Give me that Left-wing theology

In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, many Democrats realized that they needed to appeal to people who place a high priority on "moral values." It sounds like a promising way for the Democrat party to expand their base, except that they want to accomplish their task while retaining their views on abortion and homosexuality.

Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas, has written about how amazing it is that blue-collar workers, people who should be joining Marxist guerilla movements or at least voting against Wall Street speculators, seem to be strong supporters of Republicans candidates. Of course, one could examine the various economic theories that have been offered by Left throughout the decades. It is possible that blue-collar, red-state voters have concluded that socialism doesn't deliver prosperity.

But don't tell that to Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right gets it wrong and why the Left doesn't get it. Jim Wallis believes that concern for the poor should be the primary concern of Christians and this automatically translates into more spending by the federal government on social welfare programs. Katherine Mangu-Ward has analyzed Wallis's politicial-theological blueprint.

Take the political program advocated in God's Politics. A liberal Democrat will find almost nothing here to challenge him, unless he balks at praise for "healthy, two-parent families"; a conservative Republican almost nothing to agree with. The obvious exception is abortion. Wallis is pro-life and forthrightly deplores the Democratic party's "highly ideological and very rigid stance on this critical moral issue." But his chapter "A Consistent Ethic of Life" offers a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down for committed pro-choice Democrats, pairing the case against abortion with the case against capital punishment. Pro-choicers will have no trouble shrugging off this breach in an otherwise nearly flawless leftist litany on poverty, war, the environment, domestic spending, racism, the Middle East, the evils of advertising, and the awarding of sinister contracts to Halliburton.
Asked to name a prominent Republican ally, Wallis mentions only Mark Hatfield, who retired from the Senate in 1997. Current Democratic senators, meanwhile, are fervent in their praise. Byron Dorgan calls Wallis a "breath of fresh air." Both Minority Leader Harry Reid and liberal patriarch Edward Kennedy credit Wallis with helping them figure out how to talk about values, aides told the Los Angeles Times. Reid has even borrowed from Wallis's editorials in the magazine he edits, Sojourners, for floor speeches, vowing to "turn this budget into a moral document."

Certainly the religious right's alliance with the Republican party, beginning during the mid-1970s when Ronald Reagan challenged President Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, has been no small factor in the Republican party becoming America's majority party.

I suppose that there are many people who regularly vote Republican who are agnostic on economic issues and would be perfectly willing to support a socially conservative Democrat, even if he supported a higher minimum wage, Canadian style health care and a host of other anti-corporate ideas lifted from Ralph Nader's campaign literature. But most Americans, religious and non-religious alike, have seen this movie before and realize that what's bad for business isn't necessarily good for them.