Millennials, who will be the decisive cohort in future national elections, are less religious than previous generations and less likely to respond to social wedge issues. Evangelicals, on the other hand, are voting in record numbers in the Republican primaries — in fact, they make up half of Republican voters — because the GOP today is older, more conservative, and more reactionary than ever. That’s the opposite direction from America at large:

The link between religion and politics that’s motivated many Republican primary voters this year is far less prevalent in public attitudes more broadly: Instead nearly six in 10 Americans express disinterest in whether a presidential candidate shares their religious views.

More than six in 10 in this ABC News/Washington Post poll also say political leaders should not rely on their religious beliefs in making policy decisions. And fewer than four in 10 say the country has gone too far in separating church and state; rather there’s been a modest increase since the 1990s in the number who see too much mixing of religion and government.

As I keep saying, cultures in decline tend to fight harder to maintain privilege and power rather than adapt to a changing environment. The oncoming electoral disaster at the heart of right wing reactionary fears — one in which educated young people, women, and minorities outnumber the “good” white Christian folk — is a creature of their own making. A Barna Group attitudes survey in 2007

show(ed) that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a “good impression” of Christianity.

One of the groups hit hardest by the criticism is evangelicals. Such believers have always been viewed with skepticism in the broader culture. However, those negative views are crystallizing and intensifying among young non-Christians. The new study shows that only 3% of 16 – to 29-year-old non-Christians express favorable views of evangelicals. This means that today’s young non-Christians are eight times less likely to experience positive associations toward evangelicals than were non-Christians of the Boomer generation (25%).

The research shows that many Christians are innately aware of this shift in people’s perceptions of Christianity: 91% of the nation’s evangelicals believe that “Americans are becoming more hostile and negative toward Christianity.” Among senior pastors, half contend that “ministry is more difficult than ever before because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity.”

Evangelicals have been increasingly desperate about this trend, and this fear of a changing American social environment explains why a majority of white evangelical voters in Mississippi say Obama is a Muslim. Having steeped for decades in propaganda about “secular humanism” taking over the country, the white evangelical voter is merely grasping for a shorthand way to express what they already believed before Obama was elected.

Of course, the echo chamber of conservative media sources amplifies this fear at all times. Little wonder, then, that the conservative movement has fixated on the president as symbol of everything wrong with the country. This was especially pronounced in Mississippi and Alabama last week:

(A)round 4 in 10 in both states cited the ability to defeat President Barack Obama in the November election as the main quality they are seeking in a candidate. Given four choices, that has been the top factor named in every state so far.

But that is not the only quality GOP voters crave. The three other options — having a strong moral character, being a true conservative and having the proper experience — when taken together attract more than half of the voters in every state so far.

Tea parties were supposed to represent a new conservatism, one more concerned with fiscal austerity than abortion. Republicans have doubled-down on their determination to block birth control access, proving the “new” conservatism is in fact an ancient one obsessed with fighting culture wars it has already lost:

“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold.

Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.

Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now. “I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”

At Vanity Fair, contributor Todd Purdum quotes President Jimmy Carter at the end of a piece in which he declares the South is “lost” to Democrats. Purdum could just as easily be describing Southern Illinois or Southern California as all of Alabama, though, because the Southern Strategy was never aimed at a single region of the country:

“There are those who say, ‘Well, we could do it if the national party would only moderate its stands on the social issues,’” Carter said. But that would require the national Democratic Party to put at risk the support of its core liberal constituencies in the hope of winning crossover voters it might never get in the end.

Carter sees one other possibility: If a devastating economic collapse had occurred long enough before the 2008 election to make it clear that Barack Obama had nothing to do with it, “it might have been possible that a national Democrat could have re-taken this election now—if, of course, that national Democrat had been willing to run a Teddy Rooseveltian campaign against the ‘malefactors of great wealth,’” he said. But he added, “The fact is, denial is just an incredible thing when it comes to white Southerners being able to fake themselves out on the economy, and to focus on what it is they actually needed, as opposed to what they resent.”

Indeed, the defining problem of evangelical political Christianity is that the resentment defining their movement is so unlike their Christ. More than one demographic sees this hypocrisy, and does not excuse it. The consequences will not be confined to politics, either. Because evangelicals have linked their politics so closely to their faith for so long, the two will never be uncoupled in the minds of a growing number of Americans.

“Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota,” Santorum crowed, at a rally in St. Charles, Mo. “Tonight was a victory for the voices of our party, conservatives and Tea Party people.”

The Daily Beast raised some hopes and hackles the other day by declaring tea parties a “dead” movement. But writer Patricia Murphy doesn’t seem to understand that tea parties were never anything but a new brand name for the same old conservative movement. She quoted the high-flying pyramid schemer behind the local tea party organization where I live:

This should be a cautionary tale for Occupy and the left: purity is not the ticket to victory, and “holding their feet to the fire” is only effective when it leaves room for all-American compromise. Tea parties have engendered a backlash in public opinion by pushing their elected representatives into national fiscal disaster, among other things.

As I keep saying, the basic problem of modern conservatism is that it cannot answer any challenge of the 21st Century. A bit more than half the GOP would like to stop bleating about gays and abortion, while a narrow minority cannot shut up about gays and abortion. The entire party is in deep capture to this Christian conservative element — and it shows no sign of changing its mind, ever.

Faith-based politics don’t need facts or logic because they have holy writ. By refusing to share the same reality with the rest of us, conservatism preserves itself from all pressure to adapt: “ignorance is strength,” as Orwell put it. Thus the very thing that makes today’s “tea party”-style conservatism unable to answer the challenges of the day is also what keeps it going. So don’t count the religious right out just yet — in fact, assume they will be around for a long time. Culture warriors come for the party, but stay for the jihad.

About two dozen tea party activists showed up in Nashville recently to argue for a more “progressive” view of American history in the state’s public school textbooks:

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995. (Emphasis mine)

As I keep saying, I have known the tea party for decades. It’s the same old conservative movement, and these are the same old conservatives. Rather than face up to American history as a complex and dissonant whole, the old guard would bowdlerize it and teach children that slavery and the Trail of Tears were no big deal. Mind you, I agree that America’s promises of freedom and equality were (and are) incomplete: the Constitution is a living document, not a dead letter, which is why slaves were only 3/5ths of a person back then while their great-great-grandchildren are full citizens — and why Barack Obama is an American citizen. Mr. Rounds might disagree.

Via Salon.

Hilarious! This is from a man who willfully and gleefully destroyed companies and put Americans out on the street for profit. He’s the creative destroyer who passed Obamacare in Massachusetts and had an otherwise unremarkable career as a job-negating governor. His American street is not Main Street, at least not in George Bailey’s America. Perhaps in Pottersville, if he gets to be Henry F. Potter. He’s certainly not from any street in Bailey Park. Like all eager young Latter Day Saint cadets, Willard ran about for one year in shirtsleeves telling the world about Joseph Smith — and even then he managed to live in an exclusive place.

In fact, exclusivity characterizes the Republican field an rather odd way. It’s like seeing four gated communities battle for preeminence by making their gates ever more grandiose, while most of us just see supersized mcmansions more alike than different.

Romney and Rick are especially fecund practitioners of patriarchy, and all of the candidates push patriarchy. This is popular on the right, where the womb is Jesus’ own birth-cannon. Sarah Palin was an early hit with drooling knuckle-draggers for this very reason. The more disgusting elements of tea parties — overt racism and idiotic bigotry in a fact-free parallel universe — showed up at those Palin town halls first, which brings me to Ron Paul.

Paul developed the Howard Dean model of organizing very aggressively. In 2005, I could not log into my MySpace account without seeing a Ron Paul link. (At times, Twitter and Facebook become just as bad.) Paulite religion ran current with Alex Jones, who was also aggressively exploiting social media and raving about the Federal Reserve. Paul, who had already spent years developing a cult on the fringe, used the tea party meme for a moneybomb in 2007. The term had libertarian buzz on social media long before it emerged as a movement, mainly due to Ron Paul, but he certainly isn’t “the tea party candidate” today. Actually, there is no “the tea party candidate,” which is confirmation that tea parties were never anything but warmed-over conservatism. And therein lies the rub.

Paul is a favorite of libertarian Republicans, though by no means all of them. His coalition includes white supremacists, 9/11 conspiracy nuts, potheads, and other hyperengaged hyperlinkers. This has never actually been a winning electoral coalition, though it is certainly very loud. Moreover, movement conservatives — who marched into the tea party in 2009 — despise Paul. He is a goldbug crank and they know it. Moreover, his isolationism doesn’t fit the reigning conservative model of foreign affairs. At heart, the Republican Party loves neoconservative framing on national insecurity: they are angry at Obama for “surrendering,” and not about to forgive it in Paul. He is the libertarian in an authoritarian party.

It is a measure of this Republican field that the most absurdly-inclusive candidate is the most media-excluded. But that isn’t a media shortcoming: Paul chooses to walk away from interviews with CNN rather than answer questions about old newsletters. Readers may recall Sarah Palin’s retreat behind a Facebook page; she was just doing what Paul had already been doing for years.

Ron Paul would do away with the Federal Reserve system, yet somehow enjoys the regard of many Wall Street Occupiers. I can’t blame them for being misinformed, as it is nearly impossible to find an informative video about the Federal Reserve system on YouTube because so many are actually about Ron Paul. Doing away with the Fed would mean returning interest rates to the control of the banks — you know, the Big Bad too-big-to-fail banks. This is supposedly a magical cure for the American economy, but it would actually make America into Pottersville.

Which brings me to Newt Gingrich, who blows dog whistles harder than any Republican since Jesse Helms and charges the average American family’s income to his Tiffany’s card several times over in a single shopping spree. What makes him different from the other three is that he has absolutely no shame — not when presenting divorce papers, and not when asking his second wife to permit his affair. Shame is blotted out from his mind, and should be from yours because he’s a changed man now. He’s always a changed man now. He’s been a changed man many times over.

Having learned the catechism, now he’s just as Catholic as Santorum — right? So please exclude his past peccadilloes, which are less important than the advice for which he charged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, Newt is an integral part of that story, too. He was the firebrand who led the Republican Revolution and carried out the War on Government, including banking “reform.” He has been such a stalwart friend of free trade and offshored jobs that we wouldn’t be where we are without him.

Gingrich is finding success in South Carolina, where an eager evangelical crowd seems to be choosing him over Santorum or Romney. Anti-Mormon bias may explain some of the latter, but Romney’s real problem is his plasticity. Santorum has the “street cred” insofar as abortion and culture wars go, and he comes from humbler beginnings, but his street is just as exclusive as Willard’s now.

To his credit, Santorum did try to play George Bailey once:

In 2005, when Banking Committee Republicans were trying to tighten the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Santorum pushed to include language in the legislation that would strengthen their affordable-housing goals.

“We’re very concerned about making sure that we do things in working with this legislation to improve the access to affordable housing,” Santorum said during a July 28, 2005 hearing on the Senate bill.

He added that he wanted to orient Fannie and Freddie “toward taking a more active role in creating housing opportunities for low and moderate income families.”

At the time, those words were largely uncontroversial, and Republicans on the Banking Committee agreed to adopt Santorum’s amendment, voting down a Democratic alternative that would have imposed stricter affordable-housing requirements on Fannie and Freddie.

The dog whistles don’t do Rick any favors here. That debate crowd, like the post-nomination rally crowds to come, wants red meat. They want a story that blames poor (read: minority) homebuyers for the mortgage meltdown. That story isn’t true, but these are post-factual times. The failure of capitalism in 2007 and 2008 must be rationalized as personal irresponsibility by them: “lazy poor people (of color) did it! Leave Wall Street alone!”

But that’s a hard meme to rationalize with Santorum’s welcome role in expanding homeownership. Perhaps in overcompensation, Santorum has blown some dog whistles of his own lately. He’s clumsier with them than Newt or Mitt, but he has none of Newt’s baggage — or Willard’s plasticity. Inflexible, absolute, Rick is set in stone. He knows what kind of old time religion the audience has; he speaks to it in his natural voice with far greater fluency than we realize.

The blogosphere has called these candidates a clown car, but the audience is part of the circus, too, and Santorum’s success proves the point. That crowd wants to hear what they already think is true about the world come out of a candidate’s mouth. Moreover, they want to rationalize the candidates’ faults as much as possible: witness them cheer for Gingrich as he defies scrutiny of his moral character. Watch the Paulites declare him the peace party candidate and the freedom candidate while the party rank-and-file reject him for his heresies.

None of these candidates fully represents the “Republican street;” each represents a different neighborhood on it. Each of them, especially Mitt Romney, enjoys an investment income lifestyle, and like their audience they are obsessed with putting Big Government in charge of the womb. The GOP contestants on the Republican reality-show hail from Crazy street, Wall Street, and the abortion back-alley, but not “the American street.”

It is within the Republicans power to obstruct and, by doing so, make the president look weak and ineffectual. That’s the path they’ve chosen. However, the collateral damage has been enormous and the voters seem to have noticed.

People now are much more likely to tell pollsters that they want to see the president take a confrontational tone with Republicans rather than cooperate with them. That plays right into Obama’s hands as he shifts to campaign mode.

Attending a community leadership training seminar last week, I heard a Republican city council member from Huntsville tell the room he was a Republican, but not a tea party Republican — and with exactly that kind of emphasis. Indeed, tea parties have huge and growing unfavorable ratings these days, as the public understands what lies behind the label is nothing new.

But is the House GOP leadership prepared to backpedal? Evidently not, and in part that is because tea party Republicans are the most engaged on these issues. It’s not that they’re unaware of the polling — take Eric Cantor, for instance, who recently told his caucus to avoid taking things to the brink again:

The message from the majority leader is an effort to prevent the kinds of fights over government spending that could lead to government shutdowns this fall if Congress cannot agree on legislation to fund the government.

It suggests Republican leaders worry they could take a political hit if there is a government shutdown from voters already irritated over the contentious summer talks on raising the debt ceiling.

Instead, House Republicans want to use the crisis to pursue further ecocide and wage-destruction as “jobs bills:”

The Cantor memo provided additional details on the regulatory focus. The week of Sept. 12, House Republicans will try to overrule an NLRB ruling that restricts Boeing’s effort to transfer an assembly line from Washington state to South Carolina. Business leaders accuse the Obama administration of interfering to try to help their labor allies, because South Carolina is a right-to-work state with fewer unions. Labor leaders say the aerospace company is seeking a spot for cheaper labor.

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”

That is virtual boilerplate from the producerist manifesto. Coal ash regulations do not threaten anyone’s job, much less 100,000. On the other hand, Cantor’s party wants to kill transportation and infrastructure funding that supports hundreds of thousands of actual, real, not-imaginary jobs. If Cantor cared about the concrete industry, he would want to fully fund the maintenance and improvement of roads, bridges, and dams. But that’s not what he wants.

His goal, and that of his majority in the House, is to make sure the president cannot improve employment numbers before November of 2012. They don’t care how many of us are put out of work to accomplish that.

Whether or not Democrats, much less progressives, capitalize on this is another question altogether. I’m pretty sure the president plans on doing so as he “shifts to campaign mode,” because at this point he has every permission to go on the offensive.

These experts say independent voters who make up the swing bloc of the electorate typically pay less attention to politics than staunch Republican and Democratic voters.

The contentious debate in Congress over the debt limit gave the Tea Party new prominence to many of these casual observers of Washington.

As I keep saying, the circus tent can collapse on Washington while Obama rides down the pole, still on top of it all. As for the tea party:

The claim that 90% of terrorist attacks in the United States are committed by “left wing extremists” is an example of the intense, fully-formed world of rationalization they inhabit (Plato described it as a cave, but the common phrase these days is “epistemic closure.”) This is not politics; it is war, and the moment you call them out on it the tea party proves the point. I hope for more meetings like this one, because they prove that everything I have ever said about tea parties is spot-on.

A movement that elected Obama and then sat on its keister complaining for two years had seemed to be gathering momentum in the wake of events in Wisconsin. But a broad uprising has failed to materialize because progressives are too confined in their own issue-silos.

We had an example of that a week ago when Dan Choi flirted with endorsing Republican Gary Johnson for president:

During the congressional debate on “don’t ask, don’t tell” Choi said that he would not vote for Obama again, a stance that appears to have hardened. Choi told TheDC that he is “seriously considering helping a viable challenger.”

Choi has ruled out supporting Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, who he said “foolishly aids the Obama camp in making a cartoonish parody” of Republicans.

However, “There are some very appealing candidates such as Governor Gary Johnson and others who are much better than Obama on civil rights,” Choi said.

It is hard to overstate the lunacy of that kind of thinking. Indeed, those ‘graffs neatly encompass the problem. Whereas the Obama administration has overturned DADT and now proposes to overturn DOMA, Johnson — who currently polls in the single digits — isn’t the pro-gay dream candidate Choi seems to imagine: he favors civil unions instead of marriage equality.

He’s also an Ayn Rand-worshipping producerist who wants to abolish the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development; that makes him every bit the culture warrior he supposedly isn’t. More to the point, Johnson also endorses debt limit brinkmanship. Either Choi doesn’t understand that “progressive” is larger than his one issue, or he doesn’t care.

Of course, the immediate response to questions about the progressive movement’s absence from the National Mall is what a mass demonstration would accomplish. As a friend tweeted me last night, “what’s the theory of change” in such an event? The answer is that large national rallies draw attention to issues — it’s why unions held events in all fifty state capitols earlier this year — and help propel the public discussion. Isn’t that what tea parties have been doing?

Speaking of tea parties, there was one in DC yesterday. Here’s a telling pic from David Weigel of Slate:

Choi’s quote about Michele Bachmann is the most telling line in the piece I quoted above. She represents that 45% of the GOP that cannot shut up about abortion and gays — as opposed to the majority of Republicans that would like the party to shut up about abortion and gays. This divide neatly describes the dilemma faced by Republicans, and says much about what gave tea parties their initial momentum. As you can see, the momentum is spent.

The traditional agenda of movement conservatives was completely discredited by 2008. Demographic changes and declining public resistance to abortion and gay marriage threatened to turn the party that had lately dreamed of permanent majority into a permanent minority. By leveraging resentment under a new brand-name for the same old movement, Republicans were once again returned to power in the House without having to adapt to social changes. They remain uncompromising.

There was no post-midterm strategy, however, and a new class of Republican representatives feels insecure in their position. It is therefore possible for a very small group of tea party conservatives to drive the House agenda: witness the folks at Mo Brooks’ town hall encouraging him toward confrontation with the president.

Incoherent and confused, they only know that they hate Obama and want him gone. They are more afraid of the Kenyan Marxist than the consequences of default. That’s what happens when you spend three years filling their heads with doomsday nonsense — and it’s why so many freshmen Republicans are willing to court disaster. So what was that again about the value of showing up?

The induced debt limit crisis is a perfect opportunity for the progressive movement. A coalition of greens, unions, and organizations like MoveOn and BoldProgressives could seize media attention in opposition to the austerity plans of tea-drunk Republicans. But it not only won’t happen, it would require months of consensus-building and butterfly-wrangling for diverse organizations to put something together.

The reason we are at this pass is that one movement has all the attention, but no new ideas — while the other movement has lots of ideas, but no attention. Both find internal compromise even harder than compromise across the aisle.

The Tea Party Nation reserved 1,637 room nights in the Palazzo hotel, according to court documents. The tea party group cancelled two weeks before the event.

The group agreed to pay the hotel $579,148 in the event of a cancellation and $87,996 in interest has since been added to that amount.

This is why I object to professional news writers capitalizing “tea party.” There are tea parties, but there is no “the Tea Party.” Tea Party Nation, one of at least six nationwide tea party organizations, is trying to prove this by going out of business. If they do, watch as Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express say it’s because TPN was never “the real tea party” in the first place.