In 6th Century Byzantium, the Blue and Green factions engaged in bloody battles, and few could name all the causes of the deep enmity. In contemporary America, the rage of the Republicans is beginning to approach the level of the Blues and Greens.
Columnist Leonard Pitts notes that the nation's politics are "swamped by the rage red holds for blue." Unlike the situation in ancient Constantinople, it is possible to diagnose the rage of Republican reds. The desigation of "red" to the Republicans is apt because it signifies red hot emotion that grows out of the contempt and hatred that marks the Republican worldview.
The problem is, as Pitts notes, that this rage and contempt "is just business as usual." Hyperpartisanship historically brews intense emotions but they pass, and people get tired of the angst and poor government they produce. Some Republican hyperpartisanship is of the historical variety. The problem is that so much of it is of the enduring kind manufactured by cultural and historical forces.
Recently James Carville, the political analyst, was watching one of the Republican presidential debates when he decided that those Republicans harbored a “deep seated blood-lust.” He concluded that “we are on the brink of a crazy person running our nation.” Of course, there is no way of knowing which side will win in November , 2012, but Carville was right that madness had descended upon much of the Republican Party and that the malady is of an intensity and primitiveness that one could compare it to Blood Lust. Not only were Republicans making wild political claims, many of them and their followers seemed to have rejected science. Many denied biological evolution and claimed that humans did not contribute significantly to global warming.
The most recent examples of this "deep seated blood lust" are the efforts to blame the Behghazi and Boston massacre attacks on President Obama. Both efforts have a hysterical quality to them, and they are marked by the presenation of manufactured information that the mainstream media dare not flag without being called biased.
In the past scholars and the Founders have reflected on how excessive emotionalism could damage representative government. They stressed said that our political system works best when voters deliberate rationally and make decisions on the basis facts and their economic self-interest. James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson about this, but he acknowledged that voters can also become irrational when motivated by “artificial” matters like religion and partisanship—one assumes he meant hyper-partisanship.
We are now in a time of multiple crises, and three years ago there were eminent scholars suggesting that the nation would face leftist violence in the streets. Decades ago, many scholars would have thought that the problems we now face could trigger what the late Richard Hofstadter called a “status revolution,” Perhaps it would be along the lines of the progressive movement of the early 20th Century. Hofstadter also knew there could be right-wing populist movement such as that of Joseph McCarthy of the Radical Right of the late 20th Century. Harold D. Laswell wrote before Hofstadter and looked at the political pathology of mass irrationality. He had observed Mussolini's rise to power and called upon social scientists to study the psychoanalytic method and to look deeply into how personalities are shaped, and reminded readers that since the time of Socrates philosophers have wanted problems to be addressed logically, but that humans have often let irrational forces get the better of them. The rightist movement now sweeping the country is clearly irrational and could have the potential for violence. It is rendering serious damage to our political system. Despite Laswell's appeals, we still lack the tools necessarily to confidently assess what is going on today. Nevertheless, a tentative effort should be made to do so.
In in the last three decades, “artificial” hot button issues have turned American politics into a cauldron of anger and paranoia. That prepared the way for today's outbreak of irrationalism and fanaticism. Republicans used the abortion issue, gun control, and homosexuality to stoke right-wing populism, the premise of which was that a there was cultural elite that despised mainstream Americans and plotted to undermine traditional American values. Over time, this approach widened the Republican base, won elections, and proved that emotional—even irrational appeals-- worked best with so many voters. Democrats were clueless about navigating in this atmosphere and a prominent George W. Bush aide mocked them because they still live in “the reality-based community.”
The problem of fanaticism and extreme emotionalism became much worse recently, but pundits and scholars are not coming to grips with it.
The political irrationality grew much worse in 2008, and it was accompanied by violent rhetoric. The problems surfaced at Palin rallies, where the Alaska governor was given to distinguishing between good and real Americans and others. When Obama's name was mentioned, there were chants of “Kill him, Kill him!” No one told the crowd that such sentiments were inappropriate, and the press played down the Klan rally atmosphere, attributing it to excessive zeal and genuine American patriotism. Then came people toting guns to intimidate folks at Obama and Democratic rallies, and then came the extremists who disrupted Democratic town meetings, threatened members of Congress and even vandalized their offices. Still, the mainstream media did not sound the alarm.