SonofRage
12th June 2005, 19:07
Globalization, Theocracy and the New Fascism: Taking the Right's Rise to Power Seriously
Since George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the Christian right in the U.S. has come under new scrutiny, here and around the world. Some, of course, are celebrating the religious right's rise to power; but a great many others are worried about the political direction the country has taken-on matters of war and peace, on the future of respect for liberty and diversity, and on prospects for equitable and sustainable development.
The worry is quite justified. With two Islamic countries occupied by U.S. troops, with Iran and North Korea on the nuclear threshold to counter threats of occupation, with the ongoing violence and counter-violence of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, with the continuing plots against Venezuela for its oil-who would not be worried about a White House under the thumb of zealots longing for theocracy, the Apocalypse and the Second Coming?
America's cantankerous relationship with its right wing preachers over the years is no longer simply a part of our country's 'local color.' Bush's victory, even if narrow, against his multilateralist and corporate liberal rivals in the ruling class, as well as against the popular 'Anybody But Bush' forces that mobilized against him, has caused the Christian Coalition forces to become even bolder. America's theocrats are now a global concern and a growing danger to all.
Today's Christian and conservative rightists, to be sure, didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere. Their current incarnation spans nearly four decades. They got their big start in 1968 when Alabama Gov. George Wallace led a mass movement of anti-civil-rights white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into an alliance with Richard Nixon's GOP through its 1968 and 1972 'Southern Strategy.' With Nixon's Watergate demise in the 1970s, the key organizers of what was then dubbed 'the New Right,' chiefly Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, retrenched and began raising and spending millions from big capitalists to build the think tanks, policy coalitions, grassroots churches and media infrastructure that, by 1980, helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Nonetheless, as the Reagan years began, the Religious Right was still only a junior partner in the GOP. They were often used, sometimes cynically and opportunistically, but the 'Rockefeller Republicans,' then represented by Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush (the Elder), still mainly ran the show.
The New Right, however, did not intend to play second fiddle for long. Some critics saw what was happening early. Futurist and sociologist Alvin Toffler, for instance, said in his classic work, The Third Wave, published in 1980: 'In the United States, it is not hard to imagine some new political party running Billy Graham (or some facsimile) on a crude 'law-and-order' or 'anti- porn' program with a strong authoritarian streak. Or some as yet unknown Anita Bryant demanding imprisonment for gays or 'gay-symps.' Such examples provide only a faint, glimmering intimation of the religio-politics that may well lie ahead, even in the most secular of societies. One can imagine all sorts of cult-based political movements headed by Ayatollahs named Smith, Schultz or Santini (p. 379).'
Along with others, Toffler saw the beginning of the new religious right here in a much broader context. The rise of fundamentalism was a worldwide phenomenon, taking root in Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Hindu peoples around the world. Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe, authors of Televangelism, the 1988 critical study of the merger of religion and modern telecommunications, tied it directed to the rapid social change and disrupted social structures brought about by the onset of globalization.
Hadden and Shupe argue that globalization, in part, is a 'common process of secularizing social change' containing 'the very seeds of a reaction that brings religion back into the heart of concerns about public policy. The secular...is also the cause of resacralization...[which] often takes fundamentalistic forms.' They also explain, ironically, that the fundamentalist voice of protest against global secularism is itself amplified by the same high technology of globalization, a powerful tool that gives it global reach and an accelerated rate of growth. The World Council of Churches, itself a liberal-to-moderate target of the fundamentalist right, described the process at its 1998 report on its 8th Assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe:
'Globalization gives rise to a web of contradictions, tensions and anxieties. The systemic interlocking of the local and the global in the process created a number of new dynamics. It led to the concentration of power, knowledge, and wealth in institutions controlled or at least influenced by transnational corporations. But it also generated a decentralizing dynamic as people and communities struggle to regain control over the forces that threaten their very existence. In the midst of changes and severe pressure on their livelihoods and cultures, people want to affirm their cultural and religious identities...
'While globalization universalized certain aspects of modern social life, it also causes and fuels fragmentation of the social fabric of societies. As the process goes on and people lose hope, they start to compete against each other in order to secure some benefits from the global economy. In some cases this reality gives rise to fundamentalism and ethnic cleansing.'
Alvin and Heidi Toffler go further in describing the impact of this 'loss of hope' in their 1993 book, War and Antiwar: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Dividing the world into their now popularized 'three waves' analysis-an agricultural First Wave, an industrial Second Wave, and an information technology Third Wave-they put it this way:
'On a world scale, the lurch back to religion reflects a desperate search for something to replace fallen Second Wave faiths-whether Marxism or nationalism, or for that matter Scientism. In the First Wave world it is fed by memories of Second Wave exploitation. Thus it is the aftertaste of colonialism that makes First Wave Islamic populations so bitter against the West. It is the failure of socialism that propels Yugoslavs and Russians toward chauvinistic-cum-religious delirium. It is alienation and fear of immigrants that drives many Western Europeans into a fury of racism that camouflages itself as a defense of Christianity. It is corruption and the failures of Second Wave democratic forms that could well send some of the ex-Soviet republics tracking back either to Orthodox authoritarianism or Muslim fanaticism.'
read more... (http://actiontendency.net/NLN/current/davidson_theocracy.html)
Since George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the Christian right in the U.S. has come under new scrutiny, here and around the world. Some, of course, are celebrating the religious right's rise to power; but a great many others are worried about the political direction the country has taken-on matters of war and peace, on the future of respect for liberty and diversity, and on prospects for equitable and sustainable development.
The worry is quite justified. With two Islamic countries occupied by U.S. troops, with Iran and North Korea on the nuclear threshold to counter threats of occupation, with the ongoing violence and counter-violence of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, with the continuing plots against Venezuela for its oil-who would not be worried about a White House under the thumb of zealots longing for theocracy, the Apocalypse and the Second Coming?
America's cantankerous relationship with its right wing preachers over the years is no longer simply a part of our country's 'local color.' Bush's victory, even if narrow, against his multilateralist and corporate liberal rivals in the ruling class, as well as against the popular 'Anybody But Bush' forces that mobilized against him, has caused the Christian Coalition forces to become even bolder. America's theocrats are now a global concern and a growing danger to all.
Today's Christian and conservative rightists, to be sure, didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere. Their current incarnation spans nearly four decades. They got their big start in 1968 when Alabama Gov. George Wallace led a mass movement of anti-civil-rights white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into an alliance with Richard Nixon's GOP through its 1968 and 1972 'Southern Strategy.' With Nixon's Watergate demise in the 1970s, the key organizers of what was then dubbed 'the New Right,' chiefly Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, retrenched and began raising and spending millions from big capitalists to build the think tanks, policy coalitions, grassroots churches and media infrastructure that, by 1980, helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Nonetheless, as the Reagan years began, the Religious Right was still only a junior partner in the GOP. They were often used, sometimes cynically and opportunistically, but the 'Rockefeller Republicans,' then represented by Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush (the Elder), still mainly ran the show.
The New Right, however, did not intend to play second fiddle for long. Some critics saw what was happening early. Futurist and sociologist Alvin Toffler, for instance, said in his classic work, The Third Wave, published in 1980: 'In the United States, it is not hard to imagine some new political party running Billy Graham (or some facsimile) on a crude 'law-and-order' or 'anti- porn' program with a strong authoritarian streak. Or some as yet unknown Anita Bryant demanding imprisonment for gays or 'gay-symps.' Such examples provide only a faint, glimmering intimation of the religio-politics that may well lie ahead, even in the most secular of societies. One can imagine all sorts of cult-based political movements headed by Ayatollahs named Smith, Schultz or Santini (p. 379).'
Along with others, Toffler saw the beginning of the new religious right here in a much broader context. The rise of fundamentalism was a worldwide phenomenon, taking root in Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Hindu peoples around the world. Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe, authors of Televangelism, the 1988 critical study of the merger of religion and modern telecommunications, tied it directed to the rapid social change and disrupted social structures brought about by the onset of globalization.
Hadden and Shupe argue that globalization, in part, is a 'common process of secularizing social change' containing 'the very seeds of a reaction that brings religion back into the heart of concerns about public policy. The secular...is also the cause of resacralization...[which] often takes fundamentalistic forms.' They also explain, ironically, that the fundamentalist voice of protest against global secularism is itself amplified by the same high technology of globalization, a powerful tool that gives it global reach and an accelerated rate of growth. The World Council of Churches, itself a liberal-to-moderate target of the fundamentalist right, described the process at its 1998 report on its 8th Assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe:
'Globalization gives rise to a web of contradictions, tensions and anxieties. The systemic interlocking of the local and the global in the process created a number of new dynamics. It led to the concentration of power, knowledge, and wealth in institutions controlled or at least influenced by transnational corporations. But it also generated a decentralizing dynamic as people and communities struggle to regain control over the forces that threaten their very existence. In the midst of changes and severe pressure on their livelihoods and cultures, people want to affirm their cultural and religious identities...
'While globalization universalized certain aspects of modern social life, it also causes and fuels fragmentation of the social fabric of societies. As the process goes on and people lose hope, they start to compete against each other in order to secure some benefits from the global economy. In some cases this reality gives rise to fundamentalism and ethnic cleansing.'
Alvin and Heidi Toffler go further in describing the impact of this 'loss of hope' in their 1993 book, War and Antiwar: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Dividing the world into their now popularized 'three waves' analysis-an agricultural First Wave, an industrial Second Wave, and an information technology Third Wave-they put it this way:
'On a world scale, the lurch back to religion reflects a desperate search for something to replace fallen Second Wave faiths-whether Marxism or nationalism, or for that matter Scientism. In the First Wave world it is fed by memories of Second Wave exploitation. Thus it is the aftertaste of colonialism that makes First Wave Islamic populations so bitter against the West. It is the failure of socialism that propels Yugoslavs and Russians toward chauvinistic-cum-religious delirium. It is alienation and fear of immigrants that drives many Western Europeans into a fury of racism that camouflages itself as a defense of Christianity. It is corruption and the failures of Second Wave democratic forms that could well send some of the ex-Soviet republics tracking back either to Orthodox authoritarianism or Muslim fanaticism.'
read more... (http://actiontendency.net/NLN/current/davidson_theocracy.html)