{"id":5095,"date":"2005-08-27T10:23:24","date_gmt":"2005-08-27T14:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/5095.html"},"modified":"2005-08-27T10:23:24","modified_gmt":"2005-08-27T14:23:24","slug":"bushism-is-a-sect-bushites-are-nuts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bushism-is-a-sect-bushites-are-nuts-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Bushism is a sect; Bushites are nuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Ed Stephan<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of us here have said that the “uniter not a divider” split our families into hostile, hardly-speak-to-each-other pro-Bush and anti-Bush factions. I grew up in a New Deal household; my twin sister and I are still there in spirit, but my younger brother and sister are as rabid a pair of Bushies as you can find. If I email anything more opinionated than “nice weather here” I am guaranteed a deluge of pre-packaged right-wing slams in response. Family reunions have become impossible.<\/p>\n

I find this odd because, though widely scattered around the country, we have always been rather close. For the last decade we’ve exchanged daily emails covering all sorts of disagreements, without the vehement tirades of late. I divided from their religion without rancor. We were all raised Roman Catholic and I spent three years in a Franciscan seminary; when I rejected religion altogether they saw that as my choice. We respected each other’s preferences. Religion, career paths, child rearing, differences in material well-being, sports rivalries, wide varieties of cultural tastes — none of this has torn us apart. Only George W. Bush managed that.<\/p>\n

By way of contrast, my best friend in the neighborhood happens to be a Republican, practicing Roman Catholic, ex-marine, gun owner, retired small businessman. He and I enjoy lots of activities together, primarily woodworking, and we often engage in extensive discussions of religion and politics, without rancor and usually with a good deal of humor. How is it that he and I can discuss Bush easily while my siblings and I can’t?<\/p>\n

Politics, with my neighbor, is more like politics I’ve known all my life. When I lived in San Francisco I supported progressive candidates of both parties. We still had a lot of liberal (Earl Warren) Republicans and, except for the Burton machine which was extremely liberal, many Democrats there\/then were actually pretty conservative, especially on race. At one point I was a member of the Republican State Central Committee and the County Democratic Central Committee (technically not legal to be on both, especially since I wasn’t old enough to vote, but no one checked). I have always looked at politics as a kind of game: you win some, you lose some; give-and-take; you-scratch-my-back and I-scratch-yours; competition and compromise, a messy but necessary way of getting things done in the real world.<\/p>\n

The other night it hit me: the Bushies in my family aren’t interested in politics at all. The “frame” is completely different. Their behavior is more like a religious cult than a political bloc. Rather than thinking of them as “Bushies” or even Republicans (no one I know is really rich enough or mean enough to be a real Republican), I should be thinking of them as “Bushites” – like the Hutterites, or the Millerites or the Luddites. Sort of like some extreme vegans today. They have a strong sense of division between the Saved and the Damned, the Faithful and the Infidel (or Heretic); they are incapable of seeing warts or making compromises or even laughing.<\/p>\n

That’s what’s behind, I think, all the “unreality” we’ve talked about here at TCR, the Bushite “bubble mentality”. It’s not necessarily that they’re ignorant of history or science or logical reasoning. In fact, they can (selectively) quote it chapter and verse. It’s rather that they just don’t care about all that “reality-based” stuff. They love those cocooned, staged performances by their “bubble boy” because it re-enforces the purity with which they view their world. Protesters are excluded because … well, you don’t have protestors in church, do you? Forget that “lost sheep” business: Churches are for those who believe.<\/p>\n

In contrast to my own, my wife’s family is entirely unchurched. Whenever a distant relative would “get religion” (of a certain sort anyway) it was thought of as a mild form of mental illness. If this analysis is correct – and it’s the first time I’ve been able to make any sense of all that – then maybe there’s hope after all. Americans are largely pragmatic. They may not have as much sense of “the good life” as Europeans are reputed to have, but they also aren’t as bound by ideology. Hopefully, we’ll “come to our senses” before the current crowd, blinded by its peculiar faith in Bush, can do much more damage to us and our political heritage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Ed Stephan Many of us here have said that the “uniter not a divider” split our families into hostile, hardly-speak-to-each-other pro-Bush and anti-Bush factions. I grew up in a New Deal household; my twin sister and I are still there in spirit, but my younger brother and sister are as rabid a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}