BONNIE ERBE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Republicans and the religious right
March 21, 2006
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In the '80s and '90s, when a spate of Democrats swapped parties, it was common to say, “I didn't leave the Democratic Party; it left me.” The Bush presidency has finally pushed the Republican Party so far to the rabid right that if it doesn't settle back toward the middle, Republicans are setting themselves up to suffer the same sort of desertions that hobbled the Democratic Party during the last two decades.
In 1969, then-Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips wrote a book called “The Emerging Republican Majority.” This week's New York Times Book Review explains that Phillips predicted “the movement of people and resources (to wit, capital) from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the 'Sun Belt') would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades.”
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In this poll, the term voters used most frequently to describe this president was “incompetent.” We hear it more and more, with good reason. Despite all this, his support among self-described conservative Republicans dropped from 94 percent in January of last year, to 78 percent this month. Seventy-eight-percent support for this presidency by any group is outrageously high, given the budgetary, scientific, international and fiscal damage it has caused. Phillips' new book is titled, “American Theocracy.” Now he points to yet another powerful force shaping contemporary American life and culture. Brinkley calls it “radical Christianity.”
“On the far right is a still obscure but,” Phillips says, “rapidly growing group of 'Christian Reconstructionists' who believe in a 'Taliban-like' reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a 'myth' and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine.” For my own sake and for the sake of future generations of Americans, I hope Phillips turns out to have lost his gift of premonition. He was dead-on in the predictions he made in 1969, which were widely scoffed at by journalists and politicians. It will already take a generation or two to reverse the scientific and environmental damage done by this president, if indeed it ever can be undone. If Phillips is right, America's political leadership of the future will take us to a place that makes the Iron Age look modern.
Erbe is a TV host and nationally syndicated columnist. She can be reached via e-mail bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com.
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