Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason
Wednesday 19 August 2009

by: Johann Hari | Visit article original @ The Independent UK



Barack Obama's presidency has spurred an onslaught of bizarre reactions from the right wing. (Photo: Reuters)
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative message - as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view - to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation - has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be - shrill, baby, shrill.



Great article, I thought I would share with those interested. I love to see the view of us from the world around us, it usually sees what we cannot.

It is amazing how crazy it is getting out there.

The protestors at the town hall meeting don't even have their facts straight and they are mad over falsehoods and propaganda.

Healthcare should happen in this country and I am still backing it to happen.

There needs to be adjustments made to the current bill but we can still do this and should.

it was the same way against George Bush. It's the American Way to demonize the opposition

and 90% of the electorate are gullible and believe most anything they are told. And the spinmeisters play on that

and the funny thing is when you say that the Democrats/Republicans say, "yeah but they are deluded and we are right"




I'm convinced that that is why the founding fathers thought that the general population was too ignorant and too fickle to be allowed to choose a President and that is why they created the Electoral College. They never anticipated a general election to choose a President. They expected the individual state's legislatures to do it

I have a strong feeling he will be a one term hack like Carter and Bush 1. Come next November i think the Dems are gonna have their bottoms handed to em.

The article makes some good points about the irrational "right". However, socialized health care is a disaster. It has never worked anywhere its been tried, and never will work-like all central planning schemes. The real way to solve this is by stopping State involvement in health and allowing the free market to lower prices naturally.

what I get sick of, and it's been a strategem of the left for a while now, is to attempt to claim some kind of intellectual high ground. Saying things like, Fill-in-the-blank Republican is just not smart enough to understand this or that, and Fill-in-the-blank Democrat is the smartest person for the job, no one's got the intellectual firepower this person has.

and the message rings true when they follow that rhetoric with some stained t-shirt wearing hick from the backwoods of Kentucky saying something stupid and racist.

This whole game about "my dad's smarter than your dad" is just juvenile and counterproductive.

For all the intellectual firepower Tim Geithner allegedly brings to the table and vast understanding of the tax code and federal regulatory authority, he still couldn't figure out how to pay his taxes for a significant part of the last decade, an offense that would have landed you or me in a federal "bone me in the a__" prison for tax evasion.. But no cellie named Art for ol' Timmy! No, this guy gets to head up the federal treasury because "he's smart".

God forbid a person should provide for himself and his family.

And I love the stats. The status quo kills 18,000 people a year. Does that include people that die of lung cancer from smoking or of liver failure from a lifetime of drinking whiskey?

does it include all the gangbangers that can't seem to stop killing each other in those wonderful urban utopias from Detroit to Houston, from NY to LA and everywhere between?

What about the glut of the urban poor who suffer from obesity and die of heart disease?.. is there anything in the "Public Option" that will stop their mothers from feeding them twinkies and cocacola with those food stamps their neighbors subsidise, rather than rice and beans, which are far more healthy and way less expensive?

How many of those deaths could a "public option" have saved?

what about the legions of the uninsured who drive around on $4500 sets of 22" rims but "can't afford the premiums" for insurance and who, instead, go to county hospital ER's and skip out on the bill??

what does the public option do about that??

No.. What this country needs is not another taxpayer subsidised entitlement program, but a good shot in the arm of some good old self respect, rugged individualism, and self reliance.

Dependence on Government leads to shackles of economic slavery.

There should be a safety net. We should not leave defenseless those who cannot fend for themselves. But for those that can provide for themselves and refuse to do so, there should be little sympathy. The safety net should not be a destination resort hammock for the perpetually irresponsible. It takes up all the room for those that could have been caught but end up falling through.

I agree that there are problems with the way doctors are forced to deal with their patients and how healthcare is "delivered" (as though it were a truckload of groceries). But the manner in which the Dems are going about fixing it is completely bass-akwards.

That is funny. That is what has supposedly been happening.

Not really. The government has been meddling with health care for decades, and screwing it up royally. I'm not sure what makes you think that's been happening when the welfare rolls are higher than ever and inflation is sky high and there are more regulations than ever.

don't trouble her with the facts, hb34. They will only confuse her, piss her off, and then she'll dismiss them as mis-information and propaganda funded by the rightwing media and corporate interests..

Disregarding most of the rant as hypocritical.

It is hypocritical not to respect people's choices in their lives but want to "respect" their freedom to die without healthcare.

Here is the problem with the whole issue.

One (a person) cannot force self responsibility on others to their own standard without denying them the right to live their lives how they wish. Period. There is no way around it. Do we fight for only the fews freedoms or do we fight for all freedoms?

And don't give me the crapola about the cost, we are going to pay taxes in this country forever, it will never go away. And if our tax dollars care for us, all of us, as they should, then they do what they are supposed to do.

Having healthcare for all of us is in no way an infringement on anyone's rights. In no way is it socializing this country. In no way is it a hardship that we should not be willing to bear if we care about this country.

Did we not just come from a "right" president? Was he not a republican/conservative? So that is what was happening.

Welfare rolls climbing is going to happen in a recession no way around that, just as unemployment. Not a sign of anything other than a recession which was started under Bush's watch.

What facts? His interpretation of illegimate information to this argument?

It is an infringement on others' rights. The funding for this comes from inflation and taxation, both of which infringe on individuals' rights to property(money in this case). If "liberals" (sad how that word has been redefined in America) want "universal care", they can legitimately create a charity and ask for donations. Using the government to force "donations" violates the non-aggression axiom and a number of rights. On top of all that, government spending is ALWAYS less efficient because it is filtered through beaurocracy. This is not new information-it's been around for some 200 years.

You don't have to pay taxes. So it is not an infringement of your rights.

I keep telling all these folks who complain constantly about taxes, don't pey em in protest.
Tell the government you do not like that they use your tax dollars to help people and stop paying.

It is that simple.

Taxes are voluntarily paid. Or at least by most of the citizens I know. They pay them willingly and in earnest that they help this country run and help people.

For all those who find it a forced thing, they should stop paying them in protest. Your life has to be better if you are not paying those damn taxes, so stop doing it.

So again healthcare is not an infringement on anyone's rights. It will not socialize this country.

Why would anybody support Obama when his path is very close to G.W. Bush's path ?!.

I knew you would, for whatever reason, disregard me. That's why I didn't write it for you. I wrote it for all the others out there who legitmately want to debate the issue without poopoo'ing a conservative's viewpoint as being biggoted zealotry.

but in your "refutation" of my point, you prove exactly what I've been trying to say.

One cannot force someone to be responsible for him/herself. That's true. But the other side of that coin is, the irresponsible do not have the right to force the cost of their lack of responsibility onto the backs of others, which is tantamount to what your assertion claims.

No, we do not have the right to tell people how to live their lives. That's precisely what conservatives have been saying. But once you get the .gov involved in managing healthcare, that's exactly what you're opening the door for. Because once we decide that twinkies and ho-ho's and cocacola are "public health risks", it's just a slight step to saying ok, no more ho-ho's and twinkies and no more cocacola, people are dying of it and it's putting undue strain on the healthcare system..

Don't believe me? consult your own view of smoking in public..

You think so?

google "Ed Brown, Plainfield New Hampshire" Convicted of non-payment of Federal income taxes and sentenced to 63 months in Federal Prison.

Go ahead, stop paying your income taxes and see how long it takes for the feds to show up.

Stop paying your property taxes and see how long you live in your home.

Stop paying sales tax to the state and local AHJ's (authority having jurisdiction) and see how long your store stays open..

taxes voluntary.. yeah sure.

see what I mean? I couldn't have simulated her response more eloquently...

Cute piece of fiction.

If you haven't noticed by now, no matter who's in power things generally stay the same...the limits of the two-party system as one of the two invariably stays in power. Obama made a whole bunch of empty promises and continued to bail out "large" corporations. The republicans would have done the same. Money is power we live in a capitalist society so i guess the only way to free urself is to get rich (or comfortable or whatever) it seems less possible now. Obama's healthcare system is like nationwide medicaid. The insurance companies are upset, the AMA is upset, but if it wasn't this issue it'd be a different one. Without opposition we'd have an absolute dictatorship and no one wants that. America's an oligarchy not a democracy. I guess we just gotta deal with it, wouldn't it be great if no one voted in the next pres. election...i wonder what they'd do then?

I don't believe in the capitalist "money-christian" religion(i.e.We are richer than other countries therefore God loves us more) I think thats a load of bulls**t