I've been thinking a lot about crazy people lately.
More precisely, I've been thinking about why people are going crazy today in response to a mildly liberal president, a slightly more liberal Speaker of the House, and a much more conservative Senate caucus.
Crying on camera? Calling the President of the United States a racist? Demanding your country back? (did you hock it for a case of whiskey or something?)
What ... the ... hell?
I've worked up a theory on why things are as crazy as they are now, with some good news, and some bad news. If I'm right, the crazies on the political right start to make more sense, they seem even reasonable, in light of what they've lost.
There must be an explanation for why there are suddenly so many people going crazy (which isn't really all that odd for the U.S. as has been noted by Bill Moyers) But more important, why are so many people watching them silently?
I'm reading Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions (Amazon), which may be a very bad book (I'm not far through) but the basic premise is simple an fairly obvious: there are a set of assumptions and beliefs we build up over our lives that shape our world-view (our vision). Our vision affects our decision making process in an a way that is both automatic and very difficult to avoid. (Sowell goes on to identify two very broad world-views that I don't particularly agree with so it looses relevance to this diary here.)
Republicans had as their basic core beliefs a set of assumptions about the economy, about their fellow americans, about political parties and what was acceptable.
Last year a whole chain reaction of changes swept the country. Many Republican's watched the their vision get shaken to the core. Most of them adjusted, swore a little, got mad, maybe they cried privately or indulged in some gun humor, but they moved on. Glenn Beck?
Glenn Beck got into a stare down with the hole that ate all his beliefs, he's still there, staring into the abyss waiting for the darkness to blink. He you saw his beliefs about who Bush was broken, what a political campaign could be destroyed, felt the role of a black male in America shift like as it did, and even what happens when the republicans nominate a centrist failed! Wasn't McCain the Safe pick? Wasn't he the nod to the liberal masses that, yes, maybe that whole Iraq war was a bad idea, but here's a war hero, we hate him, so he must be a centrist right? WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO, NOMINATE A POLICY WONK YOU IGNORANT SCREWBALL VOTING TYPE PEOPLE!! It was probably hard to deal with.
Specifically I think this tracks to the "take my country back" crowd. "Their" country is the courty in which their vision was true. They want trickle down economics to work. They want Wall Street to be the holy chapel of wealth. They expect their preachers to hate gays (and be straight). They want so hard to go back, not to the 1960's, but to 2006 when they could pretend the world worked the way they thought it did -- when their vision didn't feel, somehow wrong.
So, when I read about Glenn Beck's "Common Sense," and I see:
Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.”
it makes perfect sense. (NYT)
Of course something just doesn't feel right -- all your assumptions don't work, you try to make your arguments and express your core beliefs, but they sound hollow and wrong. America is basically a conservative nation? Is that why there are more liberal Democrats in congress than there have been since Bill Clinton triangulated them out of power? How do you combine your assumptions about black men with the vision of a brilliant and succesfull black male on TV all the friggin' time.
That's why the South is soooo weird as well. Of course it makes sense that their world view is skewed, their world hasn't changed. They see the world coming apart around their ears. Their roads suck (because their conservative leaders bankrupt states). Their kids are getting pregnant and their divorce rates are unusually high. It helps that most of them never encounter out and proud gays or black lawyers in their day to day lives.
In short, the South works weirdly because their leaders have built the conservative vision into the very bedrock of the government there.
You expect to be fucked by the government, because their governments fuck them. You expect mismanagement because their leaders don't try to manage government well. You expect schools to be houses of indoctrination, because you have an open political agenda about removing certain subjects (darwin) from the curriculum while shoving others (prayer) in. (See, what's the matter with Texass).
Elsewhere the outliers are more widely spread out, they can't cling to their visions just by looking around them and talking to folks at church or down at the local bar. They need to go somewhere else. They need Fox News.
Fox news has these great guys on TV who tell you everything is just the way you think it is. Your vision is perfect, it's OBAMA that's wrong. In Obama's America people are racist against whites, that's why the act all shocked why you say stupid shit that doesn't match up with reality. The problem isn't that Bush did a pile-driver on the economy when he helped deregulate every industry in sight, it's that all the markets crashed in response to Obama's election (naturally).
In Beck's reality Liberals are raising your taxes RIGHT NOW, just like you always knew they would (ignoring the tax cut you see in your pay check is difficult, but you can blame Bush if you drink a little bit before you try and think about it).
Glenn Beck is therapy for the visionless. He's the soothing balm that says "everything is a-okay" when he screams about Nazi's he really means "you are right to fear liberals, they are bad, they are not those nice college kids that Obama sent to your door over and over (and over and over) during the campaign." When he tells you about death panels, you hear "you are right to say that all liberals worship a culture of death, never mind that they're trying get you the insurance you so desperately need, especially since the mill shut down and your water has started to smell like chemicals." When Limbaugh says we need segregation to protect white kids, it really means, "it's okay if you hate black people, they hate you too."
Let's call it chicken soup for the blackened evil soul of everything that's been wrong with this nation for 50 years. Let's call it a passing phase. Let's watch it die out over the next decade.
Okay, that may be wishful thinking, but if Beck doesn't fall in that fucking abyss within the year, I'll eat my hat.