American Taliban: How war, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. The author is the founder of Daily Kos.
“Totalitarianism for Christ” is the phrase by Jeff Sharlet (NPR) he uses in the book that I think does capture the factual basis of why the right is a serious threat to democracy.
“Fact is, progressives hate the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists precisely for the same reason we hate rabid conservatives at home: their fear of change, their contempt for nontraditional lifestyles, their mania for militaristic solutions, and their fascistic efforts to impose their narrow worldview on the rest of society.” [intro p x]
p 4 …these religious extremists…set out to re-create a holier-than- thou version of their religion-based ideologies, which command subservience from their flocks and allow no room for debate or open discussion “Freedom,” in the upside-down world of these self-righteous extremists, means acquiescence.
p 5 This “freedom” they all claim to seek is, to put it mildly, a limited one: freedom to worship their God and subscribe to their ideology, not freedom to live one’s life as one sees fit. At its core is the idea that all laws of the land must flow from their holy book, and that all else is deviation that must be banned.
P 6 Holding such beliefs is fine, but foisting them on the rest of us is not. Filled with a moral certitude born of religious conviction, these fundamentalists want a society in which “freedom” means being free to submit to their God.
At his point I have about 4 pages of quotes if not more so I may type more sections that particularly seem to be the best assessment of the concept of the fascist rise of the religious extremists who want an Authoritarian Theocracy rather than a democratic on: some pigs are more equal than others (Animal Farm, George Orwell).
I will have to go back and find my extensive notes to flush this out because at the time I was reading I had not been typing immediately but wrote in notebook. Silly me.
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