Ryan Sager belatedly jumps aboard the
elite pundit bandwagon:
The real McCain, whoever that is or was, may still believe that
major swathes of the Religious Right represent "agents of
intolerance" in our politics. But he has decided to stake both
his election and the Republican Party's future upon them-from
the barely coded racial refrain of "Who is Barack Obama?," to
the rallies with shouts of "terrorist" and "kill him," to the
corrosive choice of pipeline-prayer Sarah Palin as his running
mate and heir apparent.
Elsewhere, Sager refers to Christian conservatives as "the worst
elements" of the Republican coalition. Sager has
monomaniacally pushed his idea that the support of
evangelicals is bad for the GOP, and that Christian conservatives
and libertarians have no common interests. I vehemently disagree.
(See my columns on the
immorality of the welfare state and "libertarian
populism.")
A limited-government outlook has a strong appeal to
traditionaiists. The problem is Sager's visceral loathing of
those he describes as "the rural, the southern, the Evangelical"
-- i.e., Red State voters. In his quest to demonize hillbilly
holy rollers, he blames them for anything he doesn't like. For
instance, anyone who's ever attended the annual March for Life in
Washington knows that the backbone of the pro-life movement is
Catholics. And Catholics were also the most interested in the
Terri Schiavo case. But because Sager conceives both pro-life
politics and the Schiavo episode to be bad for the GOP,
he attributes these to Protestant evangelicals.
Prejudice against stereotypical "dumb hicks" in flyover country
is at the core of Sager's argument, and it leads to a profound
misreading of the Republican Party's problems.
