it's not paranoia if...

There are some really cooky theories floating around. I think our ability to tell and believe in outrageous stories is a very interesting feature of the human brain. For example, the idea that the US government is hiding evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life is pretty silly, for a variety of reasons tangential to where I am going in giving my answer to your question Charles. There is certainly no shortage of paranoid conspiracy theorists regarding all sorts of things the Bush Administration or conservatives in general may or may not have done. Key to these kinds of stories is that the accused denies the charges (for example, the idea that some people due to CIA and German banking connections and unlikely futures trading in days prior to 9/11/01 had foreknowledge of the planes flying into the Twin Towers, or the idea that President Bush is the anti-Christ). Just today, someone at work forwarded the urban legend email about the needle under the gas pump giving someone some wierd disease.

But it's not paranoia or silly conspiratorial thinking when the groups themselves are the ones advocating their radical positions. The push for control of economic and spiritual activities in the pursuit of power is nothing new or unique to America. I would argue that our Founding Fathers did an incredible thing in recognizing the twin dangers of the Western world: religious wars and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. That's why they purposefully crafted a document that separated religion from the state and vested power in the masses (land, which was cheap) rather than wealth (which was concentrated). This second point is rather widely debated, with many people saying they were just rich people who protected their wealth. I think it's pretty convincing, though, between their having to do everything behind closed doors to notes taken during the preceedings that they were selling out the rich for the benefit of the new nation. Jefferson and Washington, among others, actually died bankrupt.

It's only natural that there are some people who want to undo that vision; the very fact that our basic Constitutional structure has lasted this long is a testament to the groundwork laid by our 18th century ancestors. We have done horrible things to ourselves and others, but we've recovered every time, and generally speaking, I'm an optimist about progress.

In the religious realm, it's a little easier to track motives and goals due to the necessity of attracting followers and the donations they bring, and the lack of necessity to make popular statements since the Religious Right isn't powerful enough to outright destroy the separation between church and state and simply govern as a theocracy. The plutocrats in business and government hide their language much more subtlely precisely because our current Constitutional arrangement makes their wealth and power dependent upon consumers and voters, although they have been increasingly successful at limiting this unwanted intrusion. In extreme cases, wealthy people still go to jail and lose elections.

So for information about the movement to get religious leaders more involved in government and running society, here are some good websites:

Theocracy Watch
About.com
Americans United

And in their own words:

Christian Broadcasting Network
Christian Coalition
Discovery Institute
Family Research Council
Focus on the Family
Jerry Falwell
Moral Majority
Sun Myung Moon
Tim Lahaye

The fundamental question to ask about leaders of the Religious Right is why they spend so much time accumulating material wealth and exercising dominion over the way that other people live their lives. That's a very secular, Macheavelian pursuit, especially when organizations try to use the state for those ends.

Class warfare is alive and well; it's just that the rich have been the only people fighting it for the last 25 years. There is a group of think tanks and wealthy individuals in government and business that want to transform our republic into a cross between fascism and feudalism. Instead of religion, they cloak their ideology in the language of economics. But they don't advocate policies that secure an efficient market economy, which requires things like clearly defined property rights, perfect information, and competition. Instead, they advocate giving a blank check to large corporations, whose boards of directors are actually comprised of an amazingly small number of wealthy people, to do whatever they want. And significantly, to do it in secrecy with no public debate or accountability. From particular policy areas like repealing the estate tax, minimum wage, and environmental legislation, to general approaches like eliminating social insurance while expanding government subsidies to large corporations and changing the tax code to tax consumption rather than wealth, the idea is to quite literally create a ruling aristocracy that controls the economic resources of the country.

The fundamental question to ask laissez-faire capitalists is why they are so secretive and inconsistent in applying economic analysis to policymaking. They're not anarchists; they want very large government expenditures on things like the military and the prison system and police forces and corporate welfare. But at the same time, they oppose government intervention that promotes competition, protects consumers, strengthens education, supports an independent media, and increases accountability. Why, exactly, did wealthy executives of energy firms get to meet secretly with the Vice President, a man currently being paid by Halliburton, who to this day has fought to keep the public from knowing the details of the meetings? Why did the government explicitly prevent itself from negotiating volume discounts with drug companies? The reason this isn't consistent with either a small government or a market economy is because the real desire isn't ideological; it's the simple desire to accumulate wealth and power. The trouble with that is it's slightly incompatible with democracy. Already, the amount of corruption in our government is incredible, as is the unresponsiveness of political and business leaders to demands by voters, consumers, and employees. For example, most people would spend the federal budget radically differently than the last several budget appropriations, while a clean environment and living wages are popular demands.

Some good websites about the concentration of wealth and power:

Endgame.org
Fair Economy
Inequality.org
Marshallbrain
American Way

In their own words:

American Enterprise Institute
Club for Growth
Heritage Foundation
National Taxpayers Union
Americans for Tax Reform

None of this is to say that a Christian state or a plutocracy would necessarily be bad; that's a different discussion (although I'm sure you can tell my answer is yes and yes). My point here is to show that these really are movements and not disparate groups like many of the progressive issue-based organizations.