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On Friday, Max Blumenthal was on Democracy Now! to talk about his new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. I haven't seen a copy, much less read his book, but at first listen, it sounds like he has done an excellent job of hitting the bulls-eye of target that others--in books that were already excellent in their own rights--have only clipped before, without quite realizing that the bull's-eye even existed.
This passage from the publisher's description (link above) describes that bull's-eye:
more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement's leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.
Numerous other writers have noted how frequently religious right figures get into trouble with sex scandals. I mean, you've got to work pretty damn hard not to notice it. And in Great American Hypocrites, Glenn Greenwald went one step further, describing how conservative political heroes, not specifically religious figures, have repeatedly turned out to be the polar opposite of the images of the rectitude that they project, but here, Blumenthal is examining this phenomena not simply as hypocrisy on a grand scale, or a grand deception, but as the inexorable workings of natural laws, taking Fromm's insights and applying them systematically to a history that has been staring us in the face now for decades.
What's more, when Blumenthal includes James Dobson in this pattern, he (perhaps inadvertently) outflanks George Lakoff as well. In Moral Politics, Lakoff discussed Dobson's work in Dare To Discipline as exemplifying what he called the "Strict Father" model of childrearing on which American conservatism is based. However, in retrospect Blumenthal's approach reveals how Lakoff seemingly downplayed the more disturbing implications of what he had uncovered.
Some excerpts from the interview, and further explanation of what I mean on the flip.
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