Without Pat Robertson, American Politics Would Have Been Infinitely Better

He was the beginning of a blight that is still causing untold damage among our fellow citizens.

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

The best I can say about Pat Robertson, the Christopolitical television star and onetime presidential candidate who, on Thursday, went off to glory (and to what probably will be one of the livelier final judgments that the heavenly peanut gallery has seen in a while), is that he eventually faded into irrelevance and that he was easily surpassed for pure craziness and reckless damage by succeeding generations of clerical errors who took up politics as a career. That’s the best I can say about him.

The worst I can say about him is that American politics would have been infinitely better off had Pat chosen a career in waste management. He was the beginning of a blight that is still causing untold damage among our fellow citizens. He was one of the original vectors for the prion disease that is presently eating away at the higher functions of the Republican mind. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he was a bottomless abyssal of completely batshit crazy ideas. From The New York Times:

He suggested, for example, that Americans’ sinfulness had brought on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, and that the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 was divine retribution for a promise that Haitians had made to serve the Devil in return for his help in securing the country’s independence from France in 1804. He said that liberal Protestants embodied “the spirit of the Antichrist” and that feminism drove women to witchcraft. He called for the assassination of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. He maintained that his prayers had averted hurricanes.

In December 2020, amid intensifying efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his supporters to overturn the election, Mr. Robertson told viewers of his television show, “The 700 Club,” that a lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general challenging results in four states was a “miracle.” “They’re going to the Supreme Court to say, ‘This election was rigged and you’ve got to overturn it,’” Mr. Robertson said, citing unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. He declared that “God himself” would intervene.

His old man was a congressman, a senator, and a pretty awful person his own self. But, despite his own awfulness, or, alas, because of it, his son Pat was a transformative figure in American politics, and in American culture generally. He completely revived religious television, both as a medium for his message and, more significantly, as a loudly mooing cash cow both for his own benefit and that of his burgeoning political ambitions. His flagship show, The 700 Club, eventually became the hub of a worldwide television empire. It gave him a platform, and a viewership, that soon morphed into a purely political vehicle.

David John Marley, the author of Pat Robertson: An American Life (2007), said that Mr. Robertson’s statements were calculated to arouse his core following: Christians who felt ignored or mistreated by elites. “The more he is publicly vilified, the more his minority-under-attack thesis appears to be true,” Mr. Marley wrote. It had become a potent constituency. In 1986, Ed Rollins, who managed President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, said Mr. Robertson had “more assets than the Republican National Committee.”

The three-headed dog of splinter Protestantism, mass media, and conservative politics eventually became so powerful that, in 1988, Robertson himself ran for president, shaking up the race briefly by finishing a strong second in the Iowa caucuses, which was reason enough even back then to loath the pride of place given to a largely white state and its Clyde Crashcup nominating vehicle. Robertson’s campaign, of course, never went much past the city limits of Winterset. But his political muscle remained and, as the Times points out, his operation was instrumental in the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994. He got rich selling his network to the Murdoch empire, but only on the condition that The 700 Club be televised in perpetuity no matter what the network was called. (It’s now Freeform, if you’re keeping score at home.) That gave him a perpetual platform from which to be despicable. In 2016, when Omar Mateen shot up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people, most of them gay, Robertson half-gleefully pronounced it a two-fer.

“We’re looking at a favored group by the left, the homosexuals, and that in Islam is punishable by death or imprisonment or some sanction, so what are the left going to do?…In the meantime, Donald Trump is riding high because he said we should screen these people and he’s absolutely right. We should screen them. So the left is saying, ‘Oh you’re anti-Muslim, you’re racist’ and all this. Suddenly, that part of the narrative doesn’t play too well and they’re stuck as to what to do. But Trump is enjoying a victory.”

Pat Robertson rendered an awful lot to Caesar, as well as rendering an awful lot to his bank account. Because of that, he will be remembered by honest historians as one of the primary architects of our current political situation, and as one of the primary architects of a political party gone drunk on hatred, fear, and a very strange idea of what the gospels really mean. Paranoia is the rock on which Pat Robertson built his church.