The New Republic

Again
Nicholas Lemann & The Editors

Begin

Eliza Gray: Scientology & The Nation Of Islam/ Jonathan Chait: The Mission to Save Conservatism/ Timothy Noah: The Secret Passions of the Super-Rich

October 25, 2012 | $4.99

1. The Editors: Four More Why

Obamaism must live

TOC
TRB The Mall

10.25.12

2. Timothy Noah: Plutes Versus

Plebes The secret passions of the super-rich

4. Eliza Gray: Scientology joins forces with the Nation of Islam 6. Nate Cohn: Why Scott Brown never had a chance 8.
Thomas Mallon: Travels in the worlds
least predictable police state 11. Mark Alan Stamaty: Washingtoon A

Romney gaffe places Chip Forehead in peril

Graeme Wood: Preacher, Tailor, Zealot, Spy Conversations with a Salafi

harvester of souls

12. Andrew Goldman: Ink Stained How Romney came to hate the press 14. 18. Alec

Features

Mitt Romney benefactor and his

MacGillis: Coal Miners Donor A

surprisingly generous employees

21.

Blue states are from Sandinavia, red states are from Guatemala 24. Laura Bennett: Woe Is Twee Twentysomething whiners and the boomers who made them

Jonathon Cohn: E Pluribus Duo

The Mall

O
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10.24.12 | TNR

Thetans Scientology joins forces with and Bowties the Nation of Islam.
N A COOL, clear evening in mid-September, the Church of Scientology held a grand opening for its new national affairs office in Washington, D.C. Located in a handsome, 122-year-old mansion in Dupont Circlea genteel neighborhood populated with embassies and well-appointed homesthe office had been established to lobby on various Scientology pet causes, such as religious freedom, prisoner rehabilitation, and the evils of psychiatric drugs. Three members of Congress showed up to deliver words of welcome, as did a FEMA official, who praised the Churchs volunteer efforts after national disasters like September 11. Finally, Scientologys leader, David Miscavige, addressed the several hundred people in the

crowd. Miscavige is 52 but looks at least a decade younger. Dressed in an expertly tailored suit, his slicked hair parted to one side, he spoke excitedly of Scientologys goal to have a presence in every city in America. The message of the event couldnt have been clearer: The Church of Scientology was directing the full force of its persuasive powers at the Washington establishment. But who the Church courts and who the Church converts is a very different matter. And when Mike Rinder, Scientologys former chief spokesman, visited the Washington church last year, he noticed something strange. Half the damn people there were Nation of Islam, he told me. [Its] the weirdest, weirdest thing. For a long time, the Church of Scientology has had the reputation of an impenetrable, invincible cult. Recently, though, its been a little touch and go. Tom Cruise, once the Churchs star asset, became its biggest liability following a cascade of truly bizarre behavior: the couch jumping on Oprah, the in-home sonogram machine, the leaked motivational video scored to the Mission: Impossible theme during which he talks of Scientologists obligation to create the new reality. High-profile exposs, such as Janet Reitmans Inside Scientology, have revealed a highly paranoid, authoritarian organization in which families are broken apart and disobedient members are held at a remote Scientology outpost in Hemet, California.

Scientology has denied these allegations, but as defectors and hackers have flooded the Internet with secret documents and videos, it has become increasingly difficult for the Church to control its message. All of this has taken a toll. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, Scientology is shrinking; between 2001 and 2008 it estimates that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 to as low as 25,000. (A spokesperson for the Church dismissed this survey, claiming steady growth and millions of members worldwide.) Scientology has created the appearance of growth by opening expensive new facilities, but, on the inside, its dead, says Tom Felts, a former Washington staffer. And as the Church loses members, it has been grateful for new recruits wherever it can find them. Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam for more than three decades, has said that he first heard about Scientology 35 years ago from a former Nation minister who became a Scientologist. But the story of how Farrakhan came to embrace it concerns a Nation minister in Los Angeles named Tony Muhammad. In 2005, Muhammad was beaten by the LAPD at a prayer vigil hed helped organize for a young man killed in a drive-by shooting. The incident plunged him into an agitated, depressed state. A concerned friend introduced him to Scientology, which he credits with saving his life. When Farrakhan later

The

Eats
By Jonathan Chait
Republican nominee, de facto or de jure, for eight months now, and the grand historical joke of it has not yet worn off. A party that has set itself to frantically, fanatically expunge its moderates, quasi-moderates, suspected moderates, and fellow travelers of moderates chose as its standard bearer the lineal heir, biographically and genealogically, to its moderate tradition. It entrusted its holy crusade to repeal Barack Obamas hated health-care law to the man who had inspired it and run, four years before, promising to do the same for the rest of America. The man and his historical moment could not be more incongruous. It was as if the Mongol

Revolution

its

Own.
tribes of the thirteenth century, setting out to pillage their way across the Asian steppe, had somehow chosen Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme khan. Romneys capture of the nomination required an incredible confluence of good fortune. Any one of several RepublicansJeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryancould have outflanked Romney in both grassroots enthusiasm and establishment support but chose not to run. The one candidate with the standing and financial reach to challenge him who did grasp for the prize, Rick Perry, performed his duties with such comic, stammering ineptitude that his final oops-de-grace by that point was not even startling. What remained to challenge Romney was a gaggle of third-raters

How Republican moderates go silently to their doom.

MITT ROMNEY HAS BEEN running for president as the

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10.24.12 | TNR

lacking the money or the rudimentary organization even to get their name on the ballot everywhere. Still, running even against the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (which is to say, running essentially unopposed), Romney still trudged laboriously to victory after endless weeks. But there is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination.

IT HAS TO DO with the strange and sad fate of Republican moderation. After all, moderates, or at least relative moderates, do continue to exist in the Republican Party. They merely do not exercise power in any meaningful, open way. They provide off-therecord quotations to reporters, expressing unease over whichever radical turn the party has taken at any given moment. They can be found in Washington and elsewhere rolling their eyes at their colleagues. The odd figure with nothing left to losesay, a senator who has lost a primary challengemay even deliver a forceful assault on the partys uncompromising direction. For the most part, though, Republican moderation is a kind of secret creed, a freemasonry of the right. It lacks institutions that might legitimize it, or even a language to express itself. And since conservatism is the only acceptable ideology, the party has no open arguments with itself. Thus the debate in the Republican Party is entirely between genuine ideological warriors and unwilling conscripts, with intraparty skirmishes generally taking the form of hunts for secret heresies. In this sense, Romneys capture of the nomination is perfectly emblematic of the state of the party. Conservative activists spent months resisting Romney, sometimes furiously, despite the fact that he was defending no positions that they disagreed with. Across the entire ideological spectrumin social, economic, and foreign policyRomney stood shoulder to shoulder with his partys reactionary wing. When Romney took on his hapless opponents, he assailed them from the right, as soft on immigration or anti-capitalist. The sole point of hesitation centered on conservatives suspicion that Romney did not actually believe what he was saying. FIFTY YEARS AGO, the conservative movement, far from holding a monopoly on acceptable thought within the GOP, was merely one tribe vying for power within it, and not even the largest one. Geoffrey Kabaservices fine book tells the story of the slow extinction of the partys moderate and liberal wings. The conservative movement, he shows in often gruesome detail, took control of the party in large part due to an imbalance of passion. The rightists had strong and clearly defined principles and a willingness to fight for them, while the moderates lacked both. Meeting by meeting, caucus by caucus, the conservative minority

wrested control of the party apparatus. Sometimes this happened through physical force or the threat thereof. (Anybody who recalls the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 election imbroglio in Florida, when a Republican mob shut down a vote recount in Dade County, will find many of Kabaservices scenes familiar.) More often, the conservatives won out by packing meetings, staying until everybody else was exhausted, and other classic methods of organized fanatics. The moderates lacked the ideological selfconfidence to wage these fights with equal gusto, and battle by battle they lost ground until finally there was nowhere left to stand within the party. Republican moderates in the early 1960s held a place of influence and comfort within their party that is hard to imagine today. The worldview of the partys Rockefeller faction was formed and propagated with the help of organizations such as the Ripon Society, Republican Advance, and the Committee on Economic Development, and publications such as the New York Herald Tribune, Confluence, and Advance. And when the great wave of the Goldwater movement arrived in the early 1960s, with the explicit goal of cleansing the party of moderates and re-making it in the image of monolithic conservatism, the moderates fought back, albeit using more gentlemanly methods than those often employed against them. Moderates at the GOP convention in 1964 proposed a resolution condemning extremism of all varieties. Goldwater supporters voted it down,

Moderates do continue to exist in the Republican Party. They merely do not exercise power.
TNR | 10.24.12

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