Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement that Shattered the Party is a hit and miss book – Blumenthal shrewdly documents the carnival of personal dysfunction that defines so many leading figures on the American Right, offering a broad analysis drawn from Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom.

The authoritarian nature of America’s right wing movement has been documented by many writers and observers. Blumenthal offers an explanation, from Erich Fromm:

When radical extremists sought to cleanse society of sin and evil, what they really desired was the cleansing of their souls.

He described how submission to the authority of a higher power to escape the complexities of personal freedom would lead not to order and harmony but ultimately to destructiveness.

He points out that this escape from freedom, this dynamic of submitting one’s self to a higher authority has become the bond that holds the America’s right together. The centerpiece of this authoritarian, right wing culture, its beating heart if you will, is James Dobson and his organization Focus on the Family (or as its known among gay folks “Focus on the Anus” – or generally among its critics ” Focus on your damn family.”). Dobson is a notorious yenta, sticking his stern disapproving nose into everyone’s business. FoF is a right wing behemoth, dolling out equal parts strict father parenting advice and political patronage. Dobson is the right’s king maker, able to move millions with his opinions. Dobson’s training is as a child psychologist, author of an infamous child-rearing manual entitled Dare to Discipline which advocates beating children into submission – well into their teenage years. Dobson’s book stands in stark contrast with most modern child-rearing literature which does not advocate beating children. As Blumenthal describes it:

Dobson’s manual, Dare to Discipline, read like a manifesto for domestic violence when it finally appeared in 1970. He urged parents to beat their young children, preferably with a “neutral object” such as a belt or a rod, lest they turn into drug-addled longhairs. He also advised administering a healthy spanking every now and again.

The outcomes of Dobson’s child-rearing advice are almost inevitably maladjusted adults; that doesn’t matter – hundreds of thousands of letters pour into FoF from desperate parents asking for help with their willful children – and FoF gladly responds, usually including fund-raising pleas. Blumenthal offers some analysis of Dobson’s child-rearing methods – primarily that they don’t work, they produce insecure, uncertain adults:

“The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children,” Greven wrote. “The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy, enforced order, and absolute authority—so evident in Germany earlier in this century and in the radical right in America today—are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world.”[snip]

“Wherever children suffer from painful physical punishments and humiliating submission to more powerful authorities, sadomasochism will be present,” Greven wrote. “Sadomasochism is thus one of the most enduring consequences of coercive discipline in childhood.”[snip]

Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom, insisted that sadomasochism was more than a sexual kink. It was, he claimed, a defining characteristic of the authoritarian personality, finding its most dangerous expression in the political sphere.

It’s important to understand that one of the biggest aspects of the right movement that Blumenthal highlights is the way in which movement conservatism’s leaders appeal to the insecurities of their followers, telling them that the problems in their lives could be fixed if only they believed hard enough and in the right things and that when go wrong, it’s the believer’s fault for not believing enough. A mother writes to FoF to get advice on how to deal with her misbehaving children and she’s told the problem is that she’s a bad parent and if only she becomes strict enough her problems will go away and if her problems don’t go away, it’s because she’s insufficiently strict and insufficiently subservient to her husband who is probably also insufficiently strict.

From Dobson’s Colorado Springs empire, his influence spreads throughout the right wing movement. Almost every major figure on America’s right – including faux maverick John McCain – have paid obeisance to Dobson at one time or another. The hierarchical structure of right wing thinking requires submission to a higher and normally male authority. Dobson is the living image of George Lakoff’s strict father – his children’s lives demonstrate the emptiness of his methods; his daughter is in her 30s, unmarried and talks about her father in terms more appropriate for an 8 year old; his son went through a messy divorce and was subsumed into Dobson’s media empire.

For Blumenthal, James Dobson is the central character in America’s right wing. No one else has Dobson’s influence.

Blumenthal then takes the reader through a zoology of conservative figures – Ted Haggard, Sarah Palin (and her truly whacked out religious beliefs), David Vitter, Tom Delay, Mark Foley, and a host of movement activists. Again and again, from these figures Blumenthal traces their personal crises – and the ways in which personal crisis was transmuted into right wing politics. Blumenthal’s descriptions evoke a world in which every misdeed is forgiven if only one will proudly proclaim one’s status as a born again Christian, in which every misdeed is ignored if you can claim it was the result of Satan’s influence. Right wing conservatism is all forgiving of those it deems sufficiently fundamentalist Christian. Many of the women who staff right wing organizations can recount – at the drop of a hat – the horror stories of their ventures into the “secular” world – usually ending in some bathetic tale of woe involving an unplanned pregnancy or cheating spouse, which was magically resolved when they embraced conservative religion and politics.

Blumenthal explores as well the twisted dynamic in which these right wing conservatives have convinced themselves they are an embattled minority subject to heinous prejudice and naked bigotry. Again and again, conservatives recount their the ways in which success in the secular world was destroyed by “liberals” who could not accept their fundamentalist faith. As these stories unfold, silenced and/or damaged by “liberals” or “gays” or whomever, these conservatives found their way to the true path – to their social and religious conservatism that allowed them to see the error of the world and its wicked ways. And from their newfound perch, these conservatives venture out to wage war against the fallen world.

Blumenthal spends quite a bit of time discussing the many tabloid adventures of the rights closeted gays (Blumenthal discusses the gay men; lesbian women are virtually invisible within a movement which sees female sexuality as all but non-existent and which ignores the reality of female desire and/or edits it out of existence by simply treating as a pathological function of influence by the devil or the liberal media). It comes down to something profoundly simple –

The closeted conservative, sapped as he is of his real identity, may never experience actual intimacy through sexual fulfillment. Sex becomes like a drug, a fleeting rush of pornographic lust that can produce titillation, but never emotional connectedness to another person. Thus he is deprived of the sensation of true love, the most life-affirming experience there is. Self-destruction, then, is the leitmotif of the closeted conservative.

Ultimately, gay conservatives are forced into a life of systemic dishonesty or exile from the movement’s center; David Brock who publicly broke with the conservative movement before founding Media Matters is one of the very few gay conservatives who has successfully escaped the movement’s destructive world. (Blumenthal doesn’t discuss Andrew Sullivan, possibly because Sullivan, though gay and conservative, has never really been a movement conservative; Sullivan is a loyal Tory, and as such was probably always a little to liberal for the modern Republican party.) For most gay conservatives, the choices are literally soul killing (seriously, Phyllis Schlafly has a gay son – can you imagine what the poor bastard has gone through in his life?).

Finally, Blumenthal turns to the paradox of Mitt Romney. Mormonism certainly has its own wrinkles on this larger narrative, but it presents a challenge within the culture and politics of personal crisis that have come to define movement conservatism:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had never drunk a drop of alcohol and had been married to the same woman for over three decades. But his personal austerity meant little to the self-proclaimed proponents of family values. They preferred someone like themselves, an evangelical who either underwent or understood the born-again process. The sinless, mannequin-like Romney did not fit the mold. His campaign was burdened by evangelical fears about his membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon organization condemned as a cult by the Southern Baptist Convention and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Read that passage carefully. Social conservatives distrusted Romney not just because of his Mormonism but because of his lack of traumatic crisis. The born again process (which Blumenthal largely ignores) is reminiscent of the old Puritan “Conversion Narrative” – a long dark night of the soul during which one is tormented, psychologically tortured before being released into a new life as a born again Christian. Romney’s stolid and solid Mormonism, bounded as it is within the confines of the Word of Wisdom was free of the crisis-wracked, crisis-addled terror experienced by so many born again Christians. They couldn’t trust him because in a world defined by personal crisis, his faith seemed inauthentic.

The far right base has effectively claimed control of the Republican party and increasingly come to define it – in terms of ideology, of thinking, of worldview. The politics of personal crisis can be summed simply: human lives are messy and that scares and hurts people and so they flee from having to make their own choices and embrace a strict set of rules through which they are freed of the burden of exercising their own moral judgments.

Blumenthal’s book documents that culture from the inside out – a culture defined by authoritarian leaders, in which dissent is not tolerated, in which diversity is a danger and in which issues about sexuality and marriage are truly the most important. It’s a world in which the ordinary, albeit painful, experiences of life – from children who talk back to their parents, to divorce, to gays and lesbians, to addiction – are not seen as part of life or as illnesses to be treated but as proof of the moral collapse of the world which can only be combated through embracing the strictest of rules. To put it another way – when people break the rules, the answer is to enforce the rules more strictly (as opposed to asking if the rules make sense).

The central weakness of Blumenthal’s book is his insufficient analysis – he catalogs the rights cast of deeply fucked up characters but fails to connect the dots at several key points.

Blumenthal’s book is worth a read if only to meet such figures as RJ Rushdoony (one of the scariest religious figures you’ll ever hear about) and Harold Ahmanson (a filthy rich Californian who has underwritten many of the right’s biggest ventures, but who is also a completely screwed up mess), to get a glimpse at the deep oddness of Ted Haggard and the bizarre rantings of Leslie Unruh and to experience a foray into the repressed and depressing world of America’s right wing movement.