"The Crazy Years," or Beware of Nehemiah Scudder

Great Debates
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One of the most depressing quotes in all literature:

So what is this quote doing in Great Debates, not Café Society?

It has been my theme, almost to one-trick pony status, that the polarization and extreme statements of both Left and Right are destructive of America as an ideal and a goal toward which U.S. society has aspired. The story this is quoted from deals largely with a technically illegal but condoned peonage, ignored by the general public because they do not come in contact with it and refuse to believe that conditions are what they are painted as. It is the last story in the middle collection of “Future History” stories, set at the end of what Heinlein termed “The Crazy Years.” The next story sequentially deals with the mounting of a revolution against the theocracy that had persuaded a majority of Americans to put it in power in place of the existing government.

The “Future History” is fascinating reading. In a series of stories written between 1939-1942 and 1946-1950, Heinlein extrapolates urban sprawl, solar power, inner city decline, fear of atomic power, the achievement and abandonment of space flight, and service conglomerates, among other developments. But one trend overarches the others – with the complexity of technology and the concentration of power, a backlash of irrational behavior and extremism resulting from fear of what is not understood leads to the destruction of the very liberty that gave rise to the progress and growth that is chronicled.

“The Crazy Years” is also the title of the column written by author and fellow Heinlein fan Spider Robinson for the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was his premise that we are in fact living through the period Heinlein predicted.

The premise I propose for debate is that Spider is right, that in essence if not in detail Heinlein’s extrapolations of American social trends were accurate … and that the Religious Right and its influence on the political Right are a threat to American liberty.

Evidence to support my premise can be found in a variety of sources. For example, turn on your TV, and you will find Pat Robertson discussing political events in a manner that suggests that he has significant potential influence. Read an article on any controversial issue, and a quote from a group supportive of “family values” (by which they generally mean a strongly conservative Evangelical Protestant set of religious mores) is nearly always given as “balance” to the liberal or moderate view. Our President appears to an unbiased observer to share some if not all the stances of the Religious Right, and to bring his strong influence to bear in getting the views he shares enacted into law. The Patriot Acts and D.O.M.A. have eroded a hundred-year old movement to guarantee human rights.

To be sure, there are some exceptions to this rule. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts appears to share Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s respect for stare decisis as regards Roe and abortion rights. Vice President Cheney, arguably the most influential vice president in decades, has a stance on gay marriage scarcely distinguishable from that of Howard Dean. Mr. Bush’s principled stance on Islam is hardly that of most of his religious supporters.

But I believe these to be exceptions to a general tendency to greater influence from the Religious Right, and in particular the “Christian Reconstructionist” movement, which unabashedly seeks to impose a theocratic rule on this country. From Heinlein’s 1950 view, this is rank nutjobbery … but today it is reported as a sober, if extreme, view, as worthy of consideration as the legalization of gay marriages.

I would be most grateful if this thread did not deteriorate into a Left vs. Right argument, if intelligent conservatives like Bricker, John Mace and Mr Moto were able to find common ground with the liberals and moderates of the board in discussing whether there are in fact grounds for concern in my premises.

That said, allow me to raise these three questions: (1) Are Heinlein’s extrapolations in fact valid? (2) Granted that, are the social trends he prognosticated in fact actually happening? (3) If this is true, is there in fact cause for concern in the influence of the Religious Right on conservatism and the Republican Party?

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  1. They are not valid. If you look at history you’ll see various periods of extreme polarization (Federalists vs. Republicans ca. 1800, the South vs. the North ca. 1860, the Vietnam War ca. 1968) and you’ll see that they are generally followed by periods of calm. Political turbulence and extremes ebb and flow; you cannot extrapolate history based on current trends. Imagine what the U.S. would be like now if the battles between the hippies and the establishment continued on like they were in the 1960s.
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Wait, where are Christian Reconstructionists “reported as a sober, if extreme, view”? Can you name one politician who openly or secretly supports repealing the constitution and turing the US into a monarchy?

Imposing Mosaic law means turing the US into a Monarchy. Is there any elected official anywhere who advocates this? I’ve never heard of any. I’m sure there are addled right-wing nutjobs who do, but I’m not talking about one guy who lives in a trailer and lives off social security and has a website complaining about the Blacks and the Jews, I’m talking about people in elected office, even a local office in some Texas backwater.

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Well, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to go get some isotope explosives and blow up a road city; then I’m going to hop a slaver ship to Venus to hide out in the marshes until the Interrigum is over. I’ll hook up with those long-lived Howard Families chaps and hijack New Frontiers to go spacehopping around the galaxy. I don’t trust those calculators without moving parts, though.

Heinlein is a fun read and better versed in politics and history (and actual science) than many of his contemporary science fiction authors, but you can’t take his Future History too seriously. “The Crazy Years” seem to come around about once every quarter century in one form or another, then abate.

Stranger

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Oddly enough, the one Congressman closest to the CR’s, having associated for years with Gary North, is Libertarian/Republican (he hops back & forth) Ron Paul, whom I sincerely doubt would impose Mosaic Law in any form EXCEPT in areas where it would amount to lesser gov’t (a 10% tax cap, for instance).

Btw, to be completely accurate, while Mosaic Law did allow for Monarchy, it also recommended against it. Monarchy was regulated by Mosaic Law, but what was recommended was local representative councils, which then created regional councils, which was eventually under a national council- thus, the Sanhedrin system.

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Incidentally, CR as a movement is pretty much dead- the heir of Rushdoony’s Chaceldon - Andrew Sandlin- hardly uses the term; Gary North dissolved his publishing house & just writes his theological works for the Net (his income comes from his work as a financial/investment consultant & I’m not sure how profitable that is for him as he really freaked out over Y2K); James Jordan write mostly about theology & practical C’tian living more than political/social concerns; George Grant I think still directs some of the social ministries of D. James Kennedy’s church (DJK btw being the closest of the TV preachers to CR); R.J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, & David Chilton have all gone to be Reconstructed directly by Christ.

And on the other hand- Pat Robertson’s influence - meh; Dobson’s is sinking; and Jerry Falwell- well, while he speaks of revitalizing the Moral Majority, he also has created the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy Studies at his Liberty University- so he’s putting more efforts behind Rapturism than Reconstructionism.

Incidentally, the only two major voices out there who see Rapturists & Recons as some sinister combine are the once-influential, now shadow of his former self Bill
(“Goldwater’s Gonna Nuke Daisy-Picking Little Girls”) Moyers, and UFO Abductee Whitley Strieber.

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As long as the Church of Latter-Day Saints is around, I don’t fear a take-over by the Religious Right. Given their proven ability to work as a group, I think that any serious attempt by Robertson, et al to take over would be doomed to failure. The reason they seem such a threat currently is that they, on a few issues, are united. As soon as they get something passed, they’ll start bickering and the Center will re-assert itself. The pendulum swings…

Come to think of it…RAH mentioned the LDS in “If This Goes On…” :smiley:

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And anyway, I thought Heinlein had declared his prediction of the coming “crazy years” confirmed by the wacky hippies of the groovy 1960s. Aren’t you 40 years out of date to be worried by the Crazy Years? Wasn’t Ronald Reagan supposed to be Nehimiah Scudder, poised to turn the US into a right-wing theocracy in reaction to those damn dirty hippies?

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As an outside observer of US politics who tries to make reasonable comparisons with the rest of the industrialised democratic world, it so often seems that the “left/liberal” stance in the US would actually be neaer the rightist counterpoint everywhere else, while the rightist counterpoint in any feature or article simply would not appear on the screens and news pages in any other Western democracy (except Israel, perhaps, and even they lie leftwards of the US socially and economically).

The US media seems to consider “balance” to be literally like a see-saw: If an article features a “mainstream left/liberal” position near the pivot, this must be ‘balanced’ by a less popular position way to the right, far from the pivot.

Thus, over time, the US pivot (‘centre’) comes to reside way to the right of that found in, say, Canada, Australasia, Japan or any country in Europe.

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I think you (and others) are wrong in your assumption that there’s such a thing as an “objective” Right or Left. Fact of the matter is, every nation has it’s own right wing and left wing, just as every person has a right hand and a left hand, and each bears a much closer resemblance to its opponant than to its counterpart in anothe country. Each place has its own issues and its own priorities, and setting them on some sort or Unified Field Sliding Scale is fun, yet pointless.

Take Britain. Is the UK to the “left” of the US? Yes, in many ways, ut not when it comes to the Monarchy (remember the origins of political left vs. right?) or North Ireland. In certain matters such as freedom of speech, for instance, the US is much more liberal than many industrialized democracies.

As for Israel - putting Israel’s actions on some sort of international scale is ridiculous. Are Israel’s actions in the Territories “right wing”? How can you tell if no other nation is occupying the Territories? What’s your point of comparison? How is Israel acting more hawkisly than other nations in similar circumstances if there are no other nations in similar circumstances?

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Come now, this is just silly. There is no left and right? YOu can’t compare nations politically? Really? You can’t ask where nation X lies on issues such as the death penalty, gun control, abortion, health care, economic equality, free market, etc.? Whatever would stop one from doing that?

I think the US is far to the right of the rest of the industrialized world, pulled that way by our Banana Republicans.

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I basically agree with this.

It would be a mistake to look upon current religious influence as threatening a 100-year-old trend toward increasing rights. There have been periods of backwards sliding on civil liberties (i.e. the Palmer raids of the post WWI era, interning of Japanese citizens during WWII, postwar McCarthyism) and of disturbing fundamentalist religious influence (the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the '20s was abetted by some churches) over the past century.

The error at any time is to assume that the battle is won over the forces of ignorance and credulousness. It’s a continuing struggle. Nothing is ever guaranteed.

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Heinlien’s predictions were about as acurate as Criswell’s. It’s easy to cherry-pick some items from an author’s work, particularly an author as prolific as Heinlein, and find a few nuggets that came to pass. He speculated alot, and some times he was right. But also he was, not really close enough to be called right. (Hovercrafts?)

But let’s remember a list of serious predictions that Robert Anson himself wrote in the 1950 magazine article “Pandora’s Box”.

The full text of a well-written critique is right here.

an example:

prediction in bold, by Heinlein, comments by Justin B. Rye.

the
However, this is also the man who wrote:

*"A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. "

Robert A. Heinlein*

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Hey RAH wrote Sci-Fi, he definitely did not foretell the future only some possible futures. Consider how many books RAH wrote with Sentient life on Mars & Venus. He knew it was impossible and wrote it anyway to advance his story.

As far as Scudder, I’ll admit certain things happening these days, make me worried about the Religious right getting more powerful, but despite successfully forging an alliance to keep Kerry and his *Shudder * “Gay Marriages” out ;), They really don’t get along with each other on too many issues. Do you really expect RC and Protestants stand shoulder to shoulder long enough to hijack the government?
They probably will win the abortion battle, but while that stinks, it is hardly taking over the government. Eventually the democrats will finally reenergize and it will swing back more to the center.