Open Left - shadow elite

Shadow Elites And Religion UPDATE

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:54:26 GMT

My series, "Shadow Elites And Religion" was interrupted after its first two installments (Part 1, Part 2), mostly because I'd built up such a head of steam that I wanted to do a lot more digging for the third installment, focused on John McCain and his ties to two Word of Faith ministers--John Hagee and Rod Parsley. All sorts of other stuff intruded, and, well, the hiatus continues.

But meanwhile, Sarah Posner, Word of Faith expert extraordinaire, has posted an excellent piece over at Huffington Post--"McCain's Pastor Problem", while Gary Kamiya chimes in at Salon with "Psycho Christians and the media", and there's even signs of catchup with my second installment, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon", as noted in a frontpage post at DKos, "Moonshadows ", by DarkSyde, which focuses on recent attention to the connections between Moon and Bush Sr.--connections that I didn't delve into in my post, because I wanted to focus on the deep structural connections, but that are quite considerable in themselves.

Darkside highlights this piece at the Houston Chronicle, and John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising.

I'll be writing more this weekend, but one thing worth highlighting now is the thinness of the McCain defense--"He's not my pastor, so it's not my fault."
Well, turn this around--since he's not your pastor, then why all the investment in associating with him in the first place, and the reluctance to condemn him in the second?

Kamiya writes:

even if Hagee and Parsley had been McCain's pastors, it's hard to imagine that the media would have attacked him as relentlessly as it has attacked Obama over Wright and Farrakhan.
The media's double standard is all about deference to perceived mainstream norms, and tiptoeing around the Christian right. Despite their cartoonish views, the media treats Hagee and Parsley as quasi-mainstream figures, which makes McCain's relationship with them non-newsworthy. The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus. The issue isn't that journalists share Hagee and Parsley's views so much as that they know that they are widely held, which makes them reluctant to acknowledge how truly outrageous they are.

This is all quite true. It's also true that qustioning these charlatans would involve acts of actual journalism, and as Chief Wiggums famously said (regarding his chances of having an actual friend), "What are the chances of that?"

Posner, too, takes on the "he's not my pastor" trope:

When Hagee and Parsley were revealed to have spewed bigotry from their pulpits, many people wondered if McCain had a "pastor problem" like Obama's supposed problem with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The rejoinder from the McCain camp was that he was not responsible for every sentence uttered by people who endorse his candidacy. But his pastor problem is not just his own, it's his party's too. And it's not about candidates bearing responsibility for odious sermons. It's about bearing responsibility for propping up religious demagoguery in order to win elections.

"He's not my pastor" is a narrative trope. As the TVTropes Wiki explains:

"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations."

A large part of the work that the right has done over the past four decades has involved consciously pushing its tropes. This is a major part of cultural hegemony and the Gramscian "culture war"/"war of position" is all about. In such a context, something sounding "reasonable" is much more important than anything else. If it "sounds reasonable" it will be far less likely to be questioned, even if it has little or nothing to do with the underlying facts.

After all, who's going to look at the facts if reasonable explanation tells them there's no need to even look? Only those with a bad attitude, that's who!

That means us.

Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:01:38 GMT

Part 1 here.

In 1995, Jerry Falwell was on the brink of financial ruin, $73 million in debt, when he was saved by the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. The transaction was hidden from sight, as Moon and Falwell used a pair of Virginia businessmen as cut-outs.

Moon has been a major player on the right since at least 1982, when he established the Washington Times, which he has subsidized to the tune of $3 billion over the years, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who was the leading journalist uncovering the Iran/Contra affair in the 1980s, and who has an extensive series on Moon at his website, Consortiumnews.com.

Until the emergence of Fox News in the late 1990s, the Washington Timeswas unquestionably the leading national news/propaganda organ of the right, and thus none of the movement higher-ups questioned him or his organization. (Even today, it remains a vital hub of the rightwing noise machine.) But Moon's theology and practices were so clearly heretical that appearances required significantly soft-peddling his enduring role and influence. It's impossible to fully grasp the hypocrisy and projection involved in rightwing politics without a consideration of the role of Sun Myung Moon.

For example, Moon claims to be the Second Coming--but he also claims to be better than Jesus, saying that Jesus failed in his mission, because he didn't procreat. Moon, in contrast, has been married three times, had various affairs, and numerous children. He has never disclosed where his money comes from, but Parry cites substantial evidence that much of it comes from underworld figures in Asia and Latin America. He served 18 months for filing false tax returns and conspiracy in the early 1980s.

It's very clear that his organization functions as an authoritarian cult, and Moon is deeply hostile to the United States. He also has clearly visible ties to Bush Sr. So, naturally--based on the principle I'm writing about here-- the money he funnelled to Falwell helped Falwell to project all these negatives onto a shadow liberal elite. And so he did, devoting enormous amounts of attention to peddling The Clinton Chronicles, a pseudo-documentary film that attempted to paint President Clinton as the mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise.

Falwell not only peddled the film on his TV program, he appeared in it, and later admitted he had no idea if any of it was true. Apparently, the commandment against bearing false witness didn't make it into Falwell's Bible.

This is the flip side of the manufactured hate-fest directed at Jeremiah Wright. Figures like Moon and Falwell break every Commandment in the Book, but are regarded as revered pillars of the conservative establishment. The more they sin, the more they have to savagely attack someone else. On the flip, we'll look at just a few of the things Sun Mung Moon has done that no liberal could possibly get away with.
The Second Coming

The Wikipedia article on Moon begins thus:

Sun Myung Moon (born January 6, 1920) is the leader of the Unification Church, which he officially founded on May 1, 1954 in Seoul, South Korea. Moon is also the founder and leader of the global Unification Movement which owns, operates or subsidizes many organizations involved in political, cultural, mass-media, and other activities. One of the best known is the Washington Times newspaper, founded in 1982.[1]
Moon has said he is the Second Coming of Christ, the "Savior", "returning Lord", and "True Parent". He teaches that all people should become perfected like Jesus and like himself, and that as such he "appears in the world as the substantial body of God Himself." He is well-known for holding Blessing ceremonies, which are often called "mass weddings". [2][3]
Moon has been among the most controversial modern religious leaders. He and his followers have been widely criticized, both for their religious beliefs and for their social and political activism. [4]

Robert Parry elaborates a bit on those religious beliefs ("Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right"):

Moon asserts that Satan corrupted mankind by sexually seducing Eve in the Garden of Eden and that only through sexual purification can mankind be saved. In line with that doctrine, Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.

Moon sees himself as a second messiah who will not make the same mistake. He has engaged in sex with a variety of women over the decades. The total number of his offspring is a point of debate inside the Unification Church.

A former young leader in the church, John Stacey, goes even further, Parry wrote in another installment of his series on Moon:

Moon's criticism of Jesus also unsettled Stacey. "In the church, it's very anti-Jesus," Stacey said. "Jesus failed miserably. He died a lonely death. Reverend Moon is the hero that comes and saves pathetic Jesus. Reverend Moon is better than God. ... That's why I left the Moonies. Because it started to feel like idolatry. He's promoting idolatry."

Think of how much the right hates George Soros. Most of the money Soros gives away does not go to anything partisan, but say that it did. And then say that Soros claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ. Say he claimed to be better than Jesus. Do you think maybe people would, I duno, maybe talk about it? But how often do you ever hear anyone complain about Moon? Interesting, no? Well, that's the power of projection at work.

Please note, I'm not arguing that there's a direct link here. It's not that rightwingers look at Moon, freak out, go looking for some liberal to blame instead, and fix on George Soros. Rather, there is a deeply ingrained set of orientations, primarily associated with rightwing authoritarianism (RWA), which predisposes people to trust those they perceive as established authorities, and to demonize those seen as social outgroups. Shadow elites are manufactured out of this raw material. Their sinister, unseen machinations are what makes the social outgroups so dangerous.

For those not familiar with it, RWA is defined thus:

Right-wing authoritarianism is defined as the co-existence of three attitudinal clusters in a person:
1. Authoritarian submission -- a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression -- a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
3. Conventionalism -- a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities. (Source: Altemeyer, 1996, Chapter 1)

And it's been empirically found to have the following correlations:

1: Faulty reasoning -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Make many incorrect inferences from evidence.
* Hold contradictory ideas that result from a cognitive attribute known as compartmentalized thinking.
* Uncritically accept that many problems are 'our most serious problem.'
* Uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs.
* Uncritically trust people who tell them what they want to hear.
* Use many double standards in their thinking and judgments.
2: Hostility Toward Outgroups -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty such as a Bill of Rights.
* Severely punish 'common' criminals in a role-playing situation.
* Admit they obtain personal pleasure from punishing such people.
* Be prejudiced and hostile against racial, ethnic, nationalistic, sexual, and linguistic minorities.
* Volunteer to help the government persecute almost anyone.
* Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.
3: Perverse Character Attributes -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Be dogmatic.
* Be zealots.
* Be hypocrites.
* Be absolutists
* Be bullies when they have power over others.
* Help cause and inflame intergroup conflict.
* Seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive in situations requiring cooperation.
4: Blindness To One's Own Failings And To The Failings Of Authority Figures Whom They Respect-- RWAs are more likely to:
* Believe they have no personal failings.
* Avoid learning about their personal failings.
* Be highly self-righteous.
* Use religion to erase guilt over their acts and to maintain their self-righteousness.

That does happen in some cases, I'm sure. can't prove any direct link, it's completely compatible with the way projection works that Soros is subject to all manner of unfair, hyperbolic attacks in part because of the corruption, degeneracy and almost limitless moral arrogance of similarly situated funders on the right--including, but not limited to Moon. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's Jewish. That's all good for getting the hatemongers blood boiling. But there's millions of Jews in the world, and not that many people who claim to be the Second Coming.

The Many Loves of Sun Yung Moon

Wikipedia again:

Marriages and children
In November 1943 Moon married Sun Kil Choi. Their son, Sung Jin Moon, was born in 1946. They divorced in 1953 soon after Moon's release from prison in North Korea. Choi and Sung Jin Moon are now both members of the Unification Church. Choi has remarried. [6]
Technically, Moon was still married to his first wife when he began a relationship with his second (common law) wife Myung Hee Kim, who gave birth to a son named Hee Jin Moon (who was killed in a train accident). The church does not regard this as infidelity, but rather part of God's "providential" plan.[7]
Moon married his third wife, Hak Ja Han,[8] on April 11, 1960, soon after she turned 17 years old, in a ceremony called the "Holy Marriage." Han, called "Mother" or "True Mother" by followers, and her husband together are referred to as the "True Parents" by members of the Unification Church.
Hak Ja Han gave birth to 14 children; her second daughter died in infancy. The family is known in the church as the "True Family" and the children as the "True Children." Shortly after their marriage they presided over a Blessing Ceremony for 36 couples, the first of many such ceremonies.
Nansook Hong, ex-wife of Hyo Jin Moon, Sun Myung Moon's eldest son, said in her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family, that both Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han told her about Moon's extramarital affairs (which she said he called "providential affairs"), including one which resulted in the birth of a boy raised by a church leader, named by Sun Myung Moon's daughter Un Jin Moon on the news show 60 Minutes.[9]

Robert Parry elaborates a bit on those religious beliefs ("Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right"):

Moon asserts that Satan corrupted mankind by sexually seducing Eve in the Garden of Eden and that only through sexual purification can mankind be saved. In line with that doctrine, Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.

Parry adds more to this, however. Continuing the passage quoted in the previous section:

Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.
Moon sees himself as a second messiah who will not make the same mistake. He has engaged in sex with a variety of women over the decades. The total number of his offspring is a point of debate inside the Unification Church.

Anti-American

In "Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking George Bush", Robert Parry wrote:

Moon's jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon's recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as "Satanic." But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush's warm endorsements of Moon.
"America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists," Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. "You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan."
In similar remarks to followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church's eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. "Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."
During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women. "American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position," he said. "However, woman's shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. ... Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.
"Does woman contain the seed of life? ["No."] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent."

Parry goes on to report on a former disciple who was shaken by a Moon diatribe against America, in which Moon said, "America is so Satanic that even hamburgers should be considered evil, because they come from America'."

The disciple was shocked: "Hamburgers! My father was a butcher, so that bothered me. ... I started feeling that I was betraying my country."

So, the House GOP voting against motherhood last week. The pieces are falling into place...

Drug Crazy

Remember what I said above about George Soros and Sun Myung Moon? Well, it was sort of set-up:

On August 30, 2004, Kevin Drum wrote:

"I'M SAYING WE DON'T KNOW"....Josh Marshall links today to the latest smear from House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Lloyd Grove reports:
"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years -- George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."
And I think maybe George Bush got tossed out of the National Guard because he crashed a plane while he was high on coke and then spent the next five months in Alabama in a rehab center. I mean, we just don't know, do we?
For the record, I'd like to note that Hastert is not an overweight filmmaker or an anonymous blogger. He's the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third highest ranking Republican official in the country. This is what the leadership of the Republican party has become.

Well, you know we'd never hear the end of it if Nancy Pelosi were to act like that. But I bet you also know where I'm going next. Yup! That little old drug-dealing cult leader:

Mysterious Republican Money
By Robert Parry
September 7, 2004
If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.
While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.
Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.
Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.
How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated - at least since the Reagan-Bush era.

Parry goes on to describe how Moon is connected with the Korean CIA, rightwing Japanese WWII war criminals Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who "grew rich from their association with the yakuza, an organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea," and an assortment of different rightwing regimes in Latin America during the 1980s, including the notorious Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia. This also, inevitable, involved connections to the Nicaraguan Contras cocaine dealing.

If George Soros were to get anywhere near even a fraction of this, we'd never hear the end of it. But Moon? I'll bet that at least half the people reading this have never even heard anything about Moon's involvement in drugs and underworld finance. That's precisely how the projection process works in the fantasy construction of shadow elites.

But there's more, you see. Parry also describes how a much younger Senator John Kerry, still fired by moral passion at the time, launched an investigation into contra drug trafficking, and thus earned the ire of Moon's Washington Times:

Kerry's Probe
When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug trafficking, The Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry's probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. "Kerry's anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," announced the headline of one Times article.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, The Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry's staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth. "Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one Times article that opened with the assertion: "Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said."
Despite the attacks from The Washington Times and pressure from the Reagan-Bush administration to back off, Kerry's contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units - both in Costa Rica and Honduras - were implicated in the cocaine trade.
"It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers," Kerry's investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989. "In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter."

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as Parry goes on to note:

The available evidence now shows that there was much more to the contra drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon's organization wanted the American people to know in the 1980s. The evidence - assembled over the years by inspectors general at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies - indicates that Bolivia's Cocaine Coup government was only the first in a line of drug enterprises that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Ronald Reagan's favorite covert operation, the contra war.
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras and sharing some of the profits as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies. The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

The official story at the time was that "we" were fighting the "communists" in Central America. But as Parry shows, the reality was "something completely different," as the Pythons would say. In fact, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were not aligned with the Soviet Union. The Nicaraguan Communist Party was part of the opposition, and the Sandinistas only turned to the Soviets for aid after the US had twisted the arms of all the European governments that the Sandinistas had approached first. The official story recognizes none of these basic facts. And of course it regards any talk of drugs as a "conspiracy theory," even though it's been confirmed by the CIA's own inspector general.

That's just how vital a role projection plays in the maintenance of the power of conservative elites.

And right in the middle of it all, a virulently anti-American Korean cult leader who claims to be better than Jesus.

And they want to get us all in a tizzy over Jeremiah Wright?

Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 1

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:01:57 GMT

In my diary Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--pt. 1, I argued:

It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.

In that diary, I talked about the conservatives' creation of the truest form of shadow elite-the non-existent "Bavarian Illuminati" who had been disbanded a decade prior to the French Revolution they were accused of master-minding. In this diary set, I want to talk about shadow elites and religion-a topic which necessarily evokes a much earlier point in time, peg some further observation look much farther back in time, to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337), the first Christian Roman Emperor.

The changes that took place in Christianity as a result gave rise to or intensified contradictions that are with us still, as a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral was transformed into an imperial religion. Although tremendous intellect was devoted over the ages to attempting to perfect this transformation, it was, at bottom, an impossible task. This partly explains the distinctive nature of America's Black Church, since its practitioners are in the same position as the early Christians and their Hebrew forbearers-a fact which Black Christians seemed to have grasped almost immediately, though it seems to have entirely escaped the understanding of their slavemasters.

White Christians, OTOH, are all too vulnerable to sliding into Crusade mode, as this new release from Brave New Films-highlighting John McCain's excessive praise for holy war enthusiast Rod Parsley--reminds us:

[More on Parsley below the fold]

In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is perhaps understandable that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be castigated for causing trouble for Barack Obama, yet, whatever one thinks of his actions, he does have a point: He is acting out a traditional Christian role, and he is correct when he claims to be articulating Biblical principles. He seems a cantankerous outsider, and so he is. So were all the Hebrew prophets, so was John the Baptist, and so, too, was Jesus, as were his followers for generations, up until the time of Constantine.

In contrast, the Christian elite, from at least Constantine onward, has struggled with the contradictions of its own existence, and often, in doing so, has resorted to projecting its own contradictions, its own hypocrisy, its own confusion onto others, including, of course, its shadow elites, and rival religious traditions.

In this diary set, I want to focus on a four main contradictions underlying imperialist Christianity, as a cultural mainstream, and the religious right as it has specifically articulated itself since the 1970s....
Four Main Contradictions

The first contradiction is simply that of being imperalist Christianity-as I said above, "a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral ... transformed into an imperial religion." The second contradiction is the religious right's tortured roots in Southern segregationism, recast as moral superiority, based on issues that are almost entirely cultural, not Biblical-abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, etc.

The third contradiction is the broader conservative movement's long-time dependence on a profoundly anti-Christian figure, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who financed what was the central news/propaganda organ of the conservative movement-The Washington Times-for well over a decade, until its importance was finally matched by the Fox News Channel. Moon's claim to his own divinity is so clearly heretical that it's mindboggling he should have played such a central role in the building of the contemporary "conservative" movement. It's precisely this sort of crazy-making contradiction which only makes conservatives all the more fanatical in projecting their own shadows, and attacking the perceived transgressions of others.

The fourth contradiction is the similarly heretical Pentecostal offshoot known as "Word of Faith," a sort of New Age prosperity cult that turns its back on all the social justice teachings of the Bible. Both Rod Parsley and John Hagee are "Word of Faith" huslters with an Armageddon fixation, who show no compunction whatever over draining the bank accounts of their less affluent followers.

Whatever one's religion-or lack of same-it should be obvious that each of these configurations is hardly the pure Christian Gospel it claims to be. They are each of them riddled with their own contradictions-contradictions in which demons gestate over time, until out of those contradictions, unguarded, unfaced, anacknowledge, full grown demons come.

The five minute hate directed at Jeremiah Wright derives at least some of it instensity from the simple fact that so many of those who condemned Wright and demanded others do the same are themelves driven by those demons that they still have yet to face.

"Just War Theory"-Or Just War?

Originally, Christianity was understood as a pacifistic religion, and was most popular among the Empire's underclass. But as it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it necessarily underwent a change, giving rise to the origins of just war theory. Indeed, Wikipedia notes:

In 316, Constantine acted as a judge in a North African dispute concerning the heresy of Donatism. After making a decision against the Donatists, Constantine led an army of Christians against Christians. After 300 years of pacifism, this was the first intra-Christian persecution. More significantly, in 325 he summoned the Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council (unless the Council of Jerusalem is so classified), to deal mostly with the heresy of Arianism. Constantine also enforced the prohibition of the First Council of Nicaea against celebrating Easter on the day before the Jewish Passover (14 Nisan) (see Quartodecimanism and Easter controversy).[151]

What we see here is not just the speed with which Christianity is adapted to a war-fighting stance, but also how readily it is adapted to suppressing one form of Christianity by another. Wikipedia also notes:

From the beginning, Christianity was regarded as completely pacifistic, due to a strict interpretation of the Bible as well as constant persecution by the Roman Empire. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the empire "all of Christianity began to embrace just war theory, as an attempt to be realistic about evil and harm-doing", a critical transition for the church.[142] Another consequence of Christianity being the state religion was that clergy members were given preferred status and exempted from military service and forced labor. There was a growing divide between clergy and laity as conversions were often more about socioeconomic status rather than faith. Converts were baptized in order to abuse Christianity for political influence, a problem unheard of before Constantine, when converts to Christianity willingly risked their life for their faith. [143]

None of this is should be surprising. This is precisely what one expects from a union of church and state-the two reinfore one another, and lose certain defining attributes which they would have if standing alone. Of course, the Roman Empire had previously had another state religion, so its defining attributes were already religiously inflected. But Christianity was profoundly transformed. What three hundred years of persecution could not accomplish, a few short years of power managed quite handily. It moved from the right hand of God to the left:

Matthew 25:31 "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
37 "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45 "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

From the Crusades to the colonization of the New World to the spread of imperialism throughout Asia and Africa, Christianity would prove itself a potent driving force, spurring on the imperial lust for wealth, power and control over the lives of others-all a far, far cry from its origins and its original orientation as a religion of the dispossessed. Naturally, imperialist Christianity was always eager to see the demons in others, it had so many of them itself.

Parsley's Place: A Foretaste

Rod Parsley is a very important figure in the religious right, and I will have much more to say about him in a future instalment. He was a major player in helping Bush to win Ohio in 2004. But first, I need to lay the proper groundwork, which will take some time. For now, however, what's worth noting is how well his religious extremism fits into the larger mainstream of imperial Christianity. Over the past hundred years or so, historical forces have worked to greatly mitigate the ferocity of Christian imperialism. For four hundred years, Christian imperialism had grown increasingly dominant on the world stage, until it reached a breaking point, as the Christian powers fell on one another in World Wars I and II.

At the same time, many different missionaries to the Third World went native in one way or another. The more perceptive and open-minded of them often noticed that the people they were evangelizing were a good deal more "Christian" than the powers at their backs. To a significant extent, as Walter Russell Mead argues in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, both multi-culturalism and the Wilsonian multi-lateral tradition have their roots in America's very high level of overseas evangelization. Non-white Christian voices-from the black South to black South Africa-added to a mix that was also softened by the emergence of a more humane secular outlook. Consequently, there was a clear trajectory of mainstream Christianity to move away from its earlier, longstanding blind embrace of imperial power. This distancing was even evident in the Pope's condemnation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Parsley is not shocking to many, I assume, because there is a long, long history of imperial Christianity whose attitudes are echoed in his own. But it's important to realize that Christianity as a whole has learned some lessons over the last 100 years or so, and Parsley represents a very deliberate forgetting of those lessons, a willful embrace of the darkest aspects of our collective imperialist madness.

Fast Forward To Our Times: The Segregation/Christian Conservtive Connection

Imperialist Christianity was one of the great bulwarks of slavery, even as the Black Church and Quakerism were amongst its greatest foes. In his book Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, Larry E. Tise reveals the overwhelmingly dominant role that the Bible played as a source of Proslavery arguments in the generation leading up to the Civil War, as slavery finally became the object of sustained attack. Of course, religion played a powerful role in mobilizing opposition to slavery as well, and the same clashing views persisted down to the Civil Rights era, when mainline Protestents joined the Black Church and progressive Jews to form a powerful religiously-inspired coalition to eradicate segregation from our land. In the South, White Curches played a powerful role in legitimizing the existing segregationist order, some by directly justifying and defending it, others by insisting on the need to "go slow"-which everyone knew really meant "don't go."

The obstructionist role toward civil rights that white churches played in the South is not well known, but that doesn't mean it wasn't important-particularly given how influential religion has always been in Southern culture. When Jerry Fallwel died last year, there was nary a word in most places about his anti-civil rights past. At The Nation magazine, Max Blumenthal sought to set the record straight with an article, "Agent of Intolerance" that included some notable highlights-not only Falwell's segregationist roots, but the initial tolerance of abortion by Southern Baptists-in stark contrast to the Catholic hierarchy at that time.

[F] or Falwell, the "questions of the day" did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality--nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell's life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher's own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell's jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration.... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."

What's significant here-among other things-is how little of anything had changed in 100 years. This can be seen on at least three major points: (1) God was still the justification for keeping blacks separate, and for keeping them down. God was the original segregationist. Segregtionist society creates a segregationist God in its image, and then feels duty-bound to abide by his commands.

(2) We are assured that blacks themselves do not want their own freedom. The logic imputed was absurd on its face-"He realizes his potential is far better among his own race"-since a black man with a college degree was still the social inferior of a white grade school dropout. That simple fact might escape Falwell's intellectual grasp, but few indeed were the blacks who were quite that stupid.

In fact, what's happening here is that the White elite projects its unchanging image of the social order into the minds of the black underclass. They cannot possibly conceive of a different social order. They must surely accept that whites will always, uniformly, be better than blacks. There is no possibility of bettering themselves individually, and it's inconceivable to the White elites that the downtrodden blacks should think of themselves as a people, and act in terms of their common destiny. Therefore, because he accepts all the unspoken assumptions his imaginative creator White creator projects into him, the "true Negro" wants precisely what his imaginative creator wants him to want-things exactly as they are.

Of course this "logic" is preposterous, but it is also utterly necessary for the conservative project. For if people themselves want political reforms-if the French people themselves revolt against monarchic misrule, if the slaves want to be free, and 100 years later the segregted black masses want the same-then one cannot blame their challenge to the established order on a hidden shadow elite of troublemakers, whose only real agenda is to take the rightful place of the estabished conservative elite. Instead, one must confront their actual demands, and their actual arguments head-on, and this is one thing that conservative elites simply cannot do. It revolts them to even think of talking to a black person-or a common French peasant-as any sort of equal whatsoever. And if they somehow could stand the insult, their arguments would be blown away like so many dead leaves in the wind, since they are all based on rootless assumptions, conjured out of thin air.

(3) Miscegenation is proffered as the ultimate segregationist argument, as if nothing more need be said. But, of course, it was the Southern slaveowners who began the practice, under the threat of the lash. It only became abhorrent when it passed beyond the control of lecherous powerful men. Like any other trespass in the eyes of conservative elites, notwithstanding what they said, the problem was not the act itself, but who was doing it, and who was being served.

I spend so long reflecting on Falwell's brief remarks because they provide such direct continuity, not just with the slaveowning/slavery-justifying past, but also with the authoritarian sexual morality to come. Just as God blessed slavery and segregation, he will bless the war on abortion, and gays and lesbians as well. The fact that others moved by their own understandings of God come to opposite conclusions-that is simply unthinkable, just as it was unthinkable for the slaveowners of the 1830s. Likewise, just as the "true Negro" knows that segregation is for him, so, too, the "true Woman" will come to know that male dominance and anti-feminism are for her, and the "true Gay" will know that the only "true Gay" is an ex-gay, which is why they have to exist--even if they don't. Lastly, the "self-evident" evils of abortion, homosexuality, and secular humanism in general will come to be denounced-or forgiven, denied or ignored as the case may be-in an a totally relativistic manner, just as miscegenation was denounced, forgiven, denied or ignored from the earliest days of slavery right up to Falwell's day.

Blumenthal continues:

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
Falwell concluded, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners."

Priceless!

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.
For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell's Christian soldiers.)

Yes, folks, "Liberty University," so named because it was free of blacks!

Now we get to the good stuff:

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

Indeed, there was long a belief that life started with the first breath, just as God breathed the first breath-and his soul--into Adam. As Blumenthal goes on to explain, the Catholic right's concerns about abortion failed to interest White Southern Protestants for years to come:

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Because, of course, a Christian school could not be integrated.

Blumenthal continues:

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Yep! "So-called" segregation!

Blumenthal:

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

Of course, millions of those who were mobilized by Falwell and his cronies sincerely believed that abortion was the issue, and that it was against God's word-despite the fact that such words could not be found in the Bible. There were words against homosexuality, however, along with words against shrimp and polyester blends. (The war on Red Lobster and Sears will begin any day now, I promise!) What really mattered was that provincial elites and would-be elites, like Falwell, had a chance to reclaim the moral high ground they had once inhabited, when just to have black skin marked one as morally inferior.

The Civil Rights Movement had turned the moral universe upside down, and by God, Falwell and his cronies were going to set it right again, with themselves on top, and their enemies accused of all the shameful things they could imagine-both recycled charges stretching all the way back to slave-time, and their own experience of humiliation when all the world looked at their racism and found it morally repugnant. Indeed, this was the whole point of the Moral Majority, and the other similar groups: they were out to emulate the success of the Civil Rights Movement, copying everything about it that had washed away their precious moral authority. They wanted payback, and they wanted it bad.

And, you know what? That's exactly what they've given us, for lo these many years.

But to get it done, first they had to do a deal with the anti-Christ, Sun Myung Moon.

To be continued in Part 2.

Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:56:03 GMT

Yesterday, at DKos, No one could have predicted..., Kagro X noted how Clinton and Obama's appearances on Fox were covered by the LA Times ("Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton embrace Fox News") and the NY Times ("Democrats and Fox News Make Friends"). Particularly noteworthy was the LA Times deck: "Both Democratic contenders have stepped up their appearances, reaching out for swing voters who might be watching the populist-oriented channel."

Kargo X noted:

Populist-oriented?
Oh, my head!
But hey, no one could have predicted that Fox would use these appearances for PR purposes, right?
So there you have it. For everyone who was so sure this was brilliant, because the candidates were "reaching out," apparently we forgot that the traditional media would still have an opportunity to define for America to whom they were reaching out. Fans of the candidates assured us that it was (pick one): 1) swing voters; 2) open-minded conservatives (ha!), or; 3) people who had lost their TV remotes. But gosh darn it if the Fox PR machine hasn't schooled us all. It was populists! Which means both Clinton and Obama -- and all Democrats, by extension -- are elitists.

While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".

This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:

Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.

Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge. It was not inevitable that it would have such a weak response. But, then, the consultant class that crafted it really is part and parcel of the Versailles elite. So what could we expect?

A little historical consciousness, perhaps?
Elites Create Their Demon Others

It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group. Because this involves disowning something fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more projective identification than projection, per se:

Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.
The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.
The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.

This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed roles. In his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics (interview here, review here), Glenn Greenwald focuses long-overdue attention on the most salient aspect of this shadow-projection dynamic as it applies to presidential politics.

As I noted in my review:

Greenwald begins by noting a striking disconnect--on the one hand, voters broadly favor Democratic Party positions over Republican ones across a wide range of issue, but on the other hand, Republicans have won more elections. The reason?
The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party has used the same set of personality smears and mythical psychological and cultural imagery to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the rightwing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues.

For most of us deeply immersed in the blogosphere, who see examples of this pointed out and discussed virtually every day, this may not seem like such a striking revelation. But even seeing it on a daily basis doesn't mean that we fully appreciate its significance. To the contrary, we're so immersed in it that it's difficult to put into perspective. This is, to my knowledge, the first book to argue that character attacks on Democrats and contrasting idealization of Republicans constitute a core explanation for Republican electoral success over the past three decades. It's this central thesis that gives Greenwald's book a larger significance that deserves attention from everyone concerned about politics, including dedicated policy wonks.

Greenwald's book is still too new for his thesis to have fully gelled, but here I am going a step further, to argue that it's but one facet--albeit a very important one--of a much larger, much longer-lasting dynamic, in which the internal contradictions of elite rule are largely managed via projective identification onto shadow elites, who then become the ongoing subjects for ritualized displacement of populist discontent.

This pattern--dependent as it is on basic pyschological mechanisms and group social dynamics--almost certainly goes back far beyond the beginnings of recorded human history. It certainly played an important role throughout the centuries in the European elites' use of Jewish agents to take on various roles that drew particular animosity from the masses. Similarly, throughout the British Empire it was a common practice to use minority ethnic groups to enforce and administer policies over larger ethnic groups, thus shielding the British, while fueling inter-ethnic hostility.

A particularly significant watershed in Western political history was the French Revolution, which apologists for the deposed aristocracy blamed on a wholly imaginary anti-Christian, secular humanist elite--the notorious Bavarian Illuminati, who had been disbanded a decade earlier, and who, of course, operated in Bavaria and other German states, not France. So popular was this narrative among reactionary--and even merely conservative elites--that it even spread to America as the Federalists lost power in reaction to their tyrannical over-reach epitomized by the Alien and Sedition Acts. The myth of the Illuminati has in turn informed countless different forms of conspiracy theory throughout American history.

What the Illuminati mythos did for aristocratic elites was explain away the popular unrest with their incompetent rule, which was most extremely evidenced by the French Revolution. According to the implicit logic of the mythos, there was nothing whatsoever wrong aristocratic rule, blessed as it was by God and the Church. All the apparent problems were the results of scheming by a hidden hierarchy which was the very mirror image of the visible hierarchy, and organized with the express purpose of overhtrowing it. Such a tale functioned to (a) deny the reality of social and economic ills, (b) deny the capacity of ordinary people to think and act on their own perceptions and analyses of the misrule they suffered under, (c) deny the legitimacy of any proposed new political order based on bottom-up consent of the governed, as opposed to top-down "divine right."

Over time, of course, conspiracy theories have served a wide range of different purposes, sometimes even nominally progressive ones. Yet, they always involve an appeal to hidden forces of great, unfathomable power, which is itself a recipie for irrational modes of thought and disempowered political stances, which are ripe for exploitation by powerful others--particularly the actually existing (as opposed to shadow) elites.

Constucting America's Racial Order

Clearly, one cannot talk about Barack Obama's presidential bid without talking about race. All efforts to do so have clearly now come to grief. Roger Wilkin's book, Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism contains an instructive account of the origins of Virginia's social order, centered around Bacon's Rebellion (1676), which in turn has a central place in shaping the whole nation's racial order.

Prior to this brief uprising, Virginia was still a rather fluid society, whose upper echelon had only recently clawed its way to the top. When a variety of factors led to open rebellion, with Nathaniel Bacon at its head, there was a broad alliance of those left out of power--freemen with poor prospects, indentured servants and slaves, all of whom were relatively close in social standing, since slavery was neither permanent, hereditary, nor identical with being black. Bacon's rebellion fizzled out after Bacon died of dysentary, but the elite was justifiably shaken, and undertook a two-fold strategy to prevent a recurrence.

On the one hand, it sought to culturally define itself as superior, by adopting a culture oriented around classical Greece and Rome, requiring either tutors imported from England, or else the transport of young men to England for their education there. By itself, this would only serve to intensify the sense of difference and stoke populist hostility. The other side, however, had the opposite effect: blacks were utterly shut out of the white social order, condemned to permanent slavery as a hereditary condition. By marking the black as totally others, totally beyond the pale, the elites could now portray themselves as quintessentially white, and therefore necessarily immune to populist hatred, since hating them meant hating yourself as a white person.

Wilkens writes:

Interestingly, just as poor whites were being invited by the lords of the colony to join a sort of white social club, the actual social distance between them and the rich was widening. They would be explicitly reminded oftheir lower status by the increaing rigidities being constructed into the social system and by the barriers developed to protext the positon of holders of power and privilege. As social mobility decreased, personal frustration grew. The rage inspired by the personal suspicion of not being good enough to reach the top--a rage that might otherwise be transformed by a skillfull demagogue into rebellious impulses--was now directed at the "others" whose manifest failures were even greater than those of the lower-class whites. Poor whites were thus given two things by the new system: a floor of failure below which they could not fall, and human targets at whom they could direct their own self-loathing.

In this manner, social and economic conservatism were both inscribed into the contours of White southern populism. And just because their own elites were off-limits for hatred, this didn't mean that southern populists had no elite hatred--rather, such hatred was reserved for the elite rivals of their own elites--be they northern merchants or the monopolistic powers of the British East India Company. Over the centuries, this basic structuring has been updated a number of times, but never fundamentally altered. The actual ruling conservative elites are "organically" connected to the white masses by their whiteness/conservative identity. The blacks are the repositories for the shadows of the white masses--their phantasies of lawlessness, rebellion and moral depravity. Foreigners and Northern elites are repositories for the shadows of the white elites--their denied realities of lawlessness, rebellion and moral depravity.

Back To The Present

The foregoing is admittedly only a rough sketch, but it's enough to see the broad outline of this current minidrama in historical terms. The conservative hegemony of the past several decades, finally bursting all bounds of restraint, has produced an unmitigated disaster the likes of which our country hasn't seen since the GOP was last fully in charge, under Herbert Hoover. The degree of misrule is at least broadly comparable to the failures of the French monarchy in the late 18th Century, and Bush's record disapproval ratings--over 70 percent--despite continued fawning attention by the Versailles media is both evidence of that and a striking warning of regime change to come. The actually existing elite is thus highly motivated to rev up all its mechanisms of blame-shifting to the shadow elite, which is precisely what we have been seeing over the past several weeks.

Failing to comprehend this dynamic, Obama has walked right into the rhetorical trap of seeking absolution from the Faux populists. He will either have to wise up fast, or face the prospects of an incredible intensified recapitulation of every move that's ever been used against shadow elites for the past 200+ years.