E-mail a friendMax Blumenthal
airdate October 5, 2009
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and blogger, whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in such prestigious publications as The New York Times and on The Daily Beast Web site, where he's senior writer. His honors include the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Award for his investigative print journalism and the Online News Association's Independent Feature Award for an investigative article on Salon.com. Blumenthal's first book is Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.
Blumenthal explains how the GOP has been subsumed by the Christian right. (2:36)
Full Interview (11:31)
Max Blumenthal
Tavis: Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist who serves as the senior writer for "The Daily Beast." His new book recently made its debut on "The New York Times" best-seller list. The book is called "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party." Max, nice to have you on the program.
Max Blumenthal: Great to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. This title, "Republican Gomorrah." We obviously think of Sodom and Gomorrah when we hear that title. That's a strong indictment - Republican Gomorrah.
Blumenthal: And when we think of the Republican Party, we're supposed to think about the pro-family Party but we've seen all these scandals that have poured out, that poured out during the Republican experiment with the Republican Congress of Tom Delay, the Hammer, and George W. Bush.
We saw all the criminality that poured out of the Republican Congress, and that's why I chose this title, because it sort of contradicts the image that the Republican Party has tried to put out as it pandered to the Christian right.
Tavis: You have a book here that answers this question in greater detail, but for the sake of time tonight, what happened?
Blumenthal: What happened? Well the Republican Party was top-heavy for a long time and it was subsumed by the Christian right as it sought to increase its grassroots base, win elections throughout the Sunbelt and the West in places it couldn't win before. But what they did was they brought a radical movement into the fray, a movement that wound up substantially taking over the party, so that the big tent party of Dwight Eisenhower, which could have held power on a national level, has turned into the one-ring circus of Sarah Palin.
Tavis: Tell me more about how, of all the constituencies - and they're not as vast, of course, as the Democratic Party is in terms of all the people, the varying people they serve - but of all the constituencies the Republican Party does serve, how and why did they concede this much power, authority, control, to the Christian conservative wing of the party? Why them?
Blumenthal: Yeah, the Christian right probably only comprises about 12 percent of the population, but they exert a disproportionate influence because they're active on the local level, they're active at the state level, and they're active at the national level. They've had a 20-year, 30-year long campaign to take over the federal government.
What wound up happening was they just took over one party which was dominant for a long time, but in doing so drove that party far outside the mainstream. At the same time, the Republican Party has nowhere else to go. These are the people that hammer in the yard signs in Republican elections, these are the people that do the bulk of the work and they have no other base to turn to.
That's why on 9/12, on the National Mall, with this teabagger movement, we saw essentially a sea of Whiteness and the Democratic Party is increasingly diverse in a country that's just demographically more variegated than ever before.
Tavis: Did the Christian right wing of the Republican Party seize control, S-E-I-Z-E, or did the leaders of the party cede, C-E-D-E, control to them?
Blumenthal: Well, you have to remember that this is a movement that comes out of the battle to stop integration in the Deep South. Jerry Falwell was deeply involved in railing against Martin Luther King from the pulpit, and through a character I talk about in my book, Francis Schaeffer, really fascinating theologian, Falwell and the Republican Party learned that they could use abortion as a wedge issue to take power and to involve Evangelicals and Catholic conservatives in politics at a time when the Evangelical movement was de-politicized.
So they were able to win a lot of elections, but as the country becomes increasingly diverse and people become repelled by spectacles like the Terry Schiavo affair and repelled by the extremism that's coming out of the Republican Party, the Christian right exerts unprecedented dominance over the GOP, but at the same time the GOP is more marginalized than it's been in a generation as a result of that dominance of the Christian right.
Tavis: Talk to me about the regard, or the lack thereof, that this particular movement has for the notion of separation of church and state, because that's always fascinating to me.
Blumenthal: Well, I trace my history, the history in my book, which is really sort of the history of how the Republican Party got to where it is, to a character named R.J. Rushdoony, who I think provided the blueprint for the Christian right of the society that they hoped to create.
And he mapped out a plan for replacing the federal government with a biblical theocracy in which healthcare, road-building and schooling would be replaced by the church, and people like me, people who are religious minorities, would be second-class citizens.
The criminal justice system would be replaced by Leviticus case law, which means that disobedient children, adulterers, blasphemers, abortion doctors, would all be executed. You could call it the Christian right's trigger option, if you will.
And he had an enormous influence on the Christian right as it moved from the pews into the streets. He's so controversial they don't want to talk about that influence anymore, but this is a movement which controls the Republican Party and which has at least a soft theocratic agenda.
Tavis: When I look, Max, at what's happened to the party - and again, you write about this extensively in this new text, "Republican Gomorrah," but when I look at it you can't make the statement - one can't make the claim that they're stupid, because they were bright enough for all the years of Reagan and before Reagan, this southern strategy worked rather well with their support.
So you can't call them stupid when it comes to winning, because they've got a good track record of having won for a long period of time. You can't call them blind, I don't think - they can clearly see what's happened to their party. It's pretty obvious what's happened to the party, so they're not blind.
I'm trying to understand, then, what their view is on what's happened to the party that they've helped build, and maybe it's that they no longer care about winning. They think Armageddon is coming, and they'd rather stand on their truth, stand on their principle, and winning doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe I'm being naïve here. I'm just trying to understand how they could not see what's happened to the party as we sit here tonight.
Blumenthal: Yeah, I think the party's been so substantially taken over by this radical movement that has no capacity for self-reflection that instead of going through a rebuilding process like a losing team normally does, they've doubled down on failed talent like Sarah Palin.
Tavis: But why? That's my question, though. I had a long way of getting into it - but why? Again, they're not stupid, they can see this. Why double down on somebody like Sarah Palin, who most Americans dismissed the last time around, and now they're rallying around her like she can really take Obama out three years from now. What are they missing? What are they not getting here?
Blumenthal: I just think they have nowhere else to go, that the Democrats have taken all the moderate Republicans, for example, John McCain won 20 percent - received 20 percent less moderate Republican votes than George W. Bush did in 2004. Bush is the conservative and McCain was supposed to be the moderate, so they really have nowhere else to go but the right.
So they're using these arguments about death panels, about the healthcare reform bill funding abortion, giving money to undocumented immigrants, because they're just pandering to the base.
Tavis: But there is always someplace else to go, and that someplace else is to change strategy. Why not change strategy?
Blumenthal: Well, that would be the answer. (Laughter) But when I talk to Republicans and when I talk to people on the National Mall who are in the Republican grassroots, they seem to believe that they are in the majority.
That's why they were convinced that there were 1.5 million of them on the National Mall, and Dick Armey, the corporate lobbyist and former House Republican Majority Leader, cynically told the crowd that they had that many people out there protesting Obama when in fact it was 60,000, to give them the impression that they were the real majority, just being held back by this narrow cabal of liberal elites who really don't represent the majority.
When in fact the sun is setting on this movement and what we're hearing from them is a death rattle, but a death rattle can be very profound and very dangerous.
Tavis: So what does the party, then - let me set them aside, they being the Christian right, for the moment; let's set them aside. What does the party do now?
Blumenthal: The party is the movement now. There's no separation between the party and the movement, and we've seen people like Charles Grassley, who used to be considered a Republican Party elder, who used to convey a sense of integrity, echo a charge that first emerged from the lunatic fringe cult of Lyndon LaRouche, then was echoed by Sarah Palin on her Twitter account, that Barack Obama planned to implement death panels to pull the plug on grandma and the severely disabled; that he would basically reinstitute Hitler's T-4 program.
Charles Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee in charge of negotiating the healthcare reform bill for the Republicans. So when you see a party elder like that, 6-4-3, from LaRouche to Palin to Grassley, when you see a double play like that, you know that the party is in deep trouble. It's been marginalized, and the movement is the party.
Tavis: I've already asked you, Max, and you've answered in detail the how question - how this happened - with the history included. I guess the question now is what do you make of the fact that it happened so fast? It was literally just days ago, a few years ago, but literally just days ago that Karl Rove and George Bush were going into the White House and Rove was saying that he had a plan for Republicans to rule forever (laughter) into the future. It crashed pretty fast. Why so quickly?
Blumenthal: Pride comes before the fall. I think that this party was broken in 2000, and if Al Gore had won, if George Bush wasn't installed by a 5-4 vote on the Supreme Court, it would have been broken. Then we saw 9/11 happen, and 9/11 propelled this country momentarily into a conservative mood and it electrified the domestic agenda of the Christian right, which would have been otherwise marginalized, and George W. Bush would have been a one-term president if it weren't for 9/11.
So I think this movement was broken before, but it took some time for first of all the media to start reporting on it. The media's been derelict. And second of all, for the American public to come to its senses and see how radical the movement that controls the Republican Party really is.
Tavis: I got 30 seconds to go here. Is the conclusion, then, that there is no hope for the Republican Party? Because that would suggest that Democrats, back to that Rovian formulation, are going to rule for a long time to come.
Blumenthal: It really falls to the Democrats to implement a progressive agenda, and I think there's a lot of pressure on the Democrats because the conservative movement is not dead, it's undead. It's like this zombie lurching at Obama, intoning, "Brains," and all it can do is attack his agenda, create chaos, make rumors about death panels.
But Obama has to realize that this is a progressive moment. He can't pass the healthcare reform bill with mandates and no public option. He could sabotage himself, there are external events that could energize the Republican Party again, so it's really a moment for the Democrats and progressives to seize on, because this movement has driven the Republican Party outside the American mainstream and the American mainstream, while it may shy from labels like liberal or progressive, polls seem to reflect that they favor a public option, that they favor a public agenda.
Tavis: We read him on "The Daily Beast." His name, Max Blumenthal. His new book, already on "The New York Times" best-seller list, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party." Max, nice to have you on the program. Thanks for your work.
Blumenthal: Great to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you.
Back to October 5, 2009