I think my initial assessment of Rick Perry as a radical theoconservative was off the mark. Or perhaps it wasn’t wrong so much as misfocused: Perry clearly believes all of the insane things he said at his infamous prayer rally, but the diligent work of other journalists has convinced me that tearing down the wall between church and state is not his driving passion.
Instead, Perry’s primary motivation seems to be tearing down the wall between business and state, which is more pernicious in the sense that it is actually possible to do serious harm to the country that way. After playing with it as a thought experiment for a few months, I’m beginning to be convinced that Randian, deregulatory economic conservatism is far more dangerous than theocratic conservatism. There is a kind of built-in limit to how far religious conservatism can get in a world of political elites; eventually, the defund-Planned Parenthood-teach-intelligent-design crowd will always be blocked from the center of power. But Reaganomics and even more radical forms of fiscal madness have been able to capture some of the country’s brightest minds and most prestigious universities. It has been ushered into the halls of power in ways that were previously inconceivable.
This is why the spectacular end of Perry’s campaign at the Michigan debate last night offered such catharsis—why it was such an unqualified win for America. As Matt Taibbi and others have shown, Perry is one of the most shameless crony capitalists in modern politics, lacking a single shred of public spiritedness or interest in serving the American people. While he sold off my home state piece by piece to foreign corporations and domestic billionaires, some of whom were under criminal investigation, he openly touted his ignorance of policy and ignorance in general. (“I wouldn’t understand it anyway,” he told one Texas commissioner, explaining why he didn’t want to hear the details of a particular piece of legislation.)
It really doesn’t happen often anymore, especially not in the Republican Party, that proud ignorance and shameless sleaze are treated as they should be. This primary has and continues to be an orgy of arrogant idiocy, where crass slogans stand in for ideas, where the frontrunner has never heard the names of most of the countries he will be negotiating with as president, and the only viable candidate has to lie constantly and shamefully to avoid being considered a socialist.
The rest of the pack will still be carrying the torch, and people like Steve King and Jim DeMint still have seats in Congress. But last night, as the whole world watched, the biggest villain in the race and possibly in the whole of American politics nosedived into a giant, gaseous ball of flames and thick black smoke. And it felt amazing.
David Sessions
David Sessions is the founding editor of Patrol. He covers religion for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and is a graduate student in the Draper Program for Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. He can be reached at hdavidsessions at gmail dot com.
9 Responses to There is a God
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I couldn’t agree more. Rick Perry’s Texas career is the perfect example of what happens when the desire for partisan (and personal) advantage is put ahead of all principles of civility, collegiality, and good government.
One day, David, you’ll wake up and find that your ideological enemies and your ideological friends in national (and even state) politics are MUCH more alike than you would feel comfortable admitting now.
Politicians of all stripes pay organizations and corporations with taxpayer money in the form of tax breaks or direct payments (subsidies, contracts, etc.) with the aim of collecting a bit of that money back in the form of campaign donations. The current administration seems to prefer large banks (especially Goldman Sachs), labor unions, and environmental companies.
Why do you think that groups give money to political campaigns? Because it’s a great investment. It’s hardly isolated to Rick Perry. Even if he were “the biggest villain in the race and possibly in the whole of American politics” (unlikely), it would be him in first and everybody else in a remarkably close second.
This isn’t to excuse Rick Perry, as I don’t have to. Christ has already paid the price for Rick Perry’s sins as he has for mine. It is simply disconcerting to me to see you so closely following Saul Alinski’s playbook (Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.) rather than pointing out the broken nature of our government and the people running it. It will be hard to see past your ideology and realize that it isn’t just “the other side” that is guilty of astounding acts of “crony capitalism,” but even the people you agree with on policy are most likely utterly corrupt.
Scott, I wouldnt disagree with any of that. There is simply no way you can avoid being tarnished by this absurd, dysfunctional system. Though the GOP is mostly responsible for the unprecedented influence of money and special interests in politics, both sides have perpetuated and benefited from it. I’m no fan of the Democratic party…I’m not sure who you think my “ideological friends” are. But if you knew them, you would know they are equally outraged with Obama and his party as they are with the right.
But I must say, Perry makes even the dirtiest politicians look like public heroes. If his political sleaziness is equalled by anyone else with his stature, I’m not aware of it.
“Though the GOP is mostly responsible for the unprecedented influence of money and special interests in politics, both sides have perpetuated and benefited from it.”
How do you figure that the GOP is “mostly responsible” for any such thing? I would argue that the “left” tries to hamstring the ability of the “right” to raise money, and vice-versa. Neither side wants to get money out of politics – they just want to get the other guy’s money out of politics.
“I’m no fan of the Democratic party…I’m not sure who you think my “ideological friends” are.”
I’m assuming that they are pro-Planned Parenthood and anti-intelligent design, as those were the two specific issues you named in this article. From the tone of your articles (as well as the targets of those articles) I’m pretty sure that you find much more common cause with the Democratic party than with the GOP. That’s totally fine, by the way, and it’s ok to admit. But it’s a fallacy to continue to ascribe greater evil to one side than the other, as both sides have plenty.
Does Perry make John Corzine look like a public hero? Or Rod Blagojevich? Or William Jefferson? I’m no fan of Perry, and that Rolling Stone article is particularly devastating, but I doubt his level of sleaziness even rises to the level of “uncommon.”
Corzine and Blago are some strong counterexamples; I will stand corrected on that. Although both were guilty of criminal or near-criminal actions, neither of them ran a pay-to-play system quite as systematically as Perry has from his first day in politics.
I won’t back down, though, from the claim that the GOP is *much* more responsible for the influence of lobbyists and special interests than the Democrats. Letting businesses write their own rules is part of conservative ideology and reached a zenith under the Bush administration. It marked the first time lobbyists were literally writing their industries’ own regulations as a matter of course – and Republicans publicly insisted there was no ethical problem with that. Liberals (at least ideologically) have always been much more insistent about keeping business at arm’s length from governors and regulators.
This is not saying that both parties aren’t beholden to interests and need dirty money to operate, but Republicans in particular have zealously opposed measures to clean up government, and have as a matter of ideology helped bring special interests to the center of Washington. But both sides have benefited from this and neither is committed to ending it – so I don’t see why it’s that big a deal.
Honestly, I might find common ground with individual Democrats more than the GOP, but the same is not true of their party. The Democratic Party is just a slightly more humane capitalist party, and thus there is very little ideological difference between the two. I feel fairly comfortable in saying there would be virtually zero difference between a Mitt Romney presidency and a Barack Obama presidency. From the point of view of most Americans, both parties will fuck you, but the Democrats just might do it a little more gently.
You certainly have a point if you confine your argument to “business,” but when you add “special interests” to the mix, you lose me. Democrats have been letting labor unions write labor union rules for 50 years. The NEA writes (or “suggests”) national education regulations. Trial lawyers block tort reform. Again, Democrats want to “clean up” government by about 50% – the 50% that doesn’t help them. I can assure you that Republicans would love to get all that “dirty” union money out of politics.
If you come at the argument from a position that business money and ONLY business money is dirty, you certainly have a short path to the belief that Republicans are dirtier. Fair enough, because they ARE dirty, but if they’re any dirtier, it’s only because you’re measuring with calipers.
And you and I would probably disagree over whether it’s humane to keep poor inner-city students from using government education spending to go to markedly better private schools, or whether it’s humane to defund organizations dedicated to fighting human trafficking because they’re Catholic and therefore anti-abortion. But at least we’d disagree politely, so there’s that.
Also inhumane: that run-on sentence in my last paragraph.
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So you call Rick Perry Sleazy, and later in one of your comments you drop the f-bomb. Am I the only one who sees the problem here?