A Road to Extremism

On May 8, 2012, a Tea Party candidate defeated U.S. Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary.  Although Lugar was a corporatist stooge in the true sense of the word, at least he was the corporatist stooge that we knew.   Lugar was an entrenched Washington insider which made predicable. In his place, Indiana’s former state treasurer and Tea Party adherent, Richard Mourdock, is now the Republican candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate.  If he wins and the GOP takes control of the Senate, the road to extremism will be open and unobstructed.

This is the real fruit of the so-called “Reagan Revolution.”

Because of the GOP’s catastrophic decline in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Ronald Reagan was forced to mobilize the evangelical and religious right to win the presidency in 1980. In doing so, he inadvertently transformed American politics into a theocratic process.

 Over the course of the 1980’s (with the emergence of the neoconservative movement), religion and corporatism defined contemporary American political values. These values finally metastasized into the Tea Party movement.

 Fiscal, foreign, and social policy issues are now hopelessly intertwined with evangelical Christian values. Consequently, many Americans are confused and adhere to conservative, corporate policy because it closely aligns with their neo-Christian beliefs (in which apathy replaces compassion and intolerance and righteous indignation are the new beatitudes).

 How will this Reagan-inspired movement continue to evolve? Sadly, religious-corporate fervor can only lead to a fascist end. Noam Chomsky puts it best, “I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.”a Tea Party candidate