Power, Faith & Unbelief.

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." – Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal agreed with George Bernard Shaw that the subjects which interest civilised men can be narrowed down to politics and religion. Not just in Creation but in his 'inventions' Kalki and Messiah. The religious instinct in man fascinated Vidal, especially as he saw the late 20th Century as a period of the deterioration of the traditional religions. Meanwhile he had preempted the rise of the death cult in America in his 1954 novel Messiah. In the bourgeois fetish for the cultures of the past Vidal found great hopes for our civilisation in the Stoics of Rome and the Confucians of China. The great mistake of humanity, in his view, was monotheism in its claim to universal truth and he held Christianity in particular disdain. In his novel Julian the focus is the Roman Emperor Julian who sets out to undo the union of Christian dogma and state-power in order to revert back to the plurality of Paganism. This exemplifies the liberal side of Gore Vidal, his loyalty to secular humanism.

It is typical of Gore Vidal in his 'reflections' to blend history, religion and politics in fiction for the reason that the court historians are so awful that the novel is now the only medium that can redeem history. In Creation the protagonist is a member of the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the earliest monotheism, and witnesses the murder of Zoroaster. Cyrus is on the side of monotheism in the book, as well as the established powers in Persia and holds the masses in contempt. This is in contrast to Vidal's own political views, which could be taken as a hybrid leftism. In the book the political leaders of the time, particularly Thucydides and Pericles, are juxtaposed against one another as conservatives and democrats. The chaos of China is presented as a land which may conceive of the totalitarian impulse, while at the same time Confucian politics are received in a very positive light. Cyrus Spitama identifies himself with the conservatism of Thucydides as well as of Confucian hierarchical order and practical moral values.

In Creation Gore Vidal takes us on a tour of the ancient world, from Persia to Cathay and back, with Cyrus Spitama as our guide. Spitama is embedded in the ruling class of the Persian Empire, whilst also being descendent of Zoroaster and a follower of the Wise Lord consequently. Many of the major philosophical and religious ideas of the time are explored in the book, in Ancient Greece Cyrus encounters many philosophers and delivers his tale to his nephew Democritus. It was appropriate given the affinity Vidal had with the atomist principles espoused by Lucretius and Democritus. The vision was of a cosmos as a kind of soup of atoms bumping up against one another. The book culminates in the exposition of the atomist philosophy by Democritus. In another sense the relationship between Cyrus Spitama and Democritus mirrors the relationship between Gore Vidal and his grandfather Thomas Gore. Specifically the passing of the elder's wisdom to the young man.

The focus on the Persian Empire rails against the Western vanity, the tendency to see itself as a great fusion of Hellenism and Judeo-Christian values. Creation begins with Cyrus leaving the Odeon as Herodotus goes over his own version of history. The portrayal of Ancient Greece is just as one of many great powers rather than the centre of the world. The warring forces of China in the days of Confucius as well as the rival kingdoms of India feature prominently. The relativity of Greek glory to the lessons of the Buddha and Confucius, Mahavira and Lao Tzu. It's more than a novel, it is a work of comparative religion and philosophy crafted to persuade the reader not to be so arrogant in his modern assumptions. This is not to say that Vidal isn't writing from a position beyond commitment. Vidal was a lifelong atheist and opponent of monotheism. If anything he wants to enlighten us of the possibilities beyond the desert God of Abraham. The novel was timed well with the rise of Reaganism and the emergence of the Christian Right.


For Gore Vidal the threat of the Christian Right is equivalent to the threat of Le Pen in France, in other words it is fascistic and anti-democratic in nature. The accumulation of obscene piles of wealth in a few private hands matches the concentration of power in American society. This creates a systemic need to block democracy at every turn. Vidal would remind us that the political system in the United States is not at all democratic. First of all, there is only one political party with two right-wings - the Democrats and the Republicans - which is the party of property. Chomsky has spoken in these terms too, except he called it the business party. There is a structural need within capitalism which can be differentiated in terms of a base and a superstructure. The economic base depends upon the ideological superstructure for its legitimacy. The relation of the base to the superstructure is not just dependency, there is a tension between the pluralism and relativism of the market against the sociality of institutions and tradition.


The management of this tension can found in the revival of political religion in the new world. The Christian Right was born out of the attempts made throughout the 70s by conservatives to regroup after the losses in the last decade. The Nixon administration left America disillusioned with politics, only for great hopes to arise with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The failures of the Carter administration to achieve significant change cleared the way for Reagan in 1980. Nowadays it is almost compulsory for American Presidents to be Christian: No unbelievers allowed! But it wasn't always this way. Crucially it was Carter who had made religion an issue in his openness about the faith to which he subscribed. This could be taken as a long-time result of the Christian revival of the 1950s. Really it was the 1960s which convinced many Christians that the shared fabric of society - its traditions, institutions and moral values - was about to be destroyed in its entirety. This is less a story of a Christian Right than the story of the New Right.

The debacles of the early 60s such as the Cuban crisis and the assassination of JFK the Establishment was shaken to its foundations. Everywhere there seemed to be collapse as the issues of civil rights, racism and imperialism became the moral battleground in the American body politic. The obvious opponent for Gore Vidal was William F Buckley, l'enfant terrible of American conservatism, and they would cross swords repeatedly in debates at party conventions in the late 60s. Around this time Paul Weyrich infiltrated the student Left and was astonished by the level of planning and tactics that he witnessed. He realised that the conservatives were wrong in their assumption that the people would support them because they were right about the issues. In actuality what was needed was a movement capable of rolling back the achievements of the Left. It would be a counter to the counter-culture. The key was the mobilisation of the religious, who were largely apolitical.

As Adam Curtis notes "The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics." The New Left had actually laid the groundwork for the entrance of right-wing Christians into the political realm. The issues of gay rights, abortion and sexual discrimination mobilised the Christian Right because the liberalisation on these social issues threatened the way that they led their private lives. Then Jimmy Carter abolished the charity status of the religious schools. For many it was the last straw, enough was enough. Paul Weyrich reached out to Jerry Falwell, the product of this backroom deal was the Moral Majority. Falwell pulled some strings in order to pull together numerous right-wing preachers in America. The aim was now not just to convert, but to register the converted as Republican voters in what would later be known as the culture wars.

The network of preachers were soon spreading anti-Carter propaganda and then an obvious alternative revealed himself to the newly political Christians. It was Ronald Reagan, the old hero of libertarians, who had been trashed by Gore Vidal in a debate with Buckley. Vidal had condemned Reagan in 1967 as an aging actor with little knowledge of the world outside the United States. This is on top of viciously draconian policies were hardly friendly to blacks and the poor. Before a crowd of Christians, at a mass rally, Reagan said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would only want the Bible to read. The election could've been won without the Christian vote. It was about a movement that could be used to influence and shape the political discourse. The right-wing hegemony turned the debate towards social and cultural issues on which the liberal Left had to be marginalised. Meanwhile the Right could implement an economic agenda as the leading political issues were moral.

Crime Pays!

We live in fictitious times where Thatcher and Reagan are a lot like Gods for the present-day conservatives of Britain and America. It was demonstrated well when Reagan gave up the ghost in 2004 and we could see that the Republicans had succeeded in their efforts to elevate Ronald Reagan to almost deified heights. Of course, the death was just what George Bush needed to take the heat off the administration as the horrors of Abu Ghraib shook the world. The Reagan administration had some great tacticians, who had the sense to wage war on Grenada just as the US Marine Barracks in Beirut had been bombed. But the timing of Reagan's demise was a masterstroke that not even the Reaganite tacticians could have pulled off. It came at just the right moment. As if the funeral had not demonstrated just how far the deification had gone - how deeply the termites had feasted - Obama marked the 100th year since Reagan's birth with the words "President Reagan helped as much as any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country."

Perhaps it was the moment when Reagan added Nelson Mandela to the terrorist list (where he would remain until 2008) that restored so much optimism in America. The South African government only murdered 1.5 million people in their African neighbour-states. No wonder the Hoover Institution noted that Ronald Reagan is revered as a colossus whose "spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost." It can barely be muttered today that Reagan was perched as ornament to a criminal government. You might be called a conspiracy theorist for recalling that they gave the CIA permission to deal in guns and drugs in the funding of terrorist groups in Latin America. And if not then you will be called an extremist for recognising Reaganomics for what it was - a monumental disaster. For the reactionaries on both sides of the pond the post-war period was the real disaster, with its steady rates of growth, development and productivity. The crises of the 1960s and 70s opened up a space for the life to be snuffed out of this model.


The post-Thatcher period in which we are currently held captive holds that the time before the Iron Lady was a time of stagnant mediocrity. There were plenty of problems in Britain that had been a product of the post-war settlement. But we can't seem to see the mediocrity of what we're currently living in. The average growth rate of the 1980s was 2.4% which is what it was in the 1970s and even less than it was in the 60s. Supposedly Thatcherism rejuvenated sickly Britain and restored Greatness to its shores. Even though the same pathetic worries lingered around such topics as European integration, immigration, anti-social behaviour and crime alike. The English mind was still obsessed with the decline of status it had endured since the Empire fell. And in many ways, we the British are still in the fits that inevitably come with a disordered understanding of the past. It was actually decades of steady growth and significant development which were brought to a close in the 1980s. The golden age of capitalism was no more.

We now endure the society that the Thatcherites have laid waste to and the people who have done so well out of the devastation now tell us that the real problem are the immigrants and the dole queue. The old aim of full employment was dumped and the government effectively acted to increase unemployment in order to smash the trade unions and pacify the working-class. Before there had been a time when we were close to full employment and the wealthy paid a rate of tax which was relatively progressive. Incomes for workers had tended to rise alongside productivity which was partly driven by a strong labour movement. The bedrock of institutional power for the working-class could be found in a variety of industrial sectors and the extraction of natural resources. The Thatcherites embarked upon a savage deflation which destroyed a fifth of the industrial base in two years and oversaw a 30% decline in employment in manufacturing. The unions were blown away one by one, most famously with the mines shut because it was cheaper to import.

Since the Thatcher government smashed the unions the workers' share of national income has either stagnated or declined. With the defeats of trade unions in the 1980s the right-wing mutation of the Labour Party easily picked up pace. The socialist codger Michael Foot was soon replaced with the Welsh windbag Neil Kinnock, under whom the Labour Party served as an incompetent and hopelessly complicit opposition to Thatcherism. There was no serious opposition to take over the government, just as there wasn't in the Blair years and today under the Coalition. And yet these governments have each played the populist game, the Thatcherite mantra was "power to the people" as British Telecom was sold-off for £3.7 billion. In that decade the government transferred £14 billion from the tax-payer to the investors and paid banks £3 billion to handle these transactions. The programme consisted of giving away state assets to private companies at a reduced price to ensure maximum profits and to safeguard the interests of the private sector.

The Tories handed over a lot of public money to banks from 1992 onwards as part of the Public-Private Partnership, which sold-off public aid and gave greater power to bankers. As Michael Hudson wrote "The financial giveaway had the effect of increasing prices for basic infrastructure services by building in heavy financial fees – guaranteed for the banks, who lent the money that banks and property owners used to pay in taxes in more progressive times." The theory goes that the banks will create jobs as they invest the funds in British infrastructure, specifically public transport, but it was really a way for real estate speculators to get even richer. The extension of the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf cost £3.5 billion as it raised property values along the route by £13 billion. The public investment in transport could pay for itself simply with a tax on the higher rent-of-location and the site value. But the government would rather the banks rake in the cash.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out when politicians prefer to talk about 'jobs' than even utter the filthy word 'profits'. The allies of the super-rich then moved to sell-off British Rail and saw to it that the railways carry an over-flowing gravy train for the wealthy. It is standard practice in a privatisation for the state to make sure the buyers are well served with comfy pillows stuffed with the taxes of working-class people. Last year Richard Branson gobbled up £18 million of tax-payer's money as the system underwent a multi-billion state upgrade. The privatisation opened up a space for private ownership safeguarded by public investment and, even as standards of service have slipped, there has been no attempt to re-nationalise the railways. The government contributes £4.6 billion to the railways as the private sector pays just £459 million into the set-up, most of which goes towards stock rather than anything in the real world.

Looking back on it all, its clear that it was just the beginning. We shouldn't forget the real content of such policies when David Cameron talks the same way about hospitals and schools. The same goes for the talk of selling off the woods and the exposed plans to sell bits of the police even. The first decision of New Labour was to abandon the last lever of the state to the markets, the Bank of England became 'independent' of the government. It was clear that there would be no dramatic shift from the post-Thatcherite line that has been safely established to stand its ground. The pillaging and the pig-out for the rich has yet to cease, the same can be said for the pains of the poor. We may live to see the state reduced to a slither of what it once was before we see a change in paradigm. It isn't clear just how far this model can be pushed before something has to give, but it can be said that this is not the final crisis of neoliberalism.