Revealed religions have a basic structural problem when their revelations do not match up with observed reality. And when this gets pointed out to them, they tend to overreact. The Catholic Church, for example, burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, banned Copernicus' last book and kept Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life, all because these scientists had figured out that the Earth revolves around the run rather than the other way around, thus contradicting the revelation, and through it the theology, which was the basis of the Vatican's claim to power.
A similar mindset has taken shape among some political elements in the United States.
The classic American political example of the conflict between reality and theology is, of course, evolution; it, and abortion, are the two scientific advances that were the catalysts for moving previously uninvolved religious organizations into the political sphere in recent years. The anti-abortion and the anti-evolution crusades were the first efforts to use the political process to protect, and then to enforce, a specific religious doctrine. (First effort in this political cycle, I should have said; Pico reminded me of the obvious; religious groups on all sides have tried to push their beliefs into law throughout the history of the US and even the colonies. I meant that they hadn't been active for a long while, until 1973 and Roe v. Wade.)
Both crusades allowed some flexibility at first: Exceptions to abortion were allowed for rape, incest, or to save the mother's life; and the anti-evolution crowd wrestled with intelligent design (admittedly more of a tactical device than a true belief) and wavered between young-earth and old-earth-young-human versions of creation. But for each, there was and remains a core belief that cannot be contradicted, cannot even be questioned, regardless of what science discovers or reason requires. And gradually we have seen a hardening of position and a growing unwillingness to compromise, particularly on abortion, and a growing willingness to use violence.
This attitude of absolute fidelity to an ideology, irrespective of its relation to the real world, has now infected the secular realm; it has become the model for how the conservatives in this country relate to their own. No divine revelation is invoked in support of free-market principles, CEOs are not hailed as prophets or saints, and while there are occasional claims that the United States is the special recipient of the Almighty's blessing, by and large today's Republican party, and its Tea Party bastard child, do not invoke as a rule cite God as their justification for the right to rule the rest of the world. The mere obvious superiority of the United States is sufficient. (Bush did claim divine instructions, and Palin does, but it is not an argument one hears often outside of their circle. Dick Cheney, for example, never bothered to use it, nor do Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. And Mitt Romney wouldn't dare.)
Nonetheless, this political fundamentalism has taken on certain aspects of a religion, particularly in the way it views and punishes heretics - a heretic being defined as anyone who points out that reality does not agree with the theology.
The Republican party, and the Tea Party (which are not quite the same, for reasons that I'll get into in a minute), have locked themselves into a state such that whenever one of their own acknowledges that reality contradicts their ideology, or who is seen as insufficiently committed to the ideology, their reaction is not at all unlike the Vatican's when confronted with Galileo: An appeal to reality is a heresy that must be punished, perhaps by penitence, perhaps by excommunication. (House arrest and burning at the stake are, fortunately, beyond their power - for now.)
Penitence examples include Michael Steele's groveling before Rush Limbaugh after he dared to suggest Limbaugh's rants were not the best thing to ever happen to the GOP; Eric Cantor backing off a "listening tour" after Limbaugh questioned why Republicans needed to listen to anyone; and Sens. Snowe and Collins getting whipped back into line by Mitch McConnell when it looked like they might support the Democrats' extension of unemployment benefits. (Unlike some others here, I see the two Maine senators as - at least occasionally - wanting to do the right thing, but they keep getting hauled off to the woodshed for thinking that - which is, again, my point.)
Examples of the political equivalent of excommunication include Gov. Crist of Florida, who actually "excommunicated" himself by choosing to run as an indepedent, Sen. Bennett (R-UT), denied a shot at another term for being insufficiently conservative; and several GOP incumbents who lost primary challenges to Tea Partiers, again on the grounds that they were ideologically impure.
Which brings me to the Tea Party. An examination of its origins is going to provide opportunitites for a generation of history PhD candidates, so I'm going to limit myself here to saying that it was a not entirely spontaneously created movement intended to inject new life into a Republican party despondent after losing two elections, and also to harness the then (and very often still) inchoate anger and distrust that someone other than a Straight White American Christian Male (a SWACM) was now running the country. As is often the case with movements created out of anger and fear, the Tea Party quickly escaped its creators' grasp and, by use of anger and fear, has come to control the Republican party instead.
The elected leaders of the Republican party, by virtue of having had to campaign in general elections and then deal with the consequences, have at least a passing acquaintance with the real world, its limitations and compromises. By and large, Tea Party leaders and candidates have never been in political life, and so they approach politics with the zeal and the fanaticism of the newly converted. Anyone who disagrees with them, even if only to point out that reality does not entirely accord with their position, is declared anathema.
But the Tea Party is not - yet - a true theology. Though many of its adherents look to the Bible (in whatever translation) as their divine instruction manual, and though some Tea Partiers do claim the mandate of heaven, there is no sacred political text, no revelation. (In response to a comment I posted a few days ago, of which this diary is an expansion, New Rule suggested Atlas Shrugged, Going Rogue and other RW books as candidates, but none of these has yet been canonized.) Nor is there any priesthood, hierarchy, or other universally recognized authority to pronounce the doctrine. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and others are all vying for the title, but none has yet been awarded the mantle. In fact, the battles among the cast of characters bears some resemblance to the fight between the Jamesian and Petrine branches of the early Christian church, if not yet to the out-and-out warfare, up to and including assassination, between the Pharisees, the Saducees and the Zealots in Jerusalem even while the Romans were battering the gates. Already the Tea Party is fragmenting into factions at war not just with the establishment GOP but with itself.
Ultimately, the Tea Party and those Republicans who subscribe to its theologically-derived tactics, face the same problem as did the Vatican when confronted with Galileo: Reality will win. And they also face the problem that the political structure they have to use in order to gain power is based on the principle that reality wins.
The United States is unique in that it was founded, not on the basis of common religion, military conquest or tribal bonds, but on the basis of a political theory developed from Enlightenment principles. This is not the place to get into the details of Enlightenment philosophy; suffice it to say that the guiding principle of the Enlightenment is the supremacy of reason, particularly the supremacy of reason over revelation. The three branches of our federal government, the balance of powers, the division of rights and responsibilities, have many sources, but high among them is the idea that reasoned debate will yield the best solution to the nation's problems. The Founding Fathers did their best to minimize the impact of passion, of faction, of fundamentalism (though the word itself would not exist for another 150 years) on the processes of government.
As with all such theories, the practical implementation of Enlightenment principles has been less than perfect. Factions - political parties - formed almost immediately, and we had to fight a civil war to fix some of the flaws in the Constitution, a war whose causes and whose resolution still haunt American politics and society to this day. But the general principle remains that power rests in the hands of the people, and they lend - not give, only lend - it to those who can persuade them that they have the best, most reasonable, policies.
The Republicans cannot win the coming election by appeals to reason. For one thing, most of the country still recognizes that past Republican policies have failed: On the economy, on the Iraq and Afghan wars. I suspect that many in the GOP leadership are aware of this, and for that reason have calculated that their only hope is to make things so bad for Obama and the Democrats that the country will forget that it was Bush and the Republicans, their policies, that created the problems they want to stop Obama from fixing.
But the Republicans now have a problem of their own making: The Tea Party, which actually believes in its still rather inchoate ideology, believes that it really is the answer for what ails the nation, and, with all the fervor of the ideologically committed, will punish by rejection at the ballot box (mostly the primary, but even the general) any candidate who places reality over theology.
It is a threat that Democrats have already seen can be used to their advantage (as for example, ads reminding the voters of Joe Barton's good in actually spelling out the GOP credo that the corporation is sacred). But I think these are ad-hoc efforts, based on the revelation (!) of the moment. To really succeed, we need to understand the theological nature of the Tea Party and the way that theological attitude has subverted and converted the Republican party. The more the country sees the GOP (and Tea Party candidates running on the GOP line) as fanatical extremists insistent on sacrificing real-world solutions on the altar of their fanaticism, the more the country is likely to reject them.