Is God a Democrat?

Before the 2008 Democratic Convention, James Dobson and Focus On the Family promoted a prayer campaign asking God to rain on Barack Obama's open air convention speech in Denver. Well, it didn't come to pass; the weather was great that day, and the convention a resounding success. Instead, there cameth an economic meltdown near the end of the 2008 campaign season, convincing America that George W. Bush's economic policies were, in fact, horrible (and that John McCain had nothing helpful to say about the crisis), and catapulting Obama into the White House.

Now we have Hurricane Sandy, which altered the flow and tenor of the campaign by putting climate change squarely back on the political radar, and earning Obama an endorsement from New York's independent-minded mayor Michael Bloomberg.

So, do these uncannily-timed catastrophic events prove God is a Democrat? If you ask me, I'd say no, because I don't believe in a deity that sends plagues and murders first-born sons, much less chooses sides in an election. Even if I did, I would not presume, as do the supremely arrogant Dobson and his ilk, to have seen His yard sign. I instead draw a much more down-to-earth conclusion: real-world events favor the Democrats because that's what real-world events tend to do.

The modern Republican Party draws its fuel from myth: lone-wolf libertarianism, Randian capitalist utopianism, the inherently corrupt State (always teetering on the brink of Stalinism) and the Founding Fathers as pious prophets—not to mention a gaggle of conspiracy theories, demagoguery and hyperbolic histrionics. It's a nice way to avoid facing facts, such as global warming being real, evolution being true, taxes and regulation being necessary, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the like.

But facts, as William C. Redfield once said, have a way of substituting themselves for fancies. It's happened again and again in history as conservative stands have been dashed against the shores of reality. The Royalists did not prevail in the 1700s, nor the antebellum slave apologists and Know-Nothings, the Hooverites, the Isolationists, the John Birchers, the segregationists; and so it will be for today's Tea Party, as environmental crisis, science, economic necessity and 21st century realpolitik make these ideas irrelevant. Sorry, folks: history just aint on your side.

Meantime, we have events like Superstorm Sandy to remind us of why we should listen to those proffering data and expertise rather than claiming the mantle of righteousness—especially when of the divine sort.