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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I love how the conspiracy theorists are starting to change the tune from "Obama will be re-elected and enact his dictatorship" to "Obama will get a third term and enact his dictatorship" because he doesn't have much time left to make America a Socialist Nightmare now.

[RedKing]

But of course! So then after 2016 passes, and he doesn't run for a third time, and conversatives/libertarians actually AREN'T in FEMA death camps....they'll know it was all because of their valiant efforts.

Vitriolic blogging is, after all, the most powerful force in the universe.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

It sure is more powerful than compound interest in the short term, but posting is more of a flash in the pan. Whereas compound interest quickly becomes an incurable infection spreading to all of your economic organs, ultimately leading to dissipation and death.

[GlyphGryph]

Before they got converted to FRRREEEDERM-lovin' Republicans who decry anyone to the left of Reagan as a godless socialist.

How'd that happen?

Identity politics and rejection from the liberal mainstream, most likely. Same way the liberals lost religious backing despite it making a lot more sense than the conservative/religious alliance that exists now, by being idiots who are unable to work nicely with others even when their interests coincide.

[Owlbread]

In the UK the main driving force behind the left wing policies espoused by the Liberal Party and later the Labour Party was a strong Christian conviction that one must be charitable and help the poor. The most successful left wing British politicians in the 20th century were mostly devout Christians. For that reason I tend to associate Liberals and British Socialists with Christianity. Our Far Left is another story.

New Labour (the faction of the party that governed us in the late '90s and early-mid 2000s) were very Christian; Tony Blair, John Smith, Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown in particular. Lots of their influential Scottish politicians had close ties with the Church of Scotland, even being children of ministers i.e. "sons of the manse", Gordon Brown included. If you look through our political history, it's pretty common to find practising Church of Scotland ministers working as local and regional politicians as Labourites or Liberals.

It's always interested me that there is practically no comparable "Christian Left" in the USA. I have heard Martin Luther King being described as a Democratic Socialist though.

[GlyphGryph]

The Christian Left was a huge thing in American politics, at one point. Their absence is sort of a modern thing.

[Glowcat]

The modern "Christian Right" was born entirely out of movements such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and the social conservatism that's always been espoused by the majority of religious power structures. People don't tend to notice the "Christian Left" because it's either subsumed under racial identity (black protestant churches) or under a modern secular-christian identity - which is pretty much everybody in the Democratic party and still a majority of self-defined Liberals. There are also groups that are explicitly religious and left-leaning, but they don't tend to acquire media attention because overall their stances don't differ greatly from other liberals, at least in areas that our politics typically cover.

[Descan]

Does not help that the "Godless Commies" were the boogeyman, so to be "Not A Communist", had to be godly and right-wing.

[RedKing]

The Christian Left was a huge thing in American politics, at one point. Their absence is sort of a modern thing.

^^^^
This.


Especially in the South, pre-1950's or so. Co-opting the pulpit to conservative agendas was really one of the brilliant coups of the post-1964 Republican Party, to be honest.

Though there are still plenty of liberal denominations (UU, Church of Christ, etc.) they tend to work as part of larger secular left movements rather than directly organizing.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Interestingly, the Christian Left and Christian Right are about the same size, the latter just gets much better mobilization.

Personally, I don't like the Christian Left much better than the Right. They're just condescendingly compassionate instead of condescendingly psychopathic. Religion is ultimately a tool of the Right, and deviations from this are inherently temporary. You will eventually reach the bounds of what even liberal religion can permit through twisting doctrine, and that's not enough.

[SealyStar]

There's sort of three major political alignments for the religious. There's the good ol' fashioned religious right, and there's the social-justice-focused religious left, and then there's the religious who are economically left (compassion for the poor and so on) but socially conservative (as long as the poor aren't gay), who from my observation seem to have a plurality.

[scriver]

The Christian movements were among the main progressive mobilizers in Sweden for a long time during the 19th and first half of the 20th century in Sweden, alongside and intermingled with the socialist movements. Today it's almost entirely dead as a political movement, though, even if the Swedish Church is probably still one of the more progressive "big denominations", but it's also mostly secular. It has some heritage though, for example they're still one of the most thoroughly immigrant-friendly groups and one of the main cogs in the network that hides illegal and revoked immigrants and provides (or rather work to make it possible to provide to them) healthcare and schooling and such.

[Sheb]

Dat banner.

[Descan]

Priorities!

[SealyStar]

Dat banner.

The pun intensifies.