(Cross posted from The Blog Roundup).
A step further than the personal wisdom of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?", more insightful than George "Don't Think of an Elephant" Lakoff's skillful manipulation of language, certainly far beyond the pundits simplistic "Values Voters" explanations for the November election, Driftglass (with assistance from Steve Gilliard) presents us with a simple and concise description of the mindset of the Average Republican. Not the elite, policymaking, money-grubbing, well-connected, Bushies and their clones, but the average Joe or Jane who puts their X in the "R" box.
(more below...)
A sample:
It's not true that the Conservatives I know don't give a damn so much as they are terrified that they were wrong.
Deeply, primally terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of "welfare cheats" and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less. Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy.
Security and Enforced Orderliness is their idea Heaven and Doubt is their Hell, which is why they swarm like mayflies towards simple-minded sloganeering instead of actual, y'know, thinking... and why many of them fall madly in love with Fundamentalism. It's this anti-Faustian bargain where they get the perfect peace of mind that comes from absolute, swaggering certainty that they are completely right about every single thing. And thrown in at no extra charge, they get Paradise after they die, with the promise that they'll get to see my sorry ass screaming in agony in a lake of fire on Basic Cable for all eternity.
However, just as with the aforementioned Faust, this bargain comes with a fairly hefty price tag: Their intellectual and political souls.
But in exchange for all of this wonderfulness, they have to hand over their souls to truly evil men.
They must agree that they will never, ever, ever question Their Master's Commands. To blindly obey and to never do the math and never read the fine print. In other words, to tear from their own body and slaughter of their own volition and with their own hands the one capacity that actually makes them fully human: their capacity for free and independent thought.
So what exactly does he think would pursuade our heroic Joe and Jane to strike such a bargain in the first place? To such a mind as his, the answer is obvious:
Out there, deep in the dark, - they are told - are bearded madmen who worship a Death God that they cannot possibly understand who live just to kill them and their children for no rational reason. Not that there are not bad people in the world who really do need killin', and real enemies that I want stopped, but they are sold this campfire escaped-lunatic scare-story version of the Ay-rab Terminator which, as it turns out, also happens to be the perfect outward projection of their own deeply perverse ideology.
And in closer, right next door - they are told - are the Evil Liberal Elite who live to sell their great nation out into polyglot slavery to a band of international appeasers, Socialists and faggots. Who are either too stupid to see the threat, or hate their country so much that they cheer on American failure and need to be protected from themselves.
This summarizes the racism and xenophobia thinly veiled as nationalism and patriotism which George Orwell satirized in "1984", and which the massed ranks of Norquist and Rove clones have been beating into the heads of willingly gullible Americans for years, with the aid of the Hannity's, O'Reilly's, Krauthammers and their ilk.
Is it really possible that the whole thing comes down to Joe and Jane's inexplicable, nameless and overwhelming fear of the faceless swarthy "other"? That in the face of such fear they construct a paper tiger of intellectual justification for their collective psychosis? That they would genuinely rather destroy the very ground on which they walk than admit their own insanity, admit they were wrong?
I really think he's on to something here. I also think that Rove and others have been fully aware of this pattern of human nature. Not to draw an exact parallel, but it's exactly how any despotic leaders seize power over a relatively educated and democratic country -- Hitler is but one, obvious, example.
Driftglass has a remedy for all this, and it's a simple one:
Not to scream blindly into the void for the impossible - Steve's quite right about that - but to keep patiently repeating: "Here's what you said, and here's what you did. You were wrong. Apologize," in every venue available.
He also points out that there is a natural order to these things (which those of us who were paying attention in history class will already realize...)
The sheer weight of simple things like time and gravity and causality itself are our natural and incorruptable allies. They are merciless, and recognize no Geneva Convention niceties when meting out justice to arrant fools who try to fuck with them.
Indeed.
- Trendar