As the 2014 election season gears up—and various
politicians start floating the possibility of a 2016 presidential
run—the question of what repugicans need to do about the religio-wingnts is only getting more serious. It’s become apparent that the
religio-winguts are a electoral albatross for repugicans. The invention
of the “tea party” reflected this desire to bamboozle the press into
forgetting that the repugican cabal is controlled by a bunch of wingnut christians, by floating this narrative that this new
insurgence of wingnut energy was somehow more about economic
conservatism than social conservatism.
That narrative
has basically collapsed in the face of overwhelming evidence that the tea party’s main impact is encouraging repugican primary voters to back
even more embarrassingly bible-thumping candidates than usual, from Ted
Cruz to Christine O’Donnell. It’s impossible to ignore that the biggest
result of the supposed tea party revolution has been to refocus repugican energies on attacking abortion rights and expanding the war
on women to include attacks on previously non-controversial issues, such
as insurance coverage of birth control and maternity care. Turns out
the “tea party” was the same old religious right people know and loathe.
The
religio-wingnuts are increasingly a problem for the repugican cabal. But
it’s not one they can get rid of without creating even more problems
for themselves.
The 2012 election really demonstrated
how much the religious right hurts repugicans in general elections. The
various “rape philosophers” who lost elections after making offensive remarks about rape victims
were, by and large, expressing ideas about female sexuality and sexual
violence they got by being stalwart warriors for the religious right.
Todd Akin’s claim that “legitimate rape” didn’t result in pregnancy is a
fairy tale told by christian wingnuts to convince themselves that
exceptions in their preferred abortion bans for rape are unnecessary. Richard Mourdock’s claim that rape happens because it’s god’s plan was more of the same.
But
this was a continuation of the trend of candidates in competitive
elections losing because they say wacky things they learned as christian wingnuts. Sharron Angle’s weird religiosity—including a similar tendency to describe rape as a blessing in disguise—led
to her defeat in a previously competitive 2010 election against Harry
Reid. (She beat out a more moderate repugican in the primary, in part
because of the tea party insurgency.) The tea party favorite Christine
O’Donnell tanked her election after talking about christian lunatic
obsessions like witchcraft and sexual “purity.” The trend continued
right through 2013 when Ken Cuccinelli lost his bid to be governor of
Virginia because of his hostility to reproductive rights and his
outdated campaign to recriminalize sodomy in Virginia.
This
isn’t a problem in wingnut districts where ficus trees could win
as long as they were the official repugican nominees, but as these
examples show, the religio-wingnuts severely limit the repugicans’
ability to expand beyond that, especially when it comes to bigger
elections with a broader base of voters—like the presidential election.
Because of that, it seems the smart thing to do would be to quit running
the Todd Akins and Ken Cuccinellis and go for candidates who don’t have
the stench of misogynistic fundamentalism about them.
But
early 2014 evidence shows that repugicans have decided to keep on
keeping on with the jesus lunacy. The official repugican response to
the State of the Union address was given by Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Most
of her speech was composed of empty platitudes without even a whiff of
what kind of policies repugicans would offer instead, with one
exception: abortion. Even though Obama hadn’t mentioned it in his
speech, McMorris Rodgers wielded her young son with Down’s syndrome as
evidence for belief that abortion is never acceptable. The message was
clear. The repugicans not only refuse to give up on the religio-wingnuts—they’re keeping the religio-wingnuts and their obsessions front and
center.
It seems stupid, but if you think about it, what
other choice do they have? As the McMorris Rodgers speech indicated,
there’s a dearth of ideas outside of waging war on women in the current repugican cabal. Right now, repugicans are primarily defined by what
they’re against and they don’t seem to be for much of anything:
Against minimum wage rises, against healthcare reform, against
government interventions to improve the economy, against everything
Obama does no matter what (including taking pictures of his dog),
against food stamps, against against against. They may occasionally
make gestures toward the hint of an idea that they might want to replace
the policies they’re against with some other policies, but no one
really believes this. House repugicans spend more time passing
pointless repeal bills of the ACA than they do passing bills that do
anything at all.
Say what you will about the religio-wingnuts, at least they are for something. Sure, what they’re for is
eradicating safe abortion, making contraception hard to get,
aggressively punishing gay people for the crime of existing, injecting
creationism into schools, redirecting tax money toward their pet causes,
and stoking anti-muslim sentiment, but at least they have a mission.
The larger repugican agenda of getting out of the way so that
capitalist forces can squeeze as much wealth as they can from 99% of the
population to enrich 1% of the population is never going to be an
agenda people can support—well, people besides billionaires, that is—but
a lot of people are active members of the religio-wingnut cabal and are
willing to vote and fund raise and agitate on these fronts.
Without
the religio-wingnuts, the repugicans would be reduced to saying, “Vote
for us. For reasons. Which we can’t really explain.” In other words, the
rest of Cathy McMorris Rodgers' speech. The parts that weren’t about
pandering to the religio-wingnuts, that is.
This is the
paradox of the modern repugican cabal: In order to get the votes of the
kind of people who would support them, they have to turn everyone else
off. Sure, some people who currently vote for Democrats or refuse to
vote at all would decamp to the repugican side if repugicans dropped
the religio-wingnuts, but the number of voters they have to gain from
this is fewer than the number they have to lose if the religio-wingnuts
decides to stop voting altogether.
So next time you
wonder why they keep running all these fools who can’t stop saying nutty
stuff about jesus and controlling other people’s sex lives, just
remember: Those nutty christian lunatics are the only loyal votes they
have left. If they threw them out, they might be standing around with a
big bag of nothing.
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