The Zombie Occupied Party

Excerpts from a great interview with the ballsy, brilliant Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah; go read the whole thing, you'll find it very enlightening, I think.

But first, a caveat:  Max is drawing conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.  Not everything he says necessarily applies to every single Republican or Christian believer.  (There are still a few moderates here and there who haven't yet been burnt at the stake, you know.)  But for a great many, yes, I think so.  I have observed this same thing with my own eyes on a local and personal level.

But do keep in mind that the "authoritarian personality" and its longing to be swept up in a grand, glorious bigger-than-life movement can also happen just as well to people on the left of the political spectrum.  And has - if you'll just stop and remember some history.

Anyway, here's Max talking about the GOP ZOP:

I covered this movement [the religious right] for six years, and in covering it I met just dozens and dozens of followers, leaders and activists who told me that they had had some terrible thing happen to them in the past that they blamed themselves for. Junk — you know, alcoholism, some family crisis, sexual abuse, sex addiction, pornography addiction, drug addiction — you name it. And they confessed this to me unprompted, without me even asking about it. And I wanted to understand what it was that connected all these people together — why there seemed to be a common thread throughout the movement.

I came across Erich Fromm’s book, Escape From Freedom — which he wrote in 1941 as a warning to Americans after fleeing from Nazi Germany and watching the rise of an authoritarian movement in a democratic society. And what he said was the peril stems from people who can’t handle the pressures of freedom, who can’t handle the anxiety and pressure of exercising their free will in an open society. Often they will succumb to that pressure. They will become self-destructive, and they will seek what he calls the neurotic solutions, which is flocking to an authoritarian structure or an authoritarian leader to basically control them and help them reorder their lives.

And that’s what so many people on the Christian right told me. And if they did what they wanted to do, they would basically go crazy and do anything up to man-on-dog sex. But when they did what God wanted them to do — you know, God as translated to them through James Dobson — they could put their lives back together. Fromm helped me articulate what I was seeing on the Christian right, which was a culture of personal crisis that animates the politics of resentment.

BuzzFlash:  How does an individual, personal crisis animate the politics of resentment? What’s the tie between the two?

Max Blumenthal:  When you believe that when you do what you want to do, you can’t moderate your own behavior, and you’re destroying your life — you’re self-destructive — for whatever reason, you seek to dissolve the self, what you think is the source of your problems.

For example, if you’re ashamed of the fact that you’re gay, and you live in a community where homosexuality is looked down upon, you blame yourself. And you seek to dissolve the self in a glorious holy cause that’s bigger than you. And in giving away the self, you give yourself over to a strong authoritarian leader like James Dobson.

The story of Christ as depicted in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — and it’s depicted in every Mel Gibson movie; Mel Gibson is the top propagandist — is really the same. Iconically, at the end of each movie, the protagonist has his body torn apart while he’s screaming “freedom.” He’s transcending his own body, this vessel of shame and sin, and moving on to a higher plane, and becoming part of this glorious cause, becoming a symbol of it.

That’s the goal of so many of the men of the Christian right. It’s why Mark Sanford, for example, when he confessed his affair with his Latina lover in a nationally televised press conference, said the reason why he followed God’s law is to restrain himself from the self. It’s like John Ensign, the only Pentecostal senator in the Senate, a far right-wing legislator from Nevada — well, what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. His affair was revealed with a staffer he’d been paying hush money to. He wrote her a letter and he said, “The reason why I did this with you is I walked away from God.” In other words, “I did what I wanted to do.”

Sarah Palin, in her autobiography, Going Rogue, says you have to give your life over to God and let God take over. In other words, give away yourself and let God take over control over your own life. This is a movement populated by people who believe that they have to give away their own individual will.

They give away the self to a higher leader, which is the essential mentality of an authoritarian follower. And the reason why they think that way, the reason why they want to give the self away, is they loathe what their individual will has made them do, and they feel that it will lead them to do, which is a sin. . . .

It’s only about 12 to 20 percent of the American voting public. But they must see themselves as [persecuted] early Christians in order to exercise their influence in a way that’s disproportionate to their numbers in order to energize the base, to energize the activists, to get them to be fervent politically: constantly running for school board elections, running for dog catcher, hammering in yard signs, leafleting church parking lots on Election Day. They have to believe that their very survival is at stake. . . .

But the movement that has control of the Republican Party . . . .  All they care about is ideological purity. Everyone who’s representing them in Congress thinks just like they do and is not representing on the parochial concerns of their district, but the dominionist agenda of the Christian right and the radical right.

So I would call the GOP the ZOP — instead of the Grand Old Party, it’s the Zombie Occupied Party. It has no ideas. It has no capacity for maneuvering on constituent concerns. It’s just like a zombie that’s lurching towards Obama and towards all the moderate Republicans and yelling, “Brains!” And eventually, it’ll eat itself alive.

However, and at the end of George Romerez’ Land of the Dead, the zombies figure out how to use guns. So if Barack Obama, the White House and the Democratic Congress don’t have an agenda of their own, the Zombie Occupied Party could do some serious damage. And they already have.