Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part three): terrible times in the last days

Cover via Amazon

Last night I wrapped up the second half of Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.

This was fairly unpleasant reading: Blumenthal talked about the personal lives of various Christian leaders and their children, various Republican men and their sexual behavior, including various illegal activities, the question of whether a man who has sex with other men is a homosexual, etc. Then he devotes an entire section of the book to the significance of Sarah Palin.

This is pretty sordid stuff; I got really tired after a while of Blumenthal's descriptions of pornography, sex acts, etc. I suppose I should have expected this, however, from a book with the word "Gomorrah" in it.

I also got tired of Blumenthal's rhetorical flourishes; he often characterizes a person or organization organization in a way that isn't accurate and typically involves a value judgment or a particular interpretation of history (was Francis Schaeffer really the godfather of Dominonism? Is Youth With A Mission a Dominionist group? etc.) and footnote factual claims on each side of the flourish without doing anything to suggest why his characterization is accurate.

I finally decided that Blumenthal is just a muckraker, and I shouldn't expect anything more from this book. It's not a good book, Blumenthal doesn't apparently understand what he's seeing, he apparently doesn't understand that when James Dobson talks about "The Family" he's talking about an idealized nuclear family and not the group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast (or just doesn't care), he evidently thinks abortion and pornography are morally neutral or even beneficial, etc. etc.

All that being said, I wish I could find a version of this book that had been fact-checked a bit more carefully, and was written for a centrist rather than a left-leaning audience: he covers a lot of political ground, mentions, contextualizes, and connects a lot of names, and at least mentions every high-profile scandal in the Christian Right (and many in the Republican Party) for the last twenty years. He at least name-checks a lot of the things about the current state of the Christian Right that really bother me, including

• The connections between Sarah Palin and Third Wave Pentecostalism
• Anything and everything having to do with the Council for National Policy
• Purity balls (do these things really exist?)
• The continuing unacknowledged influence of Rousas John Rushdoony
• The various sexual scandals and the way Christian Right leaders respond to them
• The fact that the "movement" has more to do with making Christians into Republicans (and not, say, the other way around)

Unfortunately Blumental makes a mess of this book; I almost wonder if it was intended to inoculate people on the Christian Right against criticism, rather than it's apparent intent to diagnose a real problem on the right.

Blumenthal's basic premise, that the Republican Party is popular with the Christian Right (or perhaps the other way around) because the Christian Right alternately tells fear stories and offers the prospect of a "magic daddy" who can keep everyone safe at the cost of their freedom. This is unfortunately something Blumenthal assumes rather than proves, and it colors his analysis to its detriment. He doesn't compare it to any other fear and magic stories popular in political circles (collective action, labor unions, the New Deal, the Great Society, the free market, etc.) and as I've noted earlier he always seem to be reaching for connections that don't quite make sense.
 

I'm glad to have this book behind me; I'll probably take a break from religion and politics for a little while before wading back into my history of Fundamentalist Christianity/history of the Religious Right reading list again.

reading Going Rogue

Cover of Going Rogue: An American Life

I spent a chunk of the Christmas break reading the Sarah Palin memoir Going Rogue: An American Life.

I don't know what to call this book, exactly. It sort of fits into the shameless political autobiography category, sort of fits into the political tell-all category. I don't read much of either genre: this year I read the Gary Aldrich Clinton-era hit piece Unlimited Access, which fits neatly into the second category, and that's it, so I don't have much to measure it against.

This is an honest-to-goodness four-hundred pager, with lots of self-contained paragraphs that link up to tell the Sarah Palin story, in more or less five acts:

• Family history and life before she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska
• Time as mayor of Wasilla
• Year-plus as Governor of Alaska
• McCain-Palin 2008
• Life after the campaign and a little future direction

It's a surprisingly dense read: it's written in fairly plain English, but with a fair amount of political jargon and the technical language of running a town or a state: a lot of talk about the nuts and bolts of town council politics and state budget negotiations, not to mention the technical details of running for Vice President of the United States. While a lot of these books get written on the basis of many interviews with the help of a ghostwriter, I got the impression that this was the distillation of a large number of journal entries: the narrative is at times disjointed, and there are lots of little vignettes that really contribute nothing to the overall story. I realize that Governor Palin has a lot to say about a lot of things to several different audiences, but I wondered repeatedly if the book could have done with some editing, perhaps to put the political stuff in political chapters, the family stuff in family chapters, etc.

I don't know if I'm in the target audience for this book; I suspect not. I am inclined to take the implied explanation in the last section of the book: she left the Alaska Governor's office owing a half-million dollars, and the advance for Going Rogue was a relatively painless way to cover those expenses and leave a little nest egg for the Palin family. I got the impression that the book was written as the end of something, rather than a bridge to the next phase of something. Governor Palin definitely sounds done with the whole sordid business by the end of the book.

I found this book painful to read. Palin's tone is earnest and occasionally miffed, and that wears thin pretty quickly, and frankly I didn't (and don't) care about all the scores she needed to settle and records she needed to straighten. The family stuff got old too: I realize that it's very difficult to juggle a career with the demands of being a single mom (Palin's husband works on the North Slope, more than a thousand miles from the Palin home in Wasilla), not to mention the twenty-four-hour-a-day demands of being the Governor of even a state with relatively simple politics like Alaska, but after a while the middle three children sort of blur together (the oldest, Track, is in the military, and the youngest, Trig, has Down Syndrome), and I just didn't care whether somebody was being mean to her kids, etc.

I started reading this book believing that Palin was woefully unqualified to be President of the United States, and the McCain campaign made a snap decision that thrust her into the spotlight. I still believe both of those things, but I'd be less disturbed than I was a year ago if she were appointed to a Cabinet position or were elected to Congress. She espouses a clearly-defined set of values, she's beholden to certain interests, etc. I tend to believe that a President needs to have served in an executive capacity, involved in policy-making, and either started and successfully run a small business or served in the military; preferably both of the latter. Palin is somewhat qualified on the first two counts, and not on either of the latter two counts. If she'd served out her term as Governor of Alaska and been re-elected I'd be more comfortable voting for her as Vice President. I'm not sure what she'd have to do for me to be comfortable voting for her as President. Maybe if she got the Republican nomination and she were running against John Kerry.

I realize that qualifications are sometimes a poor predictor of performance as President: Bill Clinton was poorly qualified, as was George W. Bush, while George Bush had the best resume in Washington, and Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson may have been the best-qualified of any candidates in the last century. Good Presidents tend to surround themselves with a mix of political operatives and visionaries, and of course have good luck.

I really didn't get a feel for who would be in a Palin Cabinet. She overplayed her outsider status during the 2008 campaign section of Going Rogue, repeatedly complaining about how she was part of "the B Team" while the campaign was being run by "headquarters." It isn't even clear to me who would be her Karl Rove or her Lee Atwater, much less who would be her Raul Emanuel. If anything, her story lent more credibility to the notion that the 2008 campaign had little or nothing to do with Sarah Palin per se.

I hate to say it, but I can't recommend this book as a stand-alone Sarah Palin biography; I wish someone in the McCain-Palin camp had written a less personal account I could have written first, even if it was a work of hagiography on the order of The Nixon Nobody Knows.

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