The old trope has it that for conservatives, life begins at conception and ends at birth, when we begin our metamorphosis from holy lumps of blood and bone into sinful, typically ungrateful burdens on God's chosen, the owner class. Hence, abortion and contraception are evil, while wars, guns and the death penalty are instruments of divine will. The pre-born are precious, the post-born expendable. However, as we have learned with the Terri Schiavo circus, we can live again, should we be lucky enough to lapse into a permanent vegetative state.
What's this weirdness all about? In part, it's a
fetishization of helplessness, a recurrent theme of the faux-Christian jihad. As
Josh Marshall puts it, "The defining motif of all conservative politics is victimization." From
creepy fetus keychains to Terri's rictus gawp, the Operation Rescue crowd infantalizes its icons, Terri and the babies being the tender counterpoint to Daddy - the stern patriarch protector played by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Joe Scheidler.
More below...
It's in these orgies of infantalizing, from Wichita to Pinellas Park, that the fetus fetishists are at their most revealing, exposing the paradox at the heart of their "Daddy" cosmology: for all their bluster, they feel - indeed, yearn and need to feel - utterly helpless, besieged by vast, dark forces, persecuted and martyred.
Most Americans, as the polls have shown, recoil at this frothy mixture of syrupy sentimentality and acrid hatred. The cultlike protestors, sky high on the airplane glue of Mel Gibson's Torture Jesus and their own persecution fantasies, are angry, unpredictable and inchoate, but also profoundly insecure.
It's the Achilles heel of the "Daddy Party." Like any schoolyard bully, they might talk a good menacing game, but deep down, they're all scared little brats, masking their own fear with taunts and jeers, girding their wounded, Hobbesian world-views in Hummers, wrapping themselves in the flag to cover up their secret shame and making up for their shortcomings with firearm prosthetics. Lefties and liberals, by contrast -- the "softs" -- are comfortable in their own skins. Perhaps too comfortable, at times, but cool enough to provide a sharp counterpoint to the shrieking hysterics of the right. Theirs is not the belt-buckle-and-cowboy-boots, showboating machismo of Big Daddy, but rather the quiet, assured masculinity of small-d daddies or the confident, nurturing but assertive guidance of mommies.
The Dems would do well to consciously embrace this division of labor between the parties, casting their opponents as the overcompensating, secretly insecure machos to their more adult constituents. This, I think, is where Lakoff was headed with his Daddy Party/Parent Party dyad. The sad spectacle of the Terri Schiavo fiasco made Americans scratch their heads and wonder: What are these bible-thumpers and the pols who love them so afraid of? They've got all the power in the world, and they still strut around like they've got something to prove. Is that a penis pump in Tom Delay's pocket, or is he just happy to see me? Democratic strategists would do well to encourage this, and to cast themselves as the party of real men and women.