Yesterday, James Carville made a comment in an interview with Huffington Post. It got some play around the web, but didn't really make a lot of waves. Mostly because he said what everyone knows -- even those who would rather pretend otherwise. The Republican party, Carville said, was stuck with the religious nuts. If they try to get rid of them -- or even soften the message -- it's over."I don't think they can do that because their party would crumble... That is not an option really available to them," Carville said. "They can talk about other issues and do other things, but once you have a Republican nominee, or serious Republican leaders who are pro-choice or pro-gay marriage, they are going to lose a lot of their voting base. These people will break off. And I don't think that's a real open discussion among people that really know what is going on in the Republican Party."
The problem with the religious right is that their ideas don't really change. They add causes to their list of grievances, but most don't really subtract until that cause is resolved. As a result, they're stuck in time. The ultimate conservatives, they see an unchanging society continuing forever -- at least, after they've perfected it. So time moves on, while they stay stuck. The zenith of the evangelical fanatic has probably passed, the time when they could swing a national election their way is over. The Bush administration represented the last of it and Bush's wins in both of his elections were either questionable or unimpressive.
But the end of the religious right is a slow and painful death. They linger on, weakened and weakening, railing against a world that refuses to stop changing. They stand against knowledge when facts become inconvenient, choosing the bliss of ignorance. Anachronistic thinking is applauded, while innovative thought is shouted down. Stem cells are evil, abortion is evil, evolution is evil, gays are evil, people who don't say "Merry Christmas" are evil, liberals are evil, feminists are evil, and now people who recognize global warming are evil. Nothing must ever change, unless it changes back to the way things used to be, so new knowledge that would require us to change everything is about the worst thing imaginable.
Of course, the fact that it's also drawing people away from the evangelical zealot's brand of fanaticism isn't all that attractive either... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
