Don't know much about title-ry

I'm not sure quite what future conflicts over religion in the world will look like, but one thing seems clear enough; the era of struggles between different world religions as they are traditionally understood is coming to an end. What we will get in its place are struggles between interfaith coalitions consisting of hierarchical, patriarchal fundamentalists and egalitarian progressives.

I got the impetus for this train of thought from reading James Loewen's "Lies my Teacher Told Me." Loewen mentions that American history textbooks rarely emphasize the role religious conviction has played in the lives of historical figures because of the objections of both religious fundamentalists, who will object to any unflattering portrayal of their religion, and axe-grinding atheists, who will object to any positive mention of sincerely-held beliefs. The latter note is extraneous for the moment. The interesting corrollary is how many formerly combative sects have come together to scrub any mention of their historical conflicts from the record. This is part of a larger compact between Protestants and Catholics, and between Christians in general and conservative Jews, which has been made in the past few decades, a trend which I think will continue into the future as more and more fundamentalists realize that shared material and power interest outweigh their theological differences.

Now, Ditchkins*-flavored Nu Atheists will doubtless jump in here to say that it is their gains and not the liberal religious which has caused the global circling of the wagons. This I doubt. Nu Atheists have a symbiotic relationship with the fundamentalists in which each replenishes the other's raison d'etre. They share, in the apostate class, a common enemy. And why would the Nus want to get rid of their most valuable resource; easily-manipulable strawmen? Plus, there is the reality that Nu Atheism in its design can never become a mass global movement; it exists to make Western liberals feel smugly superior from the ignorant masses, not achieve any kind of social change to threaten the entrenched power structures.

The greater threat here, as it always has been, is the apprehension by the religious elite that their own theological impulses can be turned against them. This has been most readily apparent in the past few decades with the Vatican's war on liberation theology and its association with the Latin American left movements. More recently (and more ambiguously) it has been the struggle between old-line evangelical Christians and the younger "emerging" movement which is dangerously apostate on the Real Issues. I suspect there were similar sorts of ecumenical kumbaya moments at comparable points in history; just before the Civil War, for example.

The other point of note here is that Western fundamentalists do at least still claim to be in conflict with fundamentalist Muslims. But this too seems to be more as a result of ongoing political necessity than any material disagreement. One would imagine that, when all sides come to realize their shared interest in censorship, patriarchy, and preserving the proper political succession, any alleged differences will also melt away.

*h/t Terry Eagleton

Got a Polish email in my pocket...

Stephen F. Hayward:

Surprisingly, the survey reveals Tea Partiers to be slightly more economically secure than the general population. Combine those findings with the fact that Tea Partiers are a well-educated cohort, and the narrative that the Tea Partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain.

Hayward presumably means this as a defense of Tea Partyism, but says it only one paragraph after approvingly asserting the Teabaggers populist bona fides. Consequently, his own narrative that tea marchers are spontaneously organized bands of working people genuinely concerned that over-taxation is grinding them into poverty also becomes rather hard to maintain. As Michael Lind succinctly puts it elsewhere in the Times compilation, "Tea Partiers put the “petty” in petty bourgeoisie."

The Tea Parties have arisen (in such cases as where they are not simply a rebranding of local Republican Parties) out of an honest concern that their privileged position in American political and economic life could be threatened by the present moment. Naturally, then, there's little they fear more than an organization of the working class, thus even such modest organizations such as the SEIU or the late ACORN play a pivotal role in Teabaggers' conspiracy lore. Like most self-proclaimed advocates of liberty, their principled stand against the tyranny of federal governments erodes quickly when it comes to the dissolution of voluntary mass organization along class lines. It's instructive to compare their rhetoric of liberty to that of Eugene Debs in 1895 righteously upbraiding government intervening on behalf of the Pullman car company. Certainly libertarians wouldn't be nostalgic for such days of tyranny would they?

Oh.

Death'n'taxes

The great problem with democracy, the bourgeois revolutionaries found to their dismay, turned out to be resolving the contradictions between concentration of wealth in a few hands and the fact that the throng of impoverished could still vote. "Democracy," says our libertarian interlocutor, "means people can vote themselves wealth they haven't earned!" "Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism," said another right-winger with a mustache who invaded Poland. Luckily, someone has found a solution.

Natural habitat

Balloon Juice:

Kos has a good piece about why Democrats should try to do immigration reform before the 2010 midterms. The gist is that Dems can’t do much worse than they did in 2008 among working class whites—the group that is most likely to be anti-immigration reform—in any case, but that it might be able to improve its standing among Latino voters (especially in terms of turn-out) if it passes immigration reform.

Of course, there's an important discussion to be had on illegal immigration, the reasons why it exists, the real effects it has on working-class citizens, and how to solve it in a way that empowers workers of all races.

Screw that, though. The important thing is to pump an immigration reform that's as racially divisive as possible, because there's a hot new demographic that can be locked into voting Democratic on the basis of fundamental ethnic preservation. And as we know, the purpose of Democrats winning elections is that Democrats will have won elections, which will allow us to feel better about ourselves and continue to laugh at "working-class white" people, who surely have no problems we might want to address.

Hating sinners

Renegade Evolution:

...in all these threads and what not about Bullock and James, people are fuckin’ up in arms and ready to burn people alive due to James’ alleged racism and hate, but at the same time, a whole hell of a lot of them are hating on, well, “low life” gearhead/”sleazy” white folk with tattoos and whatnot. It’s all woohoo- we hate racists and racism, we hate intolerance and stereotypes- that shit is bad- but fuck if we cannot stand those crackers!

We are headed for an endgame in American politics where the two-party monopoly locks us all into a world of stagnating, mutually-reinforcing tribalism. The elite right stirs up white fear of a cavalcade of different-looking people coming to look and sound different from you and steal your shit!, while the liberal wing points at the former and reminds their constituency of the dire consequences of a giant cracker army turned loose. Meanwhile, actual policy distinctions become harder and harder to elucidate.

For the aforementioned liberal technocrat, the specter of cracker racism is an all-encompassing narrative. There is nothing it can't do to obscure and indeed justify his own class privilege. It is, for him, the same kind of corrupting cancer that homosexuality is for a certain kind of right-wing Christian. There are no lengths to which he will not go to uncover the association with the vile prejudice which comes from never taking an African-American studies class, your general sense of common justice be damned. When he finds it, any and all of your unique circumstances can be waved away. Are you losing your house? Well, you once called a black guy "articulate," so we'll be outside cheering on the bank.

Of course, our right-wing Christian homophobe at least recites the game claim that he "loves the sinner but hates the sin." Rightfully no one believes him, so I suppose it's a blessing that the liberal technocrat makes no pretensions to doing anything but look for sins to excuse his class and cultural prejudices. Meanwhile, it's highly debatable whether any of his ostensible anti-racist crusaderism has done a lick to decrease the amount of actual racism. Indeed, when you have Pat Buchanan wailing that you should be irrationally afraid of non-white people, "intellectuals" incessantly reminding you that you are irrationally afraid of non-white people, well, damned if you don't start to believe you're irrationally afraid of non-white people.

This will become even more pronounced as liberals become increasingly unable to defend the current Democratic government's rightward surge on the merits (and right-wingers find fewer and fewer places of ideological disagreement). It's the Iraqification of America, the victory of vacuous tribal politics while the ruling class parasites walk away from the table with everyone's chips.