Navigating Iowa

Two quick links, because it's time for me to leave the office. First, a Washington Post piece on the strange marriage between social and fiscal conservatism that fuels the so-called "tea party" in Iowa. The Machine Shed in West Des Moines gets name-checked, and the rest of the piece is a who's who of Iowa's far right. The recipe for success in Iowa these days? Apparently this: "[I]t's all about Christian values. If you're an honest person and have some accountability to God, you'd be a good candidate for public office."

And second, from the Democratic Strategist, some analysis of the first article. The conclusion, which frankly terrifies me, is this, regarding what the far right considers "overreaching constitutional authority" (conveniently defined, I would argue, as "doing whatever we don't like, such as upholding equal protection under the law for minorities"):

Long before conservative activists put on wigs and beat drums, it was the language of the Christian Right, whose obsession with overturning Roe v. Wade, and with opposing church-state separation, constantly fed constitutional originalism. Similarly, the importation into the constitutional design of the Declaration of Independence, which is semi-universal in Tea Party circles, originated with the Christian Right, which used the Declaration to smuggle God into the Constitution, along with a notion of natural rights that supported, in their own minds at least, the rights of "the unborn" and the prerogatives of the traditional family.

More generally, it's hard to identify Christian Right pols who haven't strongly identified themselves with the Tea Party Movement (two of its best-known leaders, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, are highly illustrative of this fact), and hard to find Tea Party spokesmen who favor any policies that would in any way discomfit the Christian Right. Where they aren't the same people, they are certainly strong allies, and essentially two sides of the same radicalized conservative coin with the same apocalyptic vision of a righteous nation led hellwards by evil progressives. Iowa is not an outlier in this respect, but perhaps just a place where the political context makes it easier to see.