By Swamp Yankee
(Ian–this is another elevated comment. I thought (and think) it’s an excellent one, informed by life experience. In general the quality of comments lately has impressed me.)
Category: Ideology
Religion is a subset of ideology, and ideology is a set of beliefs about how how the world is and how the world should be. Capitalism is an ideology. Communism is an ideology. Scientism is an ideology. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and so on are religious ideologies.
The boundary between the two is weak. Communism and Scientism make metaphysical statements. Communism and Scientism generally state that there is no soul, there is no afterlife and there are no supernatural beings.
Capitalism believes that people, out of self interest (greed and selfishness), act in ways that create welfare for the majority. This is a radical belief, held by almost no one and no other belief system in history. It also believes in unlimited growth. The combination of these beliefs is going to wind up killing a few billion people.
But the worst religious belief is almost certainly “there is an afterlife, and only thru this religion can you achieve it. If you don’t worship this religion you will be tormented for eternity after death.”
This belief creates monsters. If there is only one way to avoid eternal torment, then ANYTHING is justified. This is one reason why Christianity and Islam have a history of atrocities. Charlemagne, a hero to most in the West, spent much of his life force-converting “pagans.” In one case he forced ten thousand Saxons to accept baptism, then immediately killed them all. Had they lived, after all, they could have gone to their priestly class and un-converted.
The mass burnings in the New World, primarily by Spain, were justified by the belief that burning pagans would let them get into Heaven. Sure, burning alive is one of the most horrible deaths possible, but what’s that compared to an eternity of torment? Burning someone alive to avoid Hell and get them into Heaven isn’t just not evil, it’s a truly good and moral act: to not burn them would be evil. If there’s something you can do to ensure you or someone else avoids eternal torment, it’s always justified.
This is the most extreme of “only my way is the good way” beliefs common in ideology. We’ll discuss this in more general terms later. It isn’t always wrong to say “some actions and beliefs and ideologies are good and others are evil”, it is always wrong to say “only this set of beliefs is right and all other sets of beliefs are wrong.”
The distinction is fine, but important. It’s also one that many moderns reject.
For those advising an attempt to take over the Republican Party. I think candidly that that is even less likely than taking over the Democratic Party.
I live in, and am involved in local politics and environmental activism in, a region that, despite being in a very Blue State, is quite conservative, with some of the towns around here reliably voting for GOP candidates — in Massachusetts — at rates above 60 and 70% (other towns are more reliably Democratic, these differences are fascinating at a sociological level, and quite complicated).
I am in coalition with these conservatives on a critical important local issue where 90 percent of the populace agrees that a corporation is lawless and must be stopped. I grew up with some of them, and know them well, we are of the same small communities (this is also true of the liberals, the left, the non-engaged, the right-wing and left-wing online street fighters, many more — these are smaller towns for Massachusetts, with one exception).
Despite this coalition, or rather because of it, and dealing with them, I think it’s unlikely they are going to be a good candidate for entryism. For one thing, they are viscerally and often just off the wall in their hardcore anti-Communism and 1950s-era redbaiting.
The other thing is that they have as kind of their Ur-Principle the idea that Private Property Is Sacred (this is, as Ur-Principles so often are, is frequently and seemingly without dissonance contradicted by them in the actual practice of their lives). They do not distinguish between the person owning a small cottage and Elon Musk; for them, private property is private property.
A third factor is that fifty years of talk radio, cable news, and now Facebook and other social media have marinated them in a culture of querulous suspicion and anti-reason; they fall for just lunatic conspiracy stuff, and while some of them are just naturally intelligent enough that they fight through this and make real contributions to our local governments, it’s still their native idiom, if that makes sense (like, believing basically every election is stolen; despite the minimizing of certain interlocutors of Trump’s misdeeds, this is a real one, this baseless accusation of fraudulent or stolen elections — this is a corrosive rhetorical move, and one that makes the actual practical life of our bodies politic in the real world more difficult.
Nor is Russiagate apposite here; Russiagate was nonsense, but Hillary Clinton, of whom I am not a fan, did show up to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration; she did acknowledge the vote totals were correct, and that she legitimately lost in the electoral college; this is _categorically_ different than Trump’s conduct in 2020-21).
A fourth factor: they genuinely dislike Difference and a pluralistic and open society; many of them are openly bigoted towards LGBTQ people. We had a Klan presence here in southeastern Massachusetts into the 1950s, and that impulse didn’t just go away. Indeed, my own Town’s High School, from which I graduated 20+ years ago, had a significant problem with what can only be described as anti-Semitic and Nazi-sympathizing public behavior by the football team. We have the local evangelical holy rollers running for School Committee (in Plymouth, Mass.) talking about banning books, in just total disregard for the U.S. and Mass. Constitutions.
They are also obsessed with culture war nonsense. Just, like, obsessed.
The thing I should emphasize: the conservatives are often extremely intelligent, and will see any kind of entryist from a mile away. I should also note I actually quite like many of them at a personal level; I don’t think they are bad people (some are, but not most), just misguided and wrong on many issues (sometimes, they are right, and I take coalition with them where it presents itself; this is natural in the parliamentary environment of Town Meeting societies).
Finally, Republicans have their own Machine which is even worse than the Democratic Machine, which at least has to pretend to some notion of human well-being. The GOP Machine in my experience down here are connected to local business elites and are also canny, and just like, wildly amoral, and won’t give up the party without a fight.
So, taken together, and played out across the country, I think it will be extremely difficult to engage in any kind of Left entryist strategy in the Republican Party.
My own strategy is premised on local politics — I live in a directly democratic Town Meeting form of government, and if I want to write a statute for the Town, I can get myself and nine other inhabitants of the Town together and put it before the Annual Town Meeting. That’s a lot of power, so I exercise what power I am able to in order to advance the goals of the Commonwealth thought that guided the authors of the Massachusetts Constitution, and, at a larger level, the American Revolution.