Joe Bageant has the situation figured in Hung Over in the End Times:

Given the near-fascist nature of U.S. governmental behavior lately, I do not think it is overstating the case to observe that we liberals seem to have become, at least to some degree, the new Jews of the rising Republican Reich. You remember the old German theme about a certain kind of people being responsible for everything wrong with an otherwise perfect white Christian society. It took a Republican mind to figure out that “elite” liberals constituted exactly such a threat to our national way of life. Remember that the German public saw the Jews as being against its “values” too, and that they had declared cultural and legal war on the Jews long before Hitler came along to galvanize the most nationalistic elements among the German people. Just as the Jews were used in Nazi Germany to rally Christian Germans, American liberals were used in the last election by the ultra-right to rouse Fundamentalist Christians -- people who were previously uninterested in the GOP political agenda but got quite excited when it was pointed out to them that their anti-Christ was, lo and beshit! right among them. A godless homo-loving stem cell sucking liberal elite right here in Riverdale! The fact that we are at least one half of the population prevents us from being an “elite” somehow escaped everyone in the excitement.

In Germany it came down to jealousy of the Jews’ success in capitalist society by a group of Christian white people who believed they had been excluded. In America it came down to supposedly being culturally excluded by the liberal elite, plus the voting rights of fetuses and allowing gay people to wear wedding rings. We can safely assume the fetuses don’t really care one way or another. The gays are still pissed. In both cases, however, the German and the American, Christianity is a form of political ideology masquerading as religious faith, deploying the ultimate force of government to root out the “evil” and dominate with its own particular delusion.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell who is controlling whom. Do the Christian Fundamentalists in this country now have significant control of the Republican Party? Or were they simply duped into backing the latest U.S. capitalist imperialist grab for empire and exploitation of ordinary working Americans. My guess is that the big Republican capitalists do not give a fuck, so long as they can grab the money and run when the lights are shot out, and that the Christians don’t care as long as they get a shot at swapping the Constitution with the Bible.

On one hand the Republicans want to own the world. On the other the godwacks want to dominate it, or destroy it if they can’t: “Ya bow to my god buddy, or we blow this whole pop stand off the map…take everybody out…startin' with the Middle East.” As near as I can tell, fundamentalists in every religion have this in common -- destroying the world to bring on their brand of paradise. The majority of Americans disagree with Christian or Jewish fundamentalist ideas, but there is no way to call the fundies on it because their agenda is couched in religious language and symbols. And we all know for crap sake that America stands for religious freedom. Even fruitcake religious freedom. So we do not challenge the Christian or right wing Zionist freaks among us (It’s open season on Muslims however.) We few who do challenge religion are declared satanic secular humanists, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic. All of which works well for only one group -- the rightwing political crazies who, in their quest for oil, capital, territory, or whatever, use god rhetoric to drive these zealots like a pack of blind slobbering dogs. This story is so old that it is sometimes hard to have much faith in the human race at all, isn’t it?
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Don’t kid yourself about making peace with these people. And for god’s sake don’t believe the pundit’s horseshit as to it being about “values.” It is about a minority among us who want to stamp out all the advances made during the Enlightenment---take us back to Biblical Law, wars and rumors of wars. And it is about a band of dyspeptic, neoconservative money grubbing bastards who knew how to exploit our most ancient and destructive legacy, the war making Calvinist fundamentalism brought here by the Scots Irish and still smoldering across the heartland. By now most of you who live where you can buy a copy of the New York Times without special ordering it, or feel free to walk down the street arm in arm with a lover of another race, are starting to wake up. All I can say is that you have worse enemies than you know, and they will still be around next election. If there is one.