Andrew Sullivan writes a must-read post about the derangement of the GOP in response to former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren's must-read post about the derangement of the GOP. Sullivan:


[The] GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the "Prosperity Gospel" as a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation (yes, that kind of Gospel is compatible with Rand, just not compatible with the actual Gospels); for military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); and for radical change and contempt for existing institutions (as a product of End-Times thinking, intensified after 9/11)...

And so [our current] political deadlock conceals a religious war at its heart.
Why after all should one abandon or compromise sacred truths? And for those whose Christianity can only be sustained by denial of modern complexity, of scientific knowledge, and of what scholarly studies of the Bible's origins have revealed, this fusion of political and spiritual lives into one seamless sensibility and culture, is irresistible. And public reminders of modernity—that, say, many Americans do not celebrate Christmas, that gay people have human needs, that America will soon be a majority-minority country and China will overtake the US in GDP by mid-century—are terribly threatening.

But all these nuances do not therefore vanish. The gays don't disappear. China keeps growing. The population becomes browner and browner. Women's lives increasingly become individual choices not social fates. And this enrages and terrifies the fundamentalist even more. Hence the occasional physical lashing out—think Breivik or McVeigh—but more profoundly, the constant endless insatiable cultural lashing out at the "elites" who have left fundamentalism behind, and have, on many core issues, science on their side.

First go read Lofgren's piece, if you haven't already, then go read Sullivan's. They're both required reading.