Implosion

When bleeding heart liberal Art Agnos became mayor of San Francisco around 1988, one writer predicted a short and unhappy tenure for a guy with crystal clear liberal credentials and a long political record. The problem Art will find, he wrote, is that the people who put him in power are inherent windmill tilters. They won't know how the handle real power. Eventually, they'll turn on themselves and each other, and suicidally overreach because they're too used to being one hill short of where they really want to be. They were right.

For a week now I've been looking at the Christian right's weird war against the mainly Republicans-appointed federal judiciary and wondering why it all seemed so familiar. It's Art Agnos all over again, only this time played out on the theofascist right.

The right should be at the height of its power. It's seen as handing the presidential election to Bush, and rallying enough voters to the polls to give the GOP more seats in Congress. So why are they acting so aggrieved?

They're really not comfortable with sitting in the big house. Their personal vision of themselves is that of an insurgent liberation force in an occupied land. The "enemy" is pervasive, in our schools, libraries and entertainment. Yet, even with their friends and allies in control of the national government, they couldn't get their way on the Schiavo case. Surely, there are still political forces outside their control which is frustrating them. Since the federal courts were designed by the Founding Fathers to expressly be outside political pressure, that must be the problem. Like all purported revolutionaries, the world only makes sense when there's a clear villain.

They also don't get that even in a free society you don't always get your way. That's the point of constitutional limitations on state power. You'd think good conservatives would understand this.
The problem is that the theofascist right just doesn't understand Freedom. Sure, we're free, they say, to Do the Right Thing. One of government's key goals in a free society is to establish frameworks within which people can make decisions. Issues like Schiavo, and whether to give birth, and when to end your own life, and when and where to read dirty books and which whom you want to love and lust with are all key choices free people should be able to make in a free society.

The theofascists won't allow this, because, by God and Jesus, you might choose the wrong thing. And that's not right. What kind of free society allows people to make choices like this? The only real choice is whether you're going to Lutheran, Baptist or Catholic services. As God and the (deist) Founders insisted, didn't they?

Along with their patrons, the GOP, they seem to be running scared. There's an air of weird desperation in what they're doing, as if they fear they're going to be swept away in the next strong wind. Federal judges, Social Security "reform", tear-down-the-U.N. appointments, everything but issues which resonate with real people in the real world. They can't just settle for solving actual stuff. They have to redraw the landscape in what they apparently see is the short time allotted to them.

So they run after silly stuff and make the mid-term elections look a lot better for my side. There's only one explanation. God has shown them the future and they ain't running it, so they've gotta act now.

Maybe it's His/Her special way of pre-torturing them.