Fred Clark at Slacktivist has an ongoing series about Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series. The latest installment has a digression into the comfort of social conservatives with the idea of a dictator in the mold of Cincinnatus. The short version of the Cincinnatus story is that he was a Roman general who had retired to his farm. When enemies threatened Rome, he reluctantly accepted the position of dictator, beat the enemy, and returned to the farm.
Clark drops a footnote that I found interesting:
[The notion that the ideal leader is a virtuous dictator] is another division distinguishing the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party from its libertarian, free-market faction. The myth of Cincinnatus illustrates social conservatives’ comfort with unchecked power and unlimited authority. That contradicts the Madisonian concern for limited government that’s central to conservatives of a more libertarian bent.
It also helps to explain why the partisan hypocrisy often demonstrated by this kind of social conservative isn’t only partisan hypocrisy. President George W. Bush was, in their view, a virtuous man with Jesus in his heart. That virtue, they believed, was sufficient as a check and balance against any potential misuse of power. President Barack Obama, they believe, is an evil man and therefore must not be trusted with even the constitutionally constrained, limited, checked-and-balanced power of his office. This is why former Vice President Dick Cheney belongs with the social conservatives even though he was, at best, unenthusiastic about their dual obsessions of criminalizing abortion and homosexuality. Cheney believes that virtue and virtue alone is a sufficient constraint on the use of power, and that power ought to be wielded unfettered by any other limit in pursuit of that virtue.
The group of people who think that Barack Obama is not simply wrong, but evil is not as fringe as I would like them to be. Commenter here, “T,” shared with me an exchange he had with a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook who was convinced that Obama was using FEMA to stockpile coffins in preparation for concentration camps. The guy was citing Apocalyptic Bible passages as “supporting authority.” (I liked the responding question about why in the hell an evildoer bent on mass murder would trifle with coffins – departing from the normal tradition of simply dumping the bodies in a hole after mass slaughter.)
Anyway, the idea that a certain group of people sees a virtuous dictator as the preferred model of governance explains some of the schizophrenia when power shifts from one party to another. Suddenly Black Helicopters and the New World Order are a going concern again.
The Republican Party has a ‘libertarian, free-market faction’? I had no idea.
My experience has been that almost any partisan, left or right, is wholly comfortable with two things:
1. A ‘benevolent’ dictator that wears their party label.
2. Broad authoritarianism in one key area of life. For the right, it is as regards social issues. For the right, it is as regards economic issues.
Same thinking, same methodology, different areas of life. Shot by both sides.
Each side poops a brick when the pendulum swings. So what.
Mike, when I see your observations about Republicans and Democrats, I’m reminded of some of the early debates about how a heliocentric model of the earth couldn’t be correct because, so far as folks back then could observe, the stars in the sky didn’t exhibit parallax. They figured that if the earth was swinging round and round, then the stars should shift in the sky as the earth moved.
Turns out what was going on was that the stars were shifting in the sky, just ever so slightly because of the vast distances between the earth and the stars.
From your perspective, Mike, it seems that when the power shifts from one party to the other, it’s as if there was basically no shift at all. I’m glad you’re around because, even if I don’t agree that the two are identical, your complaints do help me hedge against my own natural inclination to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and look the other way when he does stuff I wouldn’t have tolerated in the Bush administration. You have some credibility here because you weren’t in the bag for the Bush administration back in the day.
Excepting that that’s pretty much a straightforward libertarian critique, not Republican soul-searching, innt? (No offense to Mike intended. Au contraire. It’s just that I’ve never seen him as a Republican.)
That said, I have to disagree in the particular: the “social authoritarianism” of the Right, part of its monarchist tradition, doesn’t seem to’ve led to much social legislation; the “economic authoritarianism” of the Left has led to what? Social Security? Usury laws that defend anything short of outright piracy? I’d say the real authoritarianism in this country reveals itself in constant martialism in perpetual search for an object–popular from the extreme Right to the Left edge of Congressional Democrats, and the related conflation of the modern multi-national corporation with the hopeful proto-entrepreneur tinkering in his garage, which is popular with everyone who needs campaign funds. But then, opinions differ.
A few thoughts:
Mike is right on the nose here. I love this: “Each side poops a brick when the pendulum swings. So what.” The line of the month!
The more benevolent thoughts expressed represent a subset within social conservatives. The scarier things are a fringe within the subset.
I’ve studied at length and taught on Revelation a few times (a study that requires six months of weekly meetings)– and there are a lot of possible interpretations of it and its elements. People often ask what I believe about it. It’s a lot easier to say what I don’t believe. In a word, the pre-trib and mid-trib Pre-Mill views are incoherent.
The conversation in question started after the guy made a reference to Obama’s birth certificate, but then got wackier and wackier. Granted, it’s only the far fringe that believes our government is going to (in the very near future) round up the Christians and execute them. But a much larger number will continue to believe notions like Obama’s Kenyan birth despite significant evidence to the contrary.
Most of what the Left was crapping bricks about during the Bush years was actions by the Bush administration (war in Iraq, or environmental oversight being provided by former extractive industry bigwigs, or top-heavy tax cuts) that without dispute actually happened. Sure, many of us thought he, and his associates (Dr. Rice, f’rinstance) did some pretty crappy work pre-9/11. But the most intense feelings in that regard were generally only after more facts became known (such as the president’s daily briefing).
Meanwhile, much of the noise about Obama this summer has been about the notions that Obama is going to oversee the process by which physicians murder old people and the disabled, or that he wasn’t born here, or that the government is scapegoating “mainstream Republicans and veterans” and calling them “terrorists” by pointing out that there’s been an uptick in far-right violence that might warrant just being more vigilant. None of the above is supported by evidence. And yet none of the above would really qualify as “fringe” thought on the Right. The “Obama death camps” stuff is fringe, but there’s a continuum of nutty thought that leads from birthers, through deathers, to the death-campers.