THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA
May 23, 2010
By S. Mayfield

It seems Pollyannaish to suggest that these extremists will lose power in the current climate... As long as such cultural issues are not driven by the middle or by the ambivalent, the returns to extremism in politics, as some social scientists argue, may appear to be too great and too ready to produce anything but continuing polarization. - John Dombrink, 2006

INTRODUCTION

There is a battle taking place in the United States and it is becoming more and more apparent that it is a battle for the United States in which there will only be one side standing at the end. Now more than ever it seems that every aspect of American life has become completely politicized. On issues as far-flung as taxes, what is taught in public schools, gay rights, the oil spill in the Gulf, Arizona’s immigration law, and the latest Supreme Court Justice Nominee – more Americans than ever before are being driven to embrace staunch ideological views that paint each issue as part of a larger struggle for the “soul of America”.

Regardless of whether or not he was being genuine; upon his election in 2008, President Obama made an impassioned plea to change the tone of America’s politics to bridge the divide between what has been simplified and narrowed down to two sides (the Liberals and the conservatives). Yet the evidence overwhelmingly reveals that the President, along with moderate Democrats and Republicans have failed to do so.

Their failure in many ways is grounded in a naiveté that leads them to think that those on the extreme right are willing to seek out common ground for the good of the nation or at the very least acknowledge the “will of the people” in making the President’s party the majority. Obviously, this has not occurred and for the most part Obama and his allies face a right wing opposition that has defined the President, all moderates and Liberals, as well as their plans and the direction of their governance as evil by nature.

Spending a day listening to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, or Glenn Beck should make this pretty clear. In their view Obama and his socialist brigade are hell-bent on overturning democracy and free-market capitalism to establish a radical left wing dictatorship. And make no mistake about it – millions of Americans agree with the sentiments they express. In this sort of mindset every jot and tittle . . . every fine point of policy, every crisis and peril is defined as part of a larger struggle for the very fate of the nation. Those entrenched in this sort of hard right, its either us or them ideology will never honestly seek compromise, because they are fully committed to permanently establishing themselves as the ruling power. Additionally, they are just as fully committed to the total annihilation of the Liberalism and the Left.

Observing the hatred, vitriol and win at all costs battle plan being executed by the Right toward the Left is to see something akin to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection being played out before our eyes. Except in this instance we are not observing a battle for ascendancy in the realm of biology and environment, in which species naturally develop in a way that seeks to guarantee that only the strongest remain. Instead, what we are seeing is a situation in which the Right is making a conscious decision to determine what they consider to be good over evil, right over wrong, and morality over immorality and destroy that which falls short.

And make no mistake, when issues are examined through the lens of good over evil and morality over immorality, they move beyond the realm of mere political debate or ideological concern and become something much greater to those involved. In this sense, the people in the battle begin to see conflicts over political, social, economic, and moral positions as those which determine the direction and survival of ethnic groups, nations, and civilizations.

Years ago S.R. Shearer made specific note of the life and death nature of this epic struggle in his writings on the late Samuel P. Huntington’s concept of civilization identity and civilization conflict. (Shearer, 1998) What Huntington essentially does is attempt to develop a theory meant to buttress right wing, conservative efforts to make the United States, through its position as the most powerful force in Western Civilization, the dominant force in the world. Huntington’s theory states that civilization identity is in the broadest sense, what shapes the battlefield of cultural and ethnic conflicts. Huntington, provided a detailed analysis of civilization identity in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, The Clash of Civilizations? In the article Huntington writes:

What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity... It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people… Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. (Huntington, p. 23-25)

Huntington constructed this thesis on the premise of defending America’s Western, European-based, Christian civilization and though he received a substantial amount of criticism from the academic world - those identifying with right wing, conservative and racist causes have flocked to defend his thesis. Roger Finke, Professor of Sociology & Religious Studies at Penn State University, noted this in the February 2008 edition of the Journal of Science and Spirit, when he stated that Huntington’s commitment to a single civilization [Western Civilization] and his homogenous [race, religion, culture] vision of that civilization has attracted those willing to go to extremes to defend it. (Finke, p. 45)

As noted previously, to these “civilization warriors” cultural and ethnic issues covering a wide range of subjects including religion, race relations, immigration, gay and lesbian rights, abortion, morality, and America’s various war efforts – are not mere points for political or social discourse. Instead they are matters of life and death for America, i.e. Western Civilization and the battle plan in these conflicts is driven by right wing conservative ideologues that are increasingly becoming radicalized to embrace the notion that those on the other side [Liberals and the Left] must be destroyed before they destroy America. In a 2006 article from the journal Contemporary Sociology, remarking upon the strong place far right ideologues hold, Dr. John Dombrink, a sociologist at the University of California Irvine, noted that:

It seems Pollyannaish to suggest that these extremists will lose power in the current climate... As long as such cultural issues are not driven by the middle or by the ambivalent, the returns to extremism in politics, as some social scientists argue, may appear to be too great and too ready to produce anything but continuing polarization. (Dombrink, p. 350)

IMPERIALIST ORIGINS

The extremists Dombrink references believe that they are fighting a battle to save the very soul and makeup of America and continue its position as the dominant force in the world; but their sentiments are not some new creation unique to America and the 21st Century. Instead, they run deep into the murky pages of ancient history. Yet, the battle being fought today is not so much connected to the concepts of the ancient Greeks or Romans, as it is to their eventual offspring: 19th Century imperial ideas about the superior nature of white, Christian, European-based civilization. It is this civilization that served as the foundation for what most conservative Americans consider traditional American culture and it is ultimately based on racial ideas that approved of slavery in the United States and produced sentiments like the following from Cecil Rhodes which state:

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories. (qtd. in South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid Building Democracy)

These were the sentiments that buttressed the great imperial empires of the 19th Century. Britain, France, the Dutch and Germany [later in the century] all sought to establish colonial empires that depended on the exploitation and subjugation of races of human beings that they considered to be distinctly inferior. It was this sort of subject position that led 19th Century Philosopher Herbert Spencer to develop his social theory of the “Survival of the Fittest,” as a way to provide a scientific covering or justification, for the misery that the colonial empires were inflicting upon their subjects. In Spencer’s, Principles of Biology of 1864, vol. 1, he wrote:

This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection”, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. (Spencer, p. 444)

Spencer’s conclusions led him to believe that progressive movements and social programs that sought to prop up the poor and indigent, provide a safety net for the less fortunate, or attempt any sort of redistribution of resources were those that could lead to the ruin of dominant nations and races. As Spencer noted in his Political Writings this would occur because:

Every powerful spring of action is destroyed—acuteness of intellect is not wanted—force of moral feeling is never called for—the higher powers of his mind are deprived of their natural exercise, and a gradual deterioration of character must ensue. Take away the demand for exertion, and you will ensure inactivity. Induce inactivity, and you will soon have degradation … [T]o do for the people what they are naturally fitted to do for themselves, is to adopt one of the most efficient means of lowering the standard of national character. (Spencer, p. 49)

Isn’t this the same mindset that drives much of the ideology of the Right today? Are they not drawn to the ideas of men like Huntington and Spencer as a way to justify the extremism they are willing to engage in to ensure that the “American way of life” and America itself is preserved as a “favored nations” in “the struggle for life”? Is this not the sentiment that the Right draws upon to justify deregulation of the economy and to castigate efforts to provide welfare or handouts to the poor? Even today, Spencer’s ideas flourish in the minds of a great number of Americans, who believe that the poor are poor through their own weakness and that the lesser among us need only to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps or fall by the wayside as “nature intended.”

And even in today’s so-called modern world in which the ghosts of our racist past have supposedly long been vanquished, beliefs about "the American way of life" are often still developed through the prism of racist thought. America’s history with Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans is one fraught with violence and oppression. It is one in which the Herbert Spencer’s of our own culture have always been quick to point out the genetic, biological, and mental weaknesses of the dark skinned “inferior races” that have been painted as a threat to the “American way of life.” We can see these sentiments bubble to the surface in the Right’s current treatment of President Obama and we can also see their manifestation even more viciously in the attitudes toward and treatment of people of Mexican ancestry in the ongoing immigration crisis.

As Vicki L. Ruíz points out in her 1998 book, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, a common theme throughout modern history is the often overt racism that Mexican Americans have faced in the United States. During this experience they have often been cast as responsible for society’s ills and Ruíz details one particular occasion in the 1930’s in which “Mexican ‘expert’” Dr. Roy Garis of Vanderbilt University testified before a congressional committee that:

Mexican women were instinctively prone to adultery . . . Their minds run to nothing higher than animal functions – eat, sleep, and sexual debauchery. In every huddle of Mexican shacks one meets the same idleness… filthy children with faces plastered with flies, diseases, lice . . . apathetic peons and lazy squaws. (qtd. in Ruiz, p. 28)

Ruíz also provides evidence that this racism did not end with the passing of men like Garis. Instead she shows us that as late as the 1960’s and beyond Mexican American women were contending with serious issues of racism. In 1967 Mexican American women were sterilized against their will, while giving birth at the USC/Los Angeles County Medical Center (p. 113) and in the history of the Los Angeles student walkouts of 1968, we learn that there were white educators still telling, “little Mexicans” that they were “going to be cooking and cleaning for other people.” (Ruiz, p. 103)

How different is this past from what is heard from people like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O’Reilly today? How much change has taken place from the days when whites openly characterized Mexicans as having minds that “run to nothing higher than animal functions” to today when right wing commentators like Vox Day of World Net Daily state that:

There's no such thing as the American "melting pot," we should all stay in our little cultural enclaves, and whites should boot the brown people out of the country and "reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture." (Day, 2010)

What people like Day and wildly popular commentators like Dobbs, Beck and Limbaugh are beginning to espouse in public are the same sentiments that millions of Americans are saying in private. And while many Americans may not YET have the gall to speak publicly as Day has and state:

If Americans can find the courage to consciously reject the myth of the melting pot and expel the Mexicans from the American Southwest, the Arabs from Detroit and the Somalis from Minneapolis, they can reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. (Day, 2010)

They are nonetheless quite firmly entrenched in the belief that their “traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture” is at risk. If not tacitly, then at least implicitly, they agree with Spencer that the dominant culture [and race] is engaged in a struggle for the survival of the fittest and they are becoming more and more radicalized to seek out leaders and a direction for the country that would confront the issues of life and death that they see and accept the harsh and often horrific solutions they believe necessary to beat back the savages from the doorstep of the white Anglo-Saxon protestant culture that they define as America.

A WELL-WORN PATH: THE NAZI CORRELATION

This is the very same path down which Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party carried the German people. To Hitler, the whole of human existence was a struggle . . . and more specifically, a racial struggle in which the Aryan people would have to battle for their survival and dominance. Hitler developed this concept within the traditional idea of the Volk, and as noted by Jackson Spielvogel in Hitler and Nazi Germany, the concept of the Volk, which meant nation, people, or race; had been an underlying idea in German culture since the 19th Century. It was based upon the idea that German culture was superior to the other cultures of the world and that because of this superiority there was a special “mission” for the German people. (Spielvogel, p. 6) Upon this idea, Hitler and the Nazis built the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, which was in essence, a psychological revolution in which the Nazis sought to deconstruct what they saw as the artificial divisions separating individuals in German society and remake the whole as an ideologically and racially pure German state.

Furthermore, whereas 19th Century German concepts of the Volk were not purely rooted in racial ideology; to Hitler and the Nazis, race… or blood… was the test upon which acceptance into the Volksgemeinschaft was based. For Hitler, race was the key issue of all human development and he firmly believed in Spencer’s concept of the survival of the fittest as it applied to Aryans and the “lesser races” with which they were destined to contend. Allan Bullock also notes this in his book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, in which quotes Hitler as saying that:

The racial question gives the key to not only world history, but to all human culture. (qtd. in Bullock, 399)

Going even deeper, Spielvogel notes that Hitler believed:

The Aryan race, to which all “true” Germans belonged, was the race whose blood (soul) was of the highest degree. (Spielvogel, p. 139)

In the book, Inside Hitler's Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich, by Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, it is noted that Hitler saw other races and Marxists as threats to the Aryans and he saw the Jews as controlling these efforts. (Sax and Kuntz, p. 204) To Hitler, the Jews were the ultimate enemy of the Volksgemeinschaft, and he believed that they sought to destroy the Aryan race so they could dominate the world. (Spielvogel, p.140-141) To combat these enemies and spur Germans to embrace Hitler’s concept of the Volksgemeinschaft, the Nazis concertedly pushed the message via literature, music, film, theater, fine arts, radio and the press (Sax and Kuntz, p. 232) as well as propaganda speeches, leaflets, and pamphlets from the party.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Isn’t this strikingly similar to what the Right Wing is doing today? They have developed a tremendously persuasive propaganda machine that consistently attacks their enemies and reinforces their vision of America and the world. Their vision is also centered on the same sort of racial, cultural, and civilization identity that has driven and fascinated Spencer, Rhodes, Hitler, Huntington, and countless more. They believe that America is under attack from within and without and they believe that God has called them to save America and through the salvation of America the world.

With this connection to the divine they have been able to enlist American Christians into their cause. In fact… as the writings of Antipas Ministries have consistently proven over the years, American Christians have become the foot soldiers and standard bearers of their cause. They have become a major player in this worldly struggle for the survival future of America and have intertwined it with their belief that America is the vehicle through which the world will be claimed for Christ. . . And as S.R. Shearer of Antipas Ministries notes in his 1998 article Political Christianity, in doing so their aim is to:

Take back the nation for Christ" - not just spiritually but politically. And in this there is an underlying and growing sense among these leaders of a besieged Christian community which nonetheless feels it has a divine mandate from God to rule the world, including the United States. . . And be clear here, these men are not talking about the sweet, heavenly "bye-and-bye," but the actual seizing of political authority by Christians in the "here and now. (Shearer, 1998)

In taking this sort of stand Christians are aligning themselves with people that promote battling for the soul of America with the sword as well as the pen. In doing so they condone standing shoulder to shoulder with racists, xenophobes, and people that advocate the physical expulsion of those they see as their cultural [and racial] enemies in this battles. By heading in this direction they have set off down a path that has historically led to death and destruction.

Christians should know better than to head down such roads. To do so goes against anything that could rationally be considered as Christ-centered or Bible-based. After all, Biblical Christianity is very clear in stating:

... all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall ... give me more than twelve legions of angels? (Matt. 26:52-53)

Rather than take up the sword and fight for America and this present world, Jesus clearly told his disciples:

... My kingdom is NOT of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight ... but ... my kingdom [is] not from hence. (John 18:36)

But for some peculiar reason American Christians refuse to heed these words. They instead choose to engage and ally with those that embrace the violence, hatred, and racism of this world. ISRP, as a facet of Antipas Ministries is committed to exposing the symbiotic relationship between religion and politics in the United States, comparing what is going on now to what history has already shown us, and showing what the Bible actually has to say about it all.

Works Cited:

Shearer, S. R. "Culture Wars Civilization Conflicts." Antipas Ministries. N.p., 31 Dec. 1998. Web. 11 May 2010. <http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000195.htm>.

Huntington, Samuel P. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 23-25. Academic Search Premier. Ebsco. Kirk Library, Centralia College.

Finke, Roger. "Is the 'Clash of Civilizations' Really True? The 'Religious Economy' Is a Better Explanation." Science & Spirit 19.1 (2008): 45.

Dombrink, John. "Deepening Reds, Contrasting Blues, and Various Purples." Contemporary Sociology 35.4 (2006): 350. Academic Search Premier. Ebsco. Kirk Library, Centralia College.

"Unit 2. Colonialism and Segregation: The Origins of Apartheid ." South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid Building Democracy. Michigan State University, n.d. Web. 21 May 2010. <http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/unit.php?id=12>.

Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Biology. Vol.1. 1864.

Spencer, Herbert, John Offer, Herbert Spencer, and Herbert Spencer. Political Writings. Cambridge texts in the history of political thought. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Ruíz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Day, Vox. "The revoluciónary is right." World Net Daily. N.p., 11 May 2010. Web. 12 May 2010. <http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=151689>.

Spielvogel, Jackson J. Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2005. Print.

Bullock, Alan. Hitler, a Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Sax, Benjamin, and Dieter Kuntz. Inside Hitler's Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich. Lexington, MD: D.C. Heath, 1992. Print.

Shearer, S. R. "Political Christianity." Antipas Ministries. N.p., 1998. Web. 19 May 2010. <http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000134.htm>.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. Iowa Falls, IA: World Bible Publishers, 2001.

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