Fantastic article in yesterday's Washington Post, under the headline "Culture Wars? How 2004."
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. makes a historical comparison between the times in the 1920's, the last time that religious zealots had any measurable political power in America, and present times, when Christian Wacko political influence seems to be in ebb tide. Here's some of the Good Stuff from Dionne's article:
Boiled down to basics, Dionne's political hypothesis is that, when economic times get tough, (like now) pragmatic American voters give the "small issues" the heave-ho, especially with respect to nutty American preachers.If you were looking for a presidential election that revolved around religion and "moral values," you wouldn't start with President Bush's victory in 2004 -- nor, indeed, with any recent election. You'd go back to 1928. Now there was a culture war.
At that moment of great prosperity, the two big issues were whether the United States should continue its experiment with Prohibition and whether it should elect Al Smith, New York's Democratic governor, as the first Roman Catholic president. It wasn't even close. The "drys," who favored the ban on booze, overwhelmed the "wets," who wanted to be rid of it. And the Catholic Smith was clobbered by Republican Herbert Hoover, who carried several Southern, predominantly Protestant states that had been voting Democratic since the aftermath of the Civil War. "We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation," Hoover declared, and most Americans believed him.
Then, a little more than a year after Hoover's buoyant prediction, came Oct. 29, 1929. After the great stock market crash, the question of whether Americans could legally consume alcohol seemed rather less pressing. The controversies over Smith's Catholicism abated. By 1936, the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide election, the culture war was forgotten, replaced by a nonviolent class war against those whom FDR called "economic royalists." [...]Ancient history? Hardly. The lessons of that earlier age are eerily relevant to the current moment in American politics. When major crises intrude, culture wars can fade awfully quickly. They did so in 1936. There are many signs that they're fading again in 2008.
Interesting read, to say the least.
And we wonder. According to Dionne's essay, which candidate, gentle readers, is the modern Herbert Hoover analogue... and which one is FDR... assuming the analogy is true?
Credits: A Tip O' the Weber County Forum Tam-O-Shanter to the Utah blog Democracy for Utah blog, for first putting us on to this story.
Surely there's someone who will comment on this.
8 comments:
Godfrey is the modern municipal
equivalant of Hitler. Your boundaries are too
narrow, rudizink.
Don't forget that during that same era starting in 1930 the campaign began against marijuana which was basically the genesis of the War on Drugs. Harry Anslinger was chosen as the first Drug Czar and with the help of the Hearst papers he managed to demonize marijuana as one weapon against the racial minorities. The lies spread during that early campaign persist today as the bottom line truth about marijuana. Efforts to redeem it's standing as a most beneficial plant fall on deaf ears and flapping jaws continue to regurgitate the endless nonsense fomented by Anslinger and Hearst. Today we have clowns like John Walters and that fool from Missouri, Ashcroft continuing to build careers on these childish and baseless lies. Are we living in a lie? When will people relinquish lies in favor of truth? Religious fanatics maintain a huge hold on our culture. There is little sign that there will be any fresh truth on these matters. As long as a universal lie can be entrenched, I hold little hope for our nation.
Just a few more lies...
Intelligent Design,
War on Terror,
Gays living in sin,
Al Queada in Iraq,
Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11
These are just for starters.
While we are taught in school that Australia was settled by criminals, they forget to point out that the US was settled by criminals and religious fanatics.
We don't need another eight years of "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"
OL:
Well, only part, and not the major part, was settled by religious fanatics --- Massachusetts Bay and its daughter colonies, Connecticut [by refugees from Massachusetts who thought the Bay Staters were a little wishy washy about Puritan doctrine] and New Hampshire. the Pilgrims of Plymouth were actually quite reasonable [comparatively speaking] and not at all like John Winthrop's sour crew up in Massachusetts. And of course Rogues Island [as it was known at the time], also settled by refugees from the Puritan Utopia in Massachusetts, was a true beacon of liberty [or what passed for it in those days], with religious toleration for all. Even Jews.
Most of the colonies were settled by folks driven largely by the desire to profit themselves, or their offspring. Investors [and settlers] in Virginia expected to get real rich real quick from the gold they were sure they'd find there. The Dutch settled NY area as a way station to service shipping to the Dutch West Indies, and as a collection point for furs. Pa. settled by William Penn on the Quaker model, but he was no fanatic, and his colony was open to all faiths, all comers. NC and SC and GA settled seeking profit and so on.
The notion that "the United States was founded by the Puritans" is a Christianist fiction that gets repeated far far too often.
As for the criminals... you have a better case, particularly once England began dumping such here, offering those condemned to death the option of transportation to the colonies instead. Some chose death.
Bumper sticker seen on Harrison:
01-20-09
End of an Error.
Southsider:
Love it! Thanks. Hadn't seen that one.
Tec
I think Ashcroft is out of the picture these days and drug Czar Walters has proven to be ineffective and practically invisible. Walter's attempts to portray pot smokers as violent terrorists was laughed down by virtually every one in and out of government that ever knew a toker!
Neither one of them are building careers anymore.
A quibble... that really isn't... about the headline "Christian whackos." Probably should have been "Christianist whackos." That term evolved and is now in fairly widespread use to describe those Christians... by no means a majority of Christians in this country... who want to convert the United States into a Bible Commonwealth and change the Constitution of the nation from one that created a broadly tolerant secular national government into a Bible-enforcing government which demands conformity to "God's laws" [i.e. as understood by which ever Christianist sect is in power at the moment] and punishes those who presume to think differently. That nearly none of the various Christianist groups agree can agree with any of the others about what God's Laws actually require is a matter of some curiosity to me. LDS Christianists who think they will like and be comfortable in, and tolerated in, Mr. Huckabee's Southern Baptist Christianist vision are deluding themselves, I think.
In any case, the headline could be read to mean all Christians wish to turn the US into a modern version of the Puritan Bible Commonwealth [in which, let us remember, women Quaker missionaries were hanged for being women Quaker missionaries]. Christianists would have been a better choice, I think.
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