than any outside force on God's green earth could ever do.

Reconsidering the Holy Alliance: Reagan and John Paul II

Colleen Kochivar Baker has had two wonderful postings on her blog the past two days (here and here), which tie into the theme Brian began with his reply to me several days ago . Since my response to Brian (here) is framed as a dialogue with those reading this blog, I'm posting here some comments I have made to Colleen in reply to her postings--a continuation of the dialogue. Colleen notes at the end of her posting today that she's thinking through issues similar to those discussed in my response to Brian.

Here's my reply to Colleen,

Colleen, I read your postings yesterday and today. I want to provide a bit more background to why I brought up John Paul II and Reagan in my response to Brian. I have two primary reasons for bringing them into the discussion.

One is that, in my view, they are not manifestations of some kind of "natural" pendulum swing following Vatican II and the 1960s, to correct Vatican II and the sixties. They often get treated that way in the media, and I think this is because the right has succeeded in scripting the history that way, and in doing so, dominating our discourse about the decades following the 1960s. I think it's time to challenge the iconization of Reagan and John Paul II because their elevation to iconic status by the right is part of a bigger right-wing narrative that needs to be challenged if we're to move forward culturally and religiously.

The second reason I bring them up is to try to shine light on some of the fundamental ideas of that period that have now become normative in our discourse, and which are fundamentally wrong-headed. One of these that I keep harping on is the government-is-the-problem shtick of Reagan. I'm not convinced that Reagan ever really believed that. It was selective rhetoric on his part, to attack political ideas and movements he wanted to stop dead in their tracks. Reagan was perfectly willing to invoke government in the most heavy-handed way when it served his interests to do so.

John Paul II also had more faces than the one that appears in his iconic representation in our media, under the spell of the right. That iconic face stresses his battle against the state communism of the Eastern bloc nations, his defense of freedom of conscience against state repression, and so on.

Our media have also conveniently chosen to overlook that the principles John Paul II applies in his battle with state communism are principles he refused to accept in the life of the church itself, as well as in the church's relationship to cultures where his model for confronting Eastern bloc communism did not work. Rather than endorsing the central role of conscience within the church itself, or the kind of critique of dictatorship he encouraged in the Eastern bloc nations, John Paul II willingly repressed dissent in the church. He also refused to permit involvement of priests in political struggles in Latin America, while encouraging such involvement in Poland.

Our media have chosen to ignore, as well, John Paul II's critique of capitalism. His writings on political and economic issues balanced his critique of state communism with an equally stringent critique of our capitalist economic model. Insofar as he's been turned into a kind of religious counterpart of Reagan (and he has, in the iconic representation of the right), his complex, multi-faceted thought on political and economic issues has been distorted.

And where he richly deserves critique among those who claim to defend the right of conscience to come to informed judgment about complex issues, he is rarely critiqued. This is a testament, I believe, to the way in which the right has succeed in shaping our discourse about these two iconic figures, and also about all cultural, political, and religious developments in the latter half of the 20th century.

This dominant discourse of the right, which now masquerades as centrist, needs to be challenged if we're to move forward. The conversion of the political figures you and Brian have enumerated (and I keep wanting to add Erik Prince to the list) signals the continuing intent of powerful right-wing political and economic groups to use the Catholic church as a shelter as they keep trying to dominate the cultural and religious discourse of the 21st century.

And to his shame, Benedict is permitting this to happen, as witness his decision to bring the SSPX crowd into the fold. And he will continue to permit this to happen, unless Catholics who see the sell out to the right as a betrayal of our tradition insist that it is our church, too.

A Reader Writes: Did Vatican 2 Happen?

A very astute reader of this blog left a wonderful response to my posting yesterday about Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama’s recent address to the nation (here). Two other astute readers have added valuable replies to that response.

I’ve been thinking all day about the points these readers are making. It strikes me that there’s something very important about the questions this thread is raising, and they deserve extended conversation. I do not have all the answers to the significant questions the reader who began this thread is asking.

So I’d like to offer this space as a space for further discussion of the reader’s response. My hope is that by doing this, I will open a conversation to which many voices contribute. My own perspectives here are limited and partial, and need other perspectives to complement them.

First, here’s what Brian has to say:

In the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, the Episcopalian Church (Anglicanism in the USA) grew by 300%. I read this stat in Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

Responding to the many waves of mostly non-Protestant, Eastern and Southern European immigration that America welcomed in the late 19th century, it seems that many white Americans were looking for some conservative, respectable institution with cultural gravitas that would serve as a redoubt for "American" values or, in a variation, "Anglo-Saxon Civilization". In this way, the ECUSA, which was known as "the Republican Party at prayer" back then, became the spiritual home for the Establishment.

My feeling is that throughout the 1990s and up until late, this phenomenon has been happening on a smaller scale in the Catholic Church in the US.

Let us consider some well known converts to Catholicism in the USA in recent years:

the late Richard John Neuhaus (not as recent, but deserves mentioning), Senator Sam Brownback, reporter Richard Novak, former Governor Jeb Bush (brother of you know who), conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, Governor Bobby Jindal, Fox News Supply-Sider Lawrence Kudlow(!), one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the sleazy ex-literature professor Deal Hudson, now a full time GOP booster... oh and (drumroll please) this Easter 2009, Newt Gingrich will enter the Catholic Church.

Basically, they're all GOP activists and operatives who, other than opposing abortion, don't seem to espouse the Catholicism I was taught. I don't know much about Jeb Bush, but, well, he's got some baggage, let's just say that.

Most of these names are found within or around the Beltway in DC. I've read that one of the biggest sources of these right-wing conversions is the Opus Dei center in DC, where a priest named C. John McCloskey works. It seems to me that these converts have retained their authoritarian nature, apparently seeing nothing but good in throne-and-altar politics where people know their place. Oh, and they've expanded their "liberal bias in the media" agitprop to include "anti-Catholicism in liberal media/politics".

Is the Catholic Church in the USA to become the new "Republican Party at prayer"? On the bright side, there are too many people of other stripes already involved in the Church for it to become an establishment sect (fingers crossed).

Furthermore, it's unfortunate that bishops like Chaput, most prominently, are basically the personal chaplains for these new converts.

Is my analysis incorrect? I'm just wondering why all these right-wingers are deciding that the Catholic Church is the church for them. Did Vatican 2 happen at all?

In response, Carl notes the ties of beltway politicians and some of the right-wing Catholic groups named by Brian to money. And Colleen suggests that there’s a “sort of Trojan horse strategy” at work in the conversion of these neoconservative political figures to the Catholic church, as their former allies in the evangelical religious right go up in flames (many of them) in various scandals.

I think Brian and the respondents are onto something. And I think this phenomenon of right-wing political leaders crossing the Tiber deserves analysis.

Brian’s insights are powerful:

▪ “GOP activists and operatives who, other than opposing abortion, don't seem to espouse the Catholicism I was taught.”

▪ “Found within or around the Beltway in DC.”

▪ “Authoritarian nature, apparently seeing nothing but good in throne-and-altar politics where people know their place.”

▪ “Did Vatican 2 happen at all?”

Here are some initial points that strike me as I try to deal with the question Brian is raising here:

▪ With regard to progressive social movements, I shy away from the pendulum-swing explanation of history, in favor of action-reaction theories. As I’ve stated on this blog, in my view, the project of Vatican II has deliberately been stalled by strong reactionary forces within the church—and strong reactionary political groups have colluded with that reaction because they do not want the Catholic church to have a progressive face in social movements.

▪ What happened culturally with the 1960s was a moment of opening to a future that some powerful groups within our society (and in the churches) did not wish to entertain. In particular, there was exceptionally strong resistance within the churches to the emergence of women onto the stage of history as free agents and actors, rather than taken-for-granted decorative stage props reflecting the refulgent glory of preening heterosexual males (or males capable of convincing us that they are heterosexual).

▪ A counter movement occurred following the 1960s, in which the political and religious right cooperated to close the door to the future that had been opened in the 1960s.

▪ I have enormous respect for Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and his book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. One aspect of his analysis of Vatican II does not persuade me, however. He speaks of a pendulum movement in which reaction to Vatican II was necessary, in order to correct the out-of-control movement that had taken place in the church after Vatican II.

▪ I have a different memory of the period after Vatican II. The Catholic right have been adroit about developing a spurious discourse of outrageous liturgical violations and kooky cultural practices following Vatican II. I do not remember such developments—not anywhere to the degree to which they are “recreated” in the discourse of the Catholic right.

▪ What I observed was a deliberate throttling of the Council and its reforms, a deliberate murdering of the spirit of hope that the Council engendered in many Catholics, and an iron-fisted, draconian return to the fortress church in which those who did not like what was taking place were invited to leave the church.

▪ One anecdote to demonstrate the process I’m describing here: in the mid-1980s, I was invited to write an ethics textbook for a graduate program in lay ministry sponsored by a Catholic university. When I wrote the textbook, the director of the program told me he had sent the draft to bishops and theologians all over the nation, and had gotten glowing reviews (except from one theologian)—including from most bishops who had written in response.

▪ Several years later, as Ratzinger’s restorationist agenda emanating from the CDF with the blessing of John Paul II began to have a strong chilling effect on Catholic universities across the U.S., I received a request from the same lay ministry program (now under a new director) to re-write the ethics textbook. I was told that it no longer adequately reflected the consensus of the best Catholic moral theologians writing today. In particular, I was told to incorporate John Paul II’s writings as much as possible into my text, especially “Splendor of Truth.”

▪ I labored for months on the revision, receiving back letters of single-spaced critiques, page on page, from a Jesuit appointed to read and comment on the text as I composed it (there had been no such censor when I wrote the first edition). These focused almost exclusively on sexual ethics, and on homosexuality in particular.

▪ My point? Within less than a decade, a textbook used in a graduate lay ministry program sponsored by a Catholic university had become problematic; it had moved from being an outstanding representative of the best Catholic thought on fundamental ethical issues, to being flawed—especially in what it had to say about sexual ethics. Nothing in the text itself had shifted, except that I flooded it with deferential quotes from John Paul II. The shift took place outside . . . .

▪ This movement from the mid-1980s into the 1990s corresponded with my finding myself without a job in any Catholic theology departments, after I was given a one-year terminal contract with no disclosed reason in the early 1990s at the Catholic college at which I taught. Steve and I have now been permanently outside the Catholic academic world--as in unemployed and apparently unemployable--for over a decade now.

▪ In the same period, one theologian after another (all certainly more important than me—in mentioning myself and Steve, who suffered the same fate, I’m pointing to a wide trend emanating from Rome) was removed from his or her teaching position, silenced, pushed out.

▪ As this went on—a very important point to make—there was hardly a peep on the part of the Catholic academic community in the U.S. There was not the strong movement of outrage and reaction one would expect from scholars. The academy, the center of the American Catholic church, was part of the problem—and, a fortiori, the liberal center was very much part of the problem, because it demonstrated no solidarity at all with theologians being robbed of their vocations in this period, no concern for the effects of this movement on the lives of those subjected to this shameful treatment.

▪ Why that lack of solidarity? Liberals want to be on the winning side. As the reaction set in (a point I want to insist on: it was deliberate and was manufactured from the center of the church; the pendulum did not swing of its own accord), what constituted the center moved ever more to the right.

▪ Consequently, there is a generation of American Catholic thinkers and commentators—our intellectual class of the center—who have grown up in a culture and religious milieu in what is considered centrist is well to the right of center. Whereas I remember the “installation” of John Paul II and Reagan by powerful groups of resistance to the movements of the 1960s and to the open door those movements created for us, this generation of centrists takes for granted that John Paul II and Reagan are admirable, praiseworthy role models for church and society who came on the scene through their own merits and dominated things through the force of their personalities and ideas.

▪ In part, they take this for granted because the religious and political right has succeeded for several generations in dominating political and religious discourse to such an extent that they have made the unthinkable thinkable, and have mainstreamed right-wing ideas that were once on the margins of church and society.

▪ Brian mentions Richard John Neuhaus. He is a shining example of the movement—the deliberate, cultivated, calculated movement—I am describing. I have written extensively on this blog about the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Since its founding in the early 1980s, that group has worked without cease to undermine progressive movements in mainstream American Protestant churches, and to shut the door to the progressive moment represented by the 1960s (culturally and politically) and Vatican II (religiously).

▪ Interestingly enough, though IRD targets non-Catholic churches, among its most influential founding members were Neuhaus and Michael Novak. It has always had a sizeable Catholic presence.

▪ Groups like IRD are predominantly concerned with the economic implications of some of the progressive movements of the 1960s. What they are combating, as they drive wedges into mainstream churches regarding the role of women and gays and lesbians in the church, is the social application of the gospel in a way that critiques the prevailing ideas of neoconservative capitalism.

▪ Because of their appeal to wealthy economic elites, groups like IRD are extremely powerful and well-funded, and have strong clout in our government. They attract the kind of politicians Brian is discussing. They are part and parcel of the cultural move that has been bringing those political (and economic—Erik Prince comes to mind) leaders into the Catholic church.

▪ What do these new converts to Catholicism see in the Catholic church? They see, in part, an institution that does not intend to critique their neoconservative economic ideas or practices. They inhabit a closed inner circle of the church impervious to the economic critique of traditional Catholic social teaching. They see an institution whose rich, powerful intellectual traditions have been co-opted (in their circle, at least) by a “Catholic answers” approach to religious truth that banalizes and trivializes and ultimately betrays the tradition—though they are very loud in their claim that they alone represent the tradition.

▪ These groups have been adroit about disseminating their soundbyte “Catholic answers” everyplace they can, about claiming the center for their eccentric, politicized, a-traditional theology, and about silencing and marginalizing critical voices. They appeal to authoritarian political activists who front for wealthy economic elites.

▪ They gleefully assisted in the dumbing down of the American Catholic church through their assault on the catechetical movement that sprang up following Vatican II, and through the imposition of a catechism now regarded not as a starting point for theological reflection or for study of the tradition, but as an instant-answers approach to catechesis that has robbed a generation of Catholics of the tradition, while convincing them that knowing the answers constitutes better catechesis than ever occrred in the past.

▪ And as they carry on in this way, there have not been powerful resistance movements within American Catholicism—certainly not (and this is shameful to me as a theologian)—in the theological community, and not in parish life, which has been gutted by the restorationist movement, on the whole, with the complicity of bishops appointed by the previous pope and the present one, and parish priests who are increasingly of the John Paul II generation.

Others will perhaps see things different, and I welcome responses. As I note above, my perspective is limited and partial. I was not part of the Reagan revolution. I have never been persuaded by any aspect of neoconservative ideology, whether in religion or politics. My understanding of Catholicism militates against that ideology in a fundamental way, and always has done so.

So I do not reflect (or perhaps even fully understand) the perspective of those who were infatuated with John Paul II and Reagan and have made a gradual journey away from neoconservatism when its flaws became too glaringly apparent to ignore in the Bush presidency. I have always seen John Paul II and Reagan as the religious and political face of one cultural movement, which was all about shutting doors and following the lead of William F. Buckley when he said that the obligation of conservatives is to stand astride history and shout stop.

But history cannot and does not stop, and the obligation of believers (it seems to me) is to participate in the movement of history and try to influence it to positive goals . . . .