Goldberg on the GOP's Newfound Fear of Religion

Michelle Goldberg has published an enlightening essay about the fear being expressed by many GOP pundits that the emphasis on religion in their party is getting out of hand. Apparently, Huckabee's religiosity frightens them. Here's a quote:

Over the years Republicans worked hard to organise Christian conservatives, sending consultants and cash to help turn churches into thousands of little political machines. They embraced figures like home-schooling guru Michael Farris, whose tiny, fundamentalist Patrick Henry College has been a top source of White House interns and GOP congressional aids. Farris started a group called Generation Joshua, directed by former Bush speechwriter Ned Ryun, which pays for home-schooled kids to work on Republican campaigns.

Now he's in Huckabee's corner. "It was the endorsement by prominent national home-school advocate Michael Farris that helped propel Huckabee to a surprising second-place finish in the Iowa straw poll in August," wrote the Washington Post on Monday. Home-schoolers, it said, "could also prove to be a powerful force on caucus night".

As mainstream conservatives recoil from what they've created, their cynicism is revealed - to us, but also, perhaps, to themselves. Obviously, some right-wing leaders always saw the pious masses as dupes who would vote against their economic interests if they could be convinced they were protecting marriage and Christmas.

But there there's also a certain species of urbane Republican who live in liberal bastions and, feeling terribly oppressed by the mild contempt they face at cocktail parties, imagine a profound sympathy with the simple folk of the heartland. They're like alienated suburban kids in Che Guevara t-shirts who fantasize kinship with the authentic revolutionary souls in Chiapas or Cuba or Venezuela. Confronted with the actual individuals onto whom they've projected their political hallucinations, disillusionment is inevitable. Whatever their nostalgie de la boue, the privileged classes never really want to be ruled by the rabble. They want the rabble to help them rule.