Kathleen and the Scary God-People
One of the inevitable consequences of a political party suffering an electoral butt-whoopin' is the wave of smarter-than-thou lectures from its pundit class explaining how to "fix" the problems that lead to such disaster. Sometimes this is a healthy exercise. Frequently it's thoughtful. Regularly it's at least earnest.
But now and then it's just there to fill the empty space because... well that's what one does when one is a pundit and one's party has just been whooped. We're getting a lot of that this post-election season - aimless chattery in which one pundit or another pretends a personal bias or pet peeve is secretly the key to reforming the entirety of the conservative movement and leading the way back to electoral success.
And as long as we're talking about Kathleen Parker...
Let's take a look at her latest attempt to make sense of her previous nincompoopery. Today she tries to define "oogedy boogedy," a phrase she used in a previous column of the aimless chattery & personal bias sort, as serious political commentary.
Before we go in I'll get my own biases out on the table:
1. KP's original "Oogedy Boogedy" column wasn't a piece of serious political commentary. It was so clearly intended as provocative I more than half believe she was just mooking for attention. But in order to avoid saying something like, "I was wrong," we now get the attempt to spin it. Or beat it into the ground. Or whatever she thinks she's doing.
2. I had never heard of Kathleen Parker until she got briefly famous for hating on Sarah Palin. She didn't offer much serious political commentary then either. She simply joined the fashionable class that gave Barack Obama a complete pass on his sketchy record of non-accomplishment, while feigning cosmopolitan-set outrage over Sarah Palin's lack of experience. I didn't then and still don't think the right needs its own catty commentator a la Maureen Dowd.
3. I'm chiefly interested in Kathleen Parker only because others I read regularly have opinions about her stuff from time to time. If they stopped mentioning her, I'd forget her in the space of a week.
Anyway, let's look at her latest effort to fill-the-void in a world desperate for her wisdom:
She starts out by acting like she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy" and trying to explain how it appeared, Athena-like, from her noble brow. This would be easier to take seriously if it wasn't common knowledge that the phrase "oogedy boogedy" has been used as a comic euphemism for "scary" for at least several decades now. As she used it in exactly this manner, it wasn't really difficult to understand.
So let me clue in KP why so many of her fellow pundits feigned ignorance about what she meant in using the term: They were trying to be nice. They didn't want to say, "KP is full of crap." So they pretended you must have some secret meaning other than the very obvious and stupid one in using the term.
Let's look at the original quotation to see if any of that was necessary:
And now her current re-iteration:
What Kathleen Parker was saying is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.
What she's saying now is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.
It really doesn't matter how artfully she spins the statement, the qualifiers, or demographic and polling information she apparently thinks bolster her case. We're confronted with the basic stupidity of someone recommending a political party alienate a large and reliable block of its grassroots support in order to better its chances to compete for OTHER blocks of voters to build upon.
I have no doubt some non-GOP voters are turned off by the notion of being associated with Bible-thumping evangelicals. I knew that before any pundit looked at polls in the wake of the last election. However, serious political thinkers look for ways to reach out and bring in new voters in some way other than wishing away around a third of one's party base, along with a disproportionately larger number of its grassroots activists.
The thing about political parties in America is that they are, by definition, big tents because we only have two major parties (we'll leave the tedious explanation about why our innumerable third parties don't matter for another time). This means that, far from ideologically coherent or hierarchical entities, underneath the basic organizing structure our political parties are coalitions. These coalitions come together because they have more in common than they have with those in the other party. They don't agree all the time. Sometimes the disagreements can even break a whole coalition apart. But the main point is that one cannot treat loose coalitions of self-interested entities like a centrally planned, ideologically coherent organization.
Therefore when KP says something like:
She's ignoring the fact that some people within the Republican coalition are only engaged in politics because of their religious interests. They speak in terms of faith and God all the time, and don't really feel like shutting up about it in order to make the Kathleen Parkers sharing their party happy.
If Kathleen Parker feels like making reasoned arguments without reference to her personal faith in advancement of socially conservative positions, she is free to do so (though it won't be like she invented this concept any more than she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy"). She is free to persuade others that this is the most effective way to make these cases - superior to arguments based on faith. Where she's absurdly over-stepping here is taking in the notion that this is - or indeed that it ever can be - the only way for such arguments to be advanced in the public sphere.
Less you think I'm not being fair to KP's full point above, I'll let her elaborate it further:
No memo is ever going to "reach all the pews." And even if it did, why would you expect all those scary God-people who read such a memo to fall into line, suddenly start acting like non-threatening sheep? Why expect a kind of bland uniformity in which one cannot distinguish a Jewish-atheist from a Born-Again Christian? Why expect one and only one kind of argument from people who approach such issues from a dizzying complexity of perspectives and life experiences?
Kathleen Parker's deep insight seems to be "Imagine a world in which no negative religious baggage could be used against our party in elections. Wouldn't that make it easier to attract the kind of voters turned off by that?" Yes it would, Kathleen. And if all black voters had suddenly swapped parties because of Bush's appointments of Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, we might have more easily picked up a few more Congressional seats in urban areas. Meanwhile, back in the real world...
It would be one thing if Kathleen took the parts of her column asserting that reasoned arguments are more effective than faith-based arguments in advancing social conservative ends in the political sphere and made that her thesis. But, as she makes clear two columns running, that isn't her main point. Her main point is that we need to whip these scary God-people into a secular line, or at least shove them to the back of our metaphorical bus.
How can anyone with any serious education in American politics think in such crude and unrealistic terms, let alone persist in such thinking? The answer, I suspect, is that she doesn't. She's just trying to make her previous idiotic outbursts captured in print appear thoughtful. They weren't. She isn't. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?
But now and then it's just there to fill the empty space because... well that's what one does when one is a pundit and one's party has just been whooped. We're getting a lot of that this post-election season - aimless chattery in which one pundit or another pretends a personal bias or pet peeve is secretly the key to reforming the entirety of the conservative movement and leading the way back to electoral success.
And as long as we're talking about Kathleen Parker...
Let's take a look at her latest attempt to make sense of her previous nincompoopery. Today she tries to define "oogedy boogedy," a phrase she used in a previous column of the aimless chattery & personal bias sort, as serious political commentary.
Before we go in I'll get my own biases out on the table:
1. KP's original "Oogedy Boogedy" column wasn't a piece of serious political commentary. It was so clearly intended as provocative I more than half believe she was just mooking for attention. But in order to avoid saying something like, "I was wrong," we now get the attempt to spin it. Or beat it into the ground. Or whatever she thinks she's doing.
2. I had never heard of Kathleen Parker until she got briefly famous for hating on Sarah Palin. She didn't offer much serious political commentary then either. She simply joined the fashionable class that gave Barack Obama a complete pass on his sketchy record of non-accomplishment, while feigning cosmopolitan-set outrage over Sarah Palin's lack of experience. I didn't then and still don't think the right needs its own catty commentator a la Maureen Dowd.
3. I'm chiefly interested in Kathleen Parker only because others I read regularly have opinions about her stuff from time to time. If they stopped mentioning her, I'd forget her in the space of a week.
Anyway, let's look at her latest effort to fill-the-void in a world desperate for her wisdom:
She starts out by acting like she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy" and trying to explain how it appeared, Athena-like, from her noble brow. This would be easier to take seriously if it wasn't common knowledge that the phrase "oogedy boogedy" has been used as a comic euphemism for "scary" for at least several decades now. As she used it in exactly this manner, it wasn't really difficult to understand.
So let me clue in KP why so many of her fellow pundits feigned ignorance about what she meant in using the term: They were trying to be nice. They didn't want to say, "KP is full of crap." So they pretended you must have some secret meaning other than the very obvious and stupid one in using the term.
Let's look at the original quotation to see if any of that was necessary:
"To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh."
And now her current re-iteration:
"How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments.
That was and remains my point. It isn’t so much God causing the GOP problems; it’s his fan club."
What Kathleen Parker was saying is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.
What she's saying now is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.
It really doesn't matter how artfully she spins the statement, the qualifiers, or demographic and polling information she apparently thinks bolster her case. We're confronted with the basic stupidity of someone recommending a political party alienate a large and reliable block of its grassroots support in order to better its chances to compete for OTHER blocks of voters to build upon.
I have no doubt some non-GOP voters are turned off by the notion of being associated with Bible-thumping evangelicals. I knew that before any pundit looked at polls in the wake of the last election. However, serious political thinkers look for ways to reach out and bring in new voters in some way other than wishing away around a third of one's party base, along with a disproportionately larger number of its grassroots activists.
The thing about political parties in America is that they are, by definition, big tents because we only have two major parties (we'll leave the tedious explanation about why our innumerable third parties don't matter for another time). This means that, far from ideologically coherent or hierarchical entities, underneath the basic organizing structure our political parties are coalitions. These coalitions come together because they have more in common than they have with those in the other party. They don't agree all the time. Sometimes the disagreements can even break a whole coalition apart. But the main point is that one cannot treat loose coalitions of self-interested entities like a centrally planned, ideologically coherent organization.
Therefore when KP says something like:
"By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments."
She's ignoring the fact that some people within the Republican coalition are only engaged in politics because of their religious interests. They speak in terms of faith and God all the time, and don't really feel like shutting up about it in order to make the Kathleen Parkers sharing their party happy.
If Kathleen Parker feels like making reasoned arguments without reference to her personal faith in advancement of socially conservative positions, she is free to do so (though it won't be like she invented this concept any more than she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy"). She is free to persuade others that this is the most effective way to make these cases - superior to arguments based on faith. Where she's absurdly over-stepping here is taking in the notion that this is - or indeed that it ever can be - the only way for such arguments to be advanced in the public sphere.
Less you think I'm not being fair to KP's full point above, I'll let her elaborate it further:
"The glue that binds the GOP’s religious right — social issues, especially abortion — is not insignificant and doesn’t deserve to be dismissed. But nor should those issues be tied to scripture. Some religious conservatives understand this, but the memo apparently isn’t reaching all the pews.
They might take a cue from Nat Hentoff, a self-described Jewish-atheist..."
No memo is ever going to "reach all the pews." And even if it did, why would you expect all those scary God-people who read such a memo to fall into line, suddenly start acting like non-threatening sheep? Why expect a kind of bland uniformity in which one cannot distinguish a Jewish-atheist from a Born-Again Christian? Why expect one and only one kind of argument from people who approach such issues from a dizzying complexity of perspectives and life experiences?
Kathleen Parker's deep insight seems to be "Imagine a world in which no negative religious baggage could be used against our party in elections. Wouldn't that make it easier to attract the kind of voters turned off by that?" Yes it would, Kathleen. And if all black voters had suddenly swapped parties because of Bush's appointments of Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, we might have more easily picked up a few more Congressional seats in urban areas. Meanwhile, back in the real world...
It would be one thing if Kathleen took the parts of her column asserting that reasoned arguments are more effective than faith-based arguments in advancing social conservative ends in the political sphere and made that her thesis. But, as she makes clear two columns running, that isn't her main point. Her main point is that we need to whip these scary God-people into a secular line, or at least shove them to the back of our metaphorical bus.
How can anyone with any serious education in American politics think in such crude and unrealistic terms, let alone persist in such thinking? The answer, I suspect, is that she doesn't. She's just trying to make her previous idiotic outbursts captured in print appear thoughtful. They weren't. She isn't. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?
Posted by Doug Williams on
Friday December 5, 2008 at 2:10pm
