The GOP, Conservatives, and Insanity

[Grim_Render]

Well, from an outsiders point of view, the Republicans aren’t evil. They do what they really think is best for everyone.

Like all political parties, they contain their share of people who are in it for their own enrichment, and willing to sacrifice the good of the citizens for their own advancement. But that is not unique to the Republicans.

Insane though…that is a different issue. Not the leadership.

The Republicans have been sliding with large votergroups for some time now. Women, non-whites, under-30s etc. They’ve compensatid for this by energizing their base with increasingly apocalyptic rethoric and confrontational narratives. To get a larger percentage of their voters out of the chairs, because they think everything depends on it. That can be a great tactic, but it is a horrible strategy.

The stuff they need to get those last few old white guys to the polls is now so far out that some moderate Repulicans don’t feel safe voting for them. Obama is a muslim communist out to destroy America and take their guns away. They’ve build up their own media to reinforce these notions, and demonized the “mainstream media”.

The voters who are entangled in this…alternative reality -they may by some definitons be considered insane.

To me, its been most clear in the healthcare debate. You can tell these people that what their politicans are teling them is not true. It does not penetrate.

People they’ve known for years on messageboards living in other countries, all the independent reseach and facts -nope. They’ll believe politicans instead.

There does to me seem to be a disconnect from reality here, in favor of one where they and their people are under an intolerable level of threat. This does shade towards paranoid delusions in many of the most severe cases.

[LC_Strawhouse]

My pet theory is that “acting insane” is a calculated strategy for people to gain respect/attention if they feel marginalized and out of the mainstream. I think this describes a lot of the current crop of older right-wingers, at least the ones I’ve met. (Teenagers have been doing this forever in non-political ways.)

[foolsguinea]

OK, I veered off the point, but whether you call W Bush’s Social Security reform “privatization” or not, the insane part was that he wasn’t paying for it. He was proposing a system the changeover to which would be incredibly expensive, and trying at the same time not to raise nor allocate revenue toward it.

As I said, dumb.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

While I think the OP is obviously over-reacting, there is more than a kernel of truth there. And I think now that the election is over, we’re seeing some of the up and comers trying to distance themselves from the crazies . . .

But what will the GOP do without their votes?

[fumster]

@BrainGlutton

But what will the GOP do without their votes?

It used to be that we had conservatives running for office that tried to convince the crazies to vote for them. Now we have crazies running for office trying to convince conservatives to vote for them.

[RickJay]

@BrainGlutton

But what will the GOP do without their votes?

The Democrats do fine despite refusing to bend to the will of genuine socialists. Look at Evil Captor’s complaining about the Democrats. There’s lots of folks like that who think the Democrats are too far right for them, but in the end, they end up voting for the lesser of two evils anyway.

I don’t see why the GOP can’t do that. If they’d stop being openly hostile to people who aren’t white men, maybe they’d pick up enough of those votes to make up for the few white men they’d lose.

[BrainGlutton]

@fumster

It used to be that we had conservatives running for office that tried to convince the crazies to vote for them. Now we have crazies running for office trying to convince conservatives to vote for them.

Look, guys, what America needs to be rid of is conservatism, in whatever strength or in whatever form or by whatever name you call it.

[foolsguinea]

Yes, hardline conservatism, at core, is a delusion. “This is the power arrangement and set of traditions we have, so let’s hang onto all of this until it self-destructs due to its internal unsustainabilities! And if you try to talk sense, we’ll whine about eternal verities and call you the cultist!”

[humanafterall]

That’s alright, they can be the dirty hippies. GUESS WHO’S BACK?

[Esox_Lucius]

@Dr.Colossus

the smartest human i know in real life has become increasingly conservative over time. he has been an anti-religious atheist liberal his whole life…but he is starting to be more and more and more and more right-wing on a lot of issues. he is also growing smarter all the time.

2 reasons for his new-found conservativism: 1, he is making an increasingly good living with more and more control over his company and 2 (THE BIG REASON) he has a child-daughter and a brand new baby daughter. nearly all of his shift from liberal-moderate-to-conservative are based on what he perceives as “emphasis on family values.”

i cannot debate it one way or the other, but i think it’s interesting.

My brother has gone somewhat the same route, and I find it more baffling than interesting. As long as your friend’s job is secure and he can take care of his family, what’s it to him if a woman needs an abortion or a gay couple wants to get married? My WAG, without knowing him at all, is that deep down, for whatever reason, he’s not really all that secure with himself and is feeling the need for something he sees as “traditional” to lean on.

I’d bet that the biggest threat to him and his family’s welfare has been the Right-induced financial meltdown and recession. But the Right has “tradition” and teh bible on its side, and like a Christian who picks and chooses what he wants from his Good Book, that might be the part of right wing ideology that appeals to him now, and he can ignore the rest.

[BrainGlutton]

@foolsguinea

Yes, hardline conservatism, at core, is a delusion. “This is the power arrangement and set of traditions we have, so let’s hang onto all of this until it self-destructs due to its internal unsustainabilities! And if you try to talk sense, we’ll whine about eternal verities and call you the cultist!”

Well, American movement conservatism is a bit more complex than that. From The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.”

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

That is what America needs to marginalize and be rid of once and for all. Even “elitism” as such has more value than the RWs will acknowledge, at least when it means “deference to experts in their field of expertise.”

[BrainGlutton]

@iiandyiiii

There are plenty of smart conservatives, IMO, and smart Republicans. But (again IMO) the prominent Republicans in the last decade or two have not been intellectually curious. They’re smart (in the rawest sense of the word), but not interested in different ideas or different ways of thinking.

There are theories as to why.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@fumster

They became candidates

Wow, I set you up perfectly for that. I take full credit for that pointed quip, you couldn’t have done it without me.

[Chen019]

Does that make Democracts simply evil for their knowingly destructive immigration policies? As Mark Steyn notes:

Republicans think they’re importing hardworking immigrants who want a shot at the American Dream; the Democrats think they’re importing clients for Big Government. The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of immigrants receive some form of welfare. I see the recent Republican proposals for some form of amnesty contain all sorts of supposed safeguards against gaming the system, including a $525 application fee for each stage of the legalization process. On my own recent visit to a U.S. Immigration office, I was interested to be told that, as a matter of policy, the Obama administration is now rubberstamping all “fee waiver” requests for “exceptional hardship” filed by members of approved identity groups. And so it will go for all those GOP safeguards. While Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled immigrants, America fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic benefit to their new homeland they can’t even afford a couple of hundred bucks for the necessary paperwork.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333583/tribal-america-mark-steyn#

[sparkeyjames]

I think with my very first comment here I’ll drag this topic in a direction that some will find helpful in understanding the far right conservative mind. Warning it’s going to be long.

Authoritarianism is the subject with which you must be concerned with in order to understand the conservative mind set. Tradition, Religious belief, Group identification, level of education, ability or lack thereof to have sharpened critical thinking skills are also subjects that are bound up with authoritarianism.

Education! The higher a person advances in educational studies that require critical thinking skills it is thought that there will be less likelihood of that person to develop a strong conservative/authoritarian mindset. Not everyone who advances to a higher level of education is going to be a liberal but in higher learning the liberal mindset seems to be dominant. The same can be said in the other direction. Not everyone who does not make it into college, or has a limited college education, is going to be a conservative.

The traditionalist. Mother and Father were liberals/conservatives and/or Democrats/Republicans and that’s good enough for me. There’s no argument with that. It is set in stone in that persons mind and using the worlds biggest lever is not going to move them. They must come to an alternate conclusion on their own if ever they can. Depending on level of education and critical thinking skills some traditionalist sometime take extremely liberal personal actions. In this way to an outside observer a traditionalist can sometimes seem like a contradiction. There is hope for them however. A traditionalist with better than average critical thinking skills has a greater chance of breaking that cycle. Now the bad part. Wrap up a traditionalist with a high authoritarian group identification and you have a person that even god couldn’t budge.

Group Identification. The so called ‘my team is better than your team’ reaction taken to an extreme. This is the real killer. It is the thing that allows the Authority figures the most leverage over them. It allows them to be directed by authority figures. It makes them suspect anyone or any group not just like them. It also makes them suspect any idea that comes from outside the group no matter how logical no matter how irrefutable to be viewed with suspicion or downright derision. It also makes them insular. I don’t doubt you’ve heard of the conservative bubble. It’s even harder to break a person out of this than it is to make a traditionalist vote for the opposite party.

Religious belief. Sorry to disappoint you all but I’m going to skip this part. The book I’ll present a link to at the end of all this has a much better explanation than I could come up with in one small paragraph.

Authority figures. The authority figure is like the alpha dog in a dog pack. The charismatic leader. The ones who the authoritarians look up to. The bad part is most but not all of them are sociopaths/psychopaths or near sociopaths/psychopaths. You must remember that not all sociopaths/psychopaths are criminals or will behave with violent criminal intent. Take a look at some of the conservative leaders. Rush Limbaugh is definitely a sociopath. Roger Ailes of Fox News is an over the top sociopath. Mitt Romney is a near sociopath. Now for a shocker a lot of Democratic leaders are the same. Harry Reid? You bet your ass he can lie with the best of them. Bill Clinton yes. Yet the most dangerous of them all is the charismatic sociopath that believes their own lies and are so convincing in those lies that others will follow them down a path even unto their own destruction. Sounds like Rush doesn’t it?

If you want to read more about authoritarianism and how it applies to the conservative mindset read the book The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer from the University of Manitoba. You can get this book free in PDF format from here… http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Hint. To more thoroughly enjoy this book skip the end of chapter notes as they are tedious and meant more for other academics who might read the book. Please note that other than reading this book I have no connection with Dr. Altemeyer or the University of Manitoba.

[handsomeharry]

@fumster

Put aside policy issues where we can disagree, but it seems to me that the right is starting to act in ways that are clearly insane.

The earliest example I can think of is when GW Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. It was so totally out of left field. She was a competent lawyer but by no means a heavyweight. It left even his supporters scratching their heads and he was never able to give a coherent defense as to why he thought she was appropriate.

Move on to McCain selecting Palin. An older candidate with health problems selects someone who was clearly not ready to take on the Presidency. I think she may be more intelligent than people think, but she just didn’t have the grasp of history, geography, and current events that would have allowed her to take on the job of POTUS. In 2012, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Bachman were all seen as viable candidates. A few years ago they would have just been jokes.

Then of course there are the birthers that managed to convince a sizable number of GOP voters that Obama wasn’t a US citizen. Recently we heard from national office holders that thought women couldn’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape”.

Now we hear claims of black people being bused into Maine to vote, massive voter fraud in other states, and other wild conspiracy theories. Anyone able to look rationally at what the pools were predicting could see that the results were in line with them and we don’t need to posit a conspiracy to explain them.

Anyway, it leads to me to conclude that we are seeing batshit crazy lunacy rather than simple political disagreement. I don’t think I explained this well, but it feels very different than what I have seen in the last 40 years I have been following politics.

Why do I think you voted for Obama?

[BrainGlutton]

@Chen019

Does that make Democracts simply evil for their knowingly destructive immigration policies?

Destructive of what? All America’s previous waves of low-skill immigration were non-destructive.

[Der_Trihs]

@BrainGlutton

Destructive of what? All America’s previous waves of low-skill immigration were non-destructive.

But this one is <gasp of horror> brown!

[Kobal2]

@BrainGlutton

Destructive of what? All America’s previous waves of low-skill immigration were non-destructive.

Well, the very first one was a doozy, admittedly.

[BrainGlutton]

@Kobal2

Well, the very first one was a doozy, admittedly.

Well, the problem there wasn’t the low-skill nature of the immigrant population, it was mostly the lack of disease control . . . Nowadays, we ain’t really gonna get plague or leprosy from undocumented Mexicans, despite repeated screams to that effect.