Have you ever seen a bait-ball? It's one of the most impressive ballets between predator and prey nature can produce. Marine biologists theorize that in the ocean's depths, where light is poor or non existent, thousands of small fish can group tightly together and perhaps fool a lone predator that they are in fact one big, bad-ass menacing leviathan not to be messed with. Maybe, it's plausible. But near the surface, the only place where we've been able to observe it, the bait-ball strategy is suicidal. Watching it one can't help but feel bad for the little fishies and wonder, why don't they do something else?
The answer is they can't. Fish aren't stupid, they have brains, but they have nowhere the mental agility of dogs or primates. They rely almost entirely on instinct. So, when the bait-ball turns into a mass suicide feeding frenzy, their instinct tells them to ... form a bait-ball! Every time I watch that clip it reminds me of something we see in humans, too. The inability to learn and adjust despite catastrophic consequences to ongoing behavior. You see it manifest in all kinds of self destructive actions, addiction, some relationships, etc. Below I'll explain how, these days, it reminds me more and more of conservatives.
Getting people to vote against their own economic interests is not an easy task, but creeps and clowns and genocidal monsters have been perfecting the art for centuries. Books like What's the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Franks, or John Dean's Conservatives without a Conscience provide insight into how the modern conservative movement pulls it off better than anything I could write. The gist of it there are two groups of people, those who are honest and have a well defined set of ethics, and a much smaller group who have no such values, but are great at pretending they do.
Franks sums it up nicely in this excerpt:
Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers – when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists' furthest imaginings – when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work – you could be damned sure about what would follow.
Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.
The predators in this analogy include high numbers of sociopaths and borderline personalities, people who are adept at manipulating and taking others for anything and everything they have, without remorse. Think of the marks, the honest folks, as political chum. The predators put a great deal of money and time into misinforming and pissing off the honest folks, to the point the honest ones are neurotic, or panicked, at times they can even be stampeded into a desired direction in such numbers that they drag the entire media and cultural apparatus of the nation along with them. See the Iraq War run up for a great example.
This is done in many ways, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, terrorism, communism, socialism, state's rights, voter suppression, sequesters, starve the beast, etc. But consider a specific instance that's relevant here: We have diarists on Daily Kos who regularly generate more traffic than some of the highest rated conservative sites. But you won't see them get paying gigs on cable news, or sweet ghost written book deals supported by mass purchases. Conservatives do that for one another. Conservatives have created a career ladder, a leg up, for those willing and able to push the Big Lie.
The Lie is the only real drive remaining in the conservative movement these days is to enact ledge that immediately benefits a handful of extremely powerful, wealthy clans by any means necessary. They don't care about those cultural issues, in fact they'd rather they stay unresolved and hot. They only care about two sets of policies with the same goal, cutting taxes on rich people and dismantling regulations and institutions designed to limit how much damage they can do to the rank and file American. This is what the GOP stands for and they've been successful at it.
But there are downsides to it. For starters, these policies and institutions are there for a reason, to keep the economy from utterly collapsing like it's done in the past. On the heels of the Great Depression laws and institutions developed or were put into place to prevent another banking bubble from forming and destroying the economy. Those laws were eventually weakened to the point they were ineffective, and who would've thunk it, a banking bubble immediately formed and destroyed the economy. It knocked rich conservative for a loop, they were so shaken as their investments and business interests dropped like a stone that their confidence faltered, helping Obama get elected by a landslide in 2008.
Another point is the independence of external corrective movements. When the banks were bailed out it pissed off some conservatives who believed, truly believed, in the free market ideology they had been fed for decades. A nascent rebellion grew. Had it been allowed to flourish it might have provided real, useful correction to those elements of the conservative movement that have degenerated into a full blown racket. But because there is so much money available in that community, that movement was quickly integrated right back into the wider conservative agenda that caused the rebellion to form. The tea party doesn't even exist any more, in the space of one midterm election cycles it has already come and gone.
Contrast this with our grassroots/netroots progressive movement which is still healthy, independent, and strong. In large part because our party, the democrats, did not suckle us with establishment dollars. It's too bad for progressive bloggers who basically work for free or for a tiny portion of what their conservative counterparts pull in, I think it could be done without destroying us as there are fundamental differences in uor method of operation and goals. But our movement is still here, that's hard to argue with after watching what happened to the tea party.
Look at the state of the conservative movement today, it's a mess! They literally cannot offer anything new, and the old policies they keep pitching are such demonstrative failures even some of their wealthier donors are bailing or balking. That's why the bait-ball makes me think of them. It's a swirling panicked mass being reduced in number by time and political bottom feeders. They have nothing new to go forward on, they can't admit their economic ideology was a complete catastrophe it's was a failure, all they can do is double down on their most odious policies rejected by growing majorities of the electorate in a desperate last ditch ploy to hang onto enough of their base that they feed their rapacious predators. They are stuck, frozen in this pattern of destructive behavior, with no idea how to avoid the inevitable, total political collapse to come.