This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s surprise announcement that he is not, after all, running for president in 2012 is sparking an incipient sense of panic in the self-confident ranks of Republican insiders. Ol’ Haley was so their type: solidly conservative without getting too carried away with it, innately at home with money and those who made lots of it, and always ready to cut a shrewd deal. But now, for whatever reason, Haley’s out. And from the corridors of lobbying firms in DC and corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and elsewhere, the discerning ear can detect a high-pitched wail of distress aimed at a calm, small man in Indianapolis: “Save us, Mitch Daniels!”
With Barbour out, the conservative establishment is likely to double down on its effort to draft Daniels, who is in many ways a more perfect embodiment of their ideal than Barbour himself. But even with the encouragement and the resources of the Republican elite at his back, Daniels is right to remain cautious. The very qualities that have made him so popular among Republicans in Washington seem unlikely to win him a great deal of support among the party faithful.
Daniels, who is currently serving his second term as governor of Indiana, is reportedly Barbour’s best friend in politics–if he were to run, he’d likely get the Mississippian’s formidable help in fundraising and organizing. But beyond that, Daniels is best suited to fill the psychological void currently besetting GOP insiders. By his resume alone, he fits the bill even better than his former Reagan White House boss Barbour: a long-time Senate staffer and then White House political operative, before going back to Indiana to run a nationally prominent conservative think tank, then make his bones as a corporate exec at a pharmaceutical giant. Daniels returned to Washington to serve as OMB director, and came home again to become a famously tight-fisted and politically popular two-term governor. He’s a known quantity who is attractive to the Very Serious People in the GOP–otherwise known as “economic conservatives” or “fiscal hawks”–who want their party to return the birthers and the bible thumpers to the back-room phone banks and get on with the serious work of shaping government to serve the tangible interests of people like themselves.
Moreover, Daniels embodies the fiscal conservative creed with an unusual intensity. In his rapturously received speech at this year’s CPAC conference, the most closely watched venue for potential Republican presidential candidates, he vividly compared the “Red Menace” of fiscal indiscipline to the twentieth-century communist threat–a clever metaphor, since anti-communism is universally remembered as the glue that kept together the various wings of the conservative movement during its decades-long rise. Last year Daniels made waves by telling The Weekly Standard‘s Andrew Ferguson–who penned a lavish puff piece advertising its subject as exactly what the political doctor ordered–that the country needed a “truce” on divisive cultural issues until such time as the fiscal/economic crisis was resolved. This is exactly what Republican insiders tend to think; some, indeed, would like to make the “truce” permanent so as not to discomfit swing voters.
Best of all, and in contrast to Barbour, Daniels does not exude the constant scent of big money. Though a firm ally of GOP plutocrats, Daniels nestles his fiscal conservatism in the traditions of thrifty Hoosier folk virtues. As the Ferguson profile demonstrated with its admiring tales of the governor roaring around Indiana on his Harley and dropping into truck stops and diners unannounced to pour coffee for startled citizens, Mitch Daniels can add a populist touch to the Club for Growth agenda.
But just because conservatives in Washington love him doesn’t mean Daniels is likely to storm the field and charge to victory. In fact, Daniels has at least three glaring problems he would need to quickly solve in order to make a serious presidential bid.
The first is of his own making: The “truce” pledge, while music to the ears of many fiscal hawks, is perceived as a deadly insult by social conservatives, who are already angry about decades of being taken for granted by the party. These people matter a great deal during the Republican nominating process, particularly in Iowa, where an ongoing effort to overturn the state supreme court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage is the single hottest topic for conservative activists. During early candidate events in Iowa, virtually everyone other than Barbour has taken a veiled shot or two at Daniels and his “truce” proposal. Unless he decides to campaign as an open opponent of the Christian Right’s agenda–a proposition that has never worked for any Republican candidate, as John McCain demonstrated in 2000–Daniels will have to spend a great deal of time kissing the posteriors of social conservative activists. And in Iowa, it will have to be done one posterior at a time.

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Joan C. Williams, author of “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter,” takes a sobering look at “The Democrats’ working-class problem” in the Washington Post. She makes some key points that merit consideration from Democratic strategists and candidates, including:

…When Democrats talk about the poor, they can wind up losing more votes than they win. A key constituency in any national election is white voters who are neither rich nor poor — the working-class families whose median income is $64,000. This group, overwhelmingly Democratic before 1970, has abandoned the Democrats in large numbers, creating a conservative center in American politics. Obama needs these voters in 2012. And his team needs to learn some basic messages about how this group sees the world, in particular about their attitudes toward the rich and the poor, and about certain phrases that may not resonate with them. The donkey’s tin ear should end here.
…White working-class voters see the world very differently; they are more likely to be true believers in equal opportunity than to link poverty with social injustice. These families are less inclined to think, “There but for the grace of God go I” and more inclined to attribute poverty to a life of impulse, chaos and a lack of discipline stemming from individual choices.
…when the Democrats focus on the poor, these Americans hear disrespect — disrespect for their lives of rigid self-discipline in jobs of deadening repetitiveness, disrespect for their struggles in which one false step can mean a fall into poverty. Every time Democrats focus their message on the poor, they enhance Republican power.

Williams is painting with a very broad brush here, without any opinion data to back it up. She credits Obama with scoring bulls’ eyes in his recent speeches when he talks about Social Security and Medicare, but not Medicaid. Her broad brush notwithstanding, I find it hard to disagree with her recommendation:

The Democrats need to stick to a central theme: that Republicans are proposing to eliminate the programs that allow Americans who have worked hard all their lives, doing everything responsible people are supposed to do, to pay for medical care and keep their homes as they age. Medicare and Social Security are the rewards for the settled life. Republicans propose to replace those programs with inadequate substitutes that will return seniors to where they were before government provided safety nets: the poorest group in the country.
The president does send this message, but he mixes it with a protect-the-vulnerable message that only strengthens Republicans’ hand in the coming budget negotiations. And, most important, by undermining the potential coalition between Democrats and working-class whites, the protect-the-poor message ultimately hurts the vulnerable Americans it is designed to help.

The white working class does not embrace a blanket “soak the rich” ideology, cautions Williams. But she does see an opening for Dems to frame the issue in terms of fair taxes:

In his deficit speech, Obama emphasized a theme he has drawn on before: that the very rich do not deserve tax relief. “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined,” he said. “The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. . . . They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs?”
Nice move on the president’s part, to ask whether he needs that level of tax relief while seniors face higher health-care costs. But this theme needs to be further developed and reframed.

She notes that Dems have a huge challenge ahead in educating the public about the concentration of wealth and its effects on the aspirations of working families:

Democrats also need to debunk the myth that the rich work “darned hard for every cent.” Class mobility in the United States is lower than in other industrialized countries, and only 18 percent of the income in America’s richest families comes from work — hard or otherwise. In America, most wealth does not come from hard work. It comes from wealth.
Democrats also need, over and over again, to contrast the decline of the middle class with the explosion of wealth at the top. Between the “Ozzie and Harriett” 1950s and the “All in the Family” 1970s, ordinary Americans’ standard of living doubled. Since then, it has fallen: Forty-two percent of new wealth created from 1983 to 2004 has gone to the richest 1 percent of Americans. The richer have become much richer at the expense of the middle class: The wages of high-school educated men have fallen 25 percent since 1973, during a period when the richest Americans’ share of income doubled. The top 20 percent now controls 85 percent of American wealth — something most Americans do not know.

Williams warns that Sarah Palin connects with this pivotal constituency better than any other politician (although I don’t see how Palin’s views on issues like Social Security and Medicare will survive seniors’ scrutiny or win working class support). Williams is dead right, however, in that the white working class remains the largest swing constituency, and Democrats need to speak to their core concerns more directly and effectively.

If you only read one meaty article today, it should be historian Rick Perlstein’s Mother Jones piece on how the Republican Party has come to inhabit a virtually fact-free zone in which ideology and spin dictate the terms of debate and there’s no one to referee.
Perlstein takes the reader quickly through the twentieth century development of counter-factual politicking, from William Randolph Hearst’s invention of the dastardly destruction of the U.S.S. Maine, to LBJ’s vast exaggeration of the Tonkin Gulf incident, to Ronald Reagan’s dangerous assertions that truth-telling about America’s sins and shortcomings was unpatriotic.
But the most recent lurch into “mendocracy,” says Perlstein, has involved an enormous expansion of the ranks of authorized liars, abetted by “neutral” media who no longer seem to think there is any such thing as objective truth:

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged “balance” over truth-telling–even when one side was lying. It’s a real and profound change–one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration’s “Watergate morality.” Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the “liberal” contention that scientific facts are facts–and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It’s happened to me more than once–on public radio, no less….
And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it’s not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It’s just about anyone–a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera–who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Perlstein has put his finger on one of the most important phenomena of contemporary politics, one that has no obvious solution and thus represents something we don’t really want to talk about. We can’t bring back Walter Cronkite to referee for us, but we also can’t just accept a situation where progressives are expected to go into “neutral” venues and yuck it up with Andrew Breitbart.

Something I’ve noticed in the commentary on Haley Barbour’s decision against running for president is that it’s often asserted there is no longer a “southerner” or “true southerner” in the race. Aaron Blake did this in the Washington Post yesterday.
Now this has got to hurt if you are former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer or former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, since I suspect it’s their seriousness as candidates rather than the authenticity of their southern background that’s in question.
But what about Newt Gingrich, who represented Georgia in the U.S. House for about twenty years?
Sure, Newt was born in Pennsylvania and was an Army Brat who moved around. And he’s never had a southern accent. Nor was his suburban Atlanta House district–at least after he moved to avoid being gerrymandered in 1991–the kind of place where it was easier to find good barbecue than a good bagel. I used to tell people who complained about southern domination of American politics and cited Gingrich as an example: “Newt’s district isn’t in the South. It’s a collection of subdivisions and malls where you can phone the South toll-free.”
But still, the guy moved to the South (Columbus, Georgia to be exact) during high school, and never left (even now he lives in Virginia). He did represent Georgia for a long time. His presidential campaign, assuming it happens, will be based in Atlanta, and he’s got a lot of high-profile cracker support (including the current governor, Nathan Deal, and a famous former governor named Zell Miller). I don’t know exactly how much that will help him in, say, South Carolina, but it’s not as though the man will have to be taught how to speak at a Southern Baptist Church (he was once a Baptist deacon before a divorce or two; he’s now a Catholic, which doesn’t hurt in the South like it used to) or what to order at Lizard Thicket. While no one will ever confuse Newt with a magnolia mouth like Barbour, let’s give the guy a break and let him call himself a southerner if he wants.

Implying that he lacked sufficient “fire in the belly,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour surprised a lot of people today by announcing he would not, after all, run for president in 2012.
I’m with Jonathan Chait on this one: I never saw how Barbour would become a viable presidential candidate, despite all the money he could raise and all the wild adoration he inspired among Republican insiders. Hard-core conservatives never much trusted him, and as a former lobbyist for foreign governments and tobacco companies, he just had too hard a sale to make to actual voters in both the primaries and a general election. Some Republican pros also shuddered at the prospect of sending a Mississippian with a chronic soft spot for the Good Old Days of segregation up against the first African-American president.
The most interesting legacy of the Barbour proto-candidacy was his apparent decision to defy the party orthodoxy demanding unconditional support for higher defense spending and military adventurism. For now, that niche is again solely occupied by Ron Paul.
Barbour’s decision will instantly increase speculation that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels could jump into the race. They are big buddies, and former Bush administration colleagues. Like Barbour, Daniels is extremely popular among Beltway insiders, who will now, I predict, begin publicly begging him to run (he’s said to be close to a decision).

As James Vega explained in the previous post, GOP budget wizard Paul Ryan is a very big fan of that perennial favorite of adolescents everywhere, the late Ayn Rand (if you are unfamiliar with Rand’s life and work, check out my review of two recent biographies that appeared in Democracy last year).
While Ryan’s muse is still posthumously selling a lot of books, the long-awaited movie version of her self-described magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, is not doing so well. To be more precise, the flick is billed as “part one” of a projected trilogy, but it’s not clear at this point that parts two and three will ever be made.
As Dave Weigel notes, receipts for Atlas Shrugged, Part I have taken a nose-dive in the second week after its release, which is never a good sign:

In its second week of release, after expanding from 300 to 465 theaters, Atlas Shrugged: Part I may have started to tank. The movie hauled $879,000 over the weekend; more importantly, it only made an average of $1,890 per screen. The first week, it made $5,600 per screen. Producers have been talking about expanding the film to 1000 screens by the end of the month, but even in a remarkably lame year for Hollywood films (Water for Elephants, anyone? Anyone?) there’s no new audience discovering the film.

And that’s with Rand acolytes and elements of the Tea Party movement hyping it.
I haven’t seen the flick (the closest theater showing it is about an hour-and-a-half drive away), and am not in a hurry to see it, having gone through an Objectivist phase in high school like many Americans. The reviews are mostly very negative, and it’s reasonably clear the movie was rushed through production to take advantage of the latest politically-driven Rand fad.
The film’s notable lack of success is highly ironic, though, for two reasons. Rand spent a critical chunk of her own life in the movie business, which was, in fact, her ticket out of the Soviet Union as a young woman. But even more importantly, she always preached that money provided the only morally valid measure of human effort; it’s why she (and many of her followers) wore a gold dollar sign pin the way Christians wear crosses. By that standard, the movie she inspired appears to have been something of a waste of everybody’s time.

Writing at Daily Kos, Chris Bowers has a post up that makes the case that Wisconsin volunteers working to recall their union-busting state legislators, not D.C. Democrats, are providing the kind of leadership needed to invigorate the Democratic Party. Bowers explains:

For the past couple months, I have been looking for a way to engage the community in activism around the spending fight in D.C. The problem has been that the fight has just been so utterly bleak. It hasn’t been about the deficit, as the actual deficit impact of the deal shows. It hasn’t been about cutting spending in general–there is a ton of federal spending a lot of us here want to see cut, such as wars and subsidies to polluters, but that type of spending isn’t on the table. Instead, the fight is just about cutting programs that support the poor and working class. Further, it’s not if those programs should be cut, but how much they should be cut by. The situation has been just altogether too depressing for worthwhile action.
Despite this, Friday before last, when House Republicans voted to privatize Medicare, there seemed to be an opening for activism on the budget. There was a positive vibe flowing through the community after President Obama’s deficit speech, and I had an idea for a action on Paul Ryan that I thought would make a splash. My thinking was that we could do a petition thanking Paul Ryan for finally being honest about the Republican plan to privatize Medicare. We could deliver it at either a town hall back in his district, or at the next Budget Committee hearing. It would probably make the people taking action feel good, let us know which members of the Daily Kos community are interested in taking action on Medicare, and also get some press (all three are keys to making a petition successful). My plan was to launch the action on Tuesday, April 19, after the tax day news cycle had passed.
Then Dick Durbin happened. On Tuesday morning, literally as I was starting to put the Paul Ryan action together, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat made national news for endorsing cuts to Social Security benefits. When I read Durbin’s comments, it took all the wind out of sails on the Paul Ryan action. I no longer wanted to join in attacks against Republicans for going after entitlements when high-ranking members of my own party were going after entitlements, and I figured a large chunk of the community wouldn’t want to, either. Additionally, I didn’t even want to put together an action laying into Dick Durbin, because in his current role as “grand bargain” negotiator such attacks would actually be doing him a favor. All too often, some high-ranking Dems use us netroots types as a foil to present themselves as “reasonable” and “serious.” By attacking them as sell-outs, we give them exactly the press narrative they are seeking.

Bowers was momentarily stumped for ideas. But then “…just as Durbin was making his comments, Democratic activists in Wisconsin once again demonstrated why right now they are more worthy of our attention than Democratic leaders in D.C.” Bowers explains further:

…Recall petitions were filed against Republican state Senator Luther Olsen on Monday and state Senator Sheila Harsdorf on Tuesday. Further, there were rumors of a massive petition filing against Budget Committee chair Albert Darling coming later in the week.
In stark contrast to the national fight, here a revved-up grassroots operation is being endorsed and directly supported by the local Democratic leadership–often at great political risk to themselves–rather than being used as a foil. As a result, they are making historic achievements. With the Paul Ryan thank-you petition fresh in my mind, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude that we should just thank the Wisconsin volunteers instead.
And so, that’s what we’re doing. Please, tell them how much you appreciate what they are doing, because it is only through efforts such as theirs that we are truly going to be able to win these spending fights over the long-term.

Bowers reports that his thank you projects has generated 10,000+ thank you notes to the Wisconsin recall volunteers, and you can add yours to the effort by filling out this form.

Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.

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Robert Scheer has a thought-provoking column this week on the perspectives of multinational corporate executives about their prospects in the U.S. and elsewhere. And he goes beyond the usual hand-wringing about the inability of individual nation-states to control what multinationals do.
For one thing, he points out that multinationals depend on the U.S. government for a lot more than direct tax and spending subsidies: most notably, for a massive defense infrastructure that makes doing business around the world possible.
But Scheer also makes this observation based on what corporate CEOs say about what motivates them to invest in particular countries:

General Electric, which was bailed out by taxpayers and which stored so much of its profit abroad that it paid no taxes for the past two years, was forced to tighten up, but while cutting its foreign workforce by 1,000 it cut a far more severe 28,000 in the United States. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as his chief outside economic adviser, admits that this does not involve poorly paid work that Americans don’t want, but instead prime jobs: “We’ve globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.”

Interesting, eh? We are constantly being told by conservative pols and opinion-leaders that consumer demand in the U.S. is irrelevant to the current economic crisis; that it’s all about the terrible burdens faced by “job creators” (enjoying record profits, by the way) in the way of wage, tax and regulatory costs. Thus individual states, and the national government as well, are being encouraged avidly to pursue “race to the bottom” competitive strategies ravaging the public sector in the name of the almighty desideratum of lower business costs.
If this strategy made sense, of course, then “low-road” states like Alabama and Mississippi would be the economic dynamos of the whole world. But it’s good to hear a validation that something else is actually going on from a corporate titan.
This topic was discussed at length today on the syndicated public radio show “Left, Right and Center,” in which I sat in for Arianna Huffington along with regulars Scheer, Matt Miller and Tony Blankley. There’s a feature at the very end where everyone gets to say something very brief (in my case, 10 seconds were left) about any old topic. I got in a quick reference to today being Earth Day. It was the first and only time that was mentioned, which is, I suppose, a sign of the times.

It’s been pretty widely acknowledged that the environmental cause in this country has experienced some bad times lately. But’s it is still a shock to recognize that on this particular Earth Day, the main environment-related initiatives in the news have been Republican efforts to kill off or neuter the Environmental Protection Agency–a Republican creation, as it happens–and to liberalize offshore oil drilling.
To borrow the first line from Bradford Plumer’s rumination in The New Republic on the collapse of climate change legislation: “What the hell went wrong?”
Some would point to internal conflicts and shortcomings in the environmental movement; others to the traumatizing effect of the global economic crisis. The one thing that is crystal clear is that environmental causes, once perhaps the most bipartisan and transideological of all causes, no longer enjoy significant Republican or conservative support; au contraire, as a matter of fact. And this development has occurred very, very recently.
It’s pretty well known that cap-and-trade–or “cap-and-tax” as conservative pols now like to call it–began as a Republican initiative to use market forces, as opposed to command-and-control regulation, to promote environmental improvements, notably in the successful attack on acid rain begun when George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. John McCain was for years the point man in Congress for cap-and-trade. Republican governors like Tim Pawlenty took on bipartisanship state initiatives to deal with climate change. And beyond the purely political circles, the idea that environmental activism was entirely compatible with conservative values seemed to be spreading through much of the last decade. “Creation care” was among the hottest topics among U.S. evangelicals. The Vatican sponsored a conference on climate change in 2007. Even George W. Bush came around to the proposition that man-made factors were almost certainly causing potentially catastrophic climate change.
Then the rock rolled back down the hill. And while you can debate the contributing factors ad nauseum, the most persuasive argument is that bipartisanship on the environment–as on health care and other issues–was a casualty of the conservative/GOP determination, which is now deeply rooted in rank-and-file opinion, to oppose anything supported by Democrats (with powerful interests who profit from the destruction of the environment, of course, promoting this trend with big money and disinformation).
It’s hard to predict whether or when this sudden withdrawal of one of America’s two major political parties from even a rhetorical investment in environmentalism will change; the indicators certainly are not positive, as witnessed by John McCain’s headlong flight from his own record in 2008, and by Tim Pawlenty’s recantation of his climate change initiatives as a terrible mistake.
For the time being, anyone interested in environmental progress had better hope for a Democratic victory in 2012.
UPDATE: I only mentioned in passing the “creation care” movement among conservative evangelical Protestants that was so evident just a few years ago. But the massive backlash in the Christian Right against this movement recently, and the close coordination of the religious backlash to corporate anti-environmentalism, is very well documented by a new report from People for the American Way. It’s kind of terrifying, not just to environmentalists, but to Christians who don’t buy the idea that God has commanded us, through the agency of oil and coal extraction companies, to despoil the earth. It’s certainly grist for reflection on this Good Friday.