Given that it was published in 2009, a twenty year nadir of Red political fortunes, Max Blumenthal’s book “Republican Gomorrah” is surprisingly sad. This is a book by a very liberal guy that explores how the radical right took over the Republican Party, and he wrote it at a time when that takeover looked like serious and long term political poison. But with the exception of the occasional snarky sentence (e.g. describing the ultra masculine right wing version of everyone’s favorite carpenter as “Fabio of Nazareth”), there is no giddy triumphalism here. The book is stone faced and serious, and its tone is one of fascinated horror.
This is understandable, for the things Blumenthal describes are indeed horrible. In many places the horror stretches credulity, did conservative archfiend James Dobson really brag about abusing a dog? Did he write, in all sincerity, “Pain is a marvelous purifier”? Well, yeah, he did. Did Christian Reconstructionist and right wing intellectual godfather R.J. Rushdoony really believe that the Book of Leviticus should be enforced by the death penalty? Did his son-in-law advocate stoning people? Has president of the Family Research Council Tony Perkins raised money for a white supremacist organization? The answer to all of those questions is yes, and Blumenthal has the footnotes to prove it.
(Sensing that even a politically well informed reader might balk at some of the more outlandish antics of the right, the book has what may be the world’s most accessible citation index, with page numbers side by side with the sources. I can think of a huge number of non-fiction books I’ve read that would’ve benefited from copying this system.)
The main thread of “Republican Gomorrah” follows the rise of the radical right and documents the peculiar psychology of its leaders and adherents. That may sound a tad ambitious for a man who doesn’t have a medical degree, but there’s no other way to describe it. Starting with Dobson’s pain fetish and working from there, Blumenthal paints a frighteningly convincing picture of damaged people (literally, severe childhood trauma is a constant in the text) who find solace in authority and brook no dissent.
It’s that last part that’s the problem for the rest of us. If someone wants to flog themselves into eternity, that’s on them. But when someone thinks self flagellation should be enforced on the rest of society you have a political conflict, one that expresses itself in any number of ugly ways.
The brutal, inescapable, and incontrovertible conclusion of Blumenthal’s book is that there is no escaping the culture war. Indeed, everything is the culture war. The right wing political movement that infests today’s Republican Party began as a rebellion against miscegenistic schools. It’s been game on ever since federal funding was cut off to even “private” schools that idealized virgin white girls at the expense of lascivious, big dicked minorities. The denial of public money for schools that only the master race could attend made them friends; realizing that contraception and abortion freed women from the burdens of sex made the redemption minded hypocrites permanent allies. Whether it’s this book or one of Rick Perlstein’s anthropological endeavors, the underlying motivation is always the same: fuck the women and fuck the darkies, and clutch your pearls if the women ever fuck the darkies.
