The right has always had the advantage with people who have an authoritarian, Calvinistic approach to religion, who see God as final law-giver and Ultimate Enforcer. A God who would punish gay people because He made them wrong.
I went to a different Sunday School than they did. The Jesus I dig is the very last word in compassion and mercy, and doesn’t give two cents for the pious rituals and mealy-mouthed platitudes of Pharisees (Aramaic for “Republican”).
For some, God is fear and obedience, for others, love and communion. I made my pick, you make yours.
You still need to establish that the counter-culture was associated in people’s minds to the Democratic Party in the 60’s and 70’s, and I just don’t think that’s the case. The Weathermen, for example, were communists: not a friend of either party. (Again, which president led the U.S. into war against communists in Vietnam?) Other facets of the counter-culture were apolitical. Saying that religious voters fled the Democratic party in response to the counter-culture requires us to believe that religious voters associated the counter-culture to the Democratic party. Since the counter-culture had nothing to do with the Democratic or Republican party, that doesn’t give religious voters a heck of a lot of credit.
Of course, talking about religious voters is a bit of a red herring anyway, as they are no more a monolithic bloc of voters than any other: lots of religious voters still vote Democratic. 40% of protestant voters, 47% of catholics, 74% of jewish voters, all voted for Kerry according to the first poll I found. So it’s not as if churches are fleeing the Democratic party in droves.
The real question is why is the right wing of American politics is dominating the discourse of religion in politics. And that, I think, is much more attributable to the nature of the two campaigns than to events that took place before I was born. The Republicans are better at associating their message to religion, and at framing their message in religious terms. It’s not necessary to go back in time 30 or 40 years to explain that.
I think I’m not understanding what you’re saying. The OP says that the right-wing has gained the morality “high-ground.”
Wesley Clark says they’ve always had it; witness conservative groups like the KKK.
You say that doesn’t count because the KKK was largely southern Democrats (tangential note - in the 1920’s they were much much larger than that).
Old southern Democrats were conservative.
How does your assertion “whether or not they were right-wing, the were New Deal southern Democrats” undermine what Wesley Clark said? It doesn’t even make sense to me to have the qualifier “whether or not they were right-wing,” given the OP.
I think you have to distinguish the different sorts of religious people.
Since atheists are a small minority in the US… then most democrats are religious in some way. Taking out the blacks and jews means there are a lot of white protestant and catholics that vote Democrat. Yet somehow they weren’t “attracted” to the more religious Republican speeches. Nor would they probably be attracted by more religious Democratic speeches. Their religion is either private or not political… or not messianic.
I think the religious right peddles to a public that likes fiery speeches and messianic mentality... not only religious morality. Its just a different sort of religious "high ground".
I don’t think the conservatives have or have ever had anything that can be desribed as “the moral and religious high ground.” The right has always confused the FORMS of morality with its substance, unlike the left. The right is all for school prayer and public piety (like the Ten Commandments in courthouses) while ignoring or actively opposing attempts to help the poor, the disabled, etc.
The left has always held the moral high ground, but has found public piety distateful, which is where the confusion originates, much to the delight of right-wing political strategists.
I think it is much more complicated than the OP trys to make it. What people think of as “morality” and “family values” is really more a yearning for “tradition”; i.e., things are good as they are, please don’t tell me I have to change.
If you live in a homogemeneous society such as a small town in the south or mid-west, you and your neigbors all go to the same church, eat the same food, etc. Any introduction of diversity is a change and a challenge.
If you live in a more diverse area, with people from different religions, ethnicities, languages, etc., then you realize that one size does not fit all. Any attempt to standardize religion, morality, etc, is probably just as likely to affect you or one of your friends negatively.
It’s funny (kind of) that small towns came out so strong against gay marriage. Most gay people get the hell out of there at the first opportunity. Places that actually have a lot of gay people, even when they are still a minority, voted in favor. This despite the fact that they are 100 times more likely to be affected.
While the folks on the left were busy actually helping people, the folks on the right were buying up the media outlets and advertising firms, and sneaking through legislation to dismantle “equal time” requirements from broadcasters. Then it’s just a case of playing out the propaganda as you see fit.
As long as the liberals continue to fight for equality for all people, regardless of their popularity (or lack thereof), they will continue to hold the moral high ground over the hypocritical right.
The laugh-fest continues! Oh, wait! You are kidding, right? Or do you actually think I need to work up a case to refute how the hypocritical right is opposed to helping the poor, dedicated only to advancing its own propoganda, while that monolithic entity “the Left” continues its completely consistent effort to eradicate badness everywhere?
Sorry, right now I’m too busy counting my money while standing on the throats of the downtrodden. I’ll see if I can work it in later.
It is to laugh…keep preaching it, brother–it was so effective in 2004. Here’s hoping Michael Moore cranks out a film a year until 2008, enlisting every left-wing nutjob in Hollywood to help spread the word. Because, after all, everyone knows the right is pure, Bond-villain evil, and the left is unadulterated virtue.
The day after the election, NPR interviewed a poli-sci professor and discussed the moral values exit poll results. The professor suggested that leading up to the 70’s - most people felt that the Democrats typically had the moral stance on the issues. She also asserted that Republican party of today is the culmination of a grass-roots movement started in the early 70’s. One of the results of this movement was to establish the argument that many current issues are not political issues (or issues to be resolved by the government), but instead community and church issues. For example, welfare should not be provided by the governement, but instead by the individual’s church. I think this message really resonated with people that see the church as the center of their community - particularily if they themselves are active in providing some of these services. If her thesis is accurate, then this movement erroded much of the Democrat’s moral advantage by removing it from the issues - or at least reframing the issues.
I think there are many other reasons too. One of the reasons (IMO) is that during the 60’s and 70’s, liberals were the voice of change. Regardless of whether one agreed with the changes or not, liberals were typically pushing for radical changes to the status quo - racial equality, sexual freedom, personal freedom, etc. Conservatives on the other hand were typically trying to maintain the status quo or at least keep it from changing so quickly. From this period, liberal became linked with change. In the last 25 years, things have continued to change very radically probably more due to technology than anything else. In many people’s minds, these changes are not for the better - apparent increases in: teen sex, teen pregnancy, violence (teen and otherwise), drug use, foul language, open gays, etc. I think many people link these recent changes with the liberal movement started in the 60’s and as a result, are pushing back on the liberal ideals - circling their wagons and focusing more on the local communities and churches. They are doing this in an attempt to reaffirm their moral values.
I rather doubt that if you ask any red state voter why he votes Republican, he’d point to the counter culture of the 1960s. I just don’t see disdain for protests in the 1960s as driving votes nearly 40 years later.
I do not accept the notion that the right indeed occupies the moral and religious high ground. Republican successes in recent elections are due to a perfect storm of single issue voting and southern white racism. Republicans discovered that their fiscal policies of taking from the needy and giving to the greedy just aren’t going to win votes on their face value. They needed to make up a coalition to achieve power. They discovered that people opposed to abortion are easy to pick low hanging fruit. All you need to get their votes is express an opposition to abortion. Actually doing anything about it is completely unnecessary, all one need do is voice opposition and yammer about Roe v. Wade, and you’ve got X% of the vote before the election even starts. Prayer in schools is another issue that Republicans exploit. Just bemoan the court rulings that took prayers out of school, wear your religion on your sleeve, whine about not being able to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings, and you’ve got Y% of the vote. Now add in homophobia- voice opposition to gay marriage and make people think that gay marriages somehow threaten the family, and presto you’ve got Z% of the vote.
Is being opposed to abortion the moral high ground? Not everybody thinks so. Is being against the separation of church and state the moral high ground? I hardly think so. Is being for discrimination of gay people the moral high ground? Absolutely not. So to say that the right occupies the moral high ground is a dubious supposition at best.
Before I get called for the southern racism comment, please read this artide from Governing Magazine.
For a significant region of the country, morality isn’t the issue. It’s race.
What about the idea that Liberalism has won its major battles?
No white/colored drinking fountains, busses, schools, etc.
Social security for old people.
Medicare/medicaid for poor people.
Public assistance for destitute families.
College loans and grants for poor students.
Legalized abortions throughout the land.
Back when these things weren’t available it was easy to explain to reasonable people that a moral injustice was occuring. How do you explain a moral injustice is occuring when the arguments are
More points on a college exam because you’re a minority.
Privatization of social security will cause it to collapse.
Medicare should be for everyone, not just poor people.
Public assistance should never be administered through religious organizations.
Vouchers for poor high school students is immoral.
Late term or partial birth abortion is just a mass of cells being excised.
My point being that the bottom list is easily debatable for the conservative side… not obviously wrong like the causes of 40 years ago.
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So, “the Right” now represents the “Soul of the People”.
Henry Louis Mencken, journalist and satirist (1880 - 1956), wrote the following in Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of
the people. On some great and glorious day the plain
folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at
last and the White House will be adorned by a
downright moron.”
You’re right, race, or culture, is the issue. And if the Democratic Party shares your opinions on the topic, it can forget all its well-intentioned plans for helping the working and middle classes. The red states are dominated by working-class whites. One party favors rich idlers and one party favors blacks, Latinos and immigrants. Working class whites figure they have an outside chance of getting rich, but zero chance of becoming black, Latino or immigrant, so who do you think they’re going to vote for? After all these years of progress, the Democrats are still playing the race card, and they’re starting to rack up an unbroken series of defeats.
If this is typical of Democratic political strategizing, God help them. “Republican attacks on immigrants” means Prop 187, which passed with 59% of the vote and revived Pete Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign, which he went on to win by 15%. When Schwarzenegger was running for governor last year, these idiot Democrats thought they could damage him by getting Wilson to “admit” that Schwarzenegger had backed 187. The Democrats also tried to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, which Schwarzenegger opposed. We know how that election came out. Also passed was Prop 209, which outlawed racial preferences in the state government. And this is California we’re talking about here.
The phrasing alone shows how far out of touch the Dems are on the issue - “Republican attacks on immigrants”. The Dems don’t think there should be such a thing as illegal immigration- you should be able to just walk across the border and enroll your kids in the nearest public school. The best they could come up with to oppose Schwarzenegger was Cruz Bustamante, a guy who was a member of a Mexican separatist group that advocates removal of whites from the Southwest and killing Border Patrol officers.
That was all too much even for Californians. In the red states, and nationally, it makes you lose elections. So the rich get richer and the Democrats curse the poor for not knowing what’s good for them.
The Right may be under the self-generated illusion that they have the moral and religious high ground, but this is not necessarily the case.
What the Right currently has is a lot of attack dogs, funding, propagandists and agitproppers, whose self-righteous and repetitive message is “our way is better because [insert, typically, a tautological religious argument or some flawed information]”.
When scrutinized, religion is a highly variable and adaptive mythology/philosphy that may be employed or deployed by almost anyone – from the man committing uxoricide to the one dedicating all his life and means to bettering the lot of others – so it hardly makes sense to claim any particular side has the high ground in this department.
As for the moral high ground, it is simply laughable to claim that a set of people who actively want to restrict rights on the basis largely of their uninformed opinion should be labelled the “high ground”. From the Iraq affair to the attempts to outlaw abortion and restrict stem cell research, to the constant attempts to teach creation as a scientific theory, there is precious little morality or honesty involved on the Right. That’s a generalization of course, I know.
How did the Right gain this illusory high ground then? They simply painted themselves that way and (metaphorically) chanted their belief over and over until the message spread. Arrogance and intolerance have more to do with it than any silly ideas of morality or religious rightness or the evil of hippies and counter-cultures.
I know so many Christians who are basically liberal or libertarian, but usually vote Republican for one issue only: abortion. My parents are good examples: they’re libertarian on social issues, generally liberal on environmental, labor, and peace issues, but definitely anti-abortion, so they voted Republican. Although, I think my mom vote for Kerry this time around…
Anyway, I don’t think it’s the 1960’s counter-culture that created the meme that Republicans are more “moral,” though it did fuel fire. Also, I think the real severe division came later, as the abortion issue heated up, especially throughout the 1980s.
However, the antecedents to Republicans being supposedly more moral are much earlier, at least to the early days of the 20th century, and maybe as far back as the Civil War. Since the Republican party is now the greater conservative party–and it has not always been that way–right-wingers have latched on, with abortion to drive the way. The big change of the 1990s was the degree to which hard right-wing religious conservatives won a hegemony within the GOP.
But in the long run, liberal values have been gradually winning out. Conservatives from 100 years ago would be horrified at the today: the extent of racial integration (especially the presence of minorities in important Federal goverment positions, like the SCOTUS and Sec. of State, for example), tolerance of interacial marriages, women voting, women taking on jobs that once were exclusively occupied by men, the dependence on welfare and social security, etc. I don’t see any of those gains being overturned anytime soon.
I also don’t see the far right maintaining their grip onn supposed moral superiority forever. Change is inevitable. And there is a religious left, which isn’t going away and is a larger part of the population than is generally assumed.
I see a lot of people in this thread who are simply blind to what their opponents really want.
Naw, the Democrats aren’t really for helping the poor or for civil rights, they really deep down want to hurt white people, destroy the family, and implement godless polyamorous socialism.
And the Republicans don’t really want to protect the family or the economy, deep down they all just hate blacks and want to implement a totalitarian Big Brother style theocracy.
Self-righteousness is a drug, people. I’m right, you’re evil. And if your opponents are evil, you can justify any sort of action against Them. And the beauty of it is, They started it first! You didn’t want to do the shady things you have to do to fight Them, but They started it! And if you lose, then civilization loses forever.
The funny thing is, this lack of insight into what your political/cultural opponents are really up to is what will get your side creamed in the end. By all means, demonize and dehumanize the other side, if you want to lose and lose and lose.