Religious Fundamentalism and the Rise of the Corporate State

His tracing of our present malaise to the scribblings of a few long-dead economists is correct as far as it goes. Judt's description of the privatization mania is a particularly good discussion. If anything he could have gone much further. It was revealed, to pick a minor example at random, in a December 1, 2009 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee that 60 percent of the personnel in the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Intelligence and Analysis are contractor employees. Other examples abound.

Judt is also correct in partially ascribing our present distaste for social democracy to an ahistorical cast of mind that is forgetful of the past. Here again, his analysis could have been sharper. In a related connection it's worth mentioning that our present perception of the New Deal has been polluted by a recent deluge of Right-revisionist "histories" using meretricious arguments to prove that the New Deal made the depression worse rather than better, that FDR was a fascist, etc. [4] These arguments, believe it or not, garner a fair amount of attention in congressional debate, on talk shows and in popular writings, mainly because Democrats lack the brains and energy to refute them — assuming the Robert Rubin wing of the party would even want to refute them. And, of course, Judt is correct in pointing out that social democrats simply don't know how to use the politics of fear even when it is legitimate in appealing to the economic insecurity or immediate fear of poverty or, indeed, poverty itself, that inevitably arises from a bubble-based economy. Appealing to fear is a skill the Karl Roves in the opposing camp have honed to perfection — they beat the Democrats hands-down in any emotional contest.

The basic flaw in Judt's thesis is that he casts his net too narrowly, at least when he is talking about the United States. His opening paragraphs pose the question as to why the U.S. is different from continental Europe without answering other than in vague generalities about the relative sizes of the countries and their demographics. Judt is not wrong that the Austrian School has had a significant impact on the decline of the social democratic enterprise everywhere. But, particularly with respect to American politics, an "X" factor is missing.

The crux of our reservations about Judt's thesis is that he is flat wrong when he says: "Since the authoritarian challenge from the left has lapsed, the emphasis upon 'democracy' is largely redundant. We are all democrats today." No, we are not, for reasons that Max Blumenthal explains in Republican Gomorrah. [5] If we read Blumenthal correctly, in the last 30 years the rise of politicized, authoritarian religious fundamentalism in the U.S. has been a direct challenge not just to social democracy, but to democracy itself.

According to Blumenthal the U.S. polity now has tens of millions of low-information but politically active voters whose interests are narrowly focused on personal spiritual salvation, whose political conception of right and wrong have shrunk from Judt's moral concern about overall fairness and who controls the commons, to a near-exclusive preoccupation with superficial moral questions about abortion, gay marriage and whether the politician they vote for has been "saved." This habit is all the more socially dangerous insofar as these same people have built a hermetic parallel culture within the U.S. whose home schooling, megachurches, and charismatic preacher/father figures provide constant reinforcement of authoritarian tendencies.

Blumenthal says many things in his tour de force: that the fundamentalist religious phenomenon is fueled, particularly among its leaders, by a culture of personal crisis whereby bizarre and destructive behavior actually constitutes merit if it somehow leads to one being "saved;" by an authoritarian outlook that is at its base one of sado-masochistic impulses; by a disturbed relationship to authority; and by a variety of sexual obsessions. Did the reader know that James Dobson, the ayatollah of Focus on the Family, was a big fan of serial killer Ted Bundy, and profited monetarily from the relationship? That Tom DeLay, who called the House into a special session to prohibit Terri Schiavo's husband from disconnecting her from life support, had in fact pulled the plug on his own father? That the creationist or, to use the approved euphemism, "intelligent design" movement is an artifact funded by a millionaire fundamentalist once institutionalized for insanity?

Neither did we... but what does that have to do with Professor Judt's thesis? Judt implies, without overtly saying so, that the use of fallacious economic "efficiency" arguments to downsize and privatize public property is a corporate strategy to hijack the state. That is correct, and he should have said so more explicitly. But one aspect of this phenomenon has never been rigorously researched. To what extent was the rise of the Religious Right a totally autonomous phenomenon, and/or to what extent was it covertly fostered by corporate America? It is curious how the concerns of fundamentalist evangelicals dovetail so neatly with the interests of corporate oligarchs: hostility to broader social justice concerns (your personal problems will only be solved by getting right with Jesus); militarism (abetted by end-times apocalyptic obsessions); hostility towards environmental stewardship (if we are all going to be raptured, who but a pagan cares about the environment?); and diversion into areas like abortion and gay marriage that do not harm the interests of the oligarchy.

Even when the fundamentalists sense that there is something terribly wrong on Wall Street their anger is miraculously channeled into political outlets that hold Wall Street harmless. Rush Limbaugh continues stoutly to defend Wall Street bonuses and so far as we know this has not attended any falloff in his listenership. "Conservative" politicians in the Republican Party continue to attack financial regulation reform and the creation of a consumer protection agency, not because Democratic committee chairmen have slipped jokers into the deck rendering the legislation mostly ineffectual, [6] but because the Republicans claim there should not be any regulation at all. This position completely ignores the proximate causes of the financial meltdown, namely, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the deregulation of derivatives markets. Yet we are unaware of any objection from the fundamentalist base of the party. Instead, they have been diverted into a jihad against ACORN, on the excuse that the latter is an advocate of community lending. Whose interest does it serve when the visceral anger of tens of millions of uninformed but rabid primary voters is deflected from the Wall Street suites of Goldman Sachs to the shabby store-front offices of a weak and ineffectual gaggle of 1960s activists?

Perhaps the rise of politicized, authoritarian fundamentalism in America would have been inevitable in any case but its specific political reflexes appear to match the needs of corporate oligarchy far more closely than pure coincidence allows. Was it the result of a successful strategy to mobilize a previously passive, low-information demographic into a "John Doe Club" for the purposes of further entrenching corporate interest? As far as we know there has been no in-depth research of funding mechanisms like the Templeton Foundation (which seduces scholars with big prizes to write puff pieces on intelligent design, free enterprise, and theological mush); the DeVos fortune (authors of the Amway pyramid scheme and the funding of various theocratic organizations like Focus on the Family); and the numerous Texas oilmen who have found Jesus.

From 1517, when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, until the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe endured nearly a century and a half of turmoil and bloodshed. The peace, when it arrived, imposed not a little arbitrary rule, but in quashing the millennialist claims of religious fanatics at least it imposed a breathing space so that Europe could physically recover and a more skeptical and tolerant frame of mind might take hold. In the first half of the twentieth century Europeans forgot that lesson. Bastardized millennialist religions such as Nazism and Communism then nearly succeeded in extinguishing free thought.

When interests at the top of society act to achieve political retrogression their motives are mostly economic, as Professor Judt implies without forthrightly stating. But that does not answer the question of why a legion of followers, who gain no economic benefit from the scheme, would eagerly follow. Perhaps the answer lies less in the treatises of Friedrich Hayek than in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine.


* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] Tony Judt, "What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy," New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, Number 20, December 17, 2009.

[2] We are using the term "social democracy" as a shorthand for a mixed-economy welfare state, fully aware that FDR's New Deal had important differences with, say, the Labour Britain of Hugh Gaitskell, and that cultural considerations impelled American politicians to avoid calling the New Deal Consensus social democratic, even when, in many respects, it was.

[3] Showing his European orientation, Judt omits to mention the enormous influence of Milton Friedman, who transmuted the academic speculations of the Austrian School into a political manifesto. He turned university economics departments into corporate public relations bureaus, beguiled a prime minister and a president, and dictated the economic destiny of Chile. Among Friedman's economic findings was his assertion that the American public didn't need a Food and Drug Administration, since corporations would rigorously assure product safety either from the goodness of their hearts or pecuniary self-interest, which to Friedman amounted to the same thing.

[4] The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Schlaes is a particularly egregious example of drive-by historical revision.

[5] Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah (Nation Books, 2009).

[6] Andrew Cockburn, "Wall Street Snaps Its Fingers," CounterPunch, December 8, 2009.