I was thinking about this after a long conversation with a distant family member from Red State Texas today (and a recently converted Democrat, I'm happy to say). As many of us on Kos know, the most hateful Teabaggers, Birthers, Screamers, Palinites, and other assorted synonyms for Loudmouth Right-Wing Idiots also tend to be the most likely to be laid off, without health insurance, alcoholic, with emotional problems or otherwise in desperate need of help. It goes right alongside those statistics from the "What's the Matter with Kansas" line of analysis, showing that anti-government conservatives in the Reddest States are also the biggest recipients of federal aid by far, the hardest-hit by economic losses, family troubles and poor health care-- yet also the most likely to express hatred for the very government that's literally saving their lives, and to wag their fingers against others for the very sins they're wallowing in themselves.
From the standpoint of sociology and simple human decency, I find this to be probably the most repulsive spectacle in American culture-- that the truly wicked and predatory corporations (and I use those terms with emphasis, since that's exactly what they are), who are literally ruining the lives of millions of Americans for profit, have so successfully manipulated the minds of the wingnuts into damaging not only the rest of us, not only the country as a whole, but their own communities which are most dependent on federal help. In fact, IMHO it'll be no exaggeration that when future historians write the history of our era, corporations like most of the health insurance and predator-banking industry-- which add nothing in actual economic value, except as useless middlemen-- will be regarded in the same vein as history's most hated and society-destroying tyrants. They'll be right up there with the Stalins and the mass-murdering Belgian and British imperialists in their colonies, if not worse, since they're unscrupulous enough to use latent (or overt) racism in much of the country, faux Palin-and-Falwell style hateful evangelism, regional divisions since the Civil War, and other elements of the USA's sad historical baggage to divide and inflame us further, ruin the country, and literally kill millions of suffering people in dire straits, all for their own profit. Divide-and-rule in the worst possible sense.
This makes me wonder about y'all's experiences of this at the personal level, and how you've converted once-right-wing friends, neighbors and family members. My newly Democratic uncle in Texas lives up in the Panhandle, probably the Deep Reddest part of the state (it's essentially Bloody-Red Oklahoma transplanted a bit south). His own conversion came in part when he saw how the ruthless Sallie Mae bankers nearly ruined his own daughter, who was laid off and struggling to make student-loan payments. (Why was Congress stupid enough to allow private banks to charge usury for student loans of all things? Oh, that's right-- we had eight years of Shrub and Cheney with a GOP Congress to wreck, well, just about everything.)
Also, my Democratic pickup-drivin', tobacco-chewin' cousin out in East Texas finally got through to my uncle with a strong argument: that unscrupulous, Blue State Republican Carpetbagger bankers up in New York, had manipulated my uncle with wedge issues into stupidly helping other Right-Wing Northern Carpetbaggers into preying on his fellow Southerners and Northerners alike. (If any of you have Southern roots, deft use of the Carpetbagger argument can be convincing, though even that seems to be inadequate these days.) Since then, my uncle has been working on his blood-red right-wing neighbors and co-workers in the Panhandle. He's confident that Texas overall is heading for Blue State status in 2016 if not in 2012 or 2010, especially with the emerging Latino majority in light of the GOP's hate-just-about-everyone strategy, but also because of the gradual realization donning on even many conservative Texans. But the conversion remains frustratingly slow.
He and I both agree that Southerners at heart, tend to be populist and economically liberal, but when we point out the obvious contradictions in Republican voters' political affiliations-- the reaction is weird, generally some variation on stunned silence and desperately trying to change the subject or rephrase what they just heard. It reminds you of those creepy old films about the brainwashed Korean War vets, even when the most obvious logic was stated to them-- they respond with a blank look, almost as though a part of their minds has been literally deleted, and they're simply unable to mentally process what they're hearing. It just shows how thoroughly the corporate hatemongers have manipulated these people. And while my uncle was amenable to our arguments-- a generally apolitical conservative before, who had enough sound reasoning in him to see the light after our repeated prodding-- his neighbors are Bible-Belt types who declare Obama as some combination of Hitler, Stalin, the Antichrist, the evil Santa Claus or whatever other bete noire they can dream up. Even though, again, they also tend to be economic liberals at their real core, who absolutely hate the Wall Street bankers, corrupt insurance firms and other corporate Republicans who are literally devastating their communities. (BTW, I gotta give major props to my uncle for running some dreadfully tough operations so deep in enemy territory. If any of you have campaigned up in Swisher County or nearby, I salute you!)
Do you all have ultra-conservative family members, to whom you've tried to explain this obvious sabotaging of their self-interest for wingnut ideology? Have you been successful at bringing them over? What arguments did you use?