While watching the news this
past week I heard portions of Romney’s now-famous quote that 47% of Americans
are unable and unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. As he was
talking (May, 2012 to a group of donors), his view of the world became pretty
clear and I had a brief flash of insight that suddenly provided clarity and
unity to the vision behind a lot of conservative rhetoric over the last 10-15
years. Suddenly I could see how the hopes of very wealthy fiscal conservatives
and the visions of very conservative and evangelical biblical literalists had
become joined. The vision explained to me the current agenda of these extreme
social conservatives and their alliance with big corporate interests and the
wealthy one-percent.
They want to return America to
its “glory days,” believing we are God’s gift to the rest of humanity. They
invoke this idealized remembrance of our past history. But when you look at
their vision, it is quite incomplete. In short, they adore the Pilgrims who
came here to establish a Christian nation. After a hundred years or so, they
wanted to unfetter themselves from the constrictions of the English crown and
establish a purer form of capitalism. These early Americans developed the
Declaration of Independence, won the Revolutionary War, and developed the
Constitution. At the heart of the current conservative movement is a belief
that we need to get back to those ideals, those social and individual moral
principles, and that form of purer capitalism.
What this remembrance forgets is
the very flawed implementation of this unified vision of these (mostly) white,
western Europeans. The Pilgrims didn’t come here to establish a Christian
nation. They came here to escape the European marriage of government and
religion and to practice their form
of religious freedom – one that unified their
local government with their concept
of morality. If you disagreed, they killed or disowned you. There were as many
different forms of religious ideals of godly government as there were colonies.
Their purer form of capitalism
was pretty much identical to that of England, involving an unbridled greed that
understood the need to establish a government that existed for the protection
of the country against enemies and for fostering unregulated business
interests. What were those interests? Wealth – in the form of money, land, and
minerals or raw resources.
In turn, this led to a
government-assisted wholesale genocide of our Native Americans, legalizing the
institution of slavery (where, in our Constitution a black male is defined as
being 3/5 of a human), the wholesale destruction of fur bearing animals, and the
theft of the underground mineral rights of small landowners as well as the
legal basis of banking, both based on the precedents of English Law.
But I thought England was
repressive? Well, the English form of religious intolerance was
repressive. The English form of capitalism that favored the landed gentry was
repressive. However, our form of religious intolerance
was okay; our form of government-assisted capitalism, which favored
corporations and share holders, was also spun to become accepted as being “heavenly
blessed.”
Somehow, over time and wishful
thinking, this vision of America successfully blended Christianity, the Bible,
religious morals, capitalism, corporate greed, the Stars and Stripes,
patriotism, and Caucasian western European puritanical morals into one huge,
inseparable ball of wax. This ball of wax seems to have fostered values of
fear, exclusivity, intolerance, and mistrust. That’s not a very pretty picture
of America nor of the god that truly wants it to become the shining light of
the world.
Continued in Part 2
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