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The great irony of the last 50 years of politics
23 Comments by January 12 12:00 PMHere’s something rare: an encomium to the “values voter” from a secular publication, who usually seem to think value-concerned voters are a burden to the democratic process.
One of the great political ironies of the past few decades is that the Christian Right has been much more successful than its political rivals at fulfilling liberal thinkers’ hopes for American democracy. Liberals built an array of well-funded public-interest groups such as Common Cause, Environmental Defense, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But most of these organizations asked little more of their supporters than checkbook activism, and some were entirely supported by foundations.
The Right, on the other hand, built genuinely grassroots organizations, including Operation Rescue, the Christian Coalition, and Concerned Women for America, whose members mobilized millions of disaffected evangelical citizens through church-based networks. In his famously despairing account of Americans’ civic involvement, Bowling Alone (2000), Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam conceded the point, without appearing to find much solace in it: “It is, in short, among Evangelical Christians, rather than among the ideological heirs of the sixties, that we find the strongest evidence for an upwelling of civic engagement.”
This was not the way things were supposed to turn out.
In some ways, then, the bohemoth of the “Christian Right” was what the New Left wanted to be. Fascinating. One of the many conclusions in this good piece at The Wilson Quarterly is that it was the New Left who wanted values to return to politics, but when the value that were returning were Judeo-Christian values, they decided those values belonged elsewhere.
Less is more
