|
CNN: Religious Right Not Dead
I recall during the campaign when Tea Partyists sought to portray themselves as small government fiscal conservatives, but a look at the candidates they were backing showed that they overwhelmingly were Religious Righties and that their U.S. Senate candidates were some of the most extreme antiabortion candidates ever to run for high office. One of them, Rand Paul even won. Unfortunately, many Democrats either didn't notice, or pretended not to notice that the Tea Party comprised the elements we used to call the Religious Right. The frame obscured the reality and supported the Wishful Thinking wing of the consultantocracy. This continued even after the election result showed the breadth and depth of the Democratic thumping. Later, revisionist thinking emerged, asserting that "abortion reduction" was the stated goal of the president and of the Democratic Party platform, which is false. Abortion reduction via policy at all levels of government has been the principal approach of the antiabortion movement for a generation. (Short version of the story, here; long footnoted version, here.) Gilgoff cites recent authoritative polling and expert opinion that shows that the Religious Right and the Tea Party were and are pretty much the same people. I am glad that he also forthrightly states what many of us have been saying for a long time. ... many political experts say that religious conservatives never went anywhere - even if the news media and some quarters of the Republican Party paid them less mind in recent years.
CNN: Religious Right Not Dead | 27 comments (27 topical, 0 hidden)
CNN: Religious Right Not Dead | 27 comments (27 topical, 0 hidden)
|
||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
print page
