They Don't Realize They're The Same

Republicans say a lot of very silly things; that's nothing new. But apparently Newt Gingrich, who somehow gets to pose as the wise elder statesman of his party despite having always been, as my dad (who remembers Gingrich's first trip to the halls of power) tells me, an unimpressive Republican hack, has just made the following dire prediction: within 60 years, America may have become a "secular atheist country." But that's not all! Because it won't just be any secular atheist country, it will, quite possibly, be a secular atheist country dominated by "radical Islamists."

Ahem.

To me what this demonstrates is not just that Republicans in general, and in this particular instance Newt Gingrich, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It's that they really refuse to see one basic truth about the Islamic conservatives in the Middle East: they're the same as each other. Republicans in this country favor, relative to the overall political culture here, state support of religion, restrictive laws and customs regarding sexuality, censorship of the press and of literature, militaristic nationalism, the death penalty, etc. They also both tend to be, relative to their culture, scornful of democracy and willing to use violence or the threat thereof to avoid being judged by democracy. Liberals tend to oppose the Republican Party or the Tea Party or Pat Robertson for the same reason for the same reasons that we oppose Hamas, the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood. No, Republicans are not as bad as these groups, not in absolute terms. But they want to move our society in the direction of what the Islamists want their societies to look like. And we don't like that.

Why do Republicans oppose the Islamists? The simplest explanation is competition. After all, while the faction that opposes state support of religion is going to oppose all groups that favor state support of a given religion, the faction backing state support of a given religion ought also oppose all the groups favoring state support of other religions. If we're establishing right-wing Islam, we can't exactly be establishing right-wing Christianity at the same time, even if many of the public policies formed as a result would be similar. Alternately there's just the plain old racist/intolerant explanation, i.e. that most conservative Christians in this country just don't like Arabs. But the point is, they don't seem to get that they are in the same role in the American political culture that the Islamists play in the Mideast's political culture. And so you have Gingrich being scared of those secular, atheist, radical Islamists. Which, last time I checked, don't exist.