MAMMON’s DOGs: 

A Public Thimble Sermon and Analysis of the Political Theology of Fascism  

 Douglas Olds, July 2024 

 "Get Rich or Die Young." --50-Cent 

 “Anti-Fascism cannot provide a historical explanation of Fascism, and must stop at moral reproach and constantly conjure up its ghost.”- attributed to Augusto Del Noce 

 

 ABSTRACT: This annotated sermon answers the critique, attributed to Del Noce, that anti-fascists lack an historical understanding of the emergence of fascism. It locates the root causes of fascism in activated "political theologies of mammon" that reject the Golden Rule. Its historical forms may be recognized in the social and political decay of language, which absolutizes the desperate reactionaries of associations in decline, thereby subsuming and distorting essential human values of virtue and character of wholeness. Fascism rejects accountability to the ideals of its historical language group by neglecting, if not outright negating, Biblical obligations toward truthfulness, justice, civilizing provisioning, and universalizing care. The sermon calls for the recovery of deliberative and socializing virtues as the sheep-leading Logos of political repair and healing.

Keywords:

1. Neoliberalism
2. Fascism
3. Golden Rule
4. Economic critique
5. Political theology
6. Christian Realism
7. Language degradation
8. Financial capitalism
9. Moral crises
10. Social justice

 To answer Del Noce, consider how Jesus in Matthew 15:24-26 contrasted the sheep of Israel with those metaphorically referred to as 'dogs'--spirits of fearfulness that lash out with disordering expressions when cornered. Such spirits can be influenced--(un)leashed by a certain kind of mammon's (Matthew 6:24) hand and finance-distorted language--leading to agonistic (attack-posture) subservience as a means of achieving self-respect through ecstatic --"standing outside of" --imaging in anonymity and recurrence, the aesthetization of violence, and a collective regimentation of bared teeth. 

A fascist barks under the hand of mammon to project biological agon as ontological & thus historically necessary: machismo, alpha dog energy as dominance, & contempt of other human expressions of craft entice some of every generation, especially if they feel unsafe, disrespected, or superannuated. Alain de Benoist, a fellow traveler of the political right cognizant of the allure of fascism, described reactionaries as clothed in atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—all reactions showing that the Right’s ideal is always foregone, always spent" [9]. 

Fascism arises by concertedly manipulating a declining society by explicitly linking struggle (agon) to a specific place and giving it an intrinsic advantage perceived as autochthonous and later 'genetic.'[16] This struggle is represented with a theological significance akin to, and with the aesthetics of, the final rays of a setting sun over Pharoah--a lost battle[10] that can be reversed by resurrecting man through a new sorting of politics by identity "theft" of language [15]. 

Modern decline congeals under the magma of neoliberalism, which undermines moral equality by prioritizing privatization and wealth accumulation, destroying institutions of social harmony and the humanities' normative and primary role in education. It turns money into a destination rather than a means of exchange, householding, or sharing. 

Neoliberalism disrupts traditional communal values in its chase of power grounded in absolute advantage,[1] leading excluded or alienated people to resentment and feelings of humiliation. The mammonic focus on wealth and finance, which redefines social metrics and ethics to prioritize wealth pursuits alone, devoid of civilizing purpose, isolates and estranges common folk. They come to feel contemned, invisible, replaced, and oppressed by elites perceived as 'demonic' or 'globalizing.[2] The excluded and resentful look beyond their language and back prior to some pre-linguistic state of humanity to find a guiding force in instincts or raw aggrandizements, seeing this perspective as a form of 'vir-tus.' [13]

Atavism represents a rejection of the historical ideals of language groups to enable re-creation of a timeless social order and forms by other means.[11] Yet God is never constrained by how things are or appear to be to the conscious senses[3] without the heart's mind-directing enlightenment. As such, the effective guide and leader is one who builds trust, not fear. Never address the dogs or their tribal battle gods; Address always the children, the sheep--the meek, those turned (ysr-el: the children of encounter--Matt. 15:24) from agon by Christ's holy spirit, for theirs is the eternal kingdom. Though dogs howl & even bray with their teeth, do not fear them.[4]

 Stich-ing (analytical footnotes):

[1] Neoclassical economics began the reformulation of agency inside the industrial firm. People, once seen as the ultimate goal of production, were reclassified by theorists as an input in the production process, now termed 'labor.' This shift transformed them into a means rather than an end of production. In this process, people in the form of labor were "grafted to the process of adjustment of capitalist contradictions by the State... deliver[ed]....into the hands of a new kind of machinery that is armed with a language--[mammon's] ideological gibberish--that [is] comprehensible to only a privileged few." (Bonanno 1988). In this, people commoditized as labor lost access to meaning making outside the specious language of mammon: "branding," career, eyeballs, memes, consumer sovereignty. Traditional education lost its role in exposing people to attested values and their aesthetic contention to become "merchandise" conveying a new coded language devoid of any content other than what could be symbolized for and by the market.

Natural and environmental factors, traditionally part of humanity's common inheritance, were subsumed into factors of 'capital.' This ideological shift paved over the earth's essence of renewability, transforming these resources from sustaining to depleting by the enclosures of what had been common, shared, and sufficient into heritable private estates evaluated in terms of scarcity. 

Neoliberal policies applied to economic production and political organization gained prominence in the early 1970s, significantly influenced by Milton Friedman and later by the Chicago School of Economics following the Austrian Economists, esp. Hayek [14]. These early policies of "structural adjustment" applied in developing countries prioritized the prerogatives and priorities of capital, usually at the expense of more immobile labor and environmental factors. Multilateral development agencies and banks made loans to countries contingent on domestic austerity measures, privatization, and deregulation in developing countries.   The "Washington Consensus" promoted fiscal "discipline," tax reform, and trade promotion to align with Bill Clinton's platform advocating '"opening foreign markets so American workers can compete abroad," [5] while capital was increasingly de-territorialized and deregulated ('liberalized")[6]. The result included a revaluation of life's aspirations and civilizing purpose towards transacted wealth to the exclusion of other projects, venues, and metrics of human flourishing [7] and a policy focus on amoral finance rather than obliging care. This platform was brought to the American electorate as a "rational adjustment" to the Reagan-led conservative coalition but would, in its multilateral-led paradigm, lead to large scale changes in social and employment patterns that were painful for those affected and often of questionable necessity if not negative utility. 

The coalition of financiers and politicians supporting the Washington Consensus, later termed 'neoliberalism,' promoted the corrosive idea that the U.S.'s 'comparative advantage' was in capital formation and financial intermediation. This led to a global society structured by the logic of hegemonic wealth stimulating unconsidered appetites (mammon), rather than a political market system structured by systems of fair trade that recognized and responded to human needs provisioned by particular regional endowments of resources, sustainably managed. Such trade, as interpreted by the classical Ricardian ideal, would flow from the distribution of regional environmental endowments shaped by cultural ideals of sustainability and creative expression of human flourishing, demography, and artisan skills, with capital tied to its place of origin--tying such metaphysical awareness of local conditions to cultural practices attendant to grace.

The material result of treating labor as a means and capital as the end of production, along with policies increasingly unmooring capital from its historical origin (see Herman Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy [2014, 219]), significantly shifted domestic employment. This shift moved from traditional industrial production of tangible commodities to a new marketplace dominated by a financier-serving, absolute advantage-chasing economies as the primary venue of social purposing: investment banking, real estate, advertising, intellectual property and patent law, etc. as services of symbolic manipulation and re-arrangement of power (For the quantification of this shift in sector employment in its early stages in the 1990s, see Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom [1998]).

[2]The Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United v. FEC advanced neoliberal policies by granting corporate money political 'standing' as speech, subjecting it to protected 1st amendment freedoms from legislative regulation. This marked a further shift in reducing human agency outside of terms of financial capital formation and increasingly subject to machine logic. Prior arenas of meaning makings of life outside of the marketplace and pursuit of wealth absent social obligation and equity continued their steady ebb:

 

 As market relations increasingly define human 'essence' (as promoted by the Austrian Economists and diagnosed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation [1957]), traditional social relationships become displaced in uncentering consequentialist ethics (Olds 2023) of "careerism" and personal "branding":

Neoliberalism accepts as fundamental the rule of modern economistics - that mammon's private vice is to be made into public virtue which is the origin of its violence against the human spirit. In addition, neoliberalism ignores and displaces our desire for a respected name and identity in a shared collective enterprise that is greater than our seeking material gain alone. By excluding the tutelary and normative considerations of personal creativity and the balanced wholeness of human persons and communities contributing to each other (shalom), neoliberalism's policy-instituted chase of absolute advantage is mislabeled and propagandized as 'comparative advantage.'

Constructing and sustaining the condition and terms of society as purely market to the exclusion of other human values and endeavors requires monumental sacrifice, especially by those consigned to “shadowlands” (see below). As Rousseau (Second Discourse 171) noted, the Enlightenment project of reestablishing society on new, non-traditioned (post-Church, post-monarchical) absolutes came to propose the ideology  of meritocratic  justice. What later characterized so called "prosperity gospels." Ideologies of merit derived from valorizations of material conditions, rather than spiritual merits of virtue, "stifles natural feelings of pity" and Golden Rule obligations--now a quaint guideline--to care. Elites feel justified to ignore the impoverished and deprived as their natural (=material) desert.[12] And when meritocracy comes to be based on material wealth as market outcomes alone, such brings about the disruption of traditional centers of sociality and the looming psychological collapse of humanity by displacing the search for meaning, wholeness, and authentic identity in the dead end of mammon. Like all material philosophies, the ideological temptation of material meritocracy is its tragically too-easy substitute for the obligatory tasks of the Golden Imperative. 

Neoliberal oligarchs are indifferent to the operation of national communities grounded in language of meaning-making and coherence with purpose. By an insatiable will to mechanistic power through economic absolutism, the civilizing of care is sacrificed for a singly materialistic design that corrupts poetic depth of language for the eddies of shoddy financialization and commercial propaganda, transforming authentic human relationship with nature and neighbor for cartoons that vend. 

As disenfranchised individuals, both in the US and globally, find themselves disrespected and discarded by "elites," an increasing number find religious fascism alluring. Such offers a regressive, pre- or extra-linguistic, propagandistic identity based on "blood and soil," promising a return to a mythic and simpler primordium. 

Neoliberal policies conflict with Biblical principles of justice, environmental stewardship, and the metaphysics of human purpose and its dignity of functions. In my 2020 dissertation, Praxis for Care of the Atmosphere in Times of Climate Change, I address how these practices harm both communities and the environment. While claiming to support economic efficiency in democratic polities, neoliberal policies were designed to centralize political and economic power in unelected administrative authorities through multilateral treaties. These treaties--and the academic structure that provided their rationale--empower judicial bodies to rule on domestic, legislated regulations and impose penalties when these conflict with the neoliberal superstructures. This effectively inhibits community control over environmental and labor protections and restricts workers' mobility (relative to capital) due to language barriers, exclusionary territorial boundaries, and the high costs of physical movement. (see also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism).

Neoliberalism not only violates Biblical ethics through its commitment to mammon, but it also invalidates its theoretical warrant in the classical liberal idea of 'comparative advantage' by failing to bring general improvements in moral well-being, equitable opportunities for flourishing that align the grace of capabilities with the access for functionings and participation, and environmental and community resiliency. 

By confusing and structuring labor as a means rather than treating it as the ends of economic production, neoliberalism commits Polanyi’s (1957) “economistic fallacy” to create a political theology of mammon, with fascism as its attendant substitute for virtuous grace. For an empirical account of neoliberalism's socially malign effects, see the closing section "Shadowlands" of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (2023) and the extensive sociological literature detailing environmental devastations in maquiladoras, child and prison labor feeding global corporations, and studies of "environmental racism." See also my "Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies" (2014) linked here.

[3] As in the Christian tradents of analogia entis; Heideggerian applications of the philosophy of dasein. 

A Jesuit/Eastern Orthodox doctrinal tradition of analogia entis claims that the mind and unfolding plan of God can be understood by a human's imaginary entry into the infinite—to grasp the "mind" of God (rather than, as proposed in my work on virtue ethics, to join with [participate in] the Trinitarian heart/will=conation of God). Karl Barth called analogia entis [AE] as a doctrinal teaching "anti-Christ," which has sparked considerable and heated debate marked by charges of mutual incomprehension.  Without adopting his epithet, I align with Barth in rejecting AE, knowing that the infinite possibles (a category of Leibniz) of emerging natures inside humanity's freedom render the claim to know the transcendent mind of God through a summa of phenomenological forms and backshadowing of effects the dream walking through the fool's paradise of Platonism.

Analogia entis is, in the orthodox/roman tradition, advanced theology less for the laity and more for the priests who are supposed overseers. Minimally featured in the RC catechism, it is part of the advanced training of seminarians and priests. Its systematizer was the Jesuit Erich Przywara around the WWI era.

The Christian Reformers' contrasting idea is that the transcendent mind of God is unknowable, but the divine heart is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. So that the claim that apophatic theology (ironic for a religion of Logos)---that only negations of claims about the divine essence--serves the church's understanding is turned positive (cataphatic) in the will/heart revealed by Christ. In such a metaphysics, humility if not radical skepticism is required for epistemological predication of any summa of form, but that indeed the authentic prophets are correct about how the misshapen and hegemonic mind of egotism that oppresses will be countered by the experience of, and accountability to, justice. And my claim here and elsewhere that not only is the Golden Rule the only solution to the metacrises spewing from the assemblies and systems of the centralizing, anatomizing, categorizing, and coercing Frankenstein mind, but it WILL be its solution. The prophets, grounded in the heart and intentionality to serve, align with, and participate in God's Trinitarian essence that wills repair and reunifies by Christ's manifest virtues. Prophets, then, are indeed able to give positive statements about the future from the awareness and attendance to God’s justice. Not that these predictions serve any egoist advantage, but in order to develop and tutor wisdom in receivers. But in Christ alone we learn how the Prophets and the Torah (Matt 22: 34-38) are anthropologically grounded in the Shema's (Deut 6.4-9) existential metaphysics: the primacy of the heart attending to God’s announced and revealed mercy and steadfast love that sends us forth to do the same.

Rather than participation in the infinite to reveal and participate in an absolute and enduring, final form, the prophet is attendant to sic transit mundi --earthbound accountability. Her dynamic visions, rather than an imaginatorium of static form, might reveal a coming certainty of the particularity of power--an analogia simul latens et exstatura-- with experience of the sublime of the same nature guiding./

Dasein is a quasi-analogous, Heideggerian attempt to conceptualize the claim that reality reveals patterns and forms (of conflict and synthetic resolve) that are discernible to the mind, and that human authenticity is to live with the certainty of death, "being therein" [da-sein], with a fullest possible understanding of pure existence and absolute negation of existence without meaning-making from traditional languages and thought forms, but in social solidarity with others so aware and developing. 

Much more complex than this, but both Heidegger's existentialism and the analogia entis are to me theologically and ethically complicating (even misleading) when, esp. in the former, not outright negating.  I acknowledge, without addressing here, the depth and rigor of historical and contemplative reflections promoted by these truth-seeking traditions. However, because they are centered in mind directing the heart's intention, rather than its vice versa reordering by the Shema in Christ,[8] they fall short and do not arrive at the theological and ethical awareness and human wholeness attendant to grace they seek.

[4] The prophetic calls of  preachers Cornel West and  Chris Hedges frame systemic change in the language of practical urgencies.  E.g.  https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1812526737982726267 My approach in this blog seeks to supplement these by linking theory to empirical violations of the Golden Rule.

Prophets address systems from the bottom up, and that these modelings will filter up by the practice of Christ's virtues (rather than, or integrated with, the primacies of sacramental forms and consequentialist categorizations of idolatries and failed ambitions).  Aware of onlookers and grace's craft spread by mirroring, the political ethics of virtuous language and deliberative action is more direct, universalizing, historically-aware, and effective than grounding resistance in formalisms like cultural liturgics and symbolic demonization or ecclesial withdrawals from public milieux--no matter how dressed in "subsidiarity" commitments--which alienate the religiously traumatized and estranged.

For practical applications (virtue ethics) and constructive solutions of how the Golden Rule serves "participation" in the deliberative kingdom of God, refer to other entries in this blog and my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism (2023) https://t.ly/PvMl

[5] https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-03.html

[6] Stanley Fischer, https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp062701

[7] e.g. see  Olds, Douglas (1997). Adding Duty to Opportunity in the "Capabilities" Approach: A Proposal for Sustainable Human Development. Journal of Public and International Affairs, 8: 91-107.

[8] I have addressed these points of the disorder of mind-essentialism and the Shema's recovery to recenter the human essence as the path to Christ in recent sermons here and here.

[9]Adler, Frank. "On the French Right — New and Old: An Interview with Alain de Benoist." 2003, 116 emph. added. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/on_the_french_right_new_and_old.pdf

[10] The link of religious transactionalism as a tribal phenomenon with the kinesthetics of thymic violence reveals fascism fermenting.

The lash, marching, and ritualized actions modeled in the "prayer" of Donald Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White Cain on election day, 2020, are explicit in this video. Similar kinematics characterize invocations of a tribal god as a Baal, calling down fire (as at 11'20f in this audio), in right-wing religious assemblies such as the "ReAwaken America" tour.

In addition to linking power with domination, these conventions are explicitly driven by market objectives, as seen at 18'06 of https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1197374317933092

[11]Mammon squelches

everything not immediately translatable into this new generalised language [of commerce as meaning making and actualized by personal prosperity]. Traditional educative processes...become devalued and diminish in content, unveiling their real (and selective) substance as merchandise.

In the place of language new canons of behaviour will be supplied, formed from fairly precise rules, and mainly developed from the old processes of democratisation and assembly, which capital has learned to control perfectly. This will be doubly useful as it will also give the excluded the impression that they are “participating” in public affairs.

The computerised society of tomorrow...will be a jungle of prohibitions and rules, of nightmare in the form of deep personal decisions about participating in the common good. Deprived of a language of common reference, the ghettoised will no longer be able to read between the lines of the messages of power, and will end up having no other outlet than spontaneous riot, irrational and destructive, an end in itself.

--Alfredo M. Bonanno (1988) From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism.

It is the manipulated allowance of visceral "spontaneities" that permits the rioter the illusion of agency tied to the ecstasies--"standing outside" of community and its norms--of violence that is fascism's death-powering tie. It claims metaphysical warrant for the replacement of language-coded historical ideals for a primal, eternalizing relationship with expansionary dirt.

[12]  As post-traditional, 'natural' meritocratic society emerged from the Enlightenment, Rousseau notes how pity comes to be considered as 'misguided.' An ideology of merit--and its derivative assignment and attribution to market and brand performances-- inhibits natural empathy for the less fortunate and represses the obligations of the Golden Rule through deformed, mammon-spreading pedagogy and policies aimed primarily at eradicating any virtue that impedes the expansion of financialization and markets into more and more spheres of life.

 Neglecting empathy for poverty and deprivation in such a system is valorized as just and fair, grounding a significant portion of fascist ideologies derived from financialized materialism.

Rousseau understood Enlightenment meritocracy's drawbacks: A society that exploits its latent talent pool at the same time endows its poor with psychological and, ultimately, social baggage. In Democratic societies, those at the top feel that they belong there. They feel they’ve earned their way to the top ·and should richly enjoy their deserts. At the same time, they also feel that those who are at the bottom of the same hierarchy likewise deserve their place as a reflection of meager efforts and talents. The poor deserve their suffering, so the same society makes it 'natural' to deny offering pity or empathy.

--David Lay Williams, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx. PUP, 2024.

[13] In the "shadowland" economy, where opportunities are structurally limited by capital and which imposes strict time discipline, "gig" workers face relentless schedules that erode the virtues of patience and loyalty as personal connections disintegrate. Greed in the computer-screen age of anonymous financialization replaces these virtues with isolating pursuits and the attendant neurological mirroring of social media behaviors and bots, especially those devoted to "accelerating" chaotic and disruptive change. 

As secular meritocratic ideology blames inequities on those who cannot "compete," it breeds envy and resentment. These are increasingly manipulated for financial ends that undermine the virtue of disinterestedness and escalate the "deconstruction" of social networks of trust-building and its legacies of character formation.

[14] Note Hayek's prophesying the "cryptic" function of his prescriptive economics: "I don't believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of the government. We can't take it violently out of the hands of government. All we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.”  

Tracing this "sly prophecy for mammon" to the contemporary far right's, billionaire-led tax revolt, investigative reporter Dave Troy sensationalizes Elon Musk's "anarcho-libertarian bid to blow up the dollar." https://x.com/davetroy/status/1824833997945368797 

In such a cryptocurrency society, the medium of exchange and stored exchange value becomes subject to its private party "miner"--a personally interested "stakeholder"--as if it were a non-public good, a commodity, a "token" of the virtue, honesty, and faithfulness of its originator, and guaranteed thereby by crypto- mammon and the attendant abuse of language described in this essay. In this cryto-staking, Musk joins Peter Thiel to imagine rebuilding the world as a libertarian mammon-topia.  

Troy documents that Thiel "was talking about a global currency that couldn't be stopped back in 1999. He's just following through on this set of ideas, 25 years later." https://x.com/davetroy/status/1824819772862943325

Troy notes that Thiel plans to untether financial instruments and monetary media of exchange from their historical mandate established by morally deliberative bodies. He proposes the dubious, "accelerationist" thesis that "technology as this incredible alternative to politics." https://x.com/davetroy/status/1824820371133976993

In the context of these acolytes of the Austrian Economists, Joseph Stiglitz links Hayek's role in conceptualizing neoliberalism and fascism and takes a contrary linguistic path: the Road not to "Serfdom," per Hayek, but to "freedom" by rejecting neoliberalism. 

Stiglitz's recent book picks up the biblical distinction of sheep and wolves, though my proposal here is that the key distinction is better rendered in spiritual terms of mammon and messiah, with the former mobilizing dogs by misuse of language. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/05/07/1249203297/neoliberal-economics-the-road-to-freedom-or-authoritarianism

In addition, Stiglitz argues for morally differentiating "freedom from interference" from "freedom to" use one's capabilities for positive human flourishing. His argument cannot just be attributed to a lack of "nuance." His distinction of positive and negative freedom is too thin an account of the metaphysics of freedom. In contrast, my essay on liberty clarifies the moral obtuseness of such mainstream and secular accounts. I argue for a thicker distinction in structural terms that notes the necessity of obligation of the Golden Rule for the operation of positive freedom, an obligation absent from most, if not all, political theories.

[15] As finance became unmoored from where capital was developed, reactions and anger took hold by those seeing themselves as “losers,” so that language had to be reconditioned to serve different ideas of “winning” beyond wealth achievement. Politics became consumed with framing stereotype rather than or concealing interests behind issues, instead sorting them through crude factional identities: southern, “Christian,” exurban, male, and republican vs. a core sorting out in democrat, womanist, black and urban types (see Mason 2018, esp. 85-103). As this sorting and identity politics took hold, compromise and measured deliberation over policy gave way to “winning” at all costs—now not in terms of winning a piece of an economic pie but of social respect and increasingly a “right to life” not just in abortion debate terms. Some of the most brutal and raging of these partisans have leaned into their sorting by stereotypes and by the manipulation of language to demonize the other sides as “evil,” as “demon-possessed,” and so project the illusion that their opponents want to kill them so their side needs to first.

Certain pastors began to be recruited into these programs to "win" the nation so thereby win the past and the future-- to thereby link a claimed identity with an increasingly "sorted," partisan role:

The conservative... Christian Coalition grew steadily in support and influence in the...years [accompanying neoliberal ascendancy]. By 1995 they had publicly paired with prominent Republican senators and congressmen, including the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to announce the Contract with the American Family, which sought the legislation of Christian morality

--Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, Illinois ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, 33.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich sent members of the Republican Party a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” This memo came to be known as the GOPAC memo, and was meant to instruct Republicans on what types of words to use when describing their political opposition. As he wrote in the memo, “This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to

use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing

electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful” (Gingrich 1994).

Gingrich’s list of recommended words to describe Democrats included

betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish,

shame, sick, steal, and traitors, among many others. To this day, this is the

type of language used by party leaders to demonize opponents.

--Ibid., 132, emph. added. 

Of Gingrich's manipulation of religious identity through partisan demonization and degradation of the Logos, we may safely apply the accountability implied through Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's quote, "Night almost always falls first in the churches." Cf. Matt. 7:15: Someone is responsible.

[16] 19th C Romanticism laid the groundwork to roll back Enlightenment ideals and mobilize revolutionary mass movements through propagandizing collective myths as self-actualizing and -asserting. Rather than out-strategizing their political opponents with a superior instrumental pragmatism, they demonstrated the vacuity of the latter by popularizing a “superior idealism” based on a supposed autochthonous or ontological will that guides political instrumentality. The ever failure of fascism, then, is in the degeneracy of its ideals of will, not that their proposal that will (conation) is primary to strategy.