I'd like to provide here an initial outline of a very important piece, if not the most important piece, of current right-wing thought (subconscious though it may be). My purpose is to consider the root cause from which opinions on a wide array of issues arise. (In fact, it may be getting at the root impulse of most right-wing thought not just now, but played out in myriad ways through centuries of political activity.)
While recent events have caused many on the left to consider the racism, misogyny, hatred, and general intolerance of the "conservative" fringe, there is a connection underlying these bigotries and resistance to equality and multiculturalism that is well worth considering. As an avid reader of George Lakoff, I feel that these ideas dovetail with his - but more than just describing the differing worldviews of right and left, I'd like to delve into the psychological root of contemporary right-wing thought and discuss why they have the worldview they do; why they have what Lakoff calls the "strict father morality."
I say this is an outline because it is more of an introduction (for myself and others) to an idea I have been pondering more and more since the inauguration of President Obama and the subsequent extremism from the right to any piece of legislation or executive order that is to the left of Benito Mussolini. In this environment, I began thinking about Lakoff's experience of considering, in the wake of the 1994 Republican Revolution, what unified right-wing positions on seemingly disparate issues - why, for example, we typically find people who oppose most taxes being against legalized abortion (and vice versa).
Lakoff developed his (quite accurate) idea of a "strict father" model of people on the right and a "nurturant family" model of people on the left in considering these issues. But what is it that informs and drives this strict father model? What is attractive about it? Why do so many flock to it? We would do well to understand it fully, and not write off its adherents as simple idiots, greed-mongers or haters, if we are to convince people to at least be more open to our own views.
The feeling I have developed in watching and listening to the right-wing talking heads on Fox, and to their brethren on the AM dial, is an incurable sense that what we are truly dealing with is an inability to leave childhood behind - a deep-rooted fear that is so overwhelming it must be shoved deep down into the dark recesses of the mind, lest the ego be forced to open itself up to the realities of adult living on planet Earth.
Why such an incredible fear? Because of the rank suffering that is part and parcel of human existence. It doesn't take long in this life to see the cruelty, scarcity, and seeming evil that lurks all around us. In response to that world, in response to an understandable fear that develops as a resistance and defense mechanism against the suffering laying in wait for us all, what we would call the "right-wing" reaction is to push it away; to say that it doesn't have to be that way; to find someone to blame for our troubles; to point a finger and say that if only the bad guys were stopped from doing their bad things then everything would be Heaven on Earth.
In regard to contemporary right-wingers, I label this "The Rockwell Syndrome." I do so because of their consistent proclivity to appeal to the mores of the 1950's, the time of post-World-War-II-victorious, post-industrial-economic-success-story, white-middle-class-comfort, God-fearing-and-respecting society that is captured archetypally by the work of Norman Rockwell.
While there are certainly Rockwell paintings that are not about comfortable subjects, what I'm speaking about here is the Rockwellian vision that most readily comes to mind when considering his work: a people and a time of purity, innocence, earnestness, honesty, and decency.
And in right-wing thought, what we really hear when we listen between the lines is an appeal to such a time and place - a belief that once upon a time everything in America was perfect, before the hippies and feminists and multiculturalists and tree huggers and socialists got uppity and decided to crash the party. These are grown men and women on the right who actually think, or have convinced themselves that they think, that everything was once just fine, as God Himself ordained, before God-hating, America-hating scumbags wrecked everything for kicks and funsies.
We see this, for example, in their insistence that everybody have one, heterosexual marriage that lasts for their entire life. Yes, they point to the Bible for their reasoning and justification, but what kind of society are they hoping will spring from such an insistence? They are hoping that the boy and girl in the top picture will get married and live happily ever after just like in the fairy tales that very boy and girl would have been reading but a few years prior to their date.
It's an understandable (and even compatible with left-wing thought on some level) hope for everyone to be happy and healthy and for everything to work out. But it leaves no room for true freedom - no room for mistakes, for learning, for growth. It insists upon one particular version of reality - the one in their head - becoming the way of the world. It insists upon a fairy tale life that just isn't realistic.
And it sucks for them when it invariably doesn't work out the way they want it. It hurts them very badly that such a world will never exist. Rather than facing up to that, rather than owning their heartbreak, they push it down. They say that, "No no...I'm not wrong. The liberals are wrong. Once upon a time everything was fine. And then my enemies wrecked it. If I can stop them now, and overturn their previous victories, then that perfect past will return."
This is what we are really up against. I think we write off the extremists on the right-wing far too much as simple Bible-thumpers or bigots without considering WHY the Bible or bigotry appeals to them. Perhaps it is true that for a percentage of them they are simply nasty people, born nasty and will die nasty, the end.
But for many more I suspect that what we would find if we could venture into their subconscious layers of mind is an incredible fear that has gripped them since childhood; and in response to said fear there is a reaching out to religion and reactionary thought as a guard against the big bad world that scares the shit out of them.
This is the root of intolerance. They've decided how the world should look: it should look like the fantasy-world, white-washed version of 1950's Americana. They've further decided how people should act in order for that fantasy world to become reality. And when people don't act according to what they deem necessary for their fantasy world to be manifested into reality, they get very angry.
What is happening with an African-American president, and a Latina Supreme Court justice, and a Congress that is potentially open to the possibility of government-run health care, is a dawning upon them, more than ever before, that their fantasy world is not going to happen, at least not anytime soon. This is further driven home by all the tattooed, pierced, dyed hair freaks running around in society at large.
So they throw a tantrum. People aren't acting like they're supposed to act in order for the fantasy world to spring into existence. Of course we don't see or hear those on the right describing their resistance to change in this manner because it would doom them politically to do so; but I believe it is also because they are somewhat, if not entirely, oblivious to these impulses, though they do certainly appeal to those impulses with the language that they use and the campaigns that they put on.
In the process of throwing a tantrum, they have successfully appealed to a wide swath of the American public. They have convinced people to believe that a fantasy world is possible - or at least, through use of the language of the fantasy world, they have convinced people who don't know any better that there is a better world possible if we do X, Y, and Z without (obviously, as noted above) explaining where the drive for X, Y, and Z is coming from.
I think it is incredibly important for the left to keep this in mind when dealing with the right, and to probe deeper this concept of a continued childhood being advanced as the agenda of a major political party. If nothing else, the least we could do is make an appeal to those who would be swayed by the fantasy world language on grounds that resonate with them in a way that fulfills the reasonable and desirable characteristics of a better society, but from a more adult point of view.
For example, just about everyone believes in fairness. And fair would also be a word to describe the world that the right-wing wants to have. Now, of course our definitions of "fair" can differ greatly, but the word is one that is appealing, and we need to talk about why our version of fairness is the most just, equitable version; why we are championing a truly fair society in which everybody can get an honest chance.
So when you're listening to Hannity (if you feel compelled to punish yourself, or to consider what I'm describing here) think about this concept as you do. Think about the kind of society he's pushing for, and where his intolerance might be coming from at the deepest level. There is an aspiration there for the ain't-everything-swell, pa-goes-to-work-while-ma-cooks-and-cleans, sunday-school-and-boy-scouts, everybody's-happy-the-end version of life that is so often proclaimed to by symbolic of 1950's America (while the plight of millions of women, African-Americans, religious minorities, gays, and others, is so gratuitously ignored).
It comes back to fear. Fear of setting aside Santa Claus, setting aside fairy tale, setting aside a childish version of "God," setting aside the demand that every motherfucking thing be just swell right now! They want their childhood back. They want the world their parents promised them. And we're getting in the way. WE are preventing their fairy tale from happening.
As an example, consider the G. Gordon Liddy book titled "When I Was A Kid, This Was A Free Country." The title alone should tell you enough. It is a quintessential example of what I'm talking about here. The book is little but a screed longing for boyhood, and a lashing out at anyone who would take away that boyhood from him.
This is what the left is fighting against: a group of men and women who insist that their childhood be played out as public policy. We who want change in this country are taking their childhood away from them, and they simply aren't going to put up with it. They're going to keep throwing tantrums, banging their fists and yelling for their childhood version of America.
That's what the woman in the town hall video crying for "her America" is on about. Her childhood is ending. The world is a scary place, and cognitive dissonance only lasts so long. Big bad President Obama and the Democrats are doing things that just don't happen in her version of America, and she's not going to accept it without a good, long tantrum.
We see this playing out when people who proclaim the "sanctity of marriage" are caught having an affair, or when people who believe in "small government" are caught in a huge graft scheme. These individuals are projecting their fears onto society, and rather than getting out of an unhappy marriage or letting others do so without recrimination they continue to pretend and insist that the fairy tale remain intact.
This was most notable when Rush Limbaugh insisted that Mark Sanford's affair could be chalked up to a permissive, liberal society. Rather than admitting that a great number of people have a natural urge to have sex with more than one person, and that this urge was consummated by Mark Sanford, Rush had to point the finger and place blame on all those hippies and feminists for ruining the fairy tale in which every single person in the entire country has a monogamous, happy marriage that lasts 'til death does them part.
What we're ultimately fighting for here is an adult, non-fairy-tale version of America, and this is something that actually shouldn't be surprising to most people reading this. When Obama gave his speech on race in Philadelphia, the most common description I heard was that he was "talking to us like we're adults." That's exactly what he was doing. He was pushing America to grow up.
And that's the push that must be made again and again. Our language and our appeals to the middle should be made with the understanding that we're fighting childhood with adulthood. It would obviously be counter-productive to say it so directly, or to be patronizing or condescending; but it should be analyzed and considered that the fringe elements we're dealing with here are actually the infantile tantrums of people who refuse to grow up.
UPDATE: I am not using Norman's name to malign him; in fact, nothing in my piece attacks him personally or his art. I am speaking to a sense of place and time that is captured in many of his classic pieces, and to a political party and worldview that advances said time and place as public policy rather than engaging in something realistic in the here and now.