It really needs to be said: Congressman Paul Broun, Jr. is sort of crazy. I don’t mean he’s insane in a clinical sense; he can be left alone with children, sharp objects or small animals. But what is doubtful is whether Broun is fit to inhabit any elected office achievable outside an Elks lodge. Problem is, Broun lives in something like a cartoon, a make-believe world of absolutes: good and evil, left and right, “with us” and “against us.” Little in the way of nuance or intricacy is admitted to complicate his worldview. Broun is what they call a “true believer,” a term describing a religious certitude which just as well applies to the Congressman’s political and ideological positions. If he were an Iranian or a Palestinian, we’d call him a “fundamentalist.” Like some members of Hamas or Hezbollah, Broun applies the rigid absolutism of his religious faith to nearly all matters of state. This doesn’t disqualify Broun from much—just making decisions that affect anyone other than himself. In fact, Broun might make a great house painter. It’s more his speed, and painting is well-suited for folks with absolutist tendencies: either the wall is covered or it’s not. But Washington is not a place for painters—it’s a place for artists. Democracy is more than slapping paint on clapboards; it requires an intellectual complexity more akin to painting on a canvas. Broun ain’t no Renoir.

A Steamroller of Solipsism

Congressman Broun has become all but unhinged since the election of President Obama. He’s become so crazed that he invited a religious cleric buddy to anoint the entrance to the inauguration stage with holy oil in the days before Obama took office. Yes, holy oil. The episode, recorded for YouTube, reminded viewers of the politics of the Taliban more than anything our nation’s founders had in mind, with Broun and the Christian shaman mumbling spells to protect the state house from the swarthy interloper. I can imagine Jefferson spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.

Broun is unable to regard the centrist liberalism of Obama as anything other than what he calls “the steamroller of socialism.” Rational political observers find two immediate problems with Broun’s assessment: first, that the President’s political demeanor is one of finesse and compromise, and that Obama’s aims are to the right of even the so-called socialist governments of western Europe. There’s nothing “steamrolling” or “socialist” about the President, just charisma and the center-left politics of a president surrounded by big-business Wall Street types, Clintonites and actual Clintons.

But Broun is either too politically naive or dogmatic (or both) to discern the difference. After all, he’s a doctor by training, not an economist or political scientist. In the same way that Broun would be better able to tell a malignant cancer from a benign tumor than would most of his constituents, it might be that we’re better able to tell Marxism from capitalism, or “tyranny” from simply the majority party. But that doesn’t stop Broun. “In my opinion, we’ve elected a Marxist to be president of the United States,” he said in the days following the November election. Exactly: In your opinion, Dr. Broun. I could walk into Dr. Broun’s medical office, plop down on the butcher paper and tell him that in my opinion, I have spinal meningitis. I would not then have the disease. An elementary knowledge of the workings of capitalism and an understanding of what Marxism is (and what it isn’t) would have stopped an informed person from making any statement establishing Obama as anything other than a capitalist liberal, a Democrat.

But get this: After months of unseemly accusations, clever turns of phrase (the “un-stimulus bill,” the “porkulous” bill, the “cow patty with a marshmallow” bailout) and only days after calling President Obama’s first 100 days a “steamroller of socialism that is being shoved down our throats,” Broun was “proud to announce” the arrival of more than $2.2 million in federal money—some of it stimulus money—for the University of Georgia. There’s a specter haunting America…

Praising the Market

Broun casts the tension between capitalist and European-style socialist/Keynesian economics as no less than a battle between good and evil, or, more appropriately for Broun: God and Satan. Broun refers to capitalism as something he “believes” in, as one would “believe” in Jesus, Krishna or Zeus. In fact, Broun even conflates economic and fiscal matters with biblical rules of behavior, suggesting that Americans pay no more than that which they tithe at church: “The bottom line is that if 10 percent is good enough for the Lord, it should be good enough for Uncle Sam.” Feeding the five thousand was an impressive feat, but paying for highways, bridges and multiple wars on a 10 percent tax would be a real miracle.

Ever since Adam Smith, capitalism has been said to be animated by a sort of unseen magic, the “invisible hand” and market “forces” toward whom we must act properly or face their wrath. Further, bounty is said to “trickle down” from above—like manna from the heavens—as long as proper tribute is paid to those on top. The language of the fundamentalist economists from whom Broun gets his theory sounds as much like fire-and-brimstone preaching as it does like a social science. An “invisible hand” whose will cannot be fully known? Prayers that wealth will trickle down from unknown benefactors, as long as they are kept well-praised? Isn’t that a God? To Broun, it is. Broun’s reverent worship of the market is an easy step from his religious fundamentalism. Any deviation from extreme capitalist dogma is immediately rejected by Broun as “socialist,” “Marxist” or Hitlerian—never mind that the epithets are not synonyms at all. Confronted with what seems to Broun the inconceivable “socialism” of Obama’s economic policies, the Congressman imagines that the new president will create a “Gestapo”-like security force to maintain his “socialist” dictatorship, “exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did.” The needless overreaction is difficult to comprehend until one realizes that Broun understands the debate to be of metaphysical proportions.

In All Things, Worshipful

Broun delivered something of a creed on the floor of the House of Representatives: “There’s a great thing we call the free market in America,” he began. “I’m an ardent capitalist, and I believe the marketplace, unencumbered by government regulation, is the best way to control quality, quantity and cost of all goods and services.” In another speech, he cited the “enslavement” (on a “plantation,” no less) that comes with any deviation from his severe vision of the free market. Capitalism is not simply a type of economy to Broun, not simply one way of producing widgets—it is something to worship.

So, while it’s becoming clear to more and more Americans that the fundamentalism guiding the economy for the past generation has delivered us a debilitating global crisis, Broun appears unable to include the new revelations of the economy’s failures into his thinking. He merely hugs closer to dogma, drifting off into utopian visions of capitalist dreamworlds where corporations pay no taxes, social security is “unconstitutional,” and wealth is free to accumulate in places far from the homes of his constituents.

Broun and the crack team of Georgia House Republicans devised a “budget” to counter Obama’s “radical socialist” one. “Budget” was a misnomer, really, as the document advertised by Broun was only two pages of bullet points in oversized print. What did the make-believe budget propose? An increase in the largest socialistic program in America: the U.S. military. The military is almost entirely supplied by a handful of “corporations” who feed off of the taxpayer in a highly non-competitive non-market. There are no mom-and-pop fighter jet manufacturers competing with Lockheed Martin or Boeing. There is hardly any market at work, only government handouts to corporations. But the military buttresses another of Broun’s fundamentalist perspectives: American exceptionalism.

Matt Pulver

Coming up in Part 2: Broun’s views on American exceptionalism, military spending, immigration policy, abortion, marriage and more.