If you spend any appreciable amount of time surveying right wing online discourse, it won't be long before you run into a very frequently repeated right wing trope along the lines of: "Putatively "conservative" (read "right wing") politician, journalist, or pundit X will not dare to seriously criticize the liberal/progressive statist hegemony because to do so would jeopardize their place on the invitation lists to all those fancy Georgetown cocktail parties we all know are so important to all those beltway types."
And, if a location is offered, it's always Georgetown. It fits in with their larger narrative that they, as "true conservatives" (leaving aside for now that they are not conservative but are instead radical right wingers), are arrayed against a vast and united front of leftists, progressives, and liberals in both the Democratic and Republican parties -- all of whom are of course committed "statists." It allows them to cast themselves as alienated and disenfranchised outsiders excluded and derided by the "kewl kidz" (yes, many of them have even adopted that spelling).
As Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog notes this morning, it allows them to wallow in their Ayn Randian fantasies of "going Galt" in protest against the monolithic leftism that they tell themselves dominates modern America and most of the globe. It's a sort of daily affirmation that they must be constantly self administer in order to stave off the potential creeping realization that the world, and most definitely the US, has been dominated for a long time by just the sort of libertarian oligarchies whose effects on all of our lives they blame on the people on the left who are, at least ostensibly, working to curtail those Randian plutocrats and the misery they bring to all but the 1%ers who the right wingers have elevated to the status of near deities.
These "going Galt" daily affirmations sometimes seem bizarre to those of us outside the right wing discourse bubble, but more often they seem inane, sure, but really more trivial and inconsequential. They may indeed be inane, but they are not trivial. They are part of the crucial support structure of the top-heavy system of self-delusion right wingers must cart around with them every waking minute of every day in order to fend of recognition of the obvious reality that the people they cheer have largely got their way and that our current situation is a direct result of the triumph of right wing social, economic, and political ideology.
To test that theory, try pushing back on one of these seeming trivialities sometime, even just a little. Watch how indignant they become and how vehemently they defend some silly proposition such as the Georgetown Cocktail party circuit cabal. Their investment in these tropes is revealing.
Cross posted at 5 Seconds to Midnight.