As my recent posts on the teabag Right's response to current trends in American popular culture attempt to illustrate, right-wing America is increasingly isolating itself in an angry little bubble.
While most of the U.S. media saw Michelle Obama's video appearance at the Academy Awards as a pleasant surprise and complimented her style, conservatives reacted with predictable fury, calling it an intrusion and and even a hijacking of the award ceremony. Meanwhile, a WWE characterization of professional wrestlers (or rather rasslers) as anti-immigrant villains in mortal combat against a Mexican hero provoked howls of rage, as though the WWE had never done anything like this before.
Increasingly, the Right seems to be finding it harder and harder to live in the same country and the same culture as the rest of us. For most of us, it seems perfectly normal for the President and the First Lady to play a visible role in American public life, including appearances at sports and entertainment events, because this is what presidents and first ladies have always done. For the Right, however, it is an unforgivable intrusion into the Obama-free world they wish they lived in. For most of us, any caricature of contemporary events such as the immigration debate is to be expected, whether on Monday Night Raw or Saturday Night Live, however controversial it may be. The entertainment industry feeds on controversy. For right-wingers, however, it is more evidence of their persecuted status to cry and scream about.
The Right already has its own radio and TV networks, its own forms of conservative entertainment, its own collection of approved conservative authors and commentators, and promotes homeschooling as a way of protecting the next generation of conservatives from the influence of mainstream liberal-secular ideas. They have seceded from mainstream American culture and inhabit a quasi-Confederacy of the mind. Conservative media figures and religious leaders actively discourage their followers from exposing themselves to any other point-of-view, and rarely do right-wingers emerge from their self-imposed bubble to see what the rest of us are doing or thinking. When they do emerge - such as to watch the Oscars or a WWE rasslin' match - they immediately recoil in horror to the safety of their little bubble and send out a stream of angry tweets. Increasingly, it seems, everything the teabag Right sees or hears in American culture is confirmation of their deepest fear: It's not their country anymore.
To right-wingers, American popular culture today is full of people who don't look like them and don't share their values. Pop music, movies, TV, and now even WWE rasslin', are full of liberals spouting liberal ideas and abusing poor hard-working conservative Americans like themselves. Any acknowledgement they receive in mainstream culture is - like those anti-immigrant villains of WWE - a ridiculous caricature.
So they whine and moan and throw temper tantrums, then they retreat to their bubble and turn on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or the Christian Broadcast Network. Here, they can see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear.
This is sad, of course - particularly if, like me, you have relatives or friends who subscribe to the conservative worldview I've described. As a progressive, however, I would far rather see conservatives being disgruntled losers than swaggering, triumphalist winners, as they were during the Reagan and Bush eras. Nothing would have sickened me more than seeing them get their swagger back with a Romney win in 2012.
If the angry, intolerant attitudes many conservative express are as deep-seated as they seem, then there's no way we're going to convince them otherwise, and no way of finding political common ground with them. All that we can do is our best to defeat them. Then one day, perhaps, they'll get tired of their angry little bubble and join the rest of us in the 21st century.