Has anyone noticed lately that the right is seething? I mean more than normal, they’re absolutely furious these days, in general, at everything it seems, and I have no idea what it is they’re so pissed about half the time. Any guesses?
It’s weird: These clowns have had everything they could have dreamed of handed to them in the last few years. And yet when I read a conservative site or fundie tract, more and more lately, it often sounds like they’re foaming at the mouth pissed off. I was talking about this with a fellow blogger just a little while ago in a more specific context. But it struck me that the Angry Right is madder than hell about everything. But what the fuck do they have to be angry about?
Bush was put in office after a bitterly contested election. They won that fight. Shortly after, the 9-11 attacks provided him with un paralleled, bipartisan, patriotic support. They not only won in 2002 and 2004, they grew their influence and majorities. In that environment, the conservatives pushed through legislation of every kind, stuff they’d be hankering for years to get enacted. Again, they won, hands down.
The rightwing wanted conservative judges on the Supreme Court, they’ve had two appointed. They wanted tax cuts, they’ve had huge, titanic cuts passed. They whined about liberal media, Fox News has risen to the top of cable news ratings and other media has been infiltrated at every level. They complained about liberal prosecutors and DAs, the entire DoJ has been turned into an extremist rightwing feeding ground.
They wanted a war in Iraq, they got it. They wanted privatization, they’ve privatized everything from war to disaster relief. Right-wing churches have been given enormous sums of tax payer money under the disguise of faith based government programs, GOP cronies have cleaned up like bandits on the public pork.
They bitched for years and years about evolution, reproductive science, cloning, stem cells, abortion, birth control, and the climate change 'hoax' and on and on. Every government science agency has been taken over by wing nuts or moderates beholden to wing nuts, research has been slashed, science they found inconvenient watered down or suppressed out of existence.
Industry regulation has been loosened in every sector I can think of, or removed entirely. Fat corporate giveaways have been handed out, timber, energy, the environment; the profits of the S & P have never been higher.
Hell, even with the dems in power they're managing to get most of the ledge they don't like blocked, and keep the dems off balance and looking like spineless worms.
In short, whether you agree with the Angry Right or not on any one issue, they’ve had more of their dreams realized in a shorter time period than any other ideology I’ve ever witnessed. And yet they’re angrier than they’ve ever been, moaning and whining and bitching non-stop about how they don’t get enough and everyone is fucking them over. Why? What’s going on here?
There’s a few tentative explanations I can think of, maybe you guys can help with others.
One, they’ve been spoiled rotten. Like any kid that gets what he wants by stamping his feet and throwing a hissy fit, they’ve been conditioned to the point that their tantrum response is almost unconscious, like Pavlov’s Dog. Two, the more moderate, reasonable, mature and intellectually honest conservatives have dropped out of sight or left the party. Only the biggest loud mouth crybabies remain. Or, three, maybe they’re just exhausted mentally and cross because of it. Spending years in active denial, or in knowing willful ignorance, as the facts against you mount, has got to take a toll sooner or later.
But I think another cause may be at work here, and it’s not pretty. Progressives tend to think rationally and pragmatically (It wasn’t always the case that Republicans were so bug-fuck crazy. In fact there was a time not long ago when plenty of them were pragmatic problem solving realists. How times have changed eh?)
But conservatives these days are true believers, full blown ideologues, and their ideology, consciously or unconsciously is a big part of who they are as a person. That ideology has had its chance and failed catastrophically for all to see. And that failure has come at the hands in some cases of people, organizations, and competing ideologies that the conservatives have, as part of their rigid platform, denounced with every fiber of their being as something akin to evil.
The failure of conservative ideology over the course of the Bush Presidency and the Republican Congress is, for them anyway, public humiliation at the hands of enemies they despise. They feel it as personally as if a childhood rival had given them an atomic snooky on the playground in front of their classmates. THAT might explain the vitriolic, unhinged nature of rightwing anger directed at progressives these days, even in the face of the enormous gains they’ve made.
Then again, I’m no social psychiatrist. They’re definitely furious about something, more so now than even a few months ago, certainly more than a few years ago or a decade ago. Their anger is as irrational as hell. But it sure can’t be because they feel they’ve been shut out, or haven’t had a fair turn at calling the shots.