Entries associated with the tag "Republicanism":

Food for thought from former Bush adviser Michael Gerson in the Washington Post: 

"The two intellectually vital movements within the Republican Party today are libertarianism and Roman Catholic social thought ...

"Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules -- free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government -- asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread -- it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering. This obligation has never, in Jewish and Christian teaching, been purely private."

Ramesh Ponnuru offers some qualifications here, but doesn't challenge Gerson's basic point.

Everyone's talking about death these days. I guess it's more fun than following the campaign ads. Depending on who you read, the fear of death may make you a bigot, or a Republican, or a Buddhist.

• Amanda Marcotte writes, "As Lorraine noted in her post on this the other day, one of the primary features of turning someone into an Other that you can feel superior towards is to symbolically cast them as embodied and then implicitly or even explicitly cast yourself as superior and transcendent of bodily concerns. How does this work? Well, . . . you have racists who think that white people are smarter than black people and concurrently that black people are better athletes, which is a way of saying that black people are embodied but white people are somehow transcendent. Fundie homophobes obsess over anal sex because to them, penetration is about humiliating and embodying the penetrated one, showing that she is just a fleshy thing that will die. That men can get penetrated means men are soft, fleshy beings that will die and this causes them to panic." More, including the application to torture and some good links.

• The omnipresent Cass Sunstein blogs about a 2004 study (abstract here) that found people were more likely to approve of Bush's policies and to vote for him after being reminded that they would die someday.  "Unless circumstances have relevantly changed since 2004, Bush -- and almost certainly Republican candidates more generally -- are likely to benefit from any reference to terrorism or the September 11 attacks. So Karl Rove knows exactly what he is doing." More. The generic name for this kind of research is "mortality salience."

• My one-time classmate and longtime friend, philosopher David Loy, has published in this area too, but he takes it in a different direction. "Consciousness of death is our primary repression [contra Freud].  The Buddhists claim that, since the self is insubstantial, the death-denial represents quite valid suspicion that 'I' do not really exist.  Fear of physical death is one manifestation of the deeper fear of the death of this 'I'." The cure is to recognize the truth. "When I am no longer striving to make myself real through things, I am actualized. When I stop trying to become something, I discover that I am everything." Bad news for fundamentalism, both political and religious. Much more.

If you find value in religion, or Republicanism, be sure to let your friends and family know that you nevertheless don't countenance ignorance and abortion. Yes, it's gotten that bad.

Hello, Tom? Mammon here. Talk To Action continues its run of stunning investigative reports, reminding us of a hellhole parcel of U.S. territory on the Marianas Islands in the Pacific where where "thousands of garment workers--most of them young Chinese women--labor in indentured servitude, live in labor camps run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, and submit to forced abortions if they become pregnant. Human rights worker Eric Gregoire told ABC News, 'With 11,000 Chinese workers here, I have never seen a Chinese garment factory worker have a baby.'"

What satanic creature would countenance such conditions--and protect them by using his power in Congress?  Recently indicted Republican Tom DeLay, that's who---the darling of the Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, Focus on the Family, and many other stalwarts of the religious right.

Making America safe for stupidity.  Americans are the second most ignorant country on the subject of evolution, narrowly edging out Turkey. That's the news from political scientist Jon D. Miller--formerly of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and Northwestern University, now at Michigan State--in a paper published in the August 11 issue of Science. The original is behind a pay wall, but reasonable summaries are here and here (more spice). Oh, here's the one-sentence abstract:

"The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."

Miller is no alarmist and no sound-bite artist (as I learned when writing up his work on scientific literacy for the Reader November 18, 1994), so when he starts talking like this I pay attention.

He and his coauthors found that "individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true," and this effect was stronger in the United States, presumably because of political pandering (my word, not theirs):

"The conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and midwestern states—the 'red' states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of 'creation science.' There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform."

The percentage of Americans who disbelieve or doubt one of the best-established scientific frameworks for understanding our world has actually risen--from 55 to 60 percent in the last 20 years.