Hijacking American Conservatism

JIMMY CARTER once said that if Jesus were to show up on the doorstep of your average modern evangelical Christian conservative, he would probably be scorned and turned away. Although rather conservative by the standards of post World World Two liberalism, Carter, in context, ranks as a liberal or slightly left of center Democrat, if not a progressive one. He offered no elucidation of his remarks, other than to infer that the modern evangelical movement had been, in a sense, "hijacked" by far right political extremists, whose anti-taxation anti redistribution pro profit ideologies stand in contrast with the essential teachings of Jesus Christ. Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, give unto the poor, render unto Caesar; these admonitions, central to the fundamental Christian message, are largely missing from modern political conservatism, a movement dominated by evangelical Christians. Carter is not alone in his unfavorable assessment, but he was talking more about the church than the political arena. Much the same viewpoint is articulated about the modern conservative movement in a fascinating, provocative new book by journalist and author Joe Conason: "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds hijacked American Conservatism". A cursory glance at the official Republican party platform of 1956 clearly demonstrates that the Grand Ole Party has, in recent decades, moved much to the right. Eisenhower, and even Nixon seem moderate to slightly liberal by comparisoon to their political descendants. In the 1960 presidential race, Nixon was the "liberal", and Kennedy was the "conservative", though both could be described as essentially moderate. In those days, Republicans wanted to raise taxes, mainly to support cold war military expansion, and Democats wanted to cut taxes. Then came the era of Reagan, and Republicans evolved in their thinking, wanting to both lower taxes and increase military spending. The two didn't mix, and the national debt ballooned out of control. While Jimmy Carter was a politically liberal evangelical Christian, Reagan was a politically conservative evangelical Christian, and the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties witnessed the entry of politically conservative evangelical Christians into the political arena in huge numbers, the so called "moral majority", (which was in fact neither exclusively "moral" nor an actual majority of the electorate), into the Republican party, transforming it. This is the era, and the phenomenon, about which Mr. Conason writes. His use of the descriptors "swindlers", "grifters", and "frauds", by their very harshness, sets the tone for Conasons harsh assessment of the current conservative movement. He pays particular attention to the wave of extreme conservative talk show hosts and audiences which infiltrated the radio industry following the corporate consolidation of the radiio industry and abolition of the "fairness doctrine", and its impact on America's right wing. Essentially, an insidious "perfect storm" of converging circumstances led us to our present precarious point, at which Donald J.Trump, prevaricator in chief, a true carnival barker, as Barrack Obama described him, is the face of the Republcian party and the conservative community, despite his aborted but violent attempt at reversing his own election defeat by denying its reality and his consequent well orchestrated attempt at overthrowing the Amerian government through violent insurrection. Swindlers, grifters, and frauds indeed.