Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

Oral Roberts, inventor of the “prosperity gospel” movement, is dead. He was 91. Roberts began his evangelist career with the common, hackneyed huckster-healing act; but through national television broadcasting, Roberts would command the faithful to send him tens of millions of dollars.

Roberts himself was never as angry as John Hagee; he never led the cultural right in the same way as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Yet he was just as conservative — and equally famous, especially after declaring in 1988 that God would “call him home” unless viewers donated $8 million to his educational foundation.

At that point, Roberts had been asking viewers to donate money in return for prayer for decades. God, Roberts promised, would reward the donors with material prosperity. He called this “seed faith,” and it certainly seeded something. As Roberts was building his eponymously-named diploma mill, his form of tithing grew more popular in the charismatic movement. By the 1990’s it had bloomed into the prosperity gospel, with tens of millions of adherents.

Besides the theological problems posed by the prosperity gospel, there are the rational implications of superior piety rewarded by material abundance. As someone on WikiPedia has put it so well,

It implies both that people who are favored by God will be materially successful, and also that materially successful people are successful because God favored them. (Emphasis mine)

Surprisingly, this idea of wealth as a sign of divine approval resonated with Objectivism, the latter-day cult based on the science fiction rantings of atheist and sociopath Ayn Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum). The resulting mutant offspring are Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart, and other major culture warriors of the wingnutosphere.

Roberts probably never saw, and certainly never addressed, the mating of Objectivism and the prosperity gospel. He was retired in the final decade of his life as the two dissonant gospels of selfishness mixed in cyberspace. Nor did he initiate or encourage the pairing; Randists and gospel believers met through the auspices of Koch Industries, arch-funder of Kulturkampf organizations. Challenged, Roberts might have disowned the Randists.

Yet we must recognize him as the grandfather of a pernicious right-wing meme that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. Prosperity gospel lies at the heart of deregulation ideology; its blatant disregard of empiricism, like so much else in the wacky world of the right, is a dangerous delusion of faith-based politics. Roberts may never have wanted to be a culture warrior, but Kulturkampf is his legacy.

It’s not the first flaky behavior we’ve noticed in female culture warriors, is it? Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Miss California have a lot in common. All three are creatures of the strange nexus of right-wing evangelical movement conservatism and beauty pageants. Coincidence?

Adding: Prejean’s 15 minutes are officially over. Can’t we all just move along?

Flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne

Later today, Michele Bachmann (R-Crazyland) will bring Faux Noise and teabaggers into the halls of Congress in what she calls a “last stand” against health care reform legislation. In previewing this event, Talking Points Memo chronicles the language of desperation:

“The attitude we’re facing right now is very hostile,” Tea Party Patriot national organizer Jenny Beth Martin said… “The [members] don’t even want to hear from us on these issues.”

[...]

“There are no other rabbits to pull out of the hat,” Bachmann said. “This is the only thing I can think to do.”

[...]

(S)ome on the calls warned protesters to expect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring the full force of her office to stop them. Organizers spoke of rumors that Pelosi had ordered Capitol Police to force protester buses to park far away from the Capitol and told police to deny them the chance to deliver letters based on trumped up fears of “anthrax.”

At one point, protestors were told not to dress “too nicely” for fear the media would characterize them as a “Brooks Brothers riot,” after the astroturfed RNC protests that shut down the election recount in 2000.

“The SEIU guys will do their best to send people in suits in there to make it look like we’re spray-painting the Capitol or something,” one national organizer said.

Bachmann didn’t confirm the protesters’ fears, but she didn’t do much to alleviate them either. “Don’t bring your pitchforks — bring your video cameras,” she said to organizers. “That will absolutely scare your Representatives so much it will kill the bill.”

Bachmann called tomorrow’s protest a “desperate act,” but one that grew from a fear among the public of what might happen if the Democratic health reforms come to pass. “There’s no organization here,” she told the callers. “It’s a total organic act.” (Emphasis mine)

The last bit is funny, since Bachmann has “organized” this whole thing herself. The rest is a standard mix of fearmongering identity politics: “real” Americans bravely face the power of the state and throw themselves in the way of Teh Obamanon™ in an act of self-sacrificing patriotism. Which puts me in mind of what I wrote back in February about these culture warriors:

Kulturkampf is both means and end to the Culture Warriors. It is no coincidence that their target demographic has bought 60,000,000 copies of the apocalyptic Left Behind series: this is their political End Times. The stakes cannot be higher. What we’re seeing right now is a classic Last Stand,

a loose military term used to describe a body of troops holding a defensive position in the face of overwhelming odds. The defensive force usually takes very heavy casualties or is completely destroyed, while also inflicting high casualties on the opponent. Except in rare exceptions, such as Rorke’s Drift and the Battle of Longewala, the defending force is usually annihilated. (Emphasis mine)

Leaders invariably tout these suicidal battles as ‘the last hope.’ In the last stand of an authoritarian regime (Hitler’s Berlin being the obvious, though clichéd, example) the defending force is exhorted to believe victory is still possible, that the enemy can still be beaten. Indeed, Republican opposition to the stimulus bill represents exactly this sort of thinking.

But last stands usually fail. If they are truly dedicated, the survivors turn to guerilla warfare. Representative Pete Sessions, R-Tx, exemplified this last week when he favorably compared Republican opposition to the Taliban insurgency. This is what ‘legacy projects’ and think tanks are for: they are the madrassahs of future insurgency.

Unless Obama takes the stimulus package experience as a lesson in what the Republicans will do to his agenda — and gives up on the pipedream of ‘bipartisanship’ with a party interested only in obstruction — the organs of Republican orthodoxy will create their own version of history. Just as the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy eventually culminated in the GOP’s Southern Strategy, the Republicans will raise a new generation of recruits to continue the Kulturkampf.

That is exactly what Bachmann and company are doing today. However their “last stand” plays out in the news cycle, it will inevitably return many cycles later in the narrative of Lost Cause mythology.

Meanwhile, Bachmann’s media aide is leaving for less crazy pastures. Politico:

A conservative Republican House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Bachmann’s views — and her willingness to state them — make it hard for her to keep staff.

“When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship,” the lawmaker said. (Emphasis mine)

That “crazy captain” is trying to lead the news cycle today.

Why would anyone, least of all Newsweek and Washington Post, give culture warrior Bill Donohue a forum? This is Kulturkampf:

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Just to be perfectly clear, Donohue doesn’t think anyone has the right to use birth control, much less get an abortion. Yet he’s shocked and angry that American popular culture portrays his “values” as small-minded, stupid, and more than a little fascist — which they are.

Donohue was just ranting at our popular culture, but his post comes a day Rush Limbaugh launched a rather outrageous attack on a month-old blog post by the NYT’s Andrew Revkin: “Are Condoms the Ultimate Green Technology?“

More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions. And recent research has resulted in renewed coverage of the notion that one of the cheapest ways to curb emissions in coming decades would be to provide access to birth control for tens of millions of women around the world who say they desire it.

Here is Rush Limbaugh throwing his lot in with the hostile birth movement, inviting Revkin to kill himself:

Kulturkampf is all about power. The culture warriors know they’re out of touch; the new plan is to outnumber us the old-fashioned way.

The teabagging of financial reform has begun, and the White House is calling bullshit early:

Larry Summers, the top White House economic adviser, on Friday accused financial lobby groups of using “death panel” type scare tactics to try to block the creation of a consumer financial protection agency.

Insisting the Obama administration would not be deflected from this goal, Mr Summers rubbished advertisements claiming that the new agency would prevent florists from offering credit to their customers.

“That argument is to the financial regulation debate what the death panel argument is to the health insurance debate…”

The teabagging on this issue began Tuesday, when Republicans and Blue Dogs gathered for the C-SPAN camera and dressed up Obama’s proposed consumer protection agency as an all-out attack on the American family:

(It will) make financial decisions for American families which really is an insult to the majority of Americans who act responsibly with their finances. With the right information, proper transparency and full disclosures, families can and do make their own financial decisions. They don’t need Big Brother to do it for them.

But the “consumers” in need of protection aren’t middle-class Americans. In fact, even most rich Americans aren’t ever going to invest in Credit Default Swaps and Obligations. They’re not exactly the sort of thing you day-trade online.

That Wall Street bought into them so heavily, lost so much wealth, and now prepares to reenter that market with a vengeance, is a fantastic argument for a consumer protection agency to regulate these “innovations” of imaginary commerce — because Wall Street is the consumer here.

Summers outlined a five-point plan for reform; translation provided below:

(A)dditional capital requirements for systemically important financial institutions, special resolution authority to allow regulators to organise the controlled failure of a complex financial firm, the elimination of firms’ ability to choose their regulator, a shift towards regulating system-wide risks in addition to firm-specific risk, and the creation of the consumer protection agency.

In other words, banks “too big to fail” would be required to keep more money on hand to, um, prevent failure; and just in case they do fail, the banks would have to leave instructions for taking them apart — which is exactly what we couldn’t do with AIG.

Nor could a future AIG go shopping for a blind, deaf, and dumb watchdog, which is how the meltdown began.

The government would keep markets healthy instead of waiting for them to collapse.

And the people who invent new, interesting ways to make money out of money out of money would have to run their Ponzi schemes past a government office first.

Please, Anonymous commenters, tell me how any of those changes would impact the American family, small business, and working Americans? I’m waiting with bated breath.

Political science has a word for this kind of hypocritical rhetoric: producerism. It is a form of Culture War in which the right blames every problem on the poor and disenfranchised to drive a wedge between the lower and middle classes. We saw it a year ago as right-wing sources tried to pin the blame for the global financial meltdown on minority home-owners. Here’s Michelle Goldberg:

The mask certainly is off. The GOP is trying to convince the teabaggers that we can prevent future bailouts by doing nothing. And here’s the crazy part: unless there’s a genuine grassroots movement to support reform, Congress will follow the money and their strategy will work.