True to form, I'm struggling to grasp this evangelical's point of view, and losing.
Republicans are the YOYO party. Their understanding of the social contract is "You're On Your Own." Government can kill people, spy on them, imprison them, torture them, but it ought not to help them. Social programs and regulations to protect consumers are despised in Republican circles as an assault on the Free Market.
Welfare for the rich, though, that's ok. Bailouts for companies which engaged in risky financial scams, sure, why not? Tax cuts targeted at the wealthiest 1%. Remind me again what Jesus thought of the idea that charity begins, and ends, at the corporation. Because that's exactly what the Republicans stand for.
Once upon a time, the ideological driving force behind laissez-faire markets was "competition." A competitive market, it was thought, would always outperform a government monopoly. But this idea has been wearing thin lately among Americans. Deregulation has let to consolidation, not more competition. It's a trend towards monopolization. We see it in practically every industry: banking, health care, media, energy, telecommunications, real estate, you name it. Corporations are gobbling each other up until only a few giant players are still standing. Deregulation starts to look like corruption when it raises prices, unsafe products are liberally permitted, and politicians walk away with fat checks.
Where government does have social programs competing against private industry, as with Medicare, it wins hands down with lower overhead and lower costs - just as it does in every other advanced industrial nation, every one of which has socialized medicine. Remind me again what the appeal of privatization is to evangelicals, will you?
On the moral front, the holier-than-thou rhetoric of the Republican Party continues firing on all cylinders; morality is not a matter between citizen and God but between citizen and State. To Republicans, morality is not a choice, it's a law. Do evangelicals really think Republicans are paving the way to heaven for American citizens by legislating morality and enforcing it with prison terms?
America has about 1/4th of the world's prisoners locked up in barely post-medieval conditions, and we're not finished. The Republican administration hired Halliburton to build emergency prison camps and just recently signed a contract with Blackwater to staff them, enough for hundreds of thousands of people. There aren't enough terrorists in the entire world to fill those camps, even if we could catch them all. Just who do you think they're for, hmm?
Such tremendous Republican victories as the SCOTUS decision that "Bong Hits for Jesus" is unprotected speech because "it's nonsensical" ought to give young evangelicals pause - SCOTUS is saying that speech, by default, is unprotected unless government decides it's both meaningful and fits within an authorized exception. What's authorized is morphing every year. Do I really need to remind evangelicals that when anyone's right to self-expression is lost, everyone's is?
If it's true - and I'm not arguing the point either way - that young evangelicals are expressing a gentler, humbler version of Christianity and a desire to ease suffering and do social good, I can't quite fathom why they would continue to cling to YOYO. Unless they expect YOYO to create the climate of fear, helplessness and misery that will bring people flocking to their congregations, looking for help? Does evangelical Christianity like the idea of the Constitution shredded? A permanent underclass of disadvantaged citizens? Monopolies extracting wealth? Endless war? Suppression of dissent?
Democrats have their problems with corruption, too. But the Republicans, with the erratic exception of Ron Paul, have immersed themselves in a moral cesspool cloaked with self-righteousness. It's about time the followers of Jesus' teachings called them on it.
