Sherry Chandler

Sunday morning browsing

In Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons in the NYTimes, François Furstenberg reminds us both of the origin of the word terrorist (A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur) and of the fact that these original terroristes considered themselves the defenders, not the enemies, of liberty (not to mention equality and fraternity). Their manifestations sound familiar:

Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

And this does not even get us to Robespierre. It’s a good read.

In Rudy the Values Slayer, Frank Rich ponders how it is that a man whose social values are “indistinguishable” from Hillary Clinton’s is now the Republican front runner. He reaches a conclusion I’ve been espousing for some time, “evangelical” Christians are not all foaming-at-the-mouth religious nuts, not even Southern Baptists:

There are various explanations for [Giuliani's lead]. One is that 9/11 and terrorism fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak. But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

…

But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars’ demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals for today’s Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues.

Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin.

As it nearly always is, Rich’s writing in this piece is a joy and I recommend you read the whole piece.

On a somewhat related note, I was struck earlier this week by a post at Political Animal, God and Mammon, Part 2, that draws attention to results of a Pew Global Survey showing that

As people get less religious, they get wealthier. Or perhaps the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else behind both trends.

He has the scatter plot to prove it, which he picked up from Andrew Sullivan, who in turn got it from the original Pew report. Says Pew:

The survey finds a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status. In poorer nations, religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.1 This relationship generally is consistent across regions and countries, although there are some exceptions, including most notably the United States, which is a much more religious country than its level of prosperity would indicate. Other nations deviate from the pattern as well, including the oil-rich, predominantly Muslim — and very religious — kingdom of Kuwait.

Us and Kuwait, religious and rich. By their friends you shall know them.

Though I think Jesus considered religious and rich a sort of contradiction in terms.

We of the U.S.A. are also more intolerant than most other rich nations and more likely to want to use our army to get our way.

So I just have to wonder a little bit what religion it is we practice. Doesn’t look like the Christianity I was taught in a Southern Baptist Church.

Or maybe, given the contradiction with Rich’s article, what we need to wonder is who it is Pew is polling.

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