Sunday, March 01, 2015

The GOP/Conservatives’ War on Truth


One of the ironies in my view is that the Christofacists and their political whores in the Republican Party claim to treasure and worship "Christian values," yet no one lies more consistently and distorts the truth than they do.  It is truly as if the commandment against lying and bearing false witness had been totally removed from the Ten Commandments.  It is one of the reasons that I often state that if a Christofascist's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that they are lying. Why all the lies?  Because the truth and objective reality simply do not support their foul agenda.  The GOP/conservative agenda is nothing less than a war on modernity and the principles of the Enlightenment which motivated the thinking of the Founding Fathers.  A column in Salon looks at this decades long phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:
Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth.

They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

The Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones, progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.

Enlightenment ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen. They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and protected workers.  . . . . But the problem was that the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. After an economic free-for-all of the 1920s that had pitched the nation into the Great Depression, Americans embraced the government regulation that reined in shady business dealings and protected workers. How could businessmen make inroads against such a popular program?

[In 1951 William F.] Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology. Buckley’s radical idea didn’t go far at first, but Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy provided a new rhetorical tool to advance the Yalie’s intellectual premise. In the early 1950s, McCarthy revealed the power of the outrageous lie. He sought to gain power by claiming to defend Christianity and individualism from the secret plots of the godless Communists in the American government. . . . . 

McCarthy’s hit-and-run smears suggested that a compelling lie could convince voters so long as it fit a larger narrative of good and evil. . . . Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell turned Buckley’s ideological stand against academic inquiry into just such a narrative. In their telling, a few brave men were standing against an evil majority trying to destroy America.

They wanted to purge the country of the Liberals who made up the majority and create a new “orthodoxy” based on the ideology of strict Christianity and individualism.To press this radical political program, Buckley launched the National Review in 1955, announcing that government activism “must be fought relentlessly.” He railed against President Dwight Eisenhower, who had modified the New Deal consensus into his own “Middle Way.”

This Manichean worldview led Barry Goldwater’s candidacy to grief in 1964 as voters recoiled from its aggressive irresponsibility, but with Ronald Reagan the Movement Conservative program gained the one new piece it needed to sell its ideology: a warm narrative. Reagan pushed Christianity and individualism with both lies and anti-intellectualism, but he did so with folksy stories and charm. He described a world of hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol,” and pushed policies that dramatically rolled back New Deal reforms. When opponents noted that his stories had little basis in fact and that his policies didn’t work as he claimed, he accused them of being haters and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.”

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the “Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by studying reality. 

Facts and argument had given way to an ideology premised on Christianity and the idea of economic individualism. As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. . . . . And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history.

The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.
A further irony is that Christofascists blame the acceptance of homosexuality for the fall of Rome - never mind that the Roman Empire existed for twice as long as the United States has existed - when in fact, many historians believe that Christianity was a leading cause in the fall of Rome.  Again, fact and the truth don't matter.  For the far right, it is all about furthering a greed and self-centered agenda that is the antithesis of the Gospel message.

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