They've Come to Suck Our Blood: How are conservatives like vampires?

[marmar]

They've Come to Suck Our Blood
By Rick Perlstein

April 22nd, 2008 - 2:18pm ET


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How are conservatives like a vampires? Read on, dear reader, read on.

My blurbs are on two outstanding new books this spring, Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, out May 20, and John Gorenfeld's The Family: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom. Both end up in similar places: a group with deeply problematic religious views (Moon's are far, far, far more problematic, unless you think an avowed agenda of subjugating the United Sates and destroying Christianity isn't problematic) greatly enhance their power through cult-like methods of seduction; i.e., roping in powerful people to the outskirts of the group by obscuring the esoteric, ultimate agenda (through, in the case of the Family, the National Prayer Breakfast, and Moon, through his various "peace" awards), as the ties to the core cult are laundered through shifting front groups, with more trusted and sympathetic individuals let into greater and greater rings of esoteric knowledge about the cult's true purpose.

In the Moonies' case they can market to the inner circle of powerless believers by claiming that Senator X and Senator Y are followers, or else why would they have attended event Z? In the case of the Family, they market to an inner circle of powerful believers by roping in the likes of Clinton and other centrist-tending Democrats who feel the need to "reach out" to evangelicals. Both are complex admixtures of hustle and deep-dyed eschatological sincerity that rely on deception, after the fashion of the Mormon semi-doctrine of "lying for the Lord."

For Moon, it's all in the service of a genuinely Dr. Evil-like plot to take over the world that proceeds on two separate and strange levels: his own literal fantasies of becoming the messiah; and his own absolutely real multibillion dollar business empire that couldn't exist but for the PR racket (see above) and slave labor syndicate he's been able to build up.

For the Family, it's in the service of an ideology not unlike a Jerry Falwell's, buttressed by a very strange trickle-down theology that holds that powerful people are actually the most vulnerable and oppressed population—yes, the meek that Christ describes are actually the rich, and they shall, and should, inherit the earth.

But neither ever say, publicly, they believe such things. Such esoteric knowledge is reserved for their inner elite. That's how conservatives roll—theocratic and plutocratic wings, both.

We've written here before about the reactionary malignancy known as the National Association of Manufacturers, professional saboteurs of the rights and fortunes of working Americans ever since the 1930s. Here's where I wrote about their laundering of Birchite right-wing propaganda into America's schools in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Here and here's how they've lobbied for more smog.

And now we learn how they're lying for the Lord this year: a federal court ordered them to disclose the names of their members in their quarterly lobbying report, as the law requires; and, claiming that a First Amendment violation, they simply refused.

Without subterfuge, there is no conservatism: here is a principle that joins a disparate movement's every wing. How do they all resemble vampires? They just can't survive in the sunlight.


http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/theyve-come-suck-our-blood

[marmar]

1. PM kick....

:kick:

[marmar]

2. 4 recs nite kick.....

:kick:

[Hannah Bell]

3. Not only thAt - they live on the blood, sweat & tears of others.