Drained of the Social Gospel

Back at the beginning of this month I wondered why Senate Democrats, especially in the case of the FISA bill, have been unwilling or unable to stand up against Bush. I think I found an answer.

Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 partly through his ability to proclaim a new way through politics, a centrist approach that avoided the "extreme" liberal approach of the party. This effort was backed by the Democratic Leadership Council that had formed in 1985. It was the DLC that helped get the welfare reform of 1996 passed. You can learn more about the DLC here, though you'll see Wikipedia has banners all across this page warning that it isn't neutral, doesn't conform to quality standards, and uses too many weasel words.

The article that prompted my discussion proposed another purpose for the DLC -- a front for The Family, a secret powerful fundamentalist organization that has been influencing American politics for over 7 decades. I first encountered this group a couple months ago on reading a review of a new book about them.

I won't repeat a discussion of The Family here except to note it is very anti-democracy, non-partisan, and so powerful that Democrats (not just GOP) who want to get anywhere in Washington must at least acknowledge The Family and a few have even become Friends. Buckets of cash, access to power, and a sense that a Congressman got where he is through a combination of being better than the riff-raff and the modern equivalent of the Divine Right of Kings don’t entice just the GOP.

Whether the DLC is an official secular partner to The Family doesn't matter because DLC position papers are so similar to Family goals. The effect is to pull the party rightwards and sow so much dissent and contrary purposes in the party that the Dems can no longer get anything done. It is the members of the DLC who have been accused of being "Republican lite" or "wafflers without strong conviction."

One could look at the FISA vote as way of determining which senators are willing to support any legislation that is anti-democracy, whether or not it tramples the Constitution.

This describes DLC members and The Family:

"They share opposition to the New Deal rooted in a slavishly pro-business and radically free-market approach, a strident anti-Communism which has morphed into a pro-war jingoism driven by the needs of the military-industrial complex, antagonism to church-state separation based in a sense that an alleged decline in public morality stems from a lack of American civic religion and, underneath it all - as suggested by my statistical breakdown of Family/DLC votes on FISA, the DLC may even share to some degree the Family's political ethic holding ruling elites to be both superior to common folk and also above normal moral conventions and strictures. The Family promotes an ethos of hostility towards, or contempt for, democracy, populism and government transparency.

Association with The Family brings access to The Family's influence, to [Family leader] Doug Coe's database of Family members and friends, in the US but also around the globe, willing to pray together and help each other out in quiet, informal ways that rarely get noticed of publicized. It's an old-boys' network, under a denatured Jesus drained of the Social Gospel and refilled with an ideology maximally friendly and supportive of the status quo and the prerogatives of wealth and power.

More than that, the Family is an influence and an ideological ergot that poisons the bond between America's elected representatives and their constituents, because it tells the Washington politicians in the Family's prayer circles that they are the elite, the chosen, singled out by God, favored by God, above the rules and mores of the common folk. The Family is, in a sense, recreating a contemporary version of the Pre-Enlightenment Era Divine Right of Kings, and the recent U.S. Senate vote in favor of the new FISA bill, which grants American presidents yet greater authority under which to order the secret surveillance of American citizens, may well be, in part, a manifestation of that tendency. If many Americans wonder about a breakdown in the basic nature of American Democracy they should look to The Family."

The comment of a "denatured Jesus" sums it up quite well. They may call what they want a theocracy, but what they want is an oligarchy, rule by the elite.