The Right's Siege Mentality

By Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com. Posted April 26, 2005.

Many progressives watched in puzzlement at the end of last year as religious conservatives declared that a war was being waged across America, a campaign of untold savagery whose sole victim was a holiday celebrated by approximately four out of every five Americans. Forced to endure the horror of department store signs reading "Happy Holidays," conservatives beat their breasts and gnashed their teeth over the War on Christmas.

No doubt we'll be hearing about that war again, round about Thanksgiving. But in the interim we have the Judicial War On Faith, a conflagration written from the same script: Liberals drunk on their overwhelming power smash mighty fists down on the tender heads of righteous yet weak conservatives, who absorb blow after debilitating blow until they can stand no more, and rise up to restore all that is right and good with America.

This was the message we heard on "Justice Sunday," the all-star gathering of the radical religious right Sunday night in Louisville. Like-minded Americans were told that nothing is more important than confirming the 10 Bush nominees that Democrats have held up in the Senate. Indeed, as Focus on the Family's James Dobson told viewers, "The future of democracy...depends on the outcome of this issue."

One might have thought there were more pressing concerns in America today: persistent poverty, 45 million Americans without health insurance, environmental degradation--not to mention problems overseas like the genocide in Darfur. But those issues lack something essential: They don't let conservatives whine about their victimization.

At Justice Sunday, speaker after speaker told of the terrible injustice being perpetrated by Senate Democrats, invoking slavery and the civil rights movement again and again. The arrival of an African-American minister on stage was greeted with a standing ovation, as though he offered a living testament to the suffering of today's evangelicals.

To hear them tell it, conservatives are always the underdog, besieged and kept down by those with the real power. The act of hanging an American flag on their porch could bring a Molotov cocktail thrown through their front window by roving gangs of thought police; a cross worn on a necklace sure to bring arrest; the ordering of a Budweiser greeted with withering contempt from the microbrew cognoscenti. The triumph of liberal totalitarianism, with the abolishment of the family and religion and free speech that all honest people hold dear, is forever around the next corner, at the bottom of a slippery slope down which we find ourselves eternally tumbling. Like end-timers assuring us that though they were wrong last year and the year before, this New Year's Eve will surely bring Armageddon--they are slowed not a bit by being proved wrong again and again--the coming American Sodom always a result of next year's wedge issue.

Look at some of the titles offered by Regnery, the right's premier publishing house: Invasion Within: Overcoming the Elitists' Attack on Moral Values and the American Way; Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids; Mugged by the State: Outrageous Government Assaults on Ordinary People and Their Property; Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage; Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity; Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children; Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security.

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow with Media Matters for America and a senior contributor to The Gadflyer.

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